Roundup: Talking About History
This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.
SOURCE: BBC History Magazine (3-18-10)
[Dr Michael Scott is the Moses Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College and an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. His first book, From Democrats to Kings is out now and his second, on the sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia, is published in April 2010. For more information, visit www.michaelcscott.com.]
Ancient Greece’s most famous export to this day is arguably democracy. America, alongside many nations, recently celebrated the 2500th ‘anniversary’ of the invention of democracy in ancient Athens and its links with today’s democracies in America and around the globe. But was ancient Athenian democracy as alike to democracies of today as we may like to think?
The more you look at the facts, the more the ancient democracy of Athens and the democracies of today look different. Ancient Athens only allowed a very small group of men resident in Athens the vote. Women and foreigners were excluded.......
Ancient Greece’s most famous export to this day is arguably democracy. America, alongside many nations, recently celebrated the 2500th ‘anniversary’ of the invention of democracy in ancient Athens and its links with today’s democracies in America and around the globe. But was ancient Athenian democracy as alike to democracies of today as we may like to think?
The more you look at the facts, the more the ancient democracy of Athens and the democracies of today look different. Ancient Athens only allowed a very small group of men resident in Athens the vote. Women and foreigners were excluded.......
Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 13:44
Comments
SOURCE: National Review Online (3-17-10)
[William F. Gavin is a former assistant to Sen. James L. Buckley.]
As we celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, it is useful to remember the Irish definition of a true Irishman: someone who will go fifty miles out of his way to receive an insult. Yes, grudge-bearing is among the traits we are known for, no less than charm, wit, and loquaciousness. We believe in forgiving our enemies the same way the unconverted Augustine believed in chastity: a fine goal, Lord, but not yet.
I’ve had my own Irish grudge against liberals for decades, and perhaps now is the time for me to extend the hand of friendship — if they will apologize. Liberals in the media, universities, and politics: Emulate the great saint who, we are told, drove the snakes from Ireland, by driving the reptilian word “McCarthyism” from your vocabulary. It is bigoted, and I’m sick of hearing it.
McCarthy is an ethnically identifiable Irish Catholic name, yet it describes despicable political behavior...
As we celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, it is useful to remember the Irish definition of a true Irishman: someone who will go fifty miles out of his way to receive an insult. Yes, grudge-bearing is among the traits we are known for, no less than charm, wit, and loquaciousness. We believe in forgiving our enemies the same way the unconverted Augustine believed in chastity: a fine goal, Lord, but not yet.
I’ve had my own Irish grudge against liberals for decades, and perhaps now is the time for me to extend the hand of friendship — if they will apologize. Liberals in the media, universities, and politics: Emulate the great saint who, we are told, drove the snakes from Ireland, by driving the reptilian word “McCarthyism” from your vocabulary. It is bigoted, and I’m sick of hearing it.
McCarthy is an ethnically identifiable Irish Catholic name, yet it describes despicable political behavior...
Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:21
SOURCE: WaPo (3-16-10)
[Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post.]
Dick Armey is intellectually versatile: The former leader of House Republicans went from being a rainmaker for a Washington lobbying firm to being the unofficial leader of the anti-Washington "tea party" movement.
But his latest avocation, historian of early America, may be his most intriguing role yet. As head of FreedomWorks, the group that helps to fund and coordinate tea party activists, Armey went to the National Press Club on Monday afternoon in advance of Tuesday's tea party protest in Washington, to present some of his historical findings....
"The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers," Armey explained. The problem with Democrats and...
Dick Armey is intellectually versatile: The former leader of House Republicans went from being a rainmaker for a Washington lobbying firm to being the unofficial leader of the anti-Washington "tea party" movement.
But his latest avocation, historian of early America, may be his most intriguing role yet. As head of FreedomWorks, the group that helps to fund and coordinate tea party activists, Armey went to the National Press Club on Monday afternoon in advance of Tuesday's tea party protest in Washington, to present some of his historical findings....
"The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers," Armey explained. The problem with Democrats and...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 16:29
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (3-16-10)
[Mary Dejevsky is chief editorial writer and columnist at The Independent.]
It seems like only yesterday and, at the same time, like a hundred years. In fact, it is a quarter of a century since Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – and set in train the changes that brought the end of both the system and the country.
