History

Scientists Prove Justinian’s Plague, which Continued through the Rise of Islam, was Caused by Y. Pestis

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The first recorded world-historical pandemic took place in the Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran, as well as neighboring areas such as Arabia, 541- 750 CE. It began during the reign of Justinian (r.527 – 565) and continued during the rise of Islam and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in […]

Archaeology

Ancient Nomadic Scythians Found to be Ethnically Diverse

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The more genetic history that is done, the more it is clear that ancient ethnonyms, the names given supposed ethnicities, put a variety of peoples under a single rubric. I talked recently about how the Phoenicians, long thought to be what we would now call Lebanese, were actually a multi-ethnic […]

Abbasid Empire

Scientists prove Extensive Viking Silver Trade with Abbasid Empire from British Silver Hoard

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Northeastern England fell to the Vikings in 865, and they held it for several decades. They not only had what is now Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Durham but points south to the town of Bedale on the way to York. In 2012 archeologists found a silver and gold treasure hoard in Bedale […]

History

On the Electoral Tactics of the American Historical Association

Joan W. Scott

By Joan W. Scott professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. I was deeply disturbed to see this recent e-mailing from some 27 historians, 12 of whom are former presidents of the American Historical Association (AHA), urging members to vote for the slate proposed by […]

Cold War

The Trump Team’s Purge of Pentagon Photos Raises Sinister Echoes from the Past

Arnold R. Isaacs

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In early June, the Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on […]

History

Ibn Battuta, a 14th-century Judge and Ambassador, travelled further than Marco Polo. The Rihla records his Adventures

The Conversation

By Ismail Albayrak, Australian Catholic University In our guides to the classics, experts explain key literary works. (The Conversation) – Ibn Battuta, was born in Tangier, Morocco, on February 24, 1304. From a statement in his celebrated travel book the Rihla (“legal affairs are my ancestral profession,”) he evidently came from an intellectually distinguished family. […]

Archaeology

Early Farming in Middle East, Sometimes Matriarchal, Spread through Learning, not Conquest

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A new study by Dilek Koptekin et al., a Swiss-Turkish team, has appeared in Science that combines archeological and genetics research to shed new light on the emergence of farming in the Middle East in the transition from hunting and gathering called the Neolithic Revolution. The authors find that big […]

Colonialism

Resistance Works: How Small Groups Took on Great Powers and Won a Victory for Decolonization, Africa, Indigenous Peoples, and More

David Vine

David Vine ( Tomdispatch.com ) – At a time when many may feel that good news has gone the way of the dodo, look no further than the homeland of that long-extinct bird — Mauritius — for a dose of encouragement. There, among the islands of the Indian Ocean, news can be found about the […]

Colonialism

Russia in Iran: The Times and Life of Diplomat Ivan Jakolevich Korostovetz

Fariba Amini

“Russia’s role in Iranian history since the nineteenth century is well known, to be sure. But especially for the period until World War I, it tends to be narrated in a patterned and somewhat reductionist manner, typically through the lens of the ‘Great Game,’ with Iran a mere buffer state between Russia and Great Britain, […]