Новости за 27.05.2018

Sir John Gilbert's 1849 painting: The Plays of Shakespeare, containing scenes and characters from several of William Shakespeare's plays.

The minister feared for the children. Acknowledging the difficulties of raising them “at a time and in a place filled with obstacles and perils,” his sermon deplored new media, which produced “a constant flood of poisonous matter” dangerous to youth. 

Despite considerable media attention paid to Vladimir Putin and Russia’s meddling in American and European politics, the centennial of the Russian Revolution has failed to register on the radar screen of American politics and culture. Academic historians, however, have addressed the Bolshevik anniversary with a number of scholarly volumes which shed some light on the Russian experience and should expand understanding of a nation and society with whom the United States has experienced an adversarial... Читать дальше...

What do Russians think of Donald Trump? Does their thinking contain any insights about him?

In 2012, then candidate for president Mitt Romney declared that Russia was the United States’ “number one geopolitical foe.” In response, Romney’s opponent, President Barack Obama, mocked him mercilessly, taunting, “The 1980’s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” For her part, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opined that, “It’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards.” The press also pounced, including the prestigious New York Times: “His comments display either a shocking... Читать дальше...

Google the words “Trump” and “legitimacy.” As of this writing, there are 686,000 hits, including articles from the New Yorker, Vox, US News and World Report, Politico, the Washington Post, Real Clear Politics, and the Atlantic, each challenging or reporting on the political legitimacy of Donald J. Trump. But concerns about legitimacy aren’t one sided. Googling “Robert S. Muller,” often cast as an opposition figure to Trump, and the word “legitimacy” will yield 1,070,000 hits, including articles from theWashington Post... Читать дальше...

Sherif Hussein's son, Emir Abdullah (seated), Hussein Ruhi (far left) and Colonel Cyril Wilson at Jeddah (used with permission from OUP)

In 1770 Boston, a 17-year-old prodigy and autodidact who’d taught herself Greek, Latin, and the principles of prosody wrote an elegy for the most famous preacher in the colonies, an Anglican minister in the growing Methodist tradition named George Whitfield. The poet’s homage to Whitfield, whom she may have heard speak in Boston as he made his tour throughout the colonies from northern New England to Savannah Georgia, and deep into the western frontier, was “exceptionally popular” as the literary critic Henry Louis Gates writes... Читать дальше...

1902 Life magazine cover, depicting water curing by U.S. troops in the Philippines

Every American President from 1901 to 2017, Republican and Democratic, conservative or progressive or moderate, Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama, has advanced America domestically in a multitude of ways. Some have contributed more domestic reform than others, but all nineteen of them changed the role of the federal government and the Presidency in a positive manner.

How do you feel when you discover that your father lynched people?

That is the question asked in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Appropriate at the Theater Gym of the Virginia Repertory Company in Richmond, Virginia. The members of the Lafayette family gather after their father’s death at his plantation in Arkansas to sell his home and the various artifacts they found there. In their rummaging, the family members came across a book of photos their dad took of various lynchings of African-Americans... Читать дальше...

News of a riot at LA's Griffith Park in the era of Mayor Sam Yorty

Memorial Day traditionally marks the beginning of summer. It is a day laden with hopes for a fun-filled summer, but also a day of reflection about summers past. Those memories, however, differ across America’s color line. These differing summer memories may help us unravel a seeming contradiction in this year of anniversaries. In the past decade, culminating in the current reflection on the tumultuous events of 1968, the... Читать дальше...

Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2008.

Memorial Day is the most sacred and solemn holiday on the United States calendar. Arguably the most American, as it doesn’t honor a person or significant event in the nation’s history. It commemorates men and women of all races and creeds who gave their lives on the battlefield defending this country. According to Veterans Administration and military records, it’s estimated that around 1.3 million Americans have died in combat service to... Читать дальше...

