Новости за 27.06.2018

Click HERE for our most recent articles.

Background

News Stories

● Juneteenth celebrations unite community with parade, gatherings 

Every June 19 in Texas, communities celebrate with prayer, family gatherings and a strong dose of history. That was the day in 1865 that a union general arrived in Galveston with an order informing Texas that all slaves were freed.

● This Juneteenth Let’s Remember Stories Like This One

ANNA-LISA COX

It shows that slavery was not the only injustice affecting African Americans before the Civil War.

●... Читать дальше...

Toward the end of the Second Great Awakening, a series of revivals that marked the first half of the American 19th Century, one Baptist preacher named William Miller confidently predicted that “Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844." Based on his complex calculations derived from the Bible, the minister was certain that the millennium would arrive no later than that spring day... Читать дальше...

On March 21, 1865, the recently emancipated black residents of Charleston South Carolina, staged a parade to celebrate their new freedom. The city had been taken a month earlier by Union Army troops led by a thousand soldiers from the 21st United States Colored troops. When the parade got underway, it was led by the black soldiers, marching in formation, followed by more than five thousand people. 

On the eve of the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, does anyone remember why it took place there? Or why it began on July 1st? Most recent scholarship would answer that Robert E. Lee designed an offensive operation into Pennsylvania to offset recent Rebel setbacks and to gain greater access to the rich harvests of the Shenandoah Valley. But that doesn’t really answer the questions of why there and why then.        

Seven weeks after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Judge John C. Underwood demanded justice, while providing instructions to a federal grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia. He defined treason as “wholesale murder” that “embraces in its sweep all the crimes of the Decalogue.” This horrific act, Underwood declared, had murdered tens of thousands of young Americans during the recent war, “by the slaughter on the battlefields, and by starvation in the most loathsome dungeons.” He was... Читать дальше...

The collapse of any society brings forth monsters, to adapt Goya.

In this sense, there was nothing uniquely German about the Nazis. Hitler and the National Socialist party he created could have happened anywhere.

It is fair to say that had America, Britain, France or any nation for that matter, been left in the brutalized state of Germany in 1918-19, they may have found their own Führer, preying on their humiliation and social chaos, and blaming it all on a defenseless minority.

In this light... Читать дальше...

“Does The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Have a Hidden Meaning?” That’s the title of a TED-Ed video from last year. Since I had written, years ago, a couple essays on Oz and American culture, the TED folks asked me to write a script for the video. I started with Henry Littlefield, a high school history teacher who, in 1963, used L. Frank Baum’s story to teach some of the difficult (and, for many students, boring) issues of the Gilded Age. Littlefield suggested that the Tin Woodman (no heart) represented... Читать дальше...

It is hazardous to be a moderate in tumultuous times. And while we are dismayed by the readiness of today’s radicals to attack or shout into silence anyone who disagrees with them, we accept with a shrug that during the American Revolution, a civil war, there were vicious attacks against loyalists by patriots. It is a surprise, however, to discover that frictions within the patriot side became so bitter they actually turned deadly when a Philadelphia mob and militia, egged on by the state’s radical Executive Council... Читать дальше...

As jarring as it has been to see images of small children locked up in cages pleading to see their mom or dad, perhaps more troubling in the long term is the effort by President Trump and his supporters to strip away the humanity of immigrants, effectively to treat them as enemies in war. 

The Bible is a varied, complicated, and sometimes contradictory document, as one would expect from any text written by dozens of people, across centuries and cultures, and is subject to varying translations and interpretations. Yet for all of the differences of moral and theological nuances, it is strikingly unified when it comes to the question of how a stranger in our midst should be treated. Exodus 23:9 – “Do not oppress a foreigner.” Leviticus 19:33-34 – “When a foreigner resides among you in your land... Читать дальше...

I am worse than the kids when I go to a magic show. I sit there in the theater after the trick, mouth open, and ask my friend “How did they do that?”

