Новости за 23.08.2018

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...

For 35 years, the Capitol Steps comedy troupe has been making fun of America’s public officials, bringing howls of laughter from coast to coast, and now they are at it again. They are having a field day, too, because we have a President whom the late-night comics enjoy using for target practice. The cast members of Capitol Steps have sliced and diced everyone in recent history from Richard Nixon to Bernie Sanders and they are blasting away once more.

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

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...

Today marks the 72nd anniversary of India’s independence from Britain, which occurred on August 15, 1947. Twelve years later in 1959 Dr. Martin Luther King visited “the land of Gandhi” touring the subcontinent and meeting dignitaries, relatives, and friends of the man honored as “the Father of India."  

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.

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