Новости за 11.06.2018

For decades, Rabbi Yotav Eliach, esteemed principal of Rambam Mesivta High Schoolin Long Island, has accumulated his teachings, writings, and those of many other scholars and rabbinical authorities, tracking the history of Israel. His mission was not just to chronicle the dispossession and repossession of a people, as Walter Laqueur did in A History of Zionism, but to go beyond. Rabbi Eliach completes the circle and ties in the religious component— spiritual Judaism itself. The result is a massive and incisive tome... Читать дальше...

Over the course of his presidency, Jewish Americans overwhelmingly supported Franklin Roosevelt, voting for him with wide majorities of over 80% in each of his four elections. They turned to him, as did most Americans, to pull the country out of the Great Depression, to keep America safe, and after December 1941, to fight the war against Germany and Japan. They also supported Roosevelt, in part, because he was the only major Presidential candidate who was friendly with prominent American Jews... Читать дальше...

What girl in America today has not had her parents try to get her to boot her boyfriend, who she loves and they hate, and marry the guy they adore, who is so perfect in every way?

Stephen Aron, PhD. Is Professor and the Robert N. Burr Department Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also served for twelve years as the founding executive director and then chair of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles. He is the immediate past president of the Western History Association and the author of numerous articles and books, which include The American West: A Very Short Introduction(Oxford University Press); American Confluence... Читать дальше...

His biographer, Lone Frank, thinks so, as she explains in this revealing interview.

Related Link “We Used to Think Only Other Countries Suffered Crises of Political Legitimacy” By Richard F. Miller

Photo by By Lisa Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0

Medicine is missing something fundamental today, doctors and patients agree. While we know more about the human body than ever before, treatment and research are increasingly driven by cost and efficiency and less by the time-honored tradition of medical art. The most popular way of addressing such issues has been to teach courses in the medical humanities—almost every elite medical school has them. One of the field’s most enduring and central claims... Читать дальше...

For more than fifty years the National Rifle Association (NRA) has dominated gun control debates. Outside of the Brady Act (which ultimately expired), it has successfully stymied most gun control efforts. 

The summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un comes near the anniversary of one of President John F. Kennedy's most famous speeches.  JFK, in a 1963 commencement address at American University, proposed to the Soviet Union ending nuclear weapons testing. 

More than a few people thought Patrick J. Mogan was crazy when, during the 1960s, he proposed the creation of a national park in Lowell, Massachusetts—then one of the most depressed cities in America. A national park in Lowell? Please. Nothing there resembled Independence Hall or the Statue of Liberty, and there were no battles or presidents to commemorate in such a seemingly undistinguished factory town.

Theodore Dalrymple, the author of The Knife Went In (Gibson Square, 2017) was a psychiatrist for decades working in the UK prison system.

Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Image from the website, Women Also Know History

Related Links

●  News About Women (HNN's constantly updated index of tweets and retweets)

● Female Historians Try to End the I-Didn’t-Know-Any-Women Excuse for Men-Only Panels (Chronicle of Higher Ed)

History is a key source of public information and debate. With public figures making regular historical claims and engaging in debates over the meaning of historical sites, more historians are beginning to enter the public fray. Читать дальше...

Cartoon protesting Jefferson’s embargo (ograbme, backwards).

Not long after Thomas Jefferson took office, Britain and France went to war again and both nations began blocking foreign ports of trade and violating American neutral rights at sea by seizing U.S. merchant ships along with their valuable cargoes and crew. Even more inflammatory, the British resumed its practice of kidnapping and impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy. Then, in June, 1807, the British warship H.M.S. Leopard attacked the U.S. merchant ship Chesapeake... Читать дальше...

During the increasing consolidation, centralization, and bureaucratization which marked the political life of the 17th Century, no ruler exemplified the absolutism which marked that era as much as Louis XIV of France. Authoritarianism as practiced by the “Sun King” was a relatively novel type of tyranny, predicated on absolute allegiance to the sovereign, who in turn was in many ways identical with the burgeoning nation-state itself. Louis’s reign was marked by its reactionary nature: his opposition to religious toleration... Читать дальше...

Related Link America’s 150-Year Opioid Epidemic by Clinton Lawson

Of late journalists have been asking me about the history of narcotic addiction in America, the subject of Dark Paradise and Addicts Who Survived. Here is what I tell them, and what I tell anyone looking for a brief, then-and-now introduction.

Prior to the current epidemic of opioid addiction, the United States experienced three historically significant epidemics of opiate addiction. They were historically significant because each shaped... Читать дальше...

The historian who lived a long life is working on a long article—a monograph, perhaps, about city planning and urbanism in provincial Russia, finding and shaping Catherine the Great’s imperial urban space. Born in 1925, Albert Schmidt calls himself a workaholic, and insists he always has been, but he tries to have fun too. 

It’s New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s last day in office. I spoke with him while he was still packing up his office. We talked about why he removed statues from his city that honored the Confederacy, his new book — In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History — and of course the question many have for him: Are you running for president?Transcript

Although the U.S. mass media are awash with stories about America’s “booming economy,” the benefits are distributed very unequally, when they are distributed at all.

Suggesting that President Trump lacks a “moral compass” is not a new criticism. But this charge requires further exploration. The fault is twofold. The first is a personal failing, the second a societal one. We shall examine both of these dimensions in some detail, but first several paragraphs about the moral compass of President Obama and the values of some of our outstanding previous presidents.

At a time when we have the controversies surrounding Donald Trump in the White House, we have seen in the past few years the dramatic rise of the 18th President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, in rankings of polls of scholars in history and political science.

Some Founding Fathers, like John Dickinson, supported the colonists’ insurgency, but not independence. Some favored independence, but with little change in America’s social and political fabric. Still others, like Alexander Hamilton, who in 1776 referred to England as an “old wrinkled, withered, worn-out hag,” thought they wanted America changed until changes began to occur, and thereafter they sought to erect barriers to make it difficult to bring about further change. But some revolutionaries... Читать дальше...

The Great Mosque of Córdoba turned church after the Reconquista - By Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0

To: The 2017-2018 Pulitzer Board

From: Philip Nobile

Re: The Pulitzer's Gentlemen's Agreements 

I am writing the full Board because neither your Chair Eugene Robinson nor your Administrator Dana Canedy responded to my March 30 email and subsequent phone calls to the Pulitzer office seeking comment on my draft of "The Prize That Taints the Pulitzer's Ethics and Honor" posted on the History News Network on April 20.  

The article makes the case for reviewing the bona fides... Читать дальше...