Новости за 25.12.2018

The Favourite—the new film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos about the reign of Queen Anne of England (r. 1701-1714)—is a profound and successful work of political imagination that nevertheless depends on several serious historical inaccuracies. It is unusually truthful about the everyday workings of politics, at least as people tend to see the matter today and saw it also in Anne’s day. This is especially true of the film’s emphasis, underplayed in most historical accounts, on the use of sex in pursuit... Читать дальше...

Jennifer Frost is an associate professor of history at The University of Auckland in New Zealand. She specializes in women’s history in the United States. Her books include An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (2001) and Hedda Hopper's Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism (2011). She was interviewed by email in November 2018. 

Captain Henry T. Waskow, United States Army - By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use

God still spoke to his prophets during the 17th century English civil wars. Oftentimes God thundered in paradoxical aphorisms that sounded heretical or blasphemous. Sometimes, two centuries before Friedrich Nietzsche, God would declare his own death. For the members of the dissenting religious sects that functioned as the pamphleteers for these ideas, theology was a radical practice. Faith didn’t exist to bolster things-of-this-world, but rather God’s decomposition allowed for a fecundity where new meanings could grow. Читать дальше...

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, By Martin Falbisoner - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

When noted black intellectual Marc Lamont Hill spoke at the UN last month about justice for the Palestinian people, critics like those in the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were quick to condemn him. They said his words implied support for the “one state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which his detractors claimed was an anti-Semitic and even genocidal notion. Just one day after Hill made his comments, CNN responded to the furor by firing Hill from his post as a commentator on the network. Читать дальше...

“Is Donald Trump the incarnation of Andrew Jackson?” 

That question over the last three years has become nearly as fundamental about politics as Hamlet’s existential one was about life. But one might also notice it is almost always rhetorical, as if the people posing it have already concluded that Trump and Jackson are very much alike indeed. Perhaps the process stems from an effort to understand the Trump phenomenon by applying a historical marker that can make it more charted ground. Читать дальше...

The Republican Party has been in existence now for 164 years. It was founded in 1854 in opposition to the expansion of slavery, as permitted under the Kansas Nebraska Act of that year, which also drew the opposition of abolitionists, as well as “Free Soilers.” What started as a reform oriented party with a real commitment to principle and remained so for about a generation until the mid 1870s, became a party openly connected to the massive growth of monopoly capitalism. By then, beholden to the status quo... Читать дальше...

The holiday season in Britain is traditionally one of pantomime. In theatres across the country washed-up television actors, alleged comedians, and middle of the road pop stars whose salad days long ago wilted offer bawdy, farcical takes on fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, or The Ugly Duckling. But this Brexmas, the farce at Westminster gets top billing. 

pic.twitter.com/GRs75WRx6L

There are times it is obvious the world has changed. Dallas 1963, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Brexit. There are times when it is not immediately obvious. Archduke Franz Ferdindand’s driver taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo in June 1914. It is the consequences that make us realize how important the initial moment was. One such moment was last week. It was not the arrest, on a US request in Canada over alleged breaches of Iranian sanctions... Читать дальше...

Across the internet, poet and novelist Alice Walker this week has been harshly denounced as anti-Semitic on the basis of an interview she did with the New York Times Book Review last Sunday, for her comments  on  And The Truth Shall Set You Free,  by David Icke, whose work has been  condemned as anti-Semitic.  In the interview, Walker was asked what books were on her nightstand. She mentioned a number of books, one of which was Icke's, and  said that "In Icke's books there is the whole of existence... Читать дальше...

Germans stand on top of the Wall in the days before it was torn down - By Lear 21 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

Dove Cameron, Zurin Villanueva, Gilbert L. Bailey II, Chris Hoch. Photo by Erik Carter

Christmas is when we hope and pray for miracles, big and small.  In late 1944, the people of Finnmark in Northern Norway needed a holiday miracle in the worst way. Finnmark had been burned to the ground by the retreating Nazi German army as World War II raged. The News of Norway reported that "the population was brought literally to the point of starvation, and lack of housing, adequate clothing and other commodities caused considerable sickness, particularly among children."   Help would come from the Allied forces and charities. Читать дальше...

The year before the Nazis invaded Paris, in 1939, the most famous woman in Europe received a visitor who would change her life’s course forever. 

Jupiter-C First Launch, 9-20-1956

Although you will often hear the notion that the space age began in 1957 with the launching of the soviet made artificial satellite known as Sputnik, the actual historical record is not so simple. While it is certainly correct that the soviets did launch the first satellite into orbit a few months before the United States launched its first satellite, long before that, America had completed a series of successful launches into space and achieved many firsts. Читать дальше...

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington; his most recent book is Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are (Oxford University Press), 2018, from which this article is drawn.

Hope Ridings Miller and Richard Nixon

Accusations, hyperbole, and falsehoods studded the long lead up to our recent midterm elections. Buried in the din was the occasional call for a return to civility. But when a dozen or so mail bombs started arriving in the mail boxes of Democratic officials and operatives and that was followed by a deadly mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I stopped thinking about civility. Instead, I longed for some sanity.

Still, as... Читать дальше...

The death of George Herbert Walker Bush symbolizes the end of the Republicans as the GOP, the “Grand Old Party.” He dipped his toes into the new Republican Party that emerged during his leadership, but that new party was not his cultural home. He was in that party, but not of it. 

Even in these troubled times pilgrims flock by the thousand to the Holy Land. Many have a religious motivation: they want to walk “in the footsteps of Jesus” or to see the land of the patriarchs. Often, however, despite the best spin that the tour guides put on it, what they actually see is “the land of Herod” and the buildings of the Crusaders or the Ottomans. What is more, when they consult their digital maps or guidebooks, they will not find “the Holy Land” anywhere depicted. As a political definition of turf it simply does not exist. Читать дальше...

Congressman George Henry White of North Carolina

 Last week Congress unanimously passed the first federal anti-lynching bill. Perhaps Congressman George Henry White of North Carolina, must have finally be smiling. A Black Indian born to an enslaved woman, little made him smile during the grim days that marked the post-Civil War decades. Strong-willed, eloquent and determined, White devoted his life to educating his people. He became a teacher, school principal, and lawyer and in 1896 was... Читать дальше...

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University. His latest book — his tenth — is The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s .

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• Scrooge 'was a victim of brain disease'
• Amateur Photographer Has Focused On Decades of the National Christmas Tree

History of Christmas

• Backstory: Naughty & Nice ... A History of The Holiday Season [podcast 54 minutes... Читать дальше...

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