Новости за 17.11.2018

Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest entertainers that ever lived. The British singer with that marvelous voice strutted across stages in his outrageous costumes as the lead singer of the rock band Queen, dazzling the whole world. Their hits, such as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “We Are the Champions” and “Another One Bites the Dust” will live forever.

This book is an extremely detailed description of James Madison’s composition of his notes on the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, written largely during the period during and shortly after the Convention (1787-1789) and his minor, but extensive, revisions of the text over the next fifty years. 

In hindsight, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson appears to have been overly political. He was charged with violating the Tenure of Office Act, a hastily conceived federal law that may have been unconstitutional. Johnson’s opponents also accused him of bringing “into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach, the Congress of the United States.” Surely that last accusation was far too trivial to result in a president’s removal from office. 

Working for Richard Nixon

I did not know Ike’s vice president. The reason, I think, was that Eisenhower had a view of the vice presidency that is now at least a half century out of date. As Ike wrote in his memoirs, “The Vice President of the United States, with the constitutional duty of presiding over the Senate, is not legally a part of the Executive branch and is not subject to direction by the President.” He even included Nixon as part of a group coming to a White House meeting as coming... Читать дальше...

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany. How is it that even after eight decades, some new museum exhibits, history websites, and biographies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt continue to misrepresent his response to the pogrom?

America has had 44 Presidents, and while all of them only came to know or be aware of a few Presidents in their lifetimes, an interesting concept is to wonder how every President in Donald Trump’s lifetime and a few others before his time, likely would react to him if they had met him (and some did).

Professor Benjamin Carter Hett (Photo by Signe Reibisch)

This history still stuns. In Germany, one of the most well educated and sophisticated societies in the world, the democratic Weimar Republic fell with dizzying speed. The overthrow was engineered by authoritarian conservatives and Adolf Hitler, a former German army private and fringe political agitator with little formal education or resources. He spoke out against minorities, immigrants, free trade, a free press, free speech, the rule of law... Читать дальше...

There's evidence this was Christianity's original creed: "There is no Jew or Greek; there is no slave or free; there is no male and female, for you are all one.”

“Terrorists, rapists, drug dealers and gang members at our southern border pose an imminent threat to America’s way of life.” While this could pass as a statement from President Donald Trump on the migrant caravan, it could just as easily have been part of the anti-migrant rhetoric of the 1850s. The fear of sinister foreigners on our southern doorstep has been rife for nearly 200 years. 

As Americans turn with unusual fervor and focus to the November 6 midterm elections, President Trump and the GOP seek to stoke fear by raising a series of concerns about immigrants and potential immigrants to our shores. Thousands of troops are rushed to our southern border to head off a caravan of refugees from Central America. Republican ads claim that Democrats are for “open borders.” Trump himself announces that he will issue an executive order to end the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of... Читать дальше...

Related Link The North Korean Nuclear Crisis in History (Interviews with Mitch Lerner and David Fields)

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...

Afong Moy arrived in America in 1834, when she was fourteen, as an entertainment act hired by Nathaniel and Frederick Carnes, brothers who met her in her hometown of Guangzhou, in China, on a trade mission. They convinced her, and her family, that she would serve as an “ambassador” for the Chinese people. There were some Chinese men in the United States that year, but she was the very first Asian American woman. The Carnes really wanted her to be an entertainment attraction. They set her up in a hall on Park Avenue... Читать дальше...

I have a friend who was a high school student when Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Since then, I think he has read every single JFK assassination book ever written and has a conspiracy involving Kennedy’s murder for every day of the month. He is not alone. America is the land of conspiracies, one deeper than the other.

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...

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

The 369th in action. After being detached and seconded to the French, they wore the Adrian helmet, while retaining the rest of their U.S. uniform. Seen here at Séchault, France on 29 September 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, they wear the U.S. Army-issue Brodie helmet, correct for that time. (Wikipedia)

We have two holidays celebrating the birth of America. There’s summer’s communal holiday. Brass bands play patriotic songs from gazebos in the town parks. Mayors on squeaky PA systems repeat the words proclaimed by a free people on that first historic Fourth of July. We waited for the long summer day to end, and then we leaned back on our picnic blankets and oooo-ed and ahhhhh-ed at the jubilant reds and whites and blues tossed below the stars. 

Click HERE for our most recent articles on Veterans Day.Click HERE for our articles on World War 1.

Francis Fukuyama is not one to shy away from large concepts. He achieved worldwide attention in 1993 for his book, The End of History and the Last Man. He argued that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, we had reached the final stage of global ideological evolution and that western liberal democracy was on the verge of a permanent triumph throughout the world (i.e., the end of “history”). 

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