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Category: History/Archeology

Massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at Monsanto chemical plant in Texas killed hundreds in 1947

Massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at Monsanto chemical plant in Texas killed hundreds in 1947

The Washington Post reports: Seventy-three years ago, on an April morning at the port of Texas City near Galveston, crew members of the SS Grandcamp were busy loading thousands of pounds of ammonium nitrate. “It was the beginning of a beautiful, cool day,” the Houston Chronicle reported, “a breeze was coming out of the north.” Around 8 a.m., someone noticed smoke coming from the cargo area. And then, boom. A massive explosion sent a mushroom cloud more than 2,000 feet…

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Alaskan megaeruption may have helped end the Roman Republic

Alaskan megaeruption may have helped end the Roman Republic

Science reports: For ages, the shadow of a volcano has hung over the fall of the Roman Republic. Ancient historians told of the Sun’s mysterious disappearance after Julius Caesar’s murder in 44 B.C.E., which was followed by bouts of cold and crop failures. Now, a team of scientists and historians has discovered that one of the largest known eruptions in history struck in 43 B.C.E.—potentially contributing to 2 years of weird weather and famine as the republic dissolved and the…

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Trump is resurrecting the census’s horrific history

Trump is resurrecting the census’s horrific history

Karen Bass and Stacey Abrams write: To tell the story of America, we must see who lives within her borders. The census is the constitutionally protected tool wielded every 10 years to take stock, assess the accuracy of our national narrative, and ensure a fair and equitable distribution of political power and money to the places where people live. The mandatory decennial count is laid out in the founding documents of our nation. Over time, we have bettered its process…

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A prophet of uncertainty

A prophet of uncertainty

Adam Tooze writes: If it is true that we are now faced with pervasive risks generated and brought upon us by the forces of modernity and yet not accessible to our immediate senses, how do we cope? Until you start suffering from radiation poisoning, until your fetus suffers a horrific mutation, until you find your lungs flooding with pneumonia, the threat of the radiation or a mystery bug is unreal, inaccessible to the naked eye or immediate perception. In risk…

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The city is a lie

The city is a lie

Sam Grinsell writes: The city is a lie that we tell ourselves. The crux of this lie is that we can separate human life from the environment, using concrete, glass, steel, maps, planning and infrastructure to forge a space apart. Disease, dirt, wild animals, wilderness, farmland and countryside are all imagined to be essentially outside, forbidden and excluded. This idea is maintained through the hiding of infrastructure, the zoning of space, the burying of rivers, the visualisation of new urban…

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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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