By Beverly Lemire, University of Alberta | – (The Conversation)- Fashion is political — today as in the past. As Britain’s Empire dramatically expanded, people of all ranks lived with clothing and everyday objects in startlingly different ways than generations before. The years between 1660 and 1820 saw the expansion of the British empire and […]
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History
When Politicians get involved in Science: The marble statue of Gregor Mendel
It is 2022, the bicentenary of the birth of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, and this is being celebrated in all kinds of ways. In 1955, as a biology student, I travelled with a group of young people to Brno (then part of Czechoslovakia), where he had done his experiments with […]
The Trump Supreme Court Is Nothing New: A History of the Tyranny of the Supremes
By Steve Fraser | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Has the Trump Supreme Court gone rogue? The evidence mounts. Certainly, its recent judicial blitzkrieg has run roughshod over a century’s worth of settled law. A woman’s right to get an abortion? Gone (at least as a constitutionally protected civil right). Meanwhile, voting rights are barely […]
Of Course there were Africans in Middle Earth, Just as there Were in Medieval England
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – American white nationalism has attempted to appropriate certain cultures, times and places as quintessentially “white,” and so it is no surprise that, as John Blake at CNN writes, there is controversy on the American Right about the multicultural casting visible in the Amazon Prime series Rings of Power, based on […]
That Time Gorbachev Announced Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan and US went on Building up Muslim Fundamentalists there Anyway, leading to 9/11
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing yesterday at age 91 is a good occasion to review some of the profound mistakes of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies regarding Afghanistan. Reagan-era officials refused to believe that Premier Gorbachev actually intended to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, though Gorbachev came into […]
Slavery and War are tightly Connected – but we had no Idea just how Much until we crunched the Data
By Monti Datta, University of Richmond; Angharad Smith, United Nations University and Kevin Bales, University of Nottingham | – Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family […]
‘Summer with the Enemy’ by Syrian novelist Shahla Ujayli is a searing summer read
By Michelle Hartman, McGill University | – Wherever you spend your summer, allow yourself to be transported to Syria and immerse yourself in the world of Shahla Ujayli’s sweeping historical novel Summer with the Enemy. The ongoing devastation of the war that began in 2011 has brought Syria to the world’s attention. Reading a Syrian […]
Trump joins Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis as Former High Office-Holder Investigated for Sedition
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Carol D. Leonnig, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, and Spencer S. Hsu at the Washington Post got the scoop that the Department of Justice has for some time been investigating Donald John Trump for possible charges in connection with his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results. (I call him Donald […]
Abortion decision cherry-picks history – when the US Constitution was ratified, women had much more autonomy over abortion decisions than during 19th century
Maurizio Valsania, Università di Torino | – Justice Samuel Alito appears spellbound by the 19th century. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision Alito wrote overruling 50 years of constitutional protection for women’s right to get an abortion, he deploys arguments that are based on several historical precedents. He uses the phrase “history […]