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Category: History

Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences – it happened in the Little Ice Age

Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences – it happened in the Little Ice Age

The Little Ice Age brought some bitter extremes. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565 By Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown University In recent weeks, catastrophic floods overwhelmed towns in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, inundated subway tunnels in China, swept through northwestern Africa and triggered deadly landslides in India and Japan. Heat and drought fanned wildfires in the North American West and Siberia, contributed to water shortages in Iran, and worsened famines in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. Extremes like these are increasingly caused…

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How a vanished ancient Greek city helps us think about disasters

How a vanished ancient Greek city helps us think about disasters

Guy D Middleton writes: One night nearly 2,500 years ago, the people of Helike, a city in the northern Peloponnese, were in their homes. Perhaps they were winding down with a glass of watered wine or already sleeping after spending the day about their business in the bustling town. Some had been busy at the market, selling or buying the produce from the local farms or purchasing goods from further afield. Some might have visited the famous Temple of Poseidon,…

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It is only Utopia that allows us to dream together

It is only Utopia that allows us to dream together

Jeet Heer writes: Utopia and dystopia are twins, born at the same moment from the shared ancestry of social critique. Although remembered as the first modern attempt to systematically imagine an ideal society, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) began with a stark portrait of a Europe torn apart by war and crushing poverty, with the shocking prediction that if the enclosure of farmland continued, soon sheep would be eating people. This horrifying prospect made it urgent to look for an alternative,…

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Why the history of the vast early America matters today

Why the history of the vast early America matters today

Karin Wulf writes: Nations need history; it is a key genre for explaining the status quo. Modern nations and modern historical practices in the West developed over the same centuries, so the effort to harness the latter to the former is no surprise. Yet whether about the removal of statues, the veracity of journalism and public history projects, or the appropriateness of school curricula and course materials, questions about just how history serves the national interest have been fodder for…

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Empires, pandemics, and the economic future of the West

Empires, pandemics, and the economic future of the West

John Rapley writes: Early in 2020, after a mysterious coronavirus emerged out of China and then raced across the globe, a quiet new year took a screeching turn. Stark images of ventilated patients in Italian hospital hallways soon filled our newsfeeds. Panic erupted across the West. One after another, governments that had been telling their citizens everything was fine suddenly screamed at everyone to shelter in place and avoid all human contact. It felt like the modern world had just…

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America only punishes rebels who threaten the status quo

America only punishes rebels who threaten the status quo

Jamelle Bouie writes: The United States has never struggled to punish those radicals who stood against hierarchy and domination. Whether you were a labor radical, Black revolutionary or left-wing militant, to attempt to upset existing class and social relations — or, at times, to even associate with people who held those ideas — was to court state repression. The two Red Scares of the 20th century are evidence enough of this fact. When a perceived internal enemy is a threat…

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Will Covid-19 change science? Past pandemics offer clues

Will Covid-19 change science? Past pandemics offer clues

Science reports: Although the past may not presage the future, epidemic history illuminates how change unfolds. “Historians often say that what an epidemic will do is expose underlying fault lines,” says Erica Charters, a historian of medicine at the University of Oxford who is studying how epidemics end. But how we respond is up to us. “When we ask, ‘How does the epidemic change society?’ it suggests there’s something in the disease that will guide us. But the disease doesn’t…

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Sixty years of climate change warnings — the signs that were missed (and ignored)

Sixty years of climate change warnings — the signs that were missed (and ignored)

Alice Bell writes: In August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest). The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in…

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America’s obsession with self-help

America’s obsession with self-help

Chris Lehmann writes: Books about an idealized American character often make for a body of elusive, exasperating speculations, delivered either on the fly or from a special-pleading pulpit of one sort or another. So there’s something appealing about reversing the polarity of such inquiries, and pursuing the fugitive American character through a series of allegedly representative books. That’s the task literary journalist Jess McHugh has set herself in Americanon, gathering a baker’s dozen of influential and top-selling books that have…

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The war on history is a war on democracy

The war on history is a war on democracy

Timothy Snyder writes: In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Red Square by Diego Rivera. A numberless crowd of faceless men marched with red banners, surrounding a locomotive engine emblazoned with hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization the Soviets wished to transmit during Stalin’s first five-year plan: The achievement was impersonal, technical, unquestionable. The Soviet Union was transforming itself from an agrarian backwater into an industrial power through sheer disciplined understanding…

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Colonialism is built on the rubble of false idea of ancient Rome

Colonialism is built on the rubble of false idea of ancient Rome

Jamie Mackay writes: At the dawn of the 20th century, Italian patriots were struggling to overcome a profound inferiority complex. Ever since 1861, when Giuseppe Garibaldi unified the country’s disparate regions into a nation-state, politicians and intellectuals had been anticipating the arrival of a glorious new era. Decades on, however, the economic, diplomatic and cultural results were wanting. Nationalists knew they needed a new mythos to boost public confidence, something to make Italy seem strong and competitive on the world…

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Africa’s ancient scripts counter European ideas of literacy

Africa’s ancient scripts counter European ideas of literacy

D Vance Smith writes: Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber….

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A deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation

A deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation

Daina Ramey Berry writes: Two centuries ago, a woman named Esther claimed her freedom. The enslaved woman filed a suit against her enslaver, Bernard H. Buckner, on behalf of herself and her two children in federal court. In 1827, Buckner had intended to move the family to his new home in the District of Columbia, but had neglected to heed a local law requiring him to relocate them within a year of establishing residency. It was a technicality, part of…

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When graphs are a matter of life and death

When graphs are a matter of life and death

Hannah Fry writes: In “A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication” (Harvard), Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer, a psychologist and a statistician, argue that visual thinking, by revealing what would otherwise remain invisible, has had a profound effect on the way we approach problems. The book begins with what might be the first statistical graph in history, devised by the Dutch cartographer Michael Florent van Langren in the sixteen-twenties. This was well into the Age of Discovery, and Europeans…

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Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks

Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks

Kate Julian writes: Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home,…

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The women who preserved the story of the Tulsa race massacre

The women who preserved the story of the Tulsa race massacre

Victor Luckerson writes: After teaching an evening typewriting class, Mary E. Jones Parrish was losing herself in a good book when her daughter Florence Mary noticed something strange outside. “Mother,” Florence said, “I see men with guns.” It was May 31, 1921, in Tulsa. A large group of armed Black men had congregated below Parrish’s apartment, situated in the city’s thriving Black business district, known as Greenwood. Stepping outside, Parrish learned that a Black teen-ager named Dick Rowland had been…

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