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Category: History

White supremacy across America is sustained by white Christianity

White supremacy across America is sustained by white Christianity

Robert P. Jones writes: Over the last several weeks, the United States has engaged in a long-overdue reckoning with the racist symbols of the past, tearing down monuments to figures complicit in slavery and removing Confederate flags from public displays. But little scrutiny has been given to the cultural institutions that legitimized the worldview behind these symbols: white Christian churches. A close read of history reveals that we white Christians have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the…

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A century ago, schools beat a pandemic with outdoor classes. We should, too

A century ago, schools beat a pandemic with outdoor classes. We should, too

Ginia Bellafante writes: In the early years of the 20th century, tuberculosis ravaged American cities, taking a particular and often fatal toll on the poor and the young. In 1907, two Rhode Island doctors, Mary Packard and Ellen Stone, had an idea for mitigating transmission among children. Following education trends in Germany, they proposed the creation of an open-air schoolroom. Within a matter of months, the floor of an empty brick building in Providence was converted into a space with…

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The Anglo-America flailing states

The Anglo-America flailing states

Pankaj Mishra writes: ‘The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models…

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Women are most affected by pandemics — lessons from past outbreaks

Women are most affected by pandemics — lessons from past outbreaks

Clare Wenham et al write: Women are affected more than men by the social and economic effects of infectious-disease outbreaks. They bear the brunt of care responsibilities as schools close and family members fall ill. They are at greater risk of domestic violence and are disproportionately disadvantaged by reduced access to sexual- and reproductive-health services. Because women are more likely than men to have fewer hours of employed work and be on insecure or zero-hour contracts, they are more affected…

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How an ancient Indian emperor replaced the sound of war with the sound of ethics

How an ancient Indian emperor replaced the sound of war with the sound of ethics

Sonam Kachru writes: In the Khyber valley of Northern Pakistan, three large boulders sit atop a hill commanding a beautiful prospect of the city of Mansehra. A low brick wall surrounds these boulders; a simple roof, mounted on four brick pillars, protects the rock faces from wind and rain. This structure preserves for posterity the words inscribed there: ‘Doing good is hard – Even beginning to do good is hard.’ The words are those of Ashoka Maurya, an Indian emperor…

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Racist violence in Wilmington’s past echoes in police officer recordings today

Racist violence in Wilmington’s past echoes in police officer recordings today

Crystal R. Sanders writes: In Wilmington, N.C., three city police officers were fired Wednesday after being caught on camera making racist and disparaging comments about a fellow black officer, a black magistrate and a black arrestee. As the officers discussed the nationwide protests sparked after George Floyd’s killing, one remarked that he believed a civil war was on the horizon. He went on to admit that he planned to buy a new assault weapon because “we are just going to…

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The Confederacy was an antidemocratic, centralized state

The Confederacy was an antidemocratic, centralized state

Stephanie McCurry writes: Americans are now debating the fate of memorials to the Confederacy—statues, flags, and names on Army bases, streets, schools, and college dormitories. A century and a half of propaganda has successfully obscured the nature of the Confederate cause and its bloody history, wrapping it in myth. But the Confederacy is not part of “our American heritage,” as President Donald Trump recently claimed, nor should it stand as a libertarian symbol of small government and resistance to federal…

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Slave resistance brought about the end of slavery

Slave resistance brought about the end of slavery

Jamelle Bouie writes: Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction. Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves. “Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the…

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‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’: The history behind Trump’s latest outburst of racist bigotry

‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’: The history behind Trump’s latest outburst of racist bigotry

NPR reports: Responding to clashes between protesters and police in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s death, President Trump took to Twitter Friday morning to denounce demonstrators and wrote “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” That phrase goes back to the civil rights era, known to have been invoked by a white police chief cracking down on protests in the 1960s and a segregationist politician. ….These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just…

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After the pandemic: No one knows what’s going to happen

After the pandemic: No one knows what’s going to happen

Mark Lilla writes: The best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t. But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well…

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Three hypotheses on post-pandemic life

Three hypotheses on post-pandemic life

Alan Durning writes: In spring 1986, as a wet-behind-the-ears research assistant at a Washington, DC, think tank, I spent my first year after college studying the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. The catastrophe’s consequences were immediate: death, displacement, downwind irradiation for hundreds of miles, and an unprecedented quasi-military cleanup that cost more than $100 billion. I assembled and summarized for my supervisor piles of news reports and research papers, and I knew what the experts said the Chernobyl disaster would mean…

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Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

The Trump administration was not alone with its slow response to the COVID-19 crisis. Getty Images / White House Pool By Arash Javanbakht, Wayne State University and Cristian Capotescu, University of Michigan More U.S. citizens have confirmed COVID-19 infections than the next five most affected countries combined. Yet as recently as mid-March, President Trump downplayed the gravity of the crisis by falsely claiming the coronavirus was nothing more than seasonal flu, or a Chinese hoax, or a deep state plot…

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Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic

Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic

There were eerie similarities between Pepys’ time and our own. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images By Ute Lotz-Heumann, University of Arizona In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary. “Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.” During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of…

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Stories of civilization collapse make for good television but bad archaeology

Stories of civilization collapse make for good television but bad archaeology

Guy D Middleton writes: There’s a common story of how the Maya civilisation was wiped out: they fell foul of unstoppable climate change. Several periods of extreme drought withered their crops and killed off thousands in their overpopulated cities. ‘There was nothing they could do or could have done. In the end, the food and water ran out – and they died,’ wrote Richardson Gill in 2007. The jungle reclaimed the cities with their palaces and pyramids until they were…

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How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic

How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic

Franz Xavier Winterhalter’s ‘The Decameron’ (1837). Heritage Images via Getty Images By Kathryn McKinley, University of Maryland, Baltimore County The coronavirus can infect anyone, but recent reporting has shown your socioeconomic status can play a big role, with a combination of job security, access to health care and mobility widening the gap in infection and mortality rates between rich and poor. The wealthy work remotely and flee to resorts or pastoral second homes, while the urban poor are packed into…

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Inequality doesn’t just make pandemics worse — it could cause them

Inequality doesn’t just make pandemics worse — it could cause them

Laura Spinney writes: A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a school of thought that, historically, pandemics have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more,…

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