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Category: History/Archeology

They tried to smear him as an antisemite – but Mayor Zohran Mamdani walks in a rich Jewish tradition

They tried to smear him as an antisemite – but Mayor Zohran Mamdani walks in a rich Jewish tradition

Molly Crabapple writes: Billionaires raised fortunes against him. The president threatened to strip his citizenship. Mainstream synagogues slandered him as the spawn of Osama Bin Laden and Chairman Mao. But today, Zohran Mamdani became the first socialist mayor of New York City. For all the hysteria, when I look at Mamdani, I didn’t see some radical departure from the past. I see him as the heir to an old and venerable Jewish tradition – that of Yiddish socialism – which…

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What if our ancestors didn’t have feelings anything like we do?

What if our ancestors didn’t have feelings anything like we do?

Gal Beckerman writes: The historian Rob Boddice sat cross-legged on his couch in Montreal on a frigid day last winter and conjured for me the image of a medieval carpenter, hammering away in his workshop. “Imagine this guy; he’s building a table,” he said. Suddenly the carpenter misses the nail and bangs his thumb instead. “What did that feel like for him?” Boddice asked. I stared for a few seconds while Boddice smiled encouragingly, as if he’d just asked me…

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How Trump upended the rules-based global order

How Trump upended the rules-based global order

Patrick Wintour writes: ‘The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”. In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt. During such eras, Gramsci more famously wrote, “morbid phenomena…

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John Roberts has been working to neuter the Voting Rights Act since the beginning of his career

John Roberts has been working to neuter the Voting Rights Act since the beginning of his career

David Daley writes: In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization, the Reagan Justice Department had a goal: preserve the VRA in name only, while rendering it unenforceable in practice. A young John Roberts was the architect of that campaign. He may soon get to finish what he started. Last month, at the oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais, a majority of the conservative justices seemed to signal their willingness to forbid any use of race data…

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U.S. immigration and assimilation debates have roots in patterns of settlement that go back centuries

U.S. immigration and assimilation debates have roots in patterns of settlement that go back centuries

Colin Woodard writes: It is said that America is a nation of immigrants, and for a truism, that’s pretty accurate. But it’s also true that the United States hasn’t always been a nation of immigrants — or at least not all at the same time and not in all the same places. These days, the debate over immigration still revolves around age-old issues — whether immigrants can assimilate, whether they must assimilate, whether the nation is augmented by newcomers or…

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The U.S. is engaging in ‘extreme rightwing tropes’ reminiscent of the 1930s, British MPs warn

The U.S. is engaging in ‘extreme rightwing tropes’ reminiscent of the 1930s, British MPs warn

The Guardian reports: The US is engaging in “extreme rightwing tropes” with echoes of the 1930s and threatening “chilling” interference in European democracies, British MPs warned ministers on Thursday. The House of Commons rounded on Donald Trump’s national security strategy, which stated that Europe was facing “civilisational erasure” and vowed to help the continent “correct its current trajectory and promote patriotic European parties”. Matt Western, a Labour MP and chair of parliament’s joint committee on the UK government’s national security…

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Decolonise political thought. Africa’s alternatives to liberalism

Decolonise political thought. Africa’s alternatives to liberalism

Gabriel Asuquo writes: When African nations such as Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Cameroon claimed independence in the mid-20th century, they inherited more than borders and fragile institutions; they also inherited a political philosophy. Liberalism, born of Europe’s Enlightenment, was presented as the universal grammar of progress. It came clothed in the language of democracy, development and human rights, promising that multiparty elections, private property, free markets and individual rights would secure for Africa a swift entry into modernity. Yet, decades…

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Echoes of 1938 in 2025

Echoes of 1938 in 2025

Timothy Snyder writes: In certain ways, the autumn of 2025 in the United States has recalled the autumn of 1938 in Nazi Germany. The mass deportation of undocumented people was one of Hitler’s largest coercive policies before the war. That fall, the German police and SS rounded up Jews who lacked German citizenship and dumped them on the Polish side of the German-Polish border. This set off a chain of events which can give us a useful perspective on where…