Related Link The North Korean Nuclear Crisis in History (Interviews with Mitch Lerner and David Fields)

What was the way of life for most ordinary women during the early Middle Ages in England? The answer is surprising. In Anglo-Saxon England – before the Norman Conquest in 1066 – men and women enjoyed relatively equal rights and social, cultural and religious conditions. They held their money and properties equally, both had rights in law, and abuse of women was not tolerated. If a marriage proved to be unhappy, the woman was free to leave it, yet still retained her Dower Rights. Any children belonged to the parents equally... Читать дальше...

“Historians in every field have to make the conventional leap into the minds of people in the past, who by definition were unlike ourselves, but historians working on Africa, by definition trained in modern institutions of higher education and communicating through scholarly networks composed of the abstractions of modernity, must take an additional leap into an experiential world that they have been trained since childhood to ignore, or marginalize. One proceeds with confidence only at one’s... Читать дальше...

On Memorial Day seventy years ago President Harry Truman proclaimed a prayer for peace to honor Americans who gave their lives in war. He said, "From the sacred memory of beloved friends and relatives who were sacrificed in the ordeal of battle, we may derive inspiration for renewed prayers and redoubled exertions in a mighty striving for peace."

We measure time by generations, are shaped by when we were born, are carried by the currents that take us, without consultation. The news, which is coming at us so fast these days, is relentless. It’s worth stepping back to find our bearings if we can. 

On November 9th 1983, the leadership of the Soviet Union nearly ordered a full pre-emptive nuclear strike against the US and Western Europe. The entire Soviet nuclear arsenal was readied. Huge SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missiles in their silos were put on standby. SS-20 mobile missile launchers deployed to their battle stations in the forests and swamps of Russia. Nuclear submarines slipped out of port and took up their launch positions. In East Germany and Poland, aircraft went onto strip-alert with their engines on... Читать дальше...

"The American's Creed" - By Peetlesnumber1 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

This piece is dedicated to Senator John McCain.

I can’t quite decide whether to offer the famous AMERICAN’S CREED at the beginning or at the end—or perhaps off to the side. Once offered, it somehow seems unlikely that readers will be warm to reading what I have managed to say on the subject, you see. Still; here it is, all 100 words:

I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people... Читать дальше...

Surname: Schneiderman. Jewish. Raised in New York City. Progressive politician. Ally to women. Ally to working people. Ally to immigrants and people of color. Enemy of sexual harassment and assault. Fiery public speaker. Friend to members of New York’s political dynasties. Advocate for higher minimum wages and improved working conditions. New York State officeholder. 

More than six months after its release, the epic documentary The Vietnam Warby Ken Burns and Lynn Novick continues to elicit strong reactions. Mark Moyar, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, recently lambasted the filmmakers for depicting a war that was “unjust, unnecessary, and unwinnable.”

The Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s continue to resonate in American political and popular culture as is evident in the almost daily tweets of President Donald Trump that investigations into collusion between the Russian government and the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign are a hoax and part of a contemporary witch hunt. Trump seeks to discredit investigators by identifying himself with the innocent victims of the Salem witchcraft accusations and executions who are celebrated in such literary... Читать дальше...

Major Rudolf “Rudy” Anderson

The stretch of thirteen now infamous days beginning in mid-October 1962 were the most dangerous in the history of mankind. This was when the world’s two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, appeared on a collision course toward thermo nuclear disaster. This dramatic event followed the frightening discovery by American reconnaissance pilots that the Russians were installing medium range ballistic missile (MRBM) sites on the island of Cuba. But while all-out war... Читать дальше...

Oxford University Press has never forgiven me for something I did as a second-year undergraduate at Oxford. May McIsack, in the fifth volume of the prestigious Oxford History of England series, stated that in the early Fourteenth Century the revenues of Gascony added up to more than the revenues of England. I explained to my tutor that the revenues of Gascony would only be £456 11shillings more than the revenues of England if the pound, or livre, of Gascony was worth the same as the English pound... Читать дальше...