History Archives - Page 7 of 13

History

Waiting for the Executioner in 1848 Austria

Regime change and the case for clemency

January 21, 2021 • by Alison Frank Johnson

_____ In 1848, the Austrian Empire was ruled by the absolutist equivalent of a lame-duck emperor. In March, a peaceful demand for civil rights escalated into a full-fledged revolution. The emperor and his advisors were forced to flee the capital city of Vienna. It was a strange situation. An emperor ruled in ...

Waiting for the Executioner in 1848 Austria

Democracy

Embracing Democracy: The Storming of the US Capitol and the Mixed Lessons of Weimar Germany

An assassination that took place almost one hundred years ago echoes today

January 21, 2021 • by Andrew I. Port

——— For the past four years, many have wondered when Donald Trump would finally have his “Have-you-no-sense-of-decency?” moment. That was, of course, the memorable rebuke uttered by attorney Joseph Welch on June 9, 1954, just after Joseph McCarthy’s insinuation that one of Welch’s colleagues had ties to a Communist organization. The ...

Embracing Democracy: The Storming of the US Capitol and the Mixed Lessons of Weimar Germany

History

Why Race Still Matters

We don’t need to know what race is — we need to know what it does

December 9, 2020 • by Alana Lentin

————— The work, most prominently, of anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century went a long way to establishing the predominantly correct view that race has no basis in actual physical differences between groups of human beings. The anthropologist of race Ashley Montagu, ...

Democracy

Donald Trump’s Lies

Why presidential falsehoods are part of United States political history

December 8, 2020 • by Eric Alterman and Claire Potter

Do Americans think presidential lying no longer matters? Perhaps a better question, journalist and historian Eric Alterman asks in his new book, Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump is Worse (Basic Books, 2020), is whether it ever mattered to voters. Following in the tradition of Isadore F. “Izzy” ...

History

QAnon Will Outlast Trumpism

How a conspiracy theory was born in the Great War and made its way into the 21st century

December 7, 2020 • by Emily Sandercock

For the past three years, someone using the alias “Q” has been posting updates to internet forums, supposedly from within the so-called “deep state.” The posts allege a conspiracy: Donald Trump, they say, is fighting a secret war against a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists entrenched in the government. Soon, ...

Activism

The Models We Need

Forty years ago this week, four U.S. women were killed in El Salvador. It’s taken this long to understand the meaning of their deaths — and their lives

December 3, 2020 • by Eileen Markey

This week in the mountains of El Salvador people who survived that nation's civil war and its violent aftermath walked solemnly into the plaza of the town of San Antonio Los Ranchos, carrying aloft portraits of four Catholic missionaries who were killed 40 years ago. The women are remembered in ...

History

The AIDS Capital of the World

As a pandemic escalated in 1984, one South Florida town predicted the calamity AIDS would become

December 1, 2020 • by Dan Royles

In 1985 researchers and reporters alike focused their attention on the city with the highest rate of AIDS diagnoses anywhere, a city that had become colloquially known as the “AIDS Capital of the World.” This city was neither New York City nor San Francisco, nor was it to be found ...

History

Thanksgiving and COVID-19

Past Present Podcast, Episode 256

November 25, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: For many families, Thanksgiving will look very different this year. Niki wrote about the myth that the “Greatest Generation” was naturally self-sacrificing. Neil referred to this Takeout article about Sarah Josepha Hale’s role in establishing Thanksgiving. Natalia referenced Depression-era Thanksgiving ...

Democracy

How Trump Has Politicized the Executive Branch

“Retail” politicization of the state may be worse than “wholesale”

November 5, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

During a press conference a week before the 2020 elections, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe warned that Iran was sending intimidating emails to Americans in order to “damage President Trump.” Ratcliffe underplayed Russia’s actions, adding, “although we have not seen the same actions from Russia, we are aware ...

How Trump Has Politicized the Executive Branch

History

Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

Lessons from the 1871 congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings

November 2, 2020 • by Andrew Wainer

“The truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935 In 1871, in the midst of escalating racial violence that killed up to 30,000 in the post-Civil War South, Congress launched one ...

Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

History

What Julius Caesar and His Debts Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

The money Julius Caesar owed changed world history

October 29, 2020 • by Kenneth Pringle

Julius Caesar was said to be so far in debt that, on the morning of the 63 BCE election for chief pontiff, in which he was a candidate, he told his mother as she kissed him goodbye “that if he did not return to her as chief pontiff he would ...

What Julius Caesar and His Debts Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

Climate & Ecology

Chimpanzee Culture Wars

Cultural primatology in the Anthropocene

October 20, 2020 • by Nicolas Langlitz

Photo Credit: Observing chimpanzee cultures in the wild, Bossou, Guinea / Nicolas Langlitz ————— As the culture wars became more heated in the 1980s, significant parts of American cultural anthropology broke ties with evolutionary anthropology. Supposedly, the evolutionists’ Panglossian perspective regarded human life as perfectly adapted and thereby naturalized the status quo ...