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Category: History/Archeology

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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Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

The Trump administration was not alone with its slow response to the COVID-19 crisis. Getty Images / White House Pool By Arash Javanbakht, Wayne State University and Cristian Capotescu, University of Michigan More U.S. citizens have confirmed COVID-19 infections than the next five most affected countries combined. Yet as recently as mid-March, President Trump downplayed the gravity of the crisis by falsely claiming the coronavirus was nothing more than seasonal flu, or a Chinese hoax, or a deep state plot…

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Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic

Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic

There were eerie similarities between Pepys’ time and our own. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images By Ute Lotz-Heumann, University of Arizona In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary. “Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.” During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of…

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Stories of civilization collapse make for good television but bad archaeology

Stories of civilization collapse make for good television but bad archaeology

Guy D Middleton writes: There’s a common story of how the Maya civilisation was wiped out: they fell foul of unstoppable climate change. Several periods of extreme drought withered their crops and killed off thousands in their overpopulated cities. ‘There was nothing they could do or could have done. In the end, the food and water ran out – and they died,’ wrote Richardson Gill in 2007. The jungle reclaimed the cities with their palaces and pyramids until they were…

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How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic

How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic

Franz Xavier Winterhalter’s ‘The Decameron’ (1837). Heritage Images via Getty Images By Kathryn McKinley, University of Maryland, Baltimore County The coronavirus can infect anyone, but recent reporting has shown your socioeconomic status can play a big role, with a combination of job security, access to health care and mobility widening the gap in infection and mortality rates between rich and poor. The wealthy work remotely and flee to resorts or pastoral second homes, while the urban poor are packed into…

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Inequality doesn’t just make pandemics worse — it could cause them

Inequality doesn’t just make pandemics worse — it could cause them

Laura Spinney writes: A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a school of thought that, historically, pandemics have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more,…

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Coronavirus and the sun: a lesson from the 1918 influenza pandemic

Coronavirus and the sun: a lesson from the 1918 influenza pandemic

Richard Hobday writes: When the influenza pandemic reached the East coast of the United States in 1918, the city of Boston was particularly badly hit. So the State Guard set up an emergency hospital. They took in the worst cases among sailors on ships in Boston harbour. The hospital’s medical officer had noticed the most seriously ill sailors had been in badly-ventilated spaces. So he gave them as much fresh air as possible by putting them in tents. And in…

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‘I didn’t know people died from the flu,’ said Trump, apparently ignorant of his own family history

‘I didn’t know people died from the flu,’ said Trump, apparently ignorant of his own family history

The Washington Post reports: In Atlanta on Friday, President Trump talked about the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus in other countries vs. the United States. He also compared coronavirus disease with influenza. “Over the last long period of time, you have an average of 36,000 people dying” a year, the president said, gesturing toward National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci, who nodded confirmation. Trump continued: “I never heard those numbers. I would’ve…

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Is anti-Zionism the new anti-Semitism?

Is anti-Zionism the new anti-Semitism?

  Zionism, or the belief in the Jewish right to self-determination in the land of Israel, has been the topic of contentious global debate for decades. And while the United States government is making moves to strengthen its special relationship with Israel, such as relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, scrutiny of Israel and its government looms large in American politics. Is it possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism? For the Motion: Bret Stephens – Op-Ed Columnist,…

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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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