For many Russians, though, the accession of 54-year-old Gorbachev after a string of old and sick men is a muted, even bitter, anniversary. Celebrated throughout the Western world as a liberator, Gorbachev is widely reviled in his homeland for destroying Soviet power. Vladimir Putin only articulated what many of his compatriots also felt, when he described the Soviet Union's collapse as "one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century". It will take many years for that judgement to be revised across the great Eurasian land mass, if it ever is.
But it...
It seems like only yesterday and, at the same time, like a hundred years. In fact, it is a quarter of a century since Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – and set in train the changes that brought the end of both the system and the country.
For many Russians, though, the accession of 54-year-old Gorbachev after a string of old and sick men is a muted, even bitter, anniversary. Celebrated throughout the Western world as a liberator, Gorbachev is widely reviled in his homeland for destroying Soviet power. Vladimir Putin only articulated what many of his compatriots also felt, when he described the Soviet Union's collapse as "one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century". It will take many years for that judgement to be revised across the great Eurasian land mass, if it ever is.
But it...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 08:12
SOURCE: Jonathan Tremblay at The End is Coming (Blog) (3-15-10)
[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and works as a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network]
The town of Ostrovany in eastern Slovakia has a problem with their society’s undesirables. The heavy minority of Gypsies (Roma) living in ghettos throughout the town has led to an endemic of minor theft and a general disdain by private citizens who have to see the gypsy hovels every day. This minority is even getting out of hand, having grown to constitute two-thirds of Ostrovany’s population. They live on a pitance of government welfare and the aforementioned theft (of fruits and vegetables mostly, according to authorities) but they are a nuisance and therefore, private citizens successfully petitionned the municipal government to build a wall around their settlements. Out of sight, out of mind?
Local officials insist the 150 metre-long, 2.2 metre-high wall “does not segregate the Roma, nor does it limit their access to main roads or services” but the fact...
The town of Ostrovany in eastern Slovakia has a problem with their society’s undesirables. The heavy minority of Gypsies (Roma) living in ghettos throughout the town has led to an endemic of minor theft and a general disdain by private citizens who have to see the gypsy hovels every day. This minority is even getting out of hand, having grown to constitute two-thirds of Ostrovany’s population. They live on a pitance of government welfare and the aforementioned theft (of fruits and vegetables mostly, according to authorities) but they are a nuisance and therefore, private citizens successfully petitionned the municipal government to build a wall around their settlements. Out of sight, out of mind?
Local officials insist the 150 metre-long, 2.2 metre-high wall “does not segregate the Roma, nor does it limit their access to main roads or services” but the fact...
Monday, March 15, 2010 - 16:48
SOURCE: The Asahi Shimbun (3-10-10)
The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945 touched off the wave of firebombing that destroyed 64 Japanese cities and culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been deeply engraved on the consciousness of humanity and commemorated in monuments, museums, films, novels and textbooks, the firebombing and napalming of civilians of many other Japanese and Asian cities has largely disappeared from consciousness, except for the victims. The bombing of March 9-10 took the lives of 100,000 Tokyoites and leveled sixteen square miles of the city in the most devastating raid in human history to that time . . . according to Japanese and US Strategic Bombing Survey figures, and may have taken the lives of many more. In recent years commemorative efforts have begun to remember the events and the victims, and lawsuits have been filed seeking damages for victims. - The Asia-Pacific Journal
Wednesday marked the 65th...
Monday, March 15, 2010 - 15:30
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (3-15-10)
[David McKittrick is an award-winning Ireland correspondent for the Independent.]
Given it will stretch to several million words, Lord Saville's report on Bloody Sunday is bound to contain surprises when it is finally published.
The exhaustive document will be handed to Shaun Woodward, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in a week's time and the findings are likely to be made public a few days later. If it concludes that the 14 people who were killed in Londonderry's Bogside on that fateful January day in 1972 had guns or bombs on them, it will create a sensation.
This would be because, firstly, all the years of hearings and hundreds of witnesses have failed to produce convincing evidence to back up allegations that those killed were gunmen and bombers. Secondly, two former British prime ministers, one Conservative and one Labour, have already exonerated those killed. In 1992, John Major said the dead "should be regarded as innocent...
Given it will stretch to several million words, Lord Saville's report on Bloody Sunday is bound to contain surprises when it is finally published.
The exhaustive document will be handed to Shaun Woodward, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in a week's time and the findings are likely to be made public a few days later. If it concludes that the 14 people who were killed in Londonderry's Bogside on that fateful January day in 1972 had guns or bombs on them, it will create a sensation.
