Новости за 09.08.2018

Man who threatened historian Manisha Sinha identified and charged: “Matthew Erickson, 39, of Porter, Texas, has been charged in the county court with threatening to commit a crime and making harassing phone calls.”https://t.co/H5GdhfXill

The North Fork fire approaches the Old Faithful complex at Yellowstone  September 7, 1988.

That’s one of the lessons of the fire that ravaged Yellowstone 30 years ago.

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.

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

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...

President Donald J. Trump has threatened a government shutdown unless the United States builds an impregnable barrier between the United States and Mexico. Trump insisted, “We need the wall… If we don’t get border security, we’ll have no choice. We’ll close down the country because we need border security.” An ill-informed citizenry is vulnerable to the kind of racial demagoguery that Donald Trump has practiced in his rise to the apex of American politics. Trump began his political career in earnest... Читать дальше...

During the post-World War II period liberal Republicans encouraged their colleagues to accept the major domestic legislation of the New Deal and abandon isolationism in favor of embracing international obligations. Harold Stassen of Minnesota was one of these liberal Republicans. Most Americans have forgotten Stassen, and those who do remember him perceive the Minnesotan as a joke for his quixotic twelve Presidential campaigns. However, Lawrence S. Kaplan, emeritus director of the Lyman L.... Читать дальше...

The Koussevitzky shed is a large, 5,700 seat, low-slung theater that sits gently amid the lawns and forests of the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the heart of the Berkshires. It was jammed to capacity, with hundreds more music and theater lovers nestled into chairs on the lawn that surrounds it July 7 for the start of a summer long tribute to the works of Leonard Bernstein, Tanglewood’s long-time conductor and its favorite son, who would have been 100 years old this August (he died in 1990). Читать дальше...

Michael Withey

Don’t fall for the tired and defeatist notion of “the powerful always win, so what’s the use?” We proved that he powerful can lose. Michael Withey

On June 1, 1981, a horrific crime shocked Seattle. 

Union officers and activists Silme Domingo, 29, and Gene Viernes, 29, were assassinated in their labor hall for near Pioneer Square. Both of the young men were working to reform the Local 37 of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) and improve... Читать дальше...

Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) - By Oilstreet,  Own work, CC BY 2.5

I think I was expecting a big memorial at ground zero in central Hiroshima, at the spot beneath where the world’s first atomic bomb exploded, blasting every building, triggering a firestorm, and vaporizing thousands of human beings. But the place of maximum destruction was marked only by a small plaque, set on a piece of marble the size of a parking meter and squeezed onto the sidewalk of a narrow street in front of a blank wall next to a carwash. Читать дальше...

Hiroshima Peace Memorial, also known as the A-Bomb Dome. The atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima detonated almost precisely above the building. Credit: Wikipedia

The best way to get across the situation that Czarist Russia and then the Soviet Union faced in the Far East is to make it clear that the Maritime Provinces and their principal port, Vladivostok, were far, far more vulnerable than even the tenuous US position in the Philippines at the time of Pearl Harbor. The lifeline upon which so much depended for the Russians was the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the chief of the US Military Mission in Moscow, Major GeneralJohn R.Deane, did not mince words when... Читать дальше...

Given the state’s history, it’s clear the law was actually about controlling women.

Amid a recent flurry of distressing and disturbing statements from President Donald Trump, one of his more bizarre utterances has gotten lost in the shuffle.

Vietnamese refugees wait to be taken aboard the amphibious command ship USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC-19).