Новости за 20.11.2018

Strange. A White House never shy about proclaiming its achievements, real or imagined, has been uncharacteristically reluctant to inform the world about one of its major successes:  Easing the hostility between China and Japan.

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

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)

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?”

Nothing seems more truly American than New York City. A century ago, however, many people feared that it had become a strange, foreign presence in the United States. By the 1910s, waves of immigration from all over the world, but especially central and eastern Europe, had transformed the metropolis into a crazy-quilt fabric of perpetual contrast. Take a walk down any street in lower Manhattan and you would hear several different languages being spoken, see every imaginable outfit, and smell food... Читать дальше...

Whenever I told anyone that I was writing a history of Gypsies they would offer an anecdote, a memory, or an opinion about modern Gypsies blighting the English countryside, begging and pick-pocketing in European cities, or otherwise causing a nuisance. The views I heard were largely hostile, a mixture of myths and confused impressions about traditional Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers, and newly-immigrant Roma in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some also had romantic notions about Gypsy freedom and exotica... Читать дальше...

Thomas Jefferson stated, “Liberty depends on the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost.” He went on to say that his preference was for a free press without government rather than government with no free press. Despite the extreme endorsement of a free press by one of our most revered of Founding Fathers, many presidents have been highly critical of the free press and some including Jefferson have taken action to limit the free press. 

When one looks at the history of Presidential elections, one discovers that only one congressman has ever gone from the House of Representatives directly to the Oval Office,

President Trump has said that as many as 15,000 U.S. troops could be deployed to the border with Mexico as approximately 3,500 migrants from mainly Honduras make their way north. His critics were incensed, saying he was playing politics with the immigration issue as elections fast approached. House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-WA), for example, said that “the president’s (decision) is fundamentally wrong and a political act at a time when leadership is needed. We should not be militarizing the border... Читать дальше...

One hundred and fifty-five years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, his paean to democracy. Donald Trump has compared himself to Lincoln and has stated falsely that Lincoln’s Address was universally panned at the time. But the differences between Lincoln and Trump couldn’t be starker. Lincoln came from a poor family, lived in a frontier cabin, and was self-educated; Trump comes from wealth, lived in a penthouse, and attended an Ivy League university. Lincoln opposed nativism; Trump champions it. Читать дальше...

On the night of October 8, 2017 – the eve of National Fire Prevention Day – a swarm of fires broke out in northern California. The resulting ‘fire siege’ burned 245,000 acres, destroyed 8,920 structures, and killed 44 people. On December 4 the siege moved to Southern California, where the six largest fires burned 308,380 acres, 1,375 structures, and took two lives. The northern siege was California’s most damaging on record; the southern had its largest fire, the Thomas. A year later, November 8... Читать дальше...