The past is never dead. It's not even past
by Julia Gossard Congratulations, you passed your comps! Now the reality sets in that in order to write your brilliant dissertation, you have to do some serious research. Here are a few things to remember in order to survive and even thrive during your research year. 1. Plan your stay around the archives’ hours and […]
by Kevin Baker In Germans into Nazis, Peter Fritzsche examines four moments in German history between 1914 and 1933 that exemplify how the Nazi movement became possible. He looks at the mass crowds of July-August 1914 when Germany mobilized at the beginning of the Great War, the crowds in 1918 following military defeat, the crowds […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: A new HBO documentary, “All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State,” takes a look back at the life of the political icon. By Zachary Montz “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Buenas noches, mis amigos! I am delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush […]
As historians, most of the time we tell stories about strangers. But I come from a family of story-tellers and, in our family, Passover was a special occasion for telling family stories. So, today I'm writing a story about a beloved family photograph.
by Christina Marie Villarreal The European Enlightenment occurred as an ongoing dialogue of ideas—a discourse composed of voices from around the globe. As Daniela Bleichmar demonstrates, southern Europe, long ignored in scholarship on the Enlightenment, had a crucial voice in the conversation. In Visible Empires, Bleichmar claims that Imperial Spain, more than any other contemporary […]
Many historical accounts of events in the Crimea simply mention that Nikita Khrushchev “gifted” the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. This does little to explain the Crimea’s current demographic make-up or what happened to put the strategic peninsula in the position to be “given” by Moscow to Ukraine in 1954.
The practice of child abandonment and efforts to manage it have a long history and I recently encountered a series of surviving artifacts from about 250 years ago that provide us with a rare window into the abandoned and the abandoners.
The practice of child abandonment and efforts to manage it have a long history and I recently encountered a series of surviving artifacts from about 250 years ago that provide us with a rare window into the abandoned and the abandoners. In France, as in other European countries, the frequency of abandonment led to the development of institutional responses to protect the children with the establishment of foundling hospitals in towns and cities across Europe.
During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory.
Stalin’s Genocides provides an in-depth analysis of the horrendous atrocities -- forced deportations, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine, and the Great Terror -- perpetrated by Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime. Norman Naimark argues that these crimes should be considered genocide and that Joseph Stalin should therefore be labeled a “genocidaire.”