Новости за 30.08.2018

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."  

The US State Department is seeking applicants for the position of agency Historian. For more information visit:  https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/509463400 The Historian is responsible under law for publication of the documentary series Foreign Relations of the United States, the official record of U. S. foreign policy.  He/she also superintends the preparation of historical research, studies on U. S. more >

Rudy Giuliani (Courtesy of Gage Skidmore)

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky co-founded the Pro-Truth Pledge (at ProTruthPledge.org), a project joined by anyone who cares about creating a united constituency of all who care about truth and facts. He authored a number of a number of books, most notably the national bestseller The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, and is regularly featured in venues like CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Newsweek, The Conversation, CNBC, and elsewhere. Читать дальше...

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.

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. 

Related Link Every article we've published on Trump  

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...

  There are few plays whose creation was an historical adventure and that is the tale of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, getting another revival at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey at Drew University, Madison, N.J. England’s Noel Coward wrote the play in 1941, at the start of World War II. He was forced to flee London, under heavy bombing by the Germans, when his office was destroyed in a nighttime raid. He went to Wales with a friend to write something about the war and wound up producing a comedy play. Читать дальше...