Новости за 12.08.2018

“Pacific Chivalry: Encouragement to Chinese Immigration,” Harper’s Weekly (1869).

George Kennan, the famous American diplomat and historian, described World War I as “the seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. This judgement is reflected in the outpouring of books on its causes and horrors by famous historians including Barbara Tuchman, Martin Gilbert, Niall Ferguson and Norman Stone

Tara Zahra is a professor of history at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, migration, the family, nationalism, and humanitarianism. She is currently working on two book projects: a history of deglobalization in interwar Europe and a history of the First World War in the Habsburg Empire, co-authored with Pieter Judson. Zahra is the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016) and Objects of War... Читать дальше...

Related Link What Historians Are Saying About the New Vietnam War Documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

In a critique I wrote last fall of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, I took the filmmakers to task for failing to expose the essential and damning truth of Vietnam: that the U.S. instigated a war of aggression that resulted in the deaths of three million Vietnamese, including more than 2 million civilians.

For generations, race studies scholars—historians, literary critics, social scientists—believed that race and its pernicious spawn racism were modern-day phenomena only. This is because race was originally defined only in biological terms, and believed to be determined by skin color, physiognomy, and genetic inheritance. The more astute, however, came to realize race could also be a matter of cultural classification, as Ann Stoler’s 1977 study of the colonial Dutch East Indies makes plain: “Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Читать дальше...

It’s been almost a year since President Donald Trump proclaimed that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the August 15, 2017, white supremacy march in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Among those “very fine people” were torch-carrying neo-Nazis involved in a melee with those seeking removal of Confederate monuments. 

In 1883, Walt Whitman, America’s “Good Gray Poet,” was asked by the organizers of Santa Fe, New Mexico’s 333th anniversary celebration to read a poem in commemoration of the occasion. Whitman was the exemplary poet of the nation in its multitudinous diversity, and the perfect speaker to mark the establishment of the Spanish colony. Unfortunately, the invitation reached Whitman’s Camden, New Jersey home too late for the poet to schedule a reading for the event, but moved by the offer, he wrote a letter of thanks “To Messrs. Читать дальше...

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...