History

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, […]

Archaeology

Genetic Study shows “Phoenicians,” like all “Nations” were a Multi-Ethnic Franchise

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Harald Ringbauer et al. writing in Nature report on a genetic study of the ancient Phoenicians that is really going to anger Lebanese Christian nationalists. In fact, it contains a profound lesson for nationalists and nationalism in general, which is that the whole thing is a scam thought up in […]

Archaeology

Genetic Study finds Echoes of the Early Modern Ethnic Cleansing of Spain’s Muslims

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A genetic history study of Spain by Gonzalo Oteo-Garcia et al. in Genome Biology eloquently confirms the story of the great seventeenth-century ethnic cleansing of the remaining crypto-Muslims of Spain. As Mar Jonsson writes in his 2007 “The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609–1614: the destruction of an […]

Colonialism

500 Years of Inflicted Horrors, from the New World to Israel

Greg Grandin

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend. A Chicago artist famous for large canvases depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a “Jewish political artist.” The painter’s quick reply was that he wasn’t a “Jewish political artist,” he […]