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Category: History/Archeology

How immunizations helped create America

How immunizations helped create America

David Leonhardt writes: The United States owes its existence as a nation partly to an immunization mandate. In 1777, smallpox was a big enough problem for the bedraggled American army that George Washington thought it could jeopardize the Revolution. An outbreak had already led to one American defeat, at the Battle of Quebec. To prevent more, Washington ordered immunizations — done quietly, so the British would not hear how many Americans were sick — for all troops who had not…

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Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Jessica Sequeira writes: Animals are everywhere in the Popol Vuh. They leap and lick and crawl and bite and squawk and hoot and screech and howl. They are considered sacred, not as disembodied beings in some faraway place, but in their coexistence with humans, day by day in the forests. The Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, with its gorgeous blue-green plumage, birthed the world from a vast and placid ocean. The Popol Vuh provides the narrative of this creation of humankind…

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The idea of the West has always been in motion and in crisis

The idea of the West has always been in motion and in crisis

Faisal Devji writes: When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Gandhi apparently responded that he thought it would be a good idea. While this celebrated statement is taken to be an ironic dismissal, Gandhi had in fact given the matter of Western civilisation much thought. In his manifesto of 1909 called Hind Swaraj or ‘Indian Home Rule’, the future Mahatma had described imperial Britain’s desire to spread Western civilisation not as hypocritical so much as suicidal. For he thought…

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The fall of the Roman Empire was a lucky break for humanity

The fall of the Roman Empire was a lucky break for humanity

Walter Scheidel writes: For an empire that collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, ancient Rome maintains a powerful presence. About 1 billion people speak languages derived from Latin; Roman law shapes modern norms; and Roman architecture has been widely imitated. Christianity, which the empire embraced in its sunset years, remains the world’s largest religion. Yet all these enduring influences pale against Rome’s most important legacy: its fall. Had its empire not unravelled, or had it been replaced by a similarly…

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The world can learn from South Africa’s ideal of nonracial democracy

The world can learn from South Africa’s ideal of nonracial democracy

Mahmood Mamdani writes: In the course of the struggle against apartheid, South Africans did something remarkable: they tried, with incomplete success, to destroy the settler and the native by reconfiguring both as survivors. They did so by adopting a response to extreme violence that defied the logic of Nuremberg – the logic of separating perpetrators from victims, punishing the perpetrators, and creating separate spheres in which the two could live without harming each other in an ongoing cycle of violence….

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Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote

Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote

Eunice Foote described the greenhouse gas effects of carbon dioxide in 1856. Carlyn Iverson/NOAA Climate.gov By Sylvia G. Dee, Rice University Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force…

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From probable to possible: The ideas of Albert O Hirschman

From probable to possible: The ideas of Albert O Hirschman

Michele Alacevich writes: Like most disciplines, the field of development economics came into being not because of disinterested intellectual curiosity but rather due to pressing contemporary events. In the late 1960s, one prominent international civil servant and development economist reflected that: the cue to the continual reorientation of our work has normally come from the sphere of politics; responding to that cue, students turn to research on issues that have attained political importance. Theories are launched, data collected, and the…

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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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