Browsed by
Category: History/Archeology

Wars are won by people willing to fight for comrade and cause

Wars are won by people willing to fight for comrade and cause

Scott Atran writes: Even when defeated and annihilated, the heroism and martyrdom of those with the will to fight often become the stuff of legend. Consider the Judeans under Eleazar at Masada, the Alamo defenders under Travis, Bowie and Crockett (note: that these men supported slavery or other unacceptable positions is irrelevant to the point here), or the Group of Personal Friends who fought to the end, defending the Chilean president Salvador Allende against Pinochet’s putschists. Or take the last…

Read More Read More

Clarence Thomas’s dystopia is becoming our reality

Clarence Thomas’s dystopia is becoming our reality

Corey Robin writes: On Friday, June 24th, Justice Clarence Thomas got something he’s sought his entire adult life: recognition. Writing in support of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Thomas recommended that the Court, as a next move, strike down a half century’s worth of “demonstrably erroneous” precedents establishing the right to contraception, the right to same-sex sexual conduct, and the right to same-sex marriage. On television and across the Internet, commentators took notice. Insiders have long…

Read More Read More

Societies lacking cohesion have a history of falling apart

Societies lacking cohesion have a history of falling apart

Science Alert reports: In the area where the Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexican borders now meet, ancestral Pueblo societies thrived and then collapsed several times, over the span of 800 years. Each time they recovered, their culture transformed. This shifting history can be seen in their pottery and the incredible stone and earth dwellings they created. During 300 of those years, some Pueblo peoples, who also used ink tattoos, were ruled by a matrilineal dynasty. As in the collapse…

Read More Read More

Putin’s war of choice was never about NATO

Putin’s war of choice was never about NATO

Natalia Antonova writes: As NATO met in Madrid last week, conspiracy theories about its role in Ukraine spread fast in Russian media. More respected theorists such as John Mearsheimer, meanwhile, still reiterate their claim that in making war, Russia was merely reacting to the West. Similar arguments have been put forth by other prominent thinkers, including Noam Chomsky. There’s just one problem with this theory. At an event in June, leaning back casually in his chair, Russian President Vladimir Putin…

Read More Read More

Russian nationalism never went away

Russian nationalism never went away

Joy Neumeyer writes: On 19 November 1990, Boris Yeltsin gave a speech in Kiev to announce that, after more than 300 years of rule by the Russian tsars and the Soviet ‘totalitarian regime’ in Moscow, Ukraine was free at last. Russia, he said, did not want any special role in dictating Ukraine’s future, nor did it aim to be at the centre of any future empire. Five months earlier, in June 1990, inspired by independence movements in the Baltics and…

Read More Read More

The norms the Supreme Court targeted this term all came from the same era

The norms the Supreme Court targeted this term all came from the same era

Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood write: The supreme court, thank heaven, finally adjourned on Thursday, after a week of decisions that blew up much of the framework of American policy and politics. And a key thing to notice about that assault on American norms was how many of their targets were adopted in a few short years in the 1960s and 1970s. Roe v Wade, of course, dates to 1973, the fruit of many year’s work by committed feminists. Thursday’s…

Read More Read More

How far do Putin’s imperial ambitions go?

How far do Putin’s imperial ambitions go?

Yaroslav Trofimov writes: At a ceremony honoring young geographers in 2016, President Vladimir Putin asked one boy about the capital of Burkina Faso and then quizzed another about where Russia’s borders end. “At the Bering Strait with the United States,” the 9-year-old boy ventured hesitantly. Mr. Putin, who chairs the board of the Russian Geographic Society, contradicted the boy to triumphant applause. “The borders of Russia,” he pronounced, “never end.” The scene, years before Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine unleashed…

Read More Read More

America is growing apart, possibly for good

America is growing apart, possibly for good

Ronald Brownstein writes: It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space….

