The past is never dead. It's not even past
by Guy Raffa What is it with baseball players and whiskers? The 2013 Red Sox perfected the art of beard-bonding on the way to their third World Series championship in ten years. Boston players and their fans rallied around what Christopher Oldstone-Moore calls the “quest beard” in his history of facial hair, Of Beards and […]
by Jesse Ritner On February 1, 1894, Frank Cook stumbled down from the Elk Mountain range, passed through the frozen town of Ashcroft, and trudging through the deep Colorado snow arrived in Aspen, Colorado. His mining partner, Mr. Spake, was dead. Mining accidents were common in late nineteenth-century Colorado. Mr. Cook, likely weary and cold […]
“Where is that terrible beauty we planted so long ago?” -Santiago del Nuevo Extremo Rodolfo Müller is almost a hundred years old, now. He still lives in the same house as always, off Simón Bolivar, between Hamburgo and Coventry. That’s in Ñuñoa, a township on the near west side of Santiago. It’s a big house, […]
By Roy Doron On November 19, 2016, President Barack Obama, speaking on the transition of power to Donald Trump said “once you’re in the Oval Office … that has a way of shaping … and in some cases modifying your thinking.” The 2016 election will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most unconventional and […]
By Mark Sheaves Images of American Indians are ubiquitous in contemporary US culture. Step into a convenience store and you can’t help but notice that two of the most popular tobacco brands, Redman Chewing Tobacco and Natural American Spirits, are adorned with the face of a feathered-headdress wearing chief. Approximately 2,000 high schools across the […]
By Aleksej Demjanski The 1960s saw an explosion of student activism across the globe. This increase in youth movements for social change was so influential that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the Central Intelligence Agency illegally monitor student movements both at home and abroad. After some investigation, the CIA produced an over two-hundred-page report, titled […]
Edward Shore considers the implications of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment for the social and environmental rights of of Brazil's traditional peoples, including three thousand rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves called "quilombos." He underscores the need for historians to use scholarship for the advancement of social justice. He addresses current threats to the territorial and environmental rights of quilombo communities in São Paulo's Atlantic Rainforest.
One evening this summer, I found myself careening down a country road at breakneck speed to the town of Studen Izvor on the Bulgarian border with Serbia. Stunning scenery enveloped a string of thinly populated towns, some peppered with socialist-era industrial ruins that somehow added to the charm. Edit, the wife of my friend and […]
When it comes to Islamic fundamentalism and inter-Arab politics, the influential Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, has seen it all. Since the 1980s he carefully documented the slow metamorphosis of a young Arab generation that came to believe that it had nothing to lose at home and everything to gain from a festival of death and glory in the distant mountains of Afghanistan.
How do you know if students are actually watching a live-streaming online lecture? Excellent question!