Новости за 31.07.2018

In seeking to understand Trump's rise to power, historians have investigated parallels with those of Hitler and Mussolini. However, striking similarities—from almost 350 years ago—with another ruler who secretly colluded with a foreign enemy have not yet been noted. 

There is a hidden history in the story of art in America. The great artists did not start out as great artists. They were trained to be good by other painters and they did artistic work wherever they could find it to improve their art and make enough money to pay the bills.

Having recently watched 72 full-length (42-55 minutes each) episodes and 18 shorter (none longer than 7 minutes) historical commentaries of the French TV series "A French Village"(FV), this reviewer feels enriched by the experience. Here's why it seems valuable, especially for potential viewers in this country.

President Harry S. Truman defended using atomic bombs against Japan as a means of ending a war that would have grown far bloodier had the planned invasion proved necessary.  Some have accused him of lying to the American people and to the world.  The Japanese were willing to surrender as early as the spring of 1945, according to these "revisionist" historians, provided only that they could retain their sacred emperor.

Almost a year before the Confederates fired on Ft. Sumter and a bookish, bald, kind-faced minister and professor named Theodor Parker would die while being treated for tuberculosis in temperate Florence, being very far from his birthplace of Lexington, Massachusetts. Rev. Parker was of the New England intellectual vanguard; conversant with the transcendentalism of his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, deeply read in the new German philosophies of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the higher biblical criticism of the time... Читать дальше...

Whatever happened to the notion that rich people should pay their fair share of the cost for their country’s public programs?

News outlets just announced that the Trump administration is going to redesign Air Force One, the Boeing 747 with the iconic blue-on-blue-on-white paint job that has heralded the arrival of every American president since John F. Kennedy.

Edwin G. Walker (1830-1901) - son of David Walker (abolitionist) - one of two Black men first elected the the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1866

Recently, speaking about the creation of the Constitution to a room filled with teachers of history, I mentioned that the drafters struggled over how best to choose the president. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention initially agreed that Congress should make the choice, but then grew concerned that foreign powers would bribe congressmen to favor their preferred candidates.

In Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, two female teachers in an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts are accused of having a lesbian affair by a student. A second student (under duress) backs up the contention of the first. There is an immediate scandal, parents are outraged, the teachers are fired and the school’s reputation is badly damaged. No, this did not happen last Thursday, as you may have suspected, but in 1934, when Hellman’s play opened as a smash hit on Broadway. Читать дальше...

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington; his most recent book is Through a Glass Brightly: Using science to see our species as we really are (Oxford University Press), 2018.

    In William Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus, the hero’s daughter, Lavinia, is brutally raped in an act of revenge. Then her assailants cut off her hands. Then they cut out her tongue. She staggers out of the woods where she is raped, covered in blood, unable to speak, and is barely able to move.

How times change. Thirty years ago, Chris Wickham was a rising young medieval historian calling for “a new Marxist theory of the complexities of socio-economic change” in the pages of the New Left Review.  Now, judging from his latest work, Medieval Europe, he has given up not only on Marxism, but on any theory or mode of analysis whatsoever.  All suffer, he believes, from the sin of teleology, the notion that history is imbued with a logic, goal, or purpose.  Historians who study the Middle Ages... Читать дальше...

Stefano Dall’Aglio is a Senior Research Fellow at the Medici Archive Project (Florence). He has held fellowships at Villa I Tatti-the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation of Geneva, the Newberry Library of Chicago, the University of Leeds, the USTC Project at the University of St Andrews, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Читать дальше...

Brazilian slaves harvesting sugar 

Scholars of American slavery have increasingly looked at bondage in other slave societies as a way to better understand their own. Firsthand study in another former slave society can prove particularly useful. In summer 2016, I had the opportunity to study slavery and slave resistance in northeast Brazil as part of a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Award team hosted by the University of Detroit Mercy. This included meeting and learning from Brazilian scholars... Читать дальше...

Monument to the Save Manapouri campaign in Manapouri, New Zealand

In the environmental sphere, people often talk of tipping points, the point at which the environment changes from one stable state to another new state, often abruptly, causing significant disruption. I believe that New Zealand could be on the cusp of a tipping point – not in the state of its environment, but rather, in terms of New Zealanders’ awareness of the gravity of environmental issues we face and the need to make meaningful interventions. Читать дальше...

The full-page ad that Facebook recently ran (May 26) in the Wall Street Journal was a history teacher’s dream. However, rather than taking out the expensive ad, the social media giant might have simply sent a message to its over 2 billion users and held a press conference, advocating forcefully for the study of the humanities, especially for history. In this era of high falsehood and fakery, clearly the American citizen seeking truth needs to understand and adopt the historian’s mindset.

From his statements about Mexican rapists, murderers, and infestation, to his action on the Southern border, to his call for a ban on Muslim immigration, to his remark about good people on both sides in Charlottesville, Donald Trump has been the face of white racism. From his 2016 campaign to the current administration, he has appealed to white people fearful of a country changing its racial color. The political vehicle enabling Trump’s rise to power has been the Republican Party. How could that have happened? Читать дальше...

In an earlier essay I identified crassness as President Trump’s chief characteristic. Now, after his mid-July trip to Europe and press accusations that he acted crassly toward German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May, we need to consider why this crass behavior is important.