This would be because, firstly, all the years of hearings and hundreds of witnesses have failed to produce convincing evidence to back up allegations that those killed were gunmen and bombers. Secondly, two former British prime ministers, one Conservative and one Labour, have already exonerated those killed. In 1992, John Major said the dead "should be regarded as innocent...
Monday, March 15, 2010 - 14:41
SOURCE: NYT (3-13-10)
[Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its collapse in 1991. This article was translated by Pavel Palazhchenko from the Russian.]
PERESTROIKA, the series of political and economic reforms I undertook in the Soviet Union in 1985, has been the subject of heated debate ever since. Today the controversy has taken on a new urgency — not just because of the 25th anniversary, but also because Russia is again facing the challenge of change. In moments like this, it is appropriate and necessary to look back.
We introduced perestroika because our people and the country’s leaders understood that we could no longer continue as we had. The Soviet system, created on the precepts of socialism amid great efforts and sacrifices, had made our country a major power with a strong industrial base. The Soviet Union was strong in emergencies, but in more normal circumstances, our system condemned us to inferiority....
PERESTROIKA, the...
PERESTROIKA, the series of political and economic reforms I undertook in the Soviet Union in 1985, has been the subject of heated debate ever since. Today the controversy has taken on a new urgency — not just because of the 25th anniversary, but also because Russia is again facing the challenge of change. In moments like this, it is appropriate and necessary to look back.
We introduced perestroika because our people and the country’s leaders understood that we could no longer continue as we had. The Soviet system, created on the precepts of socialism amid great efforts and sacrifices, had made our country a major power with a strong industrial base. The Soviet Union was strong in emergencies, but in more normal circumstances, our system condemned us to inferiority....
PERESTROIKA, the...
Sunday, March 14, 2010 - 11:54
SOURCE: NYT (3-13-10)
[Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of “The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008.”]
Ronald Reagan deserves posterity’s honor, and so it makes sense that the capital’s airport and a major building there are named for him. But the proposal to substitute his image for that of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill is a travesty that would dishonor the nation’s bedrock principles of union, freedom and equality — and damage its historical identity. Although slandered since his death, Grant, as general and as president, stood second only to Abraham Lincoln as the vindicator of those principles in the Civil War era....
When one Union general after another proved unequal to the task of leading the army, Lincoln personally elevated Grant, who, with William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, devised the strategy of “hard war” to defeat the slaveholders’ Confederacy. “I cannot spare this man,” Lincoln was reported...
Ronald Reagan deserves posterity’s honor, and so it makes sense that the capital’s airport and a major building there are named for him. But the proposal to substitute his image for that of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill is a travesty that would dishonor the nation’s bedrock principles of union, freedom and equality — and damage its historical identity. Although slandered since his death, Grant, as general and as president, stood second only to Abraham Lincoln as the vindicator of those principles in the Civil War era....
When one Union general after another proved unequal to the task of leading the army, Lincoln personally elevated Grant, who, with William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, devised the strategy of “hard war” to defeat the slaveholders’ Confederacy. “I cannot spare this man,” Lincoln was reported...
Sunday, March 14, 2010 - 11:46
SOURCE: Max Holland at Washington Decoded (3-11-10)
[Max Holland worked on the Lyndon Johnson presidential tape recordings at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs from 1999 to 2003. The full version of this article appears at Washington Decoded.]
In November 2005, The Washington Spectator published an article by this author about the publishing practices of the 9/11 Commission. “The Politics (and Profits) of Information” described how that panel skirted its obligation to publish a complete, documented, and indexed record of its investigation via the Government Printing Office, a laudable purpose achieved by every comparable probe.
“The Making of a Washington Expert,” a sidebar to the Spectator article, described how...
Friday, March 12, 2010 - 14:52
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (3-9-10)
[Robert Fisk is a columnist at the Independent.]
It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children – between three and 15 years old – who lived in the crowded dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.
Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese...
It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children – between three and 15 years old – who lived in the crowded dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.
Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese...
Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 19:31
SOURCE: The Nation (3-4-10)
[Diego Gambetta is a professor of sociology at Oxford University and the author, most recently, of Codes of the Underworld.]
On April 20, 1998, Reuters in Cologne received a letter mailed from Chemnitz, near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. It read, in part: "Nearly 28 years ago, on May 14, 1970, the RAF was born in a liberation action. Today we end this project. The urban guerrilla battle of the RAF is now history." A bizarre coincidence: April 20, 1998, was the 109th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth.
