Новости за 18.11.2018

Now that the midterm elections are over there will be some reassessments of President Donald Trump. But whatever the verdict on his appeal to supporters or as a campaigner, he remains a failure as the leader of our country. 

Look out everybody, the Big Guy is back.

King Kong, who made his debut in the classic 1933 film, is once again carrying off gorgeous Ann Darrow, killing prehistoric monsters and climbing New York’s Empire State building to face the planes, this time at the Broadway Theater at Broadway and W. 53rd Street, in New York. He is big. He is powerful. He is Kong, the mighty eighth wonder of the world.

As everybody knows from the 1933 movie, and its remakes, tough guy showman Carl Denham sails... Читать дальше...

Dr. Toyin Falola is an African historian and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair Professor in the Humanities and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Click here for his website.

Some historians say that the origins of the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation date back to the 1860s, when Abraham Lincoln’s son Tad begged his dad to spare the life of a wild turkey that had been sent to the White House to be part of a holiday dinner. Others claim that the tradition began during the Truman administration. And while it's true that the National Turkey Federation has been providing holiday turkeys to the White House since 1947, there are no extant records to confirm that this is true. Читать дальше...

On Thanksgiving Day in 1956 a group of families sat down to a feast at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. Almost none of them had ever heard of the Thanksgiving holiday. But it quickly became a favorite! 

While the details of the US, Mexico, Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA), informally known as NAFTA 2.0, are still being analyzed, some are breathing a sigh of relief that their interests appear to remain protected. For dairy producers, soy and corn growers, automobile manufacturers, and corporations, the new deal either retains or expands the access to markets they enjoyed under the earlier trade agreement, NAFTA, which went into effect in January 1994. But “we” are not those interests. Few of us own consolidated commodity grain farms... Читать дальше...

All areas of the world that were ever part of the British Empire. Current British Overseas Territories have their names underlined in red.

A half century ago this November, Richard Nixon was elected the 37th President of the United States.

There is an understandable desire to explain Trump and Trumpism by comparing him to past individuals and movements. Although understanding Trump and Trumpism in this way is useful, it runs the risk of attributing too much influence to one person. Focusing on the leader disregards the social and political environment and the people that helped bring that leader or movement to power. Instead, it is often more fruitful look at broader historical patterns in the past to understand our present.

In July 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1, with one abstention, nations from around the world attending a United Nations-sponsored conference in New York City voted to approve a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.  Although this Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received little coverage in the mass media, its passage was a momentous event, capping decades of international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements that, together, have reduced the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals by approximately... Читать дальше...

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)