Recently, Corey Lewandowski, a manager of Donald Trump's Presidential campaign told a Fox news television interviewer in regards to the ongoing immigration debate and the plight of a ten-year-old girl with Down's syndrome, "I don't want to hear your sob stories about kids separated from their parents." As a historian currently working on a book about immigration, children, and disability in the 1920s I couldn't help but notice the phrase "sob story" because it appeared so often in earlier immigration debates. Читать дальше...

Scientific evidence overwhelmingly attests to the existence of human-caused global warming. The problem, however, is many people ignore or dispute such evidence. Such it has been with evolution, and so it now is with global warming. A recent example has been the man President Trump appointed to the job of protecting our environment—the Environmental Protection Agency’s head, Scott Pruitt—and other Protestant evangelicals who share his hostility to a science-based climate policy. (Evangelicals... Читать дальше...

Italy's Duce Benito Mussolini (left) with Oswald Mosley (right) during Mosley's visit to Italy in 1936.

A standard story in show business is that of the scrappy composer/writer/actor who struggles for years and then makes good. We all know that man or woman is one out of a million, but the story always works. Sometimes, though, it has a tragic edge. That’s the tale of Jonathan Larson, the creator of the epic Broadway musical hit Rent.

Ocean’s 8, the latest in the long time of Ocean’s heist thriller movies, stretching all the way back to the 1960s with Frank Sinatra and extended to recent years with George Clooney, is the delightful tale of an all-girl robbery ring. Their target is no ordinary liquor store or bank, but the historic, mammoth Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and its decades old Met Gala ball, whose tickets cost $30,000 each and whose guests include the most famous women in the world from Madonna to Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian... Читать дальше...

The United States tried for close to 200 years to build humane asylums, and there are very good reasons why few are in existence today. At the beginning of the 19th century, New York City legislators made plans to replace what was recognized as an early attempt gone horribly wrong. The public hospital now known as Bellevue had also been the location of the city’s asylum for the “lunatic poor.” For wealthy citizens suffering from mental health issues there were private, and kinder, sanatoriums. Читать дальше...

Josiah Henson

When one thinks of the pantheon of the great black abolitionists, several spring to mind: Frederick Douglass. Harriet Tubman. Solomon Northup. But there is a fourth leader who once belonged to that hallowed group: Josiah Henson.

His accolades certainly warranted the inclusion. He rescued 118 enslaved people. He won a medal at the first World's Fair in London. Queen Victoria invited him to Windsor Castle. Lord Grey offered him a job. Rutherford B. Hayes entertained him at the White House. Читать дальше...

News story about the 1844 convention of African-Americans in Ohio

It’s 1851, in Gibson County, Indiana. And Keziah Grier is standing before the Gibson County clerk. She is nearing sixty, and the clerk is looking at her closely as he assesses her skin, the visible scars, the texture and color of her hair, her build. 

Did this remind Keziah of her childhood when she was enslaved in South Carolina, before she was brought in bondage to the Indiana Territory? By 1851 Keziah Grier had long been free... Читать дальше...

As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets). On average, that’s at least $23,386 per taxpayer.

Harvard’s Graham Allison, as early as 2013, but also last year in his book, Destined for War, expounded his concept of the “Thucydides’ Trap:” “When one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result.” He also describes it as the “severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to upend a ruling one.” 

President Donald Trump's actions at the recent G-7 Summit – imposing tariffs on America's trading partners a few days before the meeting opened, leaving the meeting early, refusing to sign the closing protocol, and disparaging the meeting's host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in post-conference tweets – continues his policy of "America First," independent of and alienating toward our longstanding Canadian and European allies. Trump has criticized the policies of the prime minister of Great Britain and the Chancellor of Germany... Читать дальше...

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain was reported to have said. I have been thinking about that observation as the minuet between Donald Trump and the Republican Party continues. While Trump undermines the rule of law in an attempt to protect his presidency from the Mueller investigation, his party members swirl around him, some of whom challenge his actions, others attempt just to survive, while still others are willing accomplices. In researching the emergence of the abolitionists movement in the 1830’s... Читать дальше...