The past is never dead. It's not even past
Muhammad Ali did not simply choose to be a cultural icon. He was also chosen. Elevated by unsurpassed boxing skills and athletic prowess to become heavyweight champion of the world, Ali transcended sports through radical political activism that has, with the passage of time, been largely smoothed of its rough edges.
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.
Thirty five years ago today, Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein made a dangerous gamble that did not pay off: with Iran vulnerable after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Hussein attacked the oil-rich province of Khuzistan, inhabited mostly by Arabs.
Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in English America in the last three quarters of the seventeenth century: Scott Irish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans were pressed into slavery.
On June 18th 1959, dressed in full army fatigues and accompanied by several comrades exhibiting an equally imposing revolutionary appearance, Che Guevara landed in Gaza.
Open a news website these days and there’s likely be a story about violence in the Middle East. There’s a good chance that the article will refer to extremist Islamists, possibly even mentioning the rising tide of anti-Western sentiment in the Middle East more broadly. Among academics, pundits, and politicians there is no shortage of opinion on why this state of affairs exists.
I had long been aware of the enigmatic sculptures known colloquially as “potbellies”or, in Spanish, barrigones, with their unusual features, often enormous bellies and recurring facial features. It was hard for me to imagine that the massive potbellies had much to tell me about the rise of the earliest state-level societies in Mesoamerica...
What do an enslaved African miner in colonial Colombia, a Portuguese Jewish merchant in Cartagena, a gem cutter in Amsterdam, and an Ottoman sultan have in common? Kris Lane’s Colour of Paradise ties together the histories of these diverse and geographically distant peoples by tracing the exploitation, trade, and consumption of emeralds between 1540 and the 1790s