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Category: History/Archeology

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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Why Confederate lies live on

Why Confederate lies live on

Clint Smith writes: Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows—masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery’s deconsecrated church. One morning before the pandemic, I took a tour of the church along with two other visitors and our tour guide, Ken. When my eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness inside, I could see that in each window stood a saint, surrounded by dazzling bursts of blues and greens and violets. Below these…

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Louisiana chemical plants thriving off slavery

Louisiana chemical plants thriving off slavery

Anya Groner writes: It’s not by chance that 158 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, rural Black communities bear the environmental consequences of Louisiana’s biggest industry. Overlay a map of southern Louisiana’s petrochemical and petroleum plants with archival maps of the area’s plantations, and you’ll find that in many cases the property lines match up. “One oppressive economy begets another,” Barbara L. Allen, a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and the author of Uneasy…

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Lessons on free speech and intellectual combat from John Milton

Lessons on free speech and intellectual combat from John Milton

Nicholas McDowell writes: Published at the height of the first English Civil War, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England (1644), remains a powerful defence of free expression. Printing might now have almost given way to digital media as the form in which beliefs and ideas are proposed, argued with and attacked, but the questions raised by Areopagitica about liberty of thought and speech, and more specifically writing, are…

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Ottoman cosmopolitanism and the myth of the sectarian Middle East

Ottoman cosmopolitanism and the myth of the sectarian Middle East

Ussama Makdisi writes: The Arab East was among the last regions in the world to be colonised by Western powers. It was also the first to be colonised in the name of self-determination. An iconic photograph from September 1920 of the French colonial general Henri Gouraud dressed in a splendid white uniform and flanked by two ‘native’ religious figures captures this moment. Seated to one side is the Patriarch of the Maronite Church, an Eastern Christian Catholic sect. On the…

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Why Biden’s Armenian genocide declaration really is a big deal

Why Biden’s Armenian genocide declaration really is a big deal

Charles Mahtesian writes: President Joe Biden on Saturday issued the document Armenian Americans have pursued for decades: a declaration that the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian civilians was genocide. It’s a deceptively simple action, carrying no force of law. Yet it’s a bold move for Biden, who has gone beyond what any American president has ever been willing to do. Until now, presidents have declined to formally apply the term “genocide” for fear of sparking a…

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The spectacular originality of Coleridge’s theory of ideas

The spectacular originality of Coleridge’s theory of ideas

Peter Cheyne writes: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. His published works containing much of his philosophical prose span from The Statesman’s Manual (1816), which set out his theory of imagination and symbolism; Biographia Literaria (1817), one of the great and founding works of literary criticism; The…

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The racism woven into America’s immigration policies

The racism woven into America’s immigration policies

Caitlin Dickerson writes: When David Dorado Romo was a boy growing up in El Paso, Texas, his great-aunt Adela told him about the day the U.S. Border Patrol melted her favorite shoes. Romo’s aunt was Mexican and had a visa that allowed her to commute into South Texas for her job as a maid. Every week she had to report to a Border Patrol station, in accordance with a program that ran from 1917 into the 1930s requiring most Mexican…

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The forgotten history of the western Klan

The forgotten history of the western Klan

Kevin Waite writes: The Ku Klux Klan was on the rise in the spring of 1869. Vigilantes could measure their success that season by the carnage they left behind: marauded homesteads, assaulted politicians, a church burned to the ground. According to a local report, insurance companies considered canceling their policies, “owing to the Ku Klux threats.” A school serving students of color was supposedly next on the Klan’s hit list. Such havoc could describe almost any southern state in the…

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The Nazi-fighting women of the Jewish resistance

The Nazi-fighting women of the Jewish resistance

Judy Batalion writes: In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair. She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied. She…

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An ancient Greek approach to risk and the lessons it can offer the modern world

An ancient Greek approach to risk and the lessons it can offer the modern world

A vase from ancient Greek civilization depicts Apollo consulting the oracle of Delphi. G. Dagli Orti/DeAgostini Collection via Getty Images By Joshua P. Nudell, Westminster College Most of us take big and small risks in our lives every day. But COVID-19 has made us more aware of how we think about taking risks. Since the start of the pandemic, people have been forced to weigh their options about how much risk is worth taking for ordinary activities – should they,…

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On British colonialism, antisemitism, and Palestinian rights

On British colonialism, antisemitism, and Palestinian rights

Avi Shlaim writes: In December 2016, then British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism. It was the first government in the world to do so, marking yet another milestone in the 100-year history of British support for Zionism and callous disregard for Palestinian rights. The “original sin” was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised to support the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people”, provided that…

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti changed American culture forever

Lawrence Ferlinghetti changed American culture forever

Fred Kaplan writes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday at the age of 101, was one of the key figures in 20th-century American culture. He was as responsible as any single other person for the rise of the Beats, the end of obscenity laws, and, not least, the transformation of San Francisco from a backwater province to a vibrant artistic center. He did all this through the creation and flourishing of a bookstore, City Lights—which, seven decades after its founding,…

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Pankaj Mishra’s reckoning with liberalism’s bloody past

Pankaj Mishra’s reckoning with liberalism’s bloody past

Kanishk Tharoor writes: For nearly three decades, Mishra has skewered the pieties of politicians and intellectuals in the Anglophone world (including India, which boasts more English speakers than the United Kingdom), while also bringing his spirited attention to the histories and imaginations of people outside circles of wealth and power. The scales first fell from his eyes during his travels and reporting in Kashmir in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the disputed Indian-administered territory, he saw firsthand the…

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The conservative case against the boomers

The conservative case against the boomers

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: Everyone’s fed up with the baby boomers. Younger progressives charge them with a form of generational hoarding—of titles and power but mostly of money. The richest generation in the history of the world, the story goes, has squandered its wealth on vanity purchases and projects while leaving younger Americans with a debased environment and crazy levels of debt. During the Presidency of Donald Trump—a boomer himself, who drew some of his strongest support from other boomers—the generation’s…

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Trump’s ‘1776 report’ excuses slavery while likening progressivism to fascism

Trump’s ‘1776 report’ excuses slavery while likening progressivism to fascism

The New York Times reports: The Trump White House on Monday released the report of the presidential “1776 Commission,” a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism that calls for a “patriotic education,” defends America’s founding on the basis of slavery and likens progressivism to fascism. President Trump formed the commission in September, saying that American heritage was under assault by revolutionary fanatics and that the nation’s schools required a new “pro-American” curriculum. Its report, released on Martin Luther King’s…

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