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Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed

Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed

Rebecca Solnit writes: As Donald Trump deteriorates and his grasp on power fades, he has been lashing out furiously at female journalists and ethnic groups, most recently Somali Americans. His insults land because of their animosity and his power, not their accuracy. Likewise, his administration’s attacks on immigrants are sloppy and driven by lies. It’s strikingly clear that the target is not individuals with criminal records. It’s anyone and everyone guilty of being brown. Native Americans with tribal identification cards,…

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Haunted by history, Japanese Americans fight against Trump’s immigration crackdown

Haunted by history, Japanese Americans fight against Trump’s immigration crackdown

The New York Times reports: From the passenger seat of a sky blue Prius, Amy Oba craned her neck to get a look at the federal detention center, a hulking tower surrounded by a black chain-link fence and laced with barbed wire. On a recent evening, she was on patrol, part of a group of Japanese Americans who are keeping a watchful eye on the actions of immigration agents in Los Angeles. “I definitely think about my family when we…

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Decades-long droughts doomed one of the world’s oldest civilizations

Decades-long droughts doomed one of the world’s oldest civilizations

Live Science reports: A series of severe, decades-long droughts ushered the end of the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world’s oldest civilizations, a new study finds. This Indus Valley Civilization (also known as the “Harappan” civilization) flourished between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in a region that stretched across the modern-day India-Pakistan border. Its people created cities, such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, which had sophisticated water-management systems. They also created a written script, which remains undeciphered by modern…

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Europeans’ views of the U.S. are now defined by their views of Trump

Europeans’ views of the U.S. are now defined by their views of Trump

Ivan Krastev writes: The Trumpian revolution has divided Europe. Unlike during earlier moments of friction, such as the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, the split is not between pro- and anti-American countries. This time, it is between pro- and anti-Trump political camps. The most important change is that European perceptions of the U.S. political system are now starkly polarized. In a June survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations, supporters of far-right parties such as Germany’s AfD, Italy’s…

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A short history of the long war on drugs in Latin America

A short history of the long war on drugs in Latin America

Greg Grandin writes: Today, Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad. Many brushed off his proclamation early in his second term that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America as a foolish, yet harmless, show of dominance. Now, however, he’s created an ongoing bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea. The Pentagon has so far destroyed 18 go-fast boats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence has…

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William Blake, poet and prophet, was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation

William Blake, poet and prophet, was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation

Jonathan Agin writes: Comparing the poet, painter, and master engraver William Blake to his contemporary William Wordsworth in a 1991 London Review of Books article, Jonathan Bate wrote that “Blake’s wildness was what shaggy men like Ginsberg needed a generation ago, but Wordsworth’s sobriety and steady eye can do more for us now.” A generation further on, it’s time we get back to Blake, who was indeed “wild” in his radically anti-imperialist, counter-enlightenment spirit. Though some of his contemporaries would…

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Students deserve to be told the truth about American history

Students deserve to be told the truth about American history

Clint Smith writes: “Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Thomas Jefferson,” I said to a group of about 70 middle schoolers in Memphis. Hands shot up across the auditorium. “What do we know about him?” I asked. “He was the president!” one said. “He had funny hair!” said another. “He wrote the Constitution?” one remarked, half-asking, half-asserting. I responded to each of their comments: “Yes, he was our country’s third president.” “That’s actually how many men wore their hair…

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The historical significance of the Trump-Epstein scandal: the degradation of humanity

The historical significance of the Trump-Epstein scandal: the degradation of humanity

  In the thicket of daily news, it’s often hard to place events within a broad historical context. Indeed, during periods of rapid change the present can feel like it is perpetually erasing the past. We fixate on the now and the what next? and rather than becoming illuminated, get sucked into a black hole of actions stripped of meaning. For this reason, the perspective of a scholar such as Sean Wilentz, the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American…

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