History

They discuss Cole’s career, ranging from his upbringing in a military family to becoming a leading public intellectual during the Iraq War

Abbasid Empire

Literature from Islamic Societies embraced homoerotic Love until the 19th century. What happened?

The Conversation

Attitudes towards homosexuality in early Islamic societies were complex

Algeria

Was Colonialism a Crime? Algerian Parliament Criminalizes 130 Years of French Rule

Juan Cole

Bennoune He wrote not only of innumerable massacres by French commanders of local populations but also of a vast transfer of landed wealth

Featured

War, Peace, and Erasure: Lessons from Wakara for Gaza and Beyond

Max Perry Mueller

Lincoln, NE (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Long before Israeli leaders invoked biblical rhetoric to justify the “erasure” of a Palestinian homeland, another colonizing people sought to remake a land in the image of their God. In July 1847, Brigham Young declared the American Great Basin “the place” God had set apart to “make” […]

Climate Change

Was Volcano-Driven Climate Change partially Behind the Black Death?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – How plague came to Europe around 1347 has long been debated by historians. Scientists have located the origin of the primary reservoir of the disease in today’s Kyrgyzstan, and it has long been thought somehow to have come west with the Mongol invasions of the fourteenth century. One colorful tale […]

Colonialism

U.S. Imperialism in Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to Maduro: The Trump Corollary

Tomdispatch

By Eric Ross In recent months, the Trump administration has escalated a decades-long campaign against the Venezuelan government and people. The renewed, intensifying threats of regime change, justified through false or inflated claims that Nicolás Maduro, its president, is directing narco-terrorism against the United States, serve as a convenient pretext for deeper and more direct […]

Featured

Sorry, White Nationalists, Europeans were Black until the Rise of Rome, and Rome was Multiracial

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – We live in a time when a once level-headed anti-populist politician such as J. D. Vance has increasingly adopted the language of white nationalism, signing on to the Great Replacement theory that nefarious forces, often coded as Jewish, are bringing in immigrants to replace “white” Americans, attacking “multiculturalism” and aligning […]

Archaeology

A Roman emperor grovelling to a Persian King: A new Statue in Tehran

The Conversation

By Peter Edwell, Macquarie University (The Conversation) – A new statue unveiled in recent days in Iran depicts a Roman emperor in subjection to a Persian king. Erected in Tehran’s Enghelab Square, the statue titled Kneeling Before Iran shows the emperor grovelling before Shapur I (who ruled around 242–270 CE). But where did this imagery […]

Archaeology

No, ancient Hebrew Slaves didn’t Build the Giza Pyramids

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The persistent myth-making of Israelis about history has become a geopolitical danger, no less than the myth-making of Christian Zionists like current US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alleges that the Muslim jurist or mufti, Amin al-Husseini, put Hitler up to the Holocaust, probably the […]