Browsed by
Category: History

Robert Bellah, a socialist who insisted that democracy needs religion

Robert Bellah, a socialist who insisted that democracy needs religion

Matthew Rose writes: If Émile Durkheim helped Bellah understand American ideals, the German sociologist Max Weber helped him confront American realities. Bellah’s deepest criticism of individualism was that it undermined the very conditions that make it possible. Its vision of human beings as free to choose their own identities and commitments had not brought about a more creative or reflective society. It had resulted in people who were lonely, disoriented, and servile to the power of markets, states, and public opinion….

Read More Read More

Who benefited from slavery?

Who benefited from slavery?

The Washington Post reports: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality. “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday…

Read More Read More

We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

Steve Minton writes: Between 1890 and 1978, at Kamloops Indian Residential School in the Canadian province of British Columbia, thousands of Indigenous children were taught to ‘forget’. Separated from their families, these children were compelled to forget their languages, their identities and their cultures. Through separation and forgetting, settler governments and teachers believed they were not only helping Indigenous children, but the nation itself. Canada would make progress, settlers hoped, if Indigenous children could just be made more like white…

Read More Read More

A perennial quest for American manhood

A perennial quest for American manhood

Virginia Heffernan writes: In reviewing the history of American manhood, it’s astounding to discover how long masculinity has been framed as “in crisis”; in the telling of these writers, it’s never not been in crisis. From the 18th-century elite to [Republican Senator Josh] Hawley and his conservative confrères, the project of defining and protecting American “manhood” doubles as a way to define and protect some obscure American essence — and these men, whether in wartime or peacetime, whether in traditional…

Read More Read More

How nationalist movements paved Ukraine’s way to freedom

How nationalist movements paved Ukraine’s way to freedom

Alexander Query writes: When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many in the West, and in the Kremlin too, expected the Ukrainian state to crumble in weeks, if not days. The government would flee, the state would be carved up – some lands absorbed by Russia, the rest perhaps being made into a Moscow-dominated puppet state. The war might continue, but it would be an insurgency in an occupied country, so the experts said. They were wrong, and part…

Read More Read More

Russia’s war on Ukraine has forced us in Germany to think differently about our role in the world

Russia’s war on Ukraine has forced us in Germany to think differently about our role in the world

Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, writes: Our security is not a given. For too long, we did not listen to the warnings of our eastern neighbours who urged us to take the threats emanating from Russia seriously. We learned that “hoping for the best” is not enough when dealing with an increasingly autocratic leader. Besides all our efforts to construct a European security architecture with Russia, our economic and political interaction also did not sway the Russian regime toward democracy….

Read More Read More

Lessons for the next Arab Spring

Lessons for the next Arab Spring

Shadi Hamid writes: On July 3, 2013, the Arab Spring ended. A military coup ousted the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president who was a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, a decade later, the role the United States played in the events leading up to the coup, and the coup itself, is still contentious. Brotherhood supporters blame the Obama administration for its unwillingness to stop the coup or even to call it one. Coup supporters, meanwhile,…

Read More Read More

The Supreme Court will decide if abusive spouses have a right to own guns

The Supreme Court will decide if abusive spouses have a right to own guns

Ian Millhiser writes: Last February, the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that a federal law prohibiting individuals from “possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order” is unconstitutional. On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear this case. It is fairly likely that the justices will reverse the Fifth Circuit’s extraordinary decision — as many as six current members of the Court have signaled that, while some of them support an expansive…

Read More Read More

As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery

As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery

John Blake writes: Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry. The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not…

Read More Read More

How Russia went from ally to adversary

How Russia went from ally to adversary

Keith Gessen writes: In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush. They met off the coast of Malta, aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky. Gorbachev was very much looking forward to the summit, as he looked forward to all his summits; things at home were spiralling out of control, but his international standing was undimmed. He was in the process of ending…

Read More Read More

Historians are learning more about how the Nazis targeted trans people

Historians are learning more about how the Nazis targeted trans people

Patrons at the Eldorado, a popular LGBTQ cabaret in Berlin during the Weimar years. Herbert Hoffmann/ullstein bild via Getty Images By Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case. It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted, there’s been very little scholarship…

Read More Read More

Water level behind Russian-controlled Kakhkovka Dam was at historic high before it was destroyed

Water level behind Russian-controlled Kakhkovka Dam was at historic high before it was destroyed

The Washington Post reports: A critical dam in southern Ukraine was heavily damaged after a reported explosion early Tuesday, sending water gushing toward dozens of communities, including some occupied by Russia, and prompting officials to evacuate thousands of people at risk of catastrophic flooding. Russia seized the dam, which is part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, on the first day of its invasion in February 2022 because of its crucial role in supplying fresh water to Crimea, the Ukrainian…

Read More Read More

White resistance to federal power

White resistance to federal power

Eric Foner writes: Earlier this year, Randy McNally, the speaker of the Tennessee Senate, issued a proclamation declaring April 2023 Confederate History Month. He urged ‘citizens from across this state’ to remember their ancestors’ ‘heroic struggle’ for ‘individual freedom’. Observers outside Tennessee may find it incongruous to identify a war fought to preserve slavery with the ideal of freedom, but Jefferson Cowie, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University, in the heart of the state, wouldn’t be surprised. His new book…

Read More Read More

America is headed toward collapse. History shows how to stave it off

America is headed toward collapse. History shows how to stave it off

Peter Turchin writes: How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled? All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the…

Read More Read More

Archaeologists discover the oldest known blueprints

Archaeologists discover the oldest known blueprints

Smithsonian Magazine reports: Stone Age hunters in the Middle East and Central Asia used giant stone structures to trap wild animals. Today, archaeologists refer to these massive constructions as desert kites because of how they look from above—like a kite with several long tails. Now, in a study published last week in the journal PLOS One, researchers say they have found stone engravings that are accurate, to-scale depictions of desert kites that date to between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago….

Read More Read More

Long-hidden ruins of vast network of Maya cities could recast history

Long-hidden ruins of vast network of Maya cities could recast history

The Washington Post reports: Beneath 1,350 square miles of dense jungle in northern Guatemala, scientists have discovered 417 cities that date back to circa 1000 B.C. and that are connected by nearly 110 miles of “superhighways” — a network of what researchers called “the first freeway system in the world.” Scientist say this extensive road-and-city network, along with sophisticated ceremonial complexes, hydraulic systems and agricultural infrastructure, suggests that the ancient Maya civilization, which stretched through what is now Central America,…

Read More Read More