The typewritten letter was anonymous and eight pages long--conciseness seldom being a virtue of violent extremists, even in the throes of dissolution. It was authenticated by the police on the basis of its style and paper. (Both had been used in previous communiqués by the group.) It also bore the group's emblem, a five-pointed star, with "RAF" (Rote Armee Fraktion, or "Red Army Faction") inscribed over a drawing...
On April 20, 1998, Reuters in Cologne received a letter mailed from Chemnitz, near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. It read, in part: "Nearly 28 years ago, on May 14, 1970, the RAF was born in a liberation action. Today we end this project. The urban guerrilla battle of the RAF is now history." A bizarre coincidence: April 20, 1998, was the 109th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth.
The typewritten letter was anonymous and eight pages long--conciseness seldom being a virtue of violent extremists, even in the throes of dissolution. It was authenticated by the police on the basis of its style and paper. (Both had been used in previous communiqués by the group.) It also bore the group's emblem, a five-pointed star, with "RAF" (Rote Armee Fraktion, or "Red Army Faction") inscribed over a drawing...
Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 19:12
SOURCE: Hillsboro Times-Gazette (OH) (3-11-10)
[Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.]
The media jumps at anniversaries of historical figures and events. For those of us who write about history, we, too, seize these opportunities to teach history, especially history Americans should know.
Here's one such case: Can you believe it has been 25 years since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power? Gorbachev seized the reins of the Soviet state on March 11, 1985. As an illustration of how much the world has changed since -in part because of Gorbachev - I was reminded of this anniversary by a journalist from no less than Pravda; that is, the Slovak version of Pravda....
This brings me to Gorbachev. Liberals in the West woefully exaggerated Gorbachev's positions and role in ending the Cold War. Their misunderstandings and misrepresentations were based on a fatal combination of wishful thinking, partisan politics, and...
The media jumps at anniversaries of historical figures and events. For those of us who write about history, we, too, seize these opportunities to teach history, especially history Americans should know.
Here's one such case: Can you believe it has been 25 years since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power? Gorbachev seized the reins of the Soviet state on March 11, 1985. As an illustration of how much the world has changed since -in part because of Gorbachev - I was reminded of this anniversary by a journalist from no less than Pravda; that is, the Slovak version of Pravda....
This brings me to Gorbachev. Liberals in the West woefully exaggerated Gorbachev's positions and role in ending the Cold War. Their misunderstandings and misrepresentations were based on a fatal combination of wishful thinking, partisan politics, and...
Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 13:24
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (3-7-10)
[Michael Ruse directs the program in the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. His latest book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, was just published by Cambridge University Press. He contributes to The Chronicle Review's blog, Brainstorm.]
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline!
I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A....
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline!
I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A....
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:50
SOURCE: Commentary Magazine (3-1-10)
[Jonathan Tobin is executive editor of Commentary.]
The cultural vilification of the politicians and officials who launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has not satisfied those intellectuals and activists who view American history as a continuum of racism, imperialism, and aggression. The authors of two new books have now extended the hunt for the spiritual antecedents of the George W. Bush administration. Their prey is an unlikely villain: Theodore Roosevelt.
For Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers, and James Bradley, who has just published The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War,1 Roosevelt is the source of much of what ails America today. Thomas offers an account of this nation’s drift to war against Spain in 1898 in which TR (as he was known in his day) is the central figure in a movement driven more by aristocratic male insecurity than national priorities. The author believes that this suggests “eerie” parallels with...
The cultural vilification of the politicians and officials who launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has not satisfied those intellectuals and activists who view American history as a continuum of racism, imperialism, and aggression. The authors of two new books have now extended the hunt for the spiritual antecedents of the George W. Bush administration. Their prey is an unlikely villain: Theodore Roosevelt.
For Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers, and James Bradley, who has just published The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War,1 Roosevelt is the source of much of what ails America today. Thomas offers an account of this nation’s drift to war against Spain in 1898 in which TR (as he was known in his day) is the central figure in a movement driven more by aristocratic male insecurity than national priorities. The author believes that this suggests “eerie” parallels with...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 15:18
SOURCE: openDemocracy (3-4-10)
[David Elstein is currently Chairman of openDemocracy. He is also Chairman of DCD Media, Screen Digest, Luther Pendragon, and the Broadcasting Policy Group.]
