Browsed by
Category: History

We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

Jamelle Bouie writes: The historian Marcus Rediker opens “The Slave Ship: A Human History” with a harrowing reconstruction of the journey, for a captive, from shore to ship: The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder — crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word…

Read More Read More

Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?

Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?

Nature reports: The missing earthworms were a sign. As archaeologist Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated a site in northeast Syria, they found a buried layer of wind-blown silt so barren there was hardly any evidence of earthworms at work during that ancient era. Something drastic had happened thousands of years ago — something that choked the land with dust for decades, leaving a blanket of soil too inhospitable even for earthworms. The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the…

Read More Read More

The speech that helped a new generation of Germans face the Nazi past honestly

The speech that helped a new generation of Germans face the Nazi past honestly

Helmut Walser Smith writes: On 8 May 1985, West Germany’s president Richard von Weizsäcker delivered something akin to the Gettysburg Address – not for a nation in the midst of war, as was the case for the United States’ president Abraham Lincoln in 1863, but for a country working through the memory and the meaning of a lost war 40 years after its end. There were, of course, vast differences in the two speeches. Given on a grey day on…

Read More Read More

Rediscovering the value of cynicism

Rediscovering the value of cynicism

Arthur Brooks writes: Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture. Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns. Whether cynicism is more warranted now than ever is yours to decide. But it won’t change…

Read More Read More

80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

80 years ago the Nazis took just 90 minutes to plan the ‘final solution’

The New York Times reports: On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “The organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes. Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference that meticulously mapped it…

Read More Read More

How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

How antisemitic conspiracy theories contributed to the recent hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue

Law enforcement officials outside Congregation Beth Israel synagogue on Jan. 15, 2022, in Colleyville, Texas. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez By Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University The man who took a rabbi and three congregants hostage in Colleyville, Texas, on Jan. 15, 2022, believed that Jews control the United States of America. He told his hostages, as one revealed in a media interview, that Jews “control the world” and that they could use their perceived power to free Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani…

Read More Read More

The world we want to live in after Covid

The world we want to live in after Covid

Dhruv Khullar writes: In 1909, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published a book called “The Rites of Passage.” In it, he explored the rituals that cultures use to transition people from one stage of life to the next. Birth, puberty, graduation, religious initiation, marriage, pregnancy, promotions, the seasons—we’re always on the threshold of one phase or another. How do communities shepherd individuals from the pre- to the post-? Van Gennep argued that certain universal principles underlie rites of passage…

Read More Read More

The forgotten medieval habit of ‘two sleeps’

The forgotten medieval habit of ‘two sleeps’

Zaria Gorvett writes: In the 17th Century, a night of sleep went something like this. From as early as 21:00 to 23:00, those fortunate enough to afford them would begin flopping onto mattresses stuffed with straw or rags – alternatively it might have contained feathers, if they were wealthy – ready to sleep for a couple of hours. (At the bottom of the social ladder, people would have to make do with nestling down on a scattering of heather or,…

Read More Read More

Paraconsistent logics find structure in our inconsistent world

Paraconsistent logics find structure in our inconsistent world

Zach Weber writes: Here is a dilemma you may find familiar. On the one hand, a life well lived requires security, safety and regularity. That might mean a family, a partner, a steady job. On the other hand, a life well lived requires new experiences, risk and authentic independence, in ways incompatible with a family or partner or job. Day to day, it can seem not just challenging to balance these demands, but outright impossible. That’s because, we sense, the…

Read More Read More

Human behavior in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine

Human behavior in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine

Ian Stewart writes: In Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), the mathematician Hari Seldon forecasts the collapse of the Galactic Empire using psychohistory: a calculus of the patterns that occur in the reaction of the mass of humanity to social and economic events. Initially put on trial for treason, on the grounds that his prediction encourages said collapse, Seldon is permitted to set up a research group on a secluded planet. There, he investigates how to minimise the destruction and reduce…

Read More Read More

The plot against American democracy that isn’t taught in schools

The plot against American democracy that isn’t taught in schools

Jonathan M. Katz writes: Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. He had been involved in many himself. He had overthrown governments and protected “friendly” client ones around the world on behalf of some of the same U.S. bankers, lawyers, and businessmen apparently now looking for his help. For 33 years and four months Butler had been a United States Marine, a veteran of nearly every overseas conflict back to the war against Spain in 1898. Respected by…

Read More Read More

A history of disruption: From fringe ideas to social change

A history of disruption: From fringe ideas to social change

David Potter writes: On 3 April 1917, a crowd gathered to meet a train arriving from Helsinki at Petrograd’s Finland Station. The train carried Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He greeted his audience with a speech calling for the overthrow of Russia’s government – and, six months later, he made this happen. The world changed. Lenin, who had been living outside of Russia for more than a decade, was known as a theorist on the fringe of Russian political society, shaping Marxist…

Read More Read More

Desmond Tutu 1931-2021

Desmond Tutu 1931-2021

On June 24, 2021, His Holiness the Dalai Lama reunited online with Archbishop Desmond Tutu from his residence in Dharamsala, HP, India, on the occasion of the release of their new movie “Mission: Joy – Finding Happiness in Troubled Times.”   The New York Times reports: As leader of the South African Council of Churches and later as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Archbishop Tutu led the church to the forefront of Black South Africans’ decades-long struggle for freedom. His…

Read More Read More

Mass migration into Britain began over 3,000 years ago

Mass migration into Britain began over 3,000 years ago

BBC News reports: Scientists have uncovered evidence for a large-scale, prehistoric migration into Britain that may be linked to the spread of Celtic languages. The mass-movement of people originated in continental Europe and occurred between 1,400 BC and 870 BC. The discovery helps to explain the genetic make-up of many present-day people in Britain. Around half the ancestry of later populations in England and Wales comes from these migrants. It’s unclear what caused the influx of people during the Middle…

Read More Read More

Falsifying Russia’s history is a step toward more violence

Falsifying Russia’s history is a step toward more violence

Anne Applebaum writes: One night in October, a group of masked men burst into the Moscow offices of Memorial, the celebrated Russian historical society and civil-rights organization, and disrupted a screening of Mr. Jones, a film about the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. They shouted, gesticulated, and chanted “fascists” and “foreign agents” at the audience. Police were called, but they allowed the masked men to escape. Instead of chasing the intruders, officers barred the doors of the building and interrogated members…

Read More Read More

What happened to the ideal of multi-religious Arab modernity?

What happened to the ideal of multi-religious Arab modernity?

Ussama Makdisi writes: By the time I was born in 1968, my grandfather was an emeritus professor and a pillar of Ras Beirut’s small and highly educated Protestant community. But by then, as well, the optimism of the first half of the 20th century had receded dramatically. European empires had long since cynically partitioned the Ottoman Empire and created several new states including Lebanon. The Arab East, of which the small Mediterranean country was an inseparable part, witnessed the vibrant…

Read More Read More