Новости за 01.07.2018

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...

A week ago Sunday, June 24, 2018, First Baptist Church of Dallas held its annual “Freedom Sunday.” The church website described the special service this way: “Celebrate our freedom as Americans and our freedom in Christ with patriotic worship and a special message from Dr. Robert Jeffress, “America is a Christian Nation.” 

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?”

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

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...

The journalist Anne Applebaum is a leading popular historian of the former European Communist countries. She has published a substantial study of the Soviet Gulag camp system that won a Pulitzer Prize, and a study of the Communist takeovers of Eastern Europe.1   In Red Famine Applebaum focuses on the great Soviet famine of the early 1930s, which she portrays as imposed artificially by the Stalin regime on Ukraine, and the result of a long history of alleged Russian and Soviet hostility toward Ukraine. Читать дальше...

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.

The heart-rending images of migrant families being separated at the border generated a political maelstrom for Republicans that resulted in the capitulation of President Trump on June 20th. Trump signed an executive order that, he said, would keep migrant families together at the border. At the time of writing, 2000 migrant children continue to be in detention centers, separated from their families, as the Republican-dominated Congress struggles to consider an immigration reform bill. (The House... Читать дальше...

The series of tweets below was posted by Angus Johnston, historian of American student culture, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

Related Links

●   Supreme Court Nominations:  HNN's General Coverage

●   HNN Hot Topic:  Filibusters

How many people have been appointed to the Supreme Court?

125 people have been appointed to the Court. According to the US Senate website seven declined to serve.

Why was President Obama denied a chance to make a third appointment to the Court?

President Barack Obama is a Democrat.  The US Senate was controlled by the Republicans when Antonin Scalia died and a seat opened up on the Court. Читать дальше...

The presidency of Donald J. Trump has stressed many institutions of American government and democracy, and the vice presidency is no exception. Prior to Trump’s presidency, six consecutive administrations, three from each party, had embraced the White House vice presidency, the new model for the nation’s second office that Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale created more than 40 years ago. Vice President Mike Pence has benefitted from these precedents during his first 17 months in office but Trump’s... Читать дальше...

The Servant of Two Masters - Truffaldino: "Ho volontà de veder come me riesce sti do servizi." English (I'd like to see how I'll manage to serve two [masters].)

Murray Polner, formerly HNN's senior book review editor, blogs at There's No There There. He is the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, Branch Rickey: A Biography, and co-editor of We Who Dared Say No To War.

1987 photo of Mark 149 Mod 2 20mm depleted uranium ammunition for the Phalanx CIWS aboard USS Missouri.

Although historians don’t typically play the game of What If, it's hard to know if the United States could have won independence from the British without the aid of the French. At critical times during the Revolutionary War, the French provided munitions, ships, money and men, and some Frenchmen, including the Marquis de Lafayette, became high-ranking officers in the Continental Army. It was, as one historian proclaimed, “an alliance of respect and friendship that the French would not forget.”... Читать дальше...

Another accident gave us Harry Blackmun. What does that tell you?

Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both had the opportunity to appoint four Supreme Court Justices, with three appointments each being accomplished without much fanfare. But both Presidents had one situation where not one, but two, Supreme Court selections became controversial, and forced both Nixon and Reagan to go to a “third choice” to accomplish the goal of completing an appointment to the highest court in the land. Читать дальше...

It was reading, said his master. That’s worth remembering as we debate the importance of a liberal education.

A rapidly deployed critical data & visualization intervention in the USA’s 2018 “Zero Tolerance Policy” for asylum seekers at the US Ports of Entry and the humanitarian crisis that has followed.

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.”