A scholar who makes large claims must expect to be held to an exacting test of accuracy. If it is failed, the integrity of the work is called into question. In this respect, Daniel Goldhagen’s treatment of events in colonial Kenya in the 1950s - which takes up thirty pages of his new book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (Little, Brown, 2009) - deserves careful scrutiny.
Daniel Goldhagen made a name for himself with Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Random House, 1997) in which he argued that millions of Germans - not just a...
Monday, March 8, 2010 - 17:33
SOURCE: LA Times (3-8-10)
[Joan Waugh is a professor of history at UCLA and the author of "U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth."]
Shame on the 14 Republican congressmen who last week proposed substituting Ronald Reagan for Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Their action suggests they need a history lesson about the Northern general who won the Civil War and went on to lead the country.
Having enjoyed brief acclaim during the Mexican-American War, the onetime farmer was toiling in obscurity when he answered President Lincoln's call for volunteers in 1861. He rapidly won fame in the Western theater, scoring decisive and morale-raising victories at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga. When Lincoln tapped him in early 1864 to be the leading general, Grant directed victories that vindicated his strategic vision and guaranteed his president's reelection....
Aided by newly enfranchised Southern blacks in states reconstructed by Congress, Grant swept to victory with his...
Shame on the 14 Republican congressmen who last week proposed substituting Ronald Reagan for Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Their action suggests they need a history lesson about the Northern general who won the Civil War and went on to lead the country.
Having enjoyed brief acclaim during the Mexican-American War, the onetime farmer was toiling in obscurity when he answered President Lincoln's call for volunteers in 1861. He rapidly won fame in the Western theater, scoring decisive and morale-raising victories at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga. When Lincoln tapped him in early 1864 to be the leading general, Grant directed victories that vindicated his strategic vision and guaranteed his president's reelection....
Aided by newly enfranchised Southern blacks in states reconstructed by Congress, Grant swept to victory with his...
Monday, March 8, 2010 - 12:55
SOURCE: NYT (3-6-10)
[Melanie Bayley is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Oxford.]
SINCE “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”)....
Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.
In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new...
SINCE “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”)....
Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.
In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new...
Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 20:03
[Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989." His most recent Outlook essay was "Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?" on Oct. 4. He will be online on to chat with readers on Monday, March 8, at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.]
Sarah Palin invokes him. Mitt Romney glorifies him. The "tea party" movement hopes to recapture him. And the Republican Party still can't get over him.
Six years after his death, and almost a century since his birth, conservatives are more transfixed than ever by Ronald Reagan, so much so that I fully expect a Gipper anxiety disorder to appear in the next edition of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual.
"What would Reagan Do?" is a leading motto for the right. You can get the slogan -- or its WWRD acronym -- on a bumper...
Sarah Palin invokes him. Mitt Romney glorifies him. The "tea party" movement hopes to recapture him. And the Republican Party still can't get over him.
Six years after his death, and almost a century since his birth, conservatives are more transfixed than ever by Ronald Reagan, so much so that I fully expect a Gipper anxiety disorder to appear in the next edition of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual.
"What would Reagan Do?" is a leading motto for the right. You can get the slogan -- or its WWRD acronym -- on a bumper...
Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 12:20
SOURCE: BBC (3-3-10)
[Gabriel Partos is a Balkans analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit.]
In delivering the opening statement of his defence Radovan Karadzic set out to portray the Bosnian war as one of self-defence by the Bosnian Serbs against the Muslims who, according to him, were bent on dominating the country.
The wartime Bosnian Serb leader, who is facing 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, elaborated on his controversial version of recent Balkan history by challenging the veracity of many widely-accepted interpretations of what happened during the Bosnian conflict.
Mr Karadzic called the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 a "myth".
He denied that the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was under siege during the war.
He described the detention camps for Muslims and Croats in north-western Bosnia as "...
In delivering the opening statement of his defence Radovan Karadzic set out to portray the Bosnian war as one of self-defence by the Bosnian Serbs against the Muslims who, according to him, were bent on dominating the country.
The wartime Bosnian Serb leader, who is facing 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, elaborated on his controversial version of recent Balkan history by challenging the veracity of many widely-accepted interpretations of what happened during the Bosnian conflict.
Mr Karadzic called the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 a "myth".
He denied that the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was under siege during the war.
He described the detention camps for Muslims and Croats in north-western Bosnia as "...
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - 09:56