Read More Read More

Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya

Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya

Neil Hauer writes: The constant boom of artillery in the near distance is the defining feature of life in the Donbas today. As Russia presses its offensive to take the eastern part of Ukraine, the signs of conflict are everywhere: buildings smashed to ruins by cruise missiles, Ukrainian tanks and howitzers on the highway headed east. The Donbas region, encompassed by a front stretching hundreds of miles and currently the scene of the most extensive fighting in Europe since World…

Read More Read More

Putin’s grim journey from economic reformer to war criminal

Putin’s grim journey from economic reformer to war criminal

Anders Åslund writes: Vladimir Putin’s 22-year reign has been marked by a steady decline in the goals he has set for himself and his country. He initially embraced progressive notions of domestic reform and international integration, but has since led Russia deeper and deeper into authoritarian isolation. His recent comments comparing himself to Peter the Great and boasting of plans to seize Ukrainian lands represent a new low in this depressing journey from would-be reformer to war criminal. It is…

Read More Read More

How did guns grow so powerful, both as weapons and symbols?

How did guns grow so powerful, both as weapons and symbols?

Phil Klay writes: Samuel Walker and fifteen other Texas Rangers rode into the countryside to hunt for Comanches in June of 1844. The Lords of the South Plains, as the Comanches were known, had ruled the American Southwest for a century; by displacing other Native American nations, raiding colonial outposts, enslaving people, and extracting tribute, they enacted what the historian Pekka Hämäläinen, in his book “The Comanche Empire,” called a story of role reversal, “in which Indians expand, dictate, and…

Read More Read More

The role of history in the war in Ukraine

The role of history in the war in Ukraine

Lawrence Freedman writes: Putin’s rhetoric is littered with historical references, recently, in his Peter the Great mode, to the start of the eighteenth century and Russia’s war with Sweden, to Catherine the Great’s acquisition of Novorussia, which includes much of the land that is now at the heart of the fighting, and then to the construction of the USSR and its eventual collapse, with the Great Patriotic War always the highlight. For Putin history describes a struggle for Russia to…

Read More Read More

Putin’s imperial ambitions

Putin’s imperial ambitions

If it wasn’t obvious by the reign of terror, Putin now openly admits he’s a Tsar. The 21st century Hitler disgraces even Russian history by comparing his depraved kleptocracy to a 17th century emperor who “opened a window to Europe.” Putin’s lobbing missiles thru that window. https://t.co/zGCA9sF5Qr — 🇺🇦Paula Chertok🗽🇺🇦 (@PaulaChertok) June 11, 2022 When Putin says he will retake what is "historically his" – and restore the Russian "borders" – I present you a map of Russia 1914. @cepa…

Read More Read More

The reason the Watergate hearings were explosive — and the January 6 hearings won’t be

The reason the Watergate hearings were explosive — and the January 6 hearings won’t be

Jeff Greenfield writes: It is fitting that a giant television screen loomed over the members of the January 6 committee Thursday night. The core premise of this hearing was that the images from that day, accompanied by the comments and testimony of key players in Donald Trump’s orbit, would galvanize a national audience. It’s too easy — and more importantly, unfair — to dismiss the presentation as “political theater.” The interviews with insurrectionists, the blunt comments from former Attorney General…

Read More Read More

The other cause of January 6: The Electoral College

The other cause of January 6: The Electoral College

Kate Shaw writes: John Eastman. Rudy Giuliani. Donald Trump himself. These people all bear some responsibility for the events of January 6, 2021. But there is another contributing factor—an institution, not a person—whose role is regularly overlooked, and that deserves a focus in the ongoing January 6 committee hearings: the Electoral College. The Electoral College isn’t responsible for President Trump’s efforts to remain in office despite his clear loss. But it was integral to Trump’s strategy, and it has everything…

Read More Read More

Climate change threatens not only our future but also our past

Climate change threatens not only our future but also our past

Melissa Gronlund writes: At Bagerhat in southern Bangladesh, a city of 360 mosques from the 15th century, salt water from the encroaching Indian Ocean is damaging the foundations. In Yemen, torrential rains are decimating the improbable mud-brick high-rises of Shibam’s 16th-century architecture, newly exposed owing to strikes from the conflict there. In Iraq, the country’s southern marshes are drying up, causing the Indigenous Bedouins to flee for cities, leading to drastic loss of intangible heritage. The effects of climate change…

Read More Read More