Новости за 09.11.2018

Now that the World Series is over, baseball historians are already at work trying to determine where the 2018 Boston Red Sox, winners of 108 regular season games and 119 altogether, rank among the best teams of all time.  The most recent entry:  the 1998 New York Yankees, winners of 114 regular season games, who then went 11-2 in the postseason.  And, of course, there are the 1927 Yankees, Murderers’ Row, featuring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who won 110 games (out of 154), then swept the Pittsburgh Pirates. Читать дальше...

As the world collectively gathers to remember those who fought in World War I a century ago, it’s tempting to consider this milestone as just a vestige of the past revisited only momentarily. Veterans of that war have long since faded away, and most of humanity is largely convinced that the horrors of trench and chemical warfare are collectively too horrible to consider facing again.

This Sunday marks the hundredth anniversary of the armistice between the opponents in the Great War, or what—following another total world-wide war only two decades later—would come to be called World War I. The centenary of Armistice Day, now Veterans Day in the United States, serves as a reminder of the difficulty of ending war. As the prime minister of France Georges Clemenceau commented during negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles to resolve the conflict: “It is much easier to make war than peace.” In fact... Читать дальше...

Wilson campaign vehicle, New York City, March 1916: “Who Keeps Us Out of War?”

The heads of the "Big Four" nations at the Paris Peace Conference, 27 May 1919. From left to right: David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson

Photo: Jerry Dalia, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

The more things change…

It is 1892 in staid, prim, proper, stiff upper lip England and two Oxford undergraduates, Jack and Charley, want to marry their girlfriends, Amy and Kitty. They are nervous and want a chaperone and, lo and behold, who do they discover is arriving by train that very day but Charley’s aunt from Brazil (“where all the nuts are” she always says), Donna Lucia D’Alvadorez. Perfect. She does not arrive, though and... Читать дальше...

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●  HNN Topic:  Antisemitism

● What historians are saying about the attack:  Their tweets and retweets

An eruv is normally a thin line of metal wire that stretches across the tops of telephone poles, barely visible to an observer who doesn’t expect it, looking scarcely different from the normal infrastructure that you would see in any large city – perhaps a line to bring cable television into homes. But the purpose of an eruv is different; rather it serves to encompass... Читать дальше...

After the American Nazi massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, we inevitably and rightly think of the genocidal antisemitism the Nazis preached and practiced. This makes perfect sense for three obvious reasons: This is a case of mass murder motivated by antisemitism, the perpetrator is an American Nazi, and he has struck in an atmosphere personally poisoned by a president (no less) who has deliberately resurrected the “America First” slogan of those Americans who were still ready... Читать дальше...

"This imbecile has us especially close to his heart. He makes no secret of his hateful feelings. He does not greet my wife at all and ignores me unless it's for official business," wrote Friedrich Kellner, courthouse administrator in the small German town of Laubach, on January 23, 1943. The "imbecile" was Heinrich Scherdt, the court constable, who had been directed by the local SS unit, a branch of the Gestapo office in Giessen, to report on the Kellners.

The Palestine Electric Company Ltd in the early 1920s.

On Sunday, King Abdullah II of Jordan canceled an annex of the 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty that gave Israeli farmers access to fields located on Jordanian territory. In doing so, Abdallah was responding to a groundswell of anti-Israel feeling brought on by a number of recent controversies, from the violence in Gaza to the shooting last year in Amman of two Jordanian citizens by an Israeli security guard.

Although the story has received extensive press coverage... Читать дальше...

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

If you cannot see the tweet thread click here.

Something went terribly wrong on the night that rough, tough staff sergeant Donna Caine, a seasoned drill instructor, led her regiment of U.S. Marines on a march through a tidal swamp at Parris Island, South Carolina, to bring the discordant group a little discipline. Five of them, two men and three women, died. It was a tragedy covered by CNN and other networks, focused national attention on Caine and the Corps and damaged the defense Department’s program to further integrate women into the Corps. Читать дальше...

