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Category: History/Archeology

Vladimir Nabokov, literary refugee

Vladimir Nabokov, literary refugee

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Stacy Schiff writes: In February 1917 riots had delivered a revolution. The czar abdicated, replaced by a liberal government, swept into power on a tide of popular support. Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, played a prominent role in that administration. Months afterward Lenin returned from exile, disembarking at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station. Within the year, what had begun as an idealistic, progressive uprising would end — like Iran’s, like Egypt’s — in totalitarianism. With Lenin arrived another 20th-century staple: a one-party…

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Technology in deep time: How it evolves alongside us

Technology in deep time: How it evolves alongside us

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Tom Chatfield writes: Plenty of creatures can communicate richly, comprehend one another’s intentions and put tools to intelligent and creative use: cetaceans, cephalopods, corvids. Some can even develop and pass on particular local practices: New Caledonian crows, for example, exhibit a “culture” of tool usage, creating distinct varieties of simple hooked tools from plants in order to help them feed. Only humans, however, have turned this craft into something unprecedented: a cumulative process of experiment and recombination that over mere…

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The forgotten campaigns of racist terror targeting Latinos in the American West

The forgotten campaigns of racist terror targeting Latinos in the American West

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The New York Times reports: Arlinda Valencia was at a funeral when an uncle told her a bewildering family secret: An Anglo lynch mob had killed her great-grandfather. “A mixture of grief and shock overwhelmed me since this was the first I heard of this,” said Ms. Valencia, 66, the leader of a teachers’ union in El Paso. “The more I looked into it, the more stunned I was at how many Mexicans were lynched in this country.” Ms. Valencia…

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Sorry, y’all, but climate change ain’t the first existential threat

Sorry, y’all, but climate change ain’t the first existential threat

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Mary Annaïse Heglar writes: Dear Climate Movement: I’m with you when you say that climate change is the most important issue facing mankind. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s the most important one ever. But, when I hear folks say — and I have heard it — that the environmental movement is the first in history to stare down an existential threat, I have to get off the train. This game of what I call “existential exceptionalism” is a losing one….

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How we discovered that Europeans used cattle 8,000 years ago

How we discovered that Europeans used cattle 8,000 years ago

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By Jane Gaastra, Haskel Greenfield & Marc Vander Linden The use of animals for their renewable products greatly increased human capabilities in prehistory. Secondary products – or anything that can be gleaned from a domestic animal repeatedly over its lifetime – expanded the capabilities of ancient human societies. They helped to provide enough food and labour surplus to make possible the first ancient civilisations. Apart from their meat, bones and skin, animals gave ancient people vital goods such as their…

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European colonization of Americas killed so many indigenous people it cooled Earth’s climate

European colonization of Americas killed so many indigenous people it cooled Earth’s climate

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The Guardian reports: European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found. Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492. This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land…

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One in 20 Britons does not believe Holocaust took place, poll finds

One in 20 Britons does not believe Holocaust took place, poll finds

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The Observer reports: One in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated, according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day. Almost half of those questioned said they did not know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and one in five grossly underestimated the number, saying that fewer than two million were killed. At least six million Jews died. The poll, commissioned by the Holocaust…

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The hidden resilience of ‘food desert’ neighborhoods

The hidden resilience of ‘food desert’ neighborhoods

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Barry Yeoman writes: Even before Ashanté Reese and I reach the front gate, retired schoolteacher Alice Chandler is standing in the doorway of her brick home in Washington, D.C. She welcomes Reese, an anthropologist whom she has known for six years, with a hug and apologizes for having nothing to feed us during this spontaneous visit. Chandler, 69 years old, is a rara avis among Americans: an adult who has lived nearly her entire life in the same house. This…

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I survived the Warsaw ghetto. Here are the lessons I’d like to pass on

I survived the Warsaw ghetto. Here are the lessons I’d like to pass on

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Stanisław Aronson writes: Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp…

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Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money

Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money

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Bruce Bower writes: Wherever you go, money talks. And it has for a long time. Sadly, though, money has been mum about its origins. For such a central element of our lives, money’s ancient roots and the reasons for its invention are unclear. As cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin multiply into a flock of digital apparitions, researchers are still battling over how and where money came to be. And some draw fascinating parallels between the latest, buzzworthy cryptocurrencies, which require only…

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Islam in Eastern Europe

Islam in Eastern Europe

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Jacob Mikanowski writes: There has never been an Eastern Europe without Islam. Eastern Europe owes its existence to the intermingling of languages, of cultures, and, perhaps above all, of faiths. It is the meeting place of the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewry, of militant Islam and crusading Christianity, of Byzantine mystics and Sufi saints. Once, this plurality would have been obvious. A visitor to Vilnius in the 17th century would have heard six languages…

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Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

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William Sloane Coffin Jr., followed by his sister, arrives at federal building in Boston on May 20, 1968. AP Photo By David Mislin, Temple University In May of 1968, a high-profile trial began in Boston that dramatically illustrated a larger phenomenon fueling the rise of conservative Christianity in the United States. Five men had been charged with conspiracy for encouraging Americans to evade the draft. One of the prominent defendants in the trial was a Presbyterian minister and Yale University…

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How a Eurasian steppe empire coped with decades of drought

How a Eurasian steppe empire coped with decades of drought

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By Diana Crow The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid climate “freeze-dries” everything, including centuries-old trees that once grew on lava flows in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley. A recent study of the tree-ring record, published in March, from some of these archaic logs reveals a drought that lasted nearly seven decades—one of the longest in a 1,700-year span of steppe history—from A.D. 783–850. Decades of prolonged drought…

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New law in China mandates ‘all of society’ honor its heroes and martyrs

New law in China mandates ‘all of society’ honor its heroes and martyrs

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Eight decades after his grandfather was killed during the Chinese civil war, Fang Huaqing is fighting to defend his legacy as a Communist hero. Mr. Fang has filed legal complaints against online critics of his ancestor’s record over the past year. His campaign got a boost Friday, when China’s legislature passed a law that requires “all of society” to “honor, study and defend” Communist Party-approved heroes and martyrs. The law, which takes effect Tuesday, subjects…

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Advice for Trump from ancient China

Advice for Trump from ancient China

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The Huainanzi, a collection of essays of Western Han philosophy and statecraft written over 2,100 years ago, states: If a ruler rejects those who work for the public good, and employs people according to friendship and factions, then those of bizarre talent and frivolous ability will be promoted out of turn, while conscientious officials will be hindered and will not advance. In this way, the customs of the people will fall into disorder throughout the state, and accomplished officials will…

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Britain left Stone Age 4,500 years ago as early Britons were replaced by metalworking migrants

Britain left Stone Age 4,500 years ago as early Britons were replaced by metalworking migrants

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BBC News reports: The ancient population of Britain was almost completely replaced by newcomers about 4,500 years ago, a study shows. The findings mean modern Britons trace just a small fraction of their ancestry to the people who built Stonehenge. The astonishing result comes from analysis of DNA extracted from 400 ancient remains across Europe. The mammoth study, published in Nature, suggests the newcomers, known as Beaker people, replaced 90% of the British gene pool in a few hundred years….

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