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Category: History/Archeology

The pattern that epidemics always follow

The pattern that epidemics always follow

Karl Taro Greenfeld writes: You are reading this because of your ancestors’ immune system. The odds of your predecessors surviving the myriad microbes that have stalked humanity every step of its march toward becoming Earth’s dominant species were incalculably long. More Homo sapiens have probably died from infectious disease than all other causes combined. Only in the past 150 years, owing to nutritional and medical advances, have we emerged from living in constant worry that a cough or fever or…

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Trump is ignoring the lessons of 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions, historian says

Trump is ignoring the lessons of 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions, historian says

The Washington Post reports: The first wave wasn’t that bad. In the spring of 1918, a new strain of influenza hit military camps in Europe on both sides of World War I. Soldiers were affected, but not nearly as severely as they would be later. Even so, Britain, France, Germany and other European governments kept it secret. They didn’t want to hand the other side a potential advantage. Spain, on the other hand, was a neutral country in the war….

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Think the U.S. is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

Think the U.S. is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

Union dead at Gettysburg, July 1863. National Archives, Timothy H. O’Sullivan photographer By Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia It has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past. As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century. Between Abraham Lincoln’s election…

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Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Bruce Bower writes: Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon. It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense…

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Palestine and the West: A century of betrayal

Palestine and the West: A century of betrayal

Avi Shlaim writes: Noam Chomsky described settler-colonialism as the most extreme and sadistic form of imperialism. The Palestinian people have suffered the unique misfortune of being at the receiving end of both Zionist settler-colonialism and western imperialism for the last century. The first and most crucial betrayal was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It committed the British government to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, provided nothing was done to “prejudice the civil…

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Auschwitz survivors warn of rising anti-Semitism 75 years on

Auschwitz survivors warn of rising anti-Semitism 75 years on

The Associated Press reports: Survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp prayed and wept as they marked the 75th anniversary of its liberation, returning Monday to the place where they lost entire families and warning about the ominous growth of anti-Semitism and hatred in the world. “We have with us the last living survivors, the last among those who saw the Holocaust with their own eyes,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told those at the commemoration, which included the German president as…

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How to be a dictator

How to be a dictator

Adam Gopnik writes: Dictatorship has, in one sense, been the default condition of humanity. The basic governmental setup since the dawn of civilization could be summarized, simply, as taking orders from the boss. Big chiefs, almost invariably male, tell their underlings what to do, and they do it, or they are killed. Sometimes this is costumed in communal decision-making, by a band of local bosses or wise men, but even the most collegial department must have a chairman: a capo…

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More than 750 American historians call for Trump to be impeached

More than 750 American historians call for Trump to be impeached

Historians on Impeachment write: We are American historians devoted to studying our nation’s past who have concluded that Donald J. Trump has violated his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His “attempts to subvert the Constitution,” as George Mason described impeachable offenses at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, urgently and justly require his impeachment. President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power…

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The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

Ronald K.L. Collins writes: In early September 1957, Jack Kerouac achieved the dream of every writer. Around midnight he and his girlfriend, Joyce Glassman, left her brownstone apartment in New York City for a nearby newsstand at Broadway and 66th Street. They waited while the nightman cut the twine around the morning edition of the New York Times. Rifling through the paper, they found on Page 27 an expected review of Kerouac’s new book, “On the Road.” Glassman recalled that…

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The dark history of colonialism behind the Thanksgiving myth

The dark history of colonialism behind the Thanksgiving myth

David J. Silverman writes: Generations of Americans have told themselves a patriotic story of the supposed first Thanksgiving that misrepresents colonization as consensual and bloodless. The story goes like this: English Pilgrims cram aboard the Mayflower and brave the stormy Atlantic to seek religious freedom in America. They disembark at Plymouth Rock and enter the howling wilderness equipped with their proto-Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, and the confidence that they are God’s chosen people. Yet sickness and starvation halve their population…

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Thoreau, the scientist

Thoreau, the scientist

Curt Stager writes: Much more has been said and written about Thoreau’s philosopher-poet side than his naturalist side, but as a scientist I am more interested in the latter. The journals that he kept from 1837 to 1861 were so full of natural history observations that they might have become a major scientific work if he had not died of a lung ailment at age 44. He probably thought so, too. Two months before his death in 1862 he wrote…

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Climate change fueled the rise and demise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, superpower of the ancient world

Climate change fueled the rise and demise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, superpower of the ancient world

Ashurbanipal, last major ruler of the Assyrian Empire, couldn’t outrun the effects of climate change. British Museum, CC BY-ND By Ashish Sinha, California State University, Dominguez Hills and Gayatri Kathayat, Xi’an Jiaotong University Ancient Mesopotamia, the fabled land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, was the command and control center of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This ancient superpower was the largest empire of its time, lasting from 912 BC to 609 BC in what is now modern Iraq and Syria….

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A big-data approach to history could help save the future

A big-data approach to history could help save the future

Laura Spinney writes: In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to ending its dependency on fossil fuels. A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright…

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The night the Cold-War world turned upside down

The night the Cold-War world turned upside down

Christopher Dickey writes: At the end of World War II, Europe had been divided between the Allied forces coalescing as NATO and the Soviets under Joseph Stalin. Defeated Germany was split between East and West, and Berlin itself partitioned. In the summer of 1948, Stalin imposed a blockade to try to bring the Allied-occupied part of the city to its knees, but the United States responded with a massive airlift that lasted almost a year, before, finally, a secure land…

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The forgotten mass destruction of Jewish homes during ‘Kristallnacht’

The forgotten mass destruction of Jewish homes during ‘Kristallnacht’

A looted Jewish shop in Aachen, Germany on the day after Kristallnacht, Nov. 10, 1938. Wolf Gruner and Armin Nolzen (eds.). ‘Bürokratien: Initiative und Effizienz,’ Berlin, 2001., Author provided By Wolf Gruner, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Every November, communities around the world hold remembrances on the anniversary of the Nazis’ brutal assault on the Jews during “Kristallnacht.” Also known as “the Night of Broken Glass,” it’s one of the most closely scrutinized…

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Why was it believed that the Aztecs greeted Cortés as a deity?

Why was it believed that the Aztecs greeted Cortés as a deity?

Camilla Townsend writes: It would become an accepted fact that the indigenous people of Mexico believed Hernando Cortés to be a god, arriving in their land in the year 1519 to satisfy an ancient prophecy. It was understood that Moctezuma (also known as Montezuma II), at heart a coward, trembled in his sandals and quickly despaired of victory. He immediately asked to turn his kingdom over to the divine newcomers, and naturally, the Spaniards happily acquiesced. Eventually, this story was…

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