The Czechs are commemorating a number of events this year, including the founding of the National Museum (200 years ago), the Revolution of 1848 (170 years ago), the establishment of Czechoslovakia (100 years ago), the Munich Agreement (80 years ago), the beginning of the communist regime (70 years ago), and the Warsaw Pact invasion (50 years ago). Czechoslovakia’s centennial, on 28 October, is the most significant of these events and has received intense media coverage in the Czech Republic because of the republic’s founder... Читать дальше...

Statue of Hamilton by Giuseppe Ceracchi (Courtesy: Jerry L. Thompson for the Boston Athenæum)

When Halloween came around in 1960 John F. Kennedy, while campaigning for president, came across a unique trick or treat event. This ghoulish party was not about collecting candy but instead raising money for the UN agency fighting child hunger and disease-UNICEF. JFK loved it! Kennedy remarked at a shopping plaza in Willow Grove where the UNICEF party took place, "I think that is in the best tradition of this country’s humane and sympathetic effort." Kennedy continued speaking about fighting hunger and disease in his short speech. Читать дальше...

As Labor Day came and went last month, many no doubt gave thanks for the low unemployment rate. At the same time the Democratic Party Labor Day BBQ saw presidential candidates, elected officials and activists touting proposals for a job guarantee to ensure full employment. Why bother if the population out of work is at historic lows? 

“Never trust anyone over thirty.” These words, uttered by Jack Weinberg, an activist at the University of California at Berkeley, became a famous slogan of the 1960s student left. It was catchy, but also contributed to a lazy portrayal of the student movement as the political equivalent of a fraternity prank. It was easily mocked: Kirkpatrick Sale, in his landmark study of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) ironically noted that on April 4, 1970 Weinberg himself turned thirty.

That question was posed recently at a Patriot Week talk I gave commemorating the bicentennial of Douglass’s birth. Created in 2009, Patriot Week is the brainchild of Judge Michael Warren and his daughter Leah of Oakland County, Michigan. Now celebrated in ten states, it aims to further our appreciation and discussion of America’s first principles and culminates on September 17 in Constitution Day, a federally-mandated observance in educational institutions that receive federal assistance of any kind. Читать дальше...

There was, once upon a time, an extremely popular genre of American biographical literature, going back at least to Parson Weems’s hagiography of George Washington, written with the explicit purpose of inspiring young boys (and only boys) to emulate the example of great leaders and accomplish great things. That genre is now regarded with amused condescension if not contempt and state US history curriculum standards, often echoing the ideology of Howard Zinn, identify few if any praiseworthy individuals... Читать дальше...

The upcoming presidential election campaign of 2020 may offer more potential candidates from a single state in our history.

After attending six President Trump rallies in October 2018, the New Yorker’sSusan Glasser wrote, “The biggest difference between Trump and any other American President, however, is not the bragging. It’s the cult of personality he has built around himself and which he insists upon at his rallies.” She added that he calls to the stage other Republican politicians who flatter him with lines like “Is he not the best President we have ever had?” and he is “the strongest President we have seen in... Читать дальше...

The hateful events of the past week – the anti-Semitic massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the attempted bombing of two former presidents and other critics of President Donald Trump, the apparently racist murder of two African Americans in a Louisville Kroger’s after a failed attempt to invade a Black church – have provoked many Americans to consider the ways that Trump’s bigoted, violent rhetoric has poisoned our nation. It is true that Trump’s persistent appeals to racial and nativist prejudice... Читать дальше...

By now, many of you are familiar with the outcries of Ashland, Oregon’s elderly scholar. Living on (now past 101), he can’t help noticing what’s happening to the Executive Branch of the government of the United States. He’s not happy! Nothing at Emory, Georgia, or Stanford, apparently, prepared him for today’s spectacle of government by guesswork. So here he is again, this time close to fulminating….