The past is never dead. It's not even past
Almost forty years after its first publication, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent remains a relevant, if controversial, read. The book, by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, follows the history of Latin America and the Caribbean through a perilous centuries-long struggle against poverty and those imperial powers whose unabashed exploitation ensure its steady existence.
The city of Beirut witnessed a legendary amount of violence during the fifteen year long Lebanese Civil War. News programs the world over broadcast it into the homes of millions of people from 1975 till the Lebanese Parliament ratified the Taif accord in late 1989.
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an interesting work.
For nearly 30 years, historians have debated about the use of former slave narratives as a “valid” historical source. Scholars question the authenticity of interviews collected in the 1930s, often by white Works Progress Administration (WPA) field workers.
The HBO series Boardwalk Empire may currently be winning laurels for its workmanlike depiction of Prohibition-era gangsters and corrupt politicos, but viewers interested in a more fully-realized work about the Golden Age of American organized crime would be wise to turn to the Coen Brother's 1990 masterpiece Miller's Crossing.
My own family hails from Aligarh, a city about 90 miles southeast of New Delhi and, as Muslims, opted to move to Pakistan. I was aware of this as a child, but because I grew up outside Pakistan, it was not until I began my research and had enough comfort speaking Urdu that I persuaded some of my elderly relatives to tell me their stories of the time of independence and partition.