Новости за 28.09.2018

If you did not know where it was, you would stroll right past the ruins of the Roman Theater in Cartagena, Spain, one of the largest and best-preserved amphitheaters of the Roman Empire, a theatrical and historical wonder.

It whitewashes FDR's response to the Holocaust.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has just published a 2019 calendar that focuses on the museum’s new exhibit about Americans’ responses to the Holocaust. Remarkably, two-thirds of the calendar has nothing do with Americans’ responses to the Holocaust. This stark discrepancy is a small but striking illustration of a disturbing bias that has crept into some of the museum’s work in recent years.

Several of the months in the calendar... Читать дальше...

Recently Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO the infamous Texas energy company Enron, was quietly released from prison and placed into a halfway house. To some, the news might offer a satisfying conclusion to the Enron story. The details of the company’s 2001 collapse, involving a massive accounting fraud, were so outlandish that Skilling’s prison term seemed as if justice had been served. After all, many Enron employees lost their retirements when the company went under. The problems with Enron... Читать дальше...

In the run-up to World War II, Latin America was up for grabs and countries that would become the Axis held the upper hand. Latin skies were ruled by airlines owned by German immigrants, some still loyal to the fatherland. Or by Italians, who flew a route that transported spies back and forth and delivered contraband vital to the war effort, like industrial diamonds and platinum, to the heart of the Reich. Mexico sent oil to Hitler and Mussolini, Germany and Japan bought up Brazilian rubber. 

As the nation commemorates and honors Senator John McCain after his passing on August 25, 2018, giving him the kind of attention and reverence often only given to former Presidents of the United States, this is a good time to reflect on the Republican Party and the US Senate since 1950.

“Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders at the top of the hill which they captured, Battle of San Juan”

“A horse leach, a ferret, a pole-cat, a weasel.” This was how editor William Cobbett painted American humanitarian Dr. Benjamin Rush in a 1793 newspaper editorial in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. 

Perhaps not unlike other prominent politicians of his time, Thomas Jefferson had an ambivalent relationship with the press. That ambivalence expressed itself in an unflagging theoretical commitment to free presses with growing practical recognition as he advanced in years that free presses seldom concerned themselves with truth. Thus, while he recognized that public papers were often put to use for political posture, in spite of the strictures of the First Amendment, he also recognized that a... Читать дальше...

Inauguration ceremony for Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933

“A steadily degenerating confidence in the future which had reached the height of general alarm. . . . We are in a pitiful position.” The American Dream “appears to lie shattered.” Words from the present Trumpian times when political rancor and divisiveness are rampant and our president continues to attack his predecessor’s legacy and despoil our environment? Nope. The quotes are from Herbert Hoover and a popular historian... Читать дальше...

Click inside the image below and scroll down to see tweets.

Charles Michael Sweeny met Ernest Hemingway “in war-torn Turkey in the fall of 1922,” shortly before the Greco-Turkish war ended. Both were there as journalists to report on the conflict, Hemingway as a “yet-to-be” novelist employed by the Toronto Star. Sweeny, not truly a reporter, was reporting for the French government.

Photo by T. Charles Erickson

It is the 1870s and wealthy May Welland, of THE Wellands of New York and Newport, wants to marry lawyer Newland Archer, of THE Archers. They are two of the young glamour kids in the New York’s snooty Gilded Age high society. The only problem is that dear Newland, who is long on good looks and short on intelligence, has fallen in love with another woman, Countess Ellen Olenska, a stunning redhead who has swept him off his feet and consumed what little brainpower he has. Читать дальше...

Democracy requires deliberation, an appreciation of complex ideas, and a willingness to learn from others. In other words, it requires communication. Communication requires one to develop ideas worth sharing. And that’s the easy part. Turning ideas into words is hard work. 

The upcoming midterm elections seem particularly heated and consequential, a referendum on President Trump and his agenda on issues such as immigration, gun control, national security, and women’s reproductive rights. 

George Washington "may have had a bad past... didn't he have a couple of things in his past?" - Donald Trump questions record of America's first president and says Democrats would not vote for founding fatherhttps://t.co/Ho7fsxxD6i pic.twitter.com/U2eWmXahVN

The U.S. Senate has put history to work to help protect freedom of the press.

You know the poem:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe

and gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.”

The story of history’s most famous (alleged) axe murderer has been turned into a movie, Lizzie, starring Chloe Sevigny, that just opened, and it attempts to show exactly how Lizzie pulled off the ax murders of her wealthy father and step mother on August 4, 1892.

The astonishment at the horror of the slayings was matched... Читать дальше...

On Thursday I was honored to speak to 23 new American citizens, at a naturalization ceremony aboard "Old Ironsides" in Boston Harbor, as they swore allegiance to the United States of America.  As the son and grandson of immigrants, you would have appreciated the drive, determination and ambition of these new Americans.  Like you and your family, they will be an engine of growth and prosperity and within a generation their families will be indistinguishable from those that have been here for 300 years. Читать дальше...

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