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Category: History

America fell for guns recently — and for reasons you will not guess

America fell for guns recently — and for reasons you will not guess

Megan Kang writes: Of all the potential explanations we tested, we discovered that the post-Second World War economic boom and relaxed federal gun regulations most drove the surge in demand for guns. As unemployment rates decreased and incomes increased, firearms – once deemed a luxury or practical necessity – grew within reach for more and more Americans. Simultaneously, cultural attitudes surrounding gun ownership may have shifted, as multiple generations of Americans returning from the Second World War, the Korean War…

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The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin – and even worried about climate change

The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin – and even worried about climate change

Donna Ferguson writes: Shortly after Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, in 1859 he started reading a little-known 100-year-old work by a wealthy French aristocrat. Its contents were quite a surprise. “Whole pages [of his book] are laughably like mine,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one’s view in another man’s words.” In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,…

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Capitalism and underdevelopment in the American South

Capitalism and underdevelopment in the American South

Keri Leigh Merritt writes: In 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned a ‘Report on the Economic Conditions of the South’, examining the ‘economic unbalance in the nation’ due to the region’s dire poverty. In a speech following the report, Roosevelt deemed the South ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’, declaring that its vast levels of inequality had led to persistent underdevelopment. Although controversial, Roosevelt’s comments were historically accurate. The president’s well-read…

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Norman Finkelstein on Gaza: The U.S. could have stopped Israel on day one

Norman Finkelstein on Gaza: The U.S. could have stopped Israel on day one

  Renowned scholar and activist Norman Finkelstein discusses Israel’s war on Gaza with Marc Lamont Hill. As Israel’s war on Gaza continues, killing more than 33,000 people, numerous scholars and politicians have voiced concern and condemned Israel’s policies and actions. Among those critics is Norman Finkelstein, a staunch advocate for Palestinian freedom and one of the foremost historians on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, himself a son of Holocaust survivors. This week on UpFront, Norman Finkelstein shares his insights on Israel’s war…

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Solar eclipses are always with us

Solar eclipses are always with us

Marina Koren writes: Cosmically speaking, the alignment of Earth, the sun, and the moon is ordinary. But from our corner of the universe, the occurrence produces something wondrous: a total solar eclipse. On April 8, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow along a narrow strip of the country, from Texas to Maine. Outside this path, the sun will not disappear, and the best and safest way to observe the event is with eclipse glasses….

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The empty promise of a two-state solution has become an instrument for sustaining Palestinian subjugation

The empty promise of a two-state solution has become an instrument for sustaining Palestinian subjugation

Tareq Baconi writes: After 176 days, Israel’s assault on Gaza has not stopped and has expanded into what Human Rights Watch has declared to be a policy of starvation as a weapon of war. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, and the international community has reverted to a deeply familiar call for a two-state solution, under which Palestinians and Israelis can coexist in peace and security. President Biden even declared “the only real solution is a two-state solution” in…

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Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?

Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?

Robert Kagan writes: Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the…

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Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’: A brief history of the ideology guiding Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’: A brief history of the ideology guiding Benjamin Netanyahu

A view of Khan Yunis in Gaza on Feb. 2, 2024, after weeks of continuous Israeli bombardment and bulldozing. Abdulqader Sabbah/Anadolu via Getty Images By Eran Kaplan, San Francisco State University Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has signaled that Israel’s military will soon launch an invasion of Rafah, the city in the southern Gaza Strip. More than 1 million Palestinians, now on the verge of famine, have sought refuge there from their bombed-out cities farther north. Despite U.S. President Joe Biden’s…

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How the unedifying ‘lessons of Iraq’ reappraisals obscure the war’s real lessons

How the unedifying ‘lessons of Iraq’ reappraisals obscure the war’s real lessons

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic Party candidate Bill Clinton distinguished himself from the Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush with regard to Bosnia by supporting a “lift and strike” policy. Armed with weapons from the old Yugoslav Army, Bosnian Serbs were on a rampage, and a United Nations embargo was preventing Muslim Bosniaks from being able to defend themselves, even as the Bush administration looked on. Clinton’s proposal would lift the arms blockade and…

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The Supreme Court’s supreme betrayal

The Supreme Court’s supreme betrayal

J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe write: The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson. In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need…

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The real reason Trump loves Putin

The real reason Trump loves Putin

Franklin Foer writes: For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the…

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How Israel quietly crushed early American Jewish dissent on Palestine

How Israel quietly crushed early American Jewish dissent on Palestine

Debbie Nathan writes: The Israeli government covertly meddled into American Jewish politics from the 1950s to 1970s, and they did so to quash Jewish criticisms of the 1948 Nakba — the mass dispossession and expulsions of Palestinians during Israel’s founding — and Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Israeli diplomats who oversaw the furtive campaign were at one point assisted by Wolf Blitzer — today the host of CNN’s primetime show “The Situation Room.” These are some of the findings of “Our…

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Pankaj Mishra: Is Israel, in its survivalist psychosis, the portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world?

Pankaj Mishra: Is Israel, in its survivalist psychosis, the portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world?

  Pankaj Mishra, in a recent lecture, said: In​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of systematic torture against Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past. He insisted that those who are tortured…

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Biden can end the bombing of Gaza right now. Here’s how

Biden can end the bombing of Gaza right now. Here’s how

Mehdi Hasan writes: Picture the scene. An Israeli prime minister launches airstrikes on an Arab population. Civilians are killed in their thousands. An American president, stunned and shocked by the scenes of carnage on his TV screen, makes a call to his Israeli counterpart. And … within minutes … the bombing is over. Sound crazy? Or maybe simplistic? Perhaps naive, even? Yet, the year was 1982. What was supposed to have been a limited incursion into southern Lebanon by the…

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A new look at our linguistic roots

A new look at our linguistic roots

Kurt Kleiner writes: Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language. Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that…

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AI used to decipher the Greek text of 2,000-year-old charred Herculaneum scroll

AI used to decipher the Greek text of 2,000-year-old charred Herculaneum scroll

Nature reports: A team of student researchers has made a giant contribution to solving one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology by revealing the content of Greek writing inside a charred scroll buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The winners of a contest called the Vesuvius Challenge trained their machine-learning algorithms on scans of the rolled-up papyrus, unveiling a previously unknown philosophical work that discusses senses and pleasure. The feat paves the way for artificial intelligence…

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