Новости за 19.08.2018

Happy Hayfeverites

Hay fever season is commencing soon, sometime around August 15, and will probably last until sneezeless October 1.Choruses of ker-choos will begin to fill the air as sneezers scurry to amass allergy pills and 4-ply tissues. Although doctors and pharmacists welcome the economic boost, it is no holiday for the sufferers. But it used to be.

Century-old newspapers touted hay fever as being fashionable, deserving of its own special holiday, St. Sneezer’s Day. It was a movable date... Читать дальше...

At a time when casual TV viewers are being suddenly hammered with Presidential slurs and slanders directed frontally at our Press, Dr. Bornet has sat quietly in his retirement home apartment and summed up what newspapers have done for him. They served him as boy, youth in uniform, when getting that Stanford history doctorate, as college instructor, author, editor, and active retiree.

The base of the double equestrian monument to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson plainly shows the influence of Charlottesville. So does the absence of Lee and Jackson.

Related Link Every article we've published on Trump  

In an era of congressional gridlock and political stands determined by opinion surveys, historians are re-evaluating our 28th President, Woodrow Wilson. Born in 1856 in Virginia to a minister, Wilson was pre-occupied with creating a high-minded vision for the United States, a nation he believed possessed a unique moral force in a corrupt world.

In your American history textbook and mine, no matter where or when you encountered it, Roger Williams and the story of Rhode Island came right after the story of William Bradford’s Plymouth colony and John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay.  In the hurried trip through the mid-seventeenth century, Williams flees Massachusetts in 1636, founds Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, voices some important ideas about the need to separate church and state, and then pretty much disappears from the narrative. Читать дальше...

A unit of the Bulgarian International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, 1937

Historians know a great deal about CIA history. The US government has acknowledged some 50 Cold War covert actions, from fiddling with Italian elections in the late 1940s to undermining Marxist influence in Yemen in the 1980s. Spy chiefs, practitioners, journalists, and academics have written enough books on the CIA to fill several libraries. Although debate still rages about the good or ill of the CIA, we know the major contours of its history.

“There was not a manual, and there was not anything other than let’s try this, and with the overriding principle that these young people should not have to pay too big a price both in terms of their academic learning, in terms of their safety, by going through this process, because they didn’t volunteer for it either. And we’re all in it, in that sense. And that was the beauty of it, I mean, there were so many beautiful moments, but a lot of ugly stuff.”– Shelton Boyles, a former English teacher... Читать дальше...

When the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced the nominees for the 70th edition of the Emmy Awards last month, it wandered, perhaps unwittingly, into the latest season of America’s history wars. 

At a time when the American population is radicalizing, when popular movements are coalescing around “radical” demands—Medicare for All, the abolition of ICE, tuition-free college, in general the demand to make society livable for everyone—it can be useful to draw collective inspiration from the past. Irruptions of the popular will have on innumerable occasions reshaped history, remade the terrain of class struggle such that the ruling class was, at least for a moment, thrown on the defensive and forced to retreat. Читать дальше...

1968: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Tet offensive and My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s abdication and Richard Nixon’s election, the Chicago Democratic convention. It’s not surprising in 2018 that we’ve been inundated with TV specials, films, and articles to commemorate episodes of the single most tumultuous year of the past century. 

When Donald Trump was a presidential candidate, he promised to “drain the swamp.” Evidently, that promise has not been kept. Washington’s “swamp” appears to be overflowing, evidenced by a recent news report that Republican Congressman Chris Collins, the first member of the U.S. House to back Trump for President, has been indicted on charges of insider trading. Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi responded to the news by claiming there is a “culture of corruption” in Washington. Pelosi and... 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).

It doesn’t deserve an award for its content.

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.

Now, it’s Emmy season and, while The Vietnam War has been passed over in the nominations for exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking... Читать дальше...

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