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Category: History/Archeology

With the queen’s death, Britain must let go of its imperial delusions

With the queen’s death, Britain must let go of its imperial delusions

Hari Kunzru writes: The queen bridged the colonial and post-colonial eras. But for those of us who have a complicated relationship to Britain’s imperial past, the continuity represented by Elizabeth was not an unmitigated good. My father’s side of our family was made up of staunch Indian nationalists who worked for the end of imperial rule in 1947. Like many other people around the world whose families fought the British Empire, I reject its mythology of benevolence and enlightenment, and…

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On 9/11, blind luck decided who lived or died

On 9/11, blind luck decided who lived or died

Garrett M. Graff writes: Joseph Lott, a sales representative for Compaq computers, survived one of the deadliest days in modern American history because he had a penchant for “art ties,” neckties featuring famous masterpieces. “It began many years earlier, in the ’90s,” he said in an oral history with StoryCorps. “I love Impressionist paintings, and I use them as a way to make points with my kids. I’d put on an art tie, and then I would ask my kids—I…

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The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism

The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism

David Corn writes: In May, during an Aspen Institute conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the audience, “I want the Republican Party to take back the party, take it back to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment…This country needs a strong Republican Party. And we do. Not a cult. But a strong Republican Party.” Her comments echoed a sentiment that Joe Biden had expressed during the 2020 campaign: If…

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Indigenous Americans ruled democratically long before the U.S. did

Indigenous Americans ruled democratically long before the U.S. did

Bruce Bower writes: On sunny summer days, powerboats pulling water-skiers zip across Georgia’s Lake Oconee, a reservoir located about an hour-and-a-half drive east of Atlanta. For those without a need for speed, fishing beckons. Little do the lake’s visitors suspect that here lie the remains of a democratic institution that dates to around 500 A.D., more than 1,200 years before the founding of the U.S. Congress. Reservoir waters, which flooded the Oconee Valley in 1979 after the construction of a…

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Gorbachev freed my generation of eastern Europeans from the abyss. We saw a different future

Gorbachev freed my generation of eastern Europeans from the abyss. We saw a different future

Ivan Krastev writes: The German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger labelled him “the hero of retreat”. But does retreat produce heroes? A lost man haunted by the death of his beloved wife and torn apart by a sense of guilt and anger for the tragic death of his beloved country. This is how Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s first and final president, vividly appears in Vitaly Mansky’s documentary Gorbachev. Heaven. This was also my experience several years ago when I visited…

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Gorbachev died shocked and bewildered by Ukraine conflict, says interpreter

Gorbachev died shocked and bewildered by Ukraine conflict, says interpreter

Reuters reports: Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow’s worsening ties with Kyiv, his interpreter said on Thursday. Pavel Palazhchenko, who worked with the late Soviet president for 37 years and was at his side at numerous U.S.-Soviet summits, spoke to Gorbachev a few weeks ago by phone and said he and others had been struck by how traumatised…

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Gorbachev never realized what he set in motion

Gorbachev never realized what he set in motion

Anne Applebaum writes: The one time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in public was on November 9, 2014. I can pin the day down because it was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were in a very large, very crowded Berlin reception room, and he was sitting at a cocktail table, looking rather lost. Gorbachev had been invited to this event as a trophy, a living, breathing souvenir of the 1980s. He was not expected to…

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Odesa is defiant. It also remains Putin’s obsession

Odesa is defiant. It also remains Putin’s obsession

Roger Cohen reports: The Odesa Fine Arts Museum, a colonnaded early-19th-century palace, stands almost empty. Early in Russia’s war on Ukraine, its staff removed more than 12,000 works for safe keeping. One large portrait remained, depicting Catherine the Great, the Russian empress and founder of Odesa, as a just and victorious goddess. Seen from below in Dmitry Levitzky’s painting, the empress is a towering figure in a pale gown with a golden train. The ships behind her symbolize Russia’s victory…

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Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Insider reports: President Joe Biden privately met with a group of historians at the White House last week who warned him about ongoing threats to democracy, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Sources familiar with the August 4 meeting, which was said to have lasted nearly two hours, told the outlet the experts described the current moment as among the most dangerous to democracy in modern history. The people in the meeting were said to have included the Princeton University history…

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A Nazi taught interrogation tactics to Syrians and Egyptians

A Nazi taught interrogation tactics to Syrians and Egyptians

“Ziad Khoury” writes: Damascus, 1988. Plainclothes security personnel hover constantly around the main entrance of an elegant residential building. There are whispers that an “important” German fugitive lives on the second floor. As teenagers back then, whenever we got too close to that building, the security officers would order us to disperse, warning that only residents were allowed on the sidewalk. The shutters were always closed, but occasionally, the occupant of that sunless flat would come out for a walk,…

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Putin’s rule is weakening

Putin’s rule is weakening

Timothy Snyder writes: It seems to me, from a distance, that Putin’s rule is weakening. We now regularly hear from people aside from Putin (for example former prime minister and president Dmitry Medvedev) about the meaning of the war, the catastrophic consequences that await Ukraine and the West, and so forth. This is interesting, because it seems like a sign that Putin is losing control. Usually the news coverage of such pronouncements focuses on their content. When Medvedev tells us…

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Don’t blame Dostoyevsky

Don’t blame Dostoyevsky

Mikhail Shishkin writes: Culture, too, is a casualty of war. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainian writers called for a boycott of Russian music, films, and books. Others have all but accused Russian literature of complicity in the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. The entire culture, they say, is imperialist, and this military aggression reveals the moral bankruptcy of Russia’s so-called civilization. The road to Bucha, they argue, runs through Russian literature. Terrible crimes, I agree, are being committed…

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Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants

Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants

John Rapley writes: One summer evening in 2015, a deranged young man entered a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. After spending nearly an hour with the assembled prayer group, he began screaming that they were ‘rapists’ who were ‘taking over our country’, and proceeded to spray them with bullets. When he left the church, nine innocents, some of whom had tragically prayed for him, lay dead. Within days, photos surfaced on the internet showing the killer wrapped in the…

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Statues perpetuate the myths of the ‘Great Man’ school of history

Statues perpetuate the myths of the ‘Great Man’ school of history

  On Sunday 7th June 2020, sparked by the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protestors marching to support the Black Lives Matter movement in Bristol tore down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the city’s harbour. This dramatic action thrust the city onto the global stage and put it at the forefront of an ongoing and bitter culture war. David Olusoga OBE is a historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and film-maker from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, now…

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The war in Ukraine is the true culture war

The war in Ukraine is the true culture war

Jason Farago writes: At the thousand-year-old Cathedral of Saint Sophia here, standing on an easel in front of a towering Baroque golden altar, is a new, freshly painted icon that’s just a foot square. It depicts a 17th-century Cossack military commander with a long gray beard. His eyebrows are arched. His halo is a plain red circle. He looks humble beneath the immense mosaics that have glinted since the 11th century — through Kyiv’s sacking by the Mongols, its absorption…

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‘Ancient ethnic hatreds’ is poor shorthand and dangerous

‘Ancient ethnic hatreds’ is poor shorthand and dangerous

Marko Attila Hoare writes: The pop group U2 staged a concert in Sarajevo in September 1997 that I attended when I was a 25-year-old student doing fieldwork in the city. I got talking to another foreign visitor who was sitting next to me, a young North American about my age. He told me he preferred women with dark features, so in Sarajevo he was most attracted to the Muslim girls. It was a comment that exemplified the way visitors often…

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