The past is never dead. It's not even past
As the international community scrambles to stop a nuclear-armed Iran from adding more fuel to the powder keg of Middle Eastern geopolitics, it is vital that contrasting understandings of the international nuclear nonproliferation regime among nations, particularly the purpose of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty administered by the IAEA, be acknowledged and resolved.
The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad is a fascinating account of superpower interventions in the Third World during the latter half of the twentieth century. Covering a wide sweep of history, Westad argues that the United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics.
Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood presents a biopic of one of the most powerful and controversial figures of twentieth-century America in the film J. Edgar.
Two weeks ago the British Guardian revealed that the Israeli Air-Force has been conducting secret training exercises in preparation for an imminent attack on Iran. As the war drums beats get stronger, one should ask why Iran preoccupies such a large part of Israel’s inner discourse?
Almost eight months to the day after the ouster of President Mubarak on February 11th another dramatic set of events set Cairo ablaze. This time, it was not the “people” who were pushing against a corrupt regime but unidentified forces that pushed the army, the riot police, the plainclothes police and some of the 165,000 gangsters who were previously employed by Mubarak (and apparently were still on someone’s payroll), to violently attack a peaceful Coptic Christian demonstration.
The death of Muammar al-Qaddafi and the end of his rule in Libya marks the end of an era. Our untiring colleague in International History, Jeremi Suri, blogs about the historical background.
The era of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Levant, became known as the period of the ‘Nahda’- the Arab renaissance.
Krishna Kumar’s study of school textbooks in Pakistan and India shows that the discipline of history in South Asia has “come under the strain of nation-building rather more than other subjects.” History teaching in these textbooks seeks to settle political and ideological points and guide children’s responses to present day situations.
More on telling the history of Egypt
“History,” at least as Egyptians read, write, think, and know it today, is actually of surprisingly recent origins. As both an idea and a method, it was put to work only at the very end of the nineteenth century, and in a few short decades, it had managed to completely replace a rich and venerable nine hundred year-old scholarly tradition of Islamic historiography.