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Immigrant Rights Protest by Betty Tsang, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Federal War on Immigrants Is a War on All Workers

… Bush's immigration reform legislation appears to be dead in the U.S. Congress, but the ground war against undocumented … in worksite raids comes, not coincidentally, at a moment when, despite a growing economy, low-wage workers are … to a jail-like detention center in the neighboring state of Washington. This is not only an immigration issue. It's also …
Jackie Robinson

Top Ten Origins: The World Series

… It’s October, time for that great American pageant: The World Series. The championship series of “America’s … prevented any measure of cooperation. But in 1903, a series was contested to determine the “world’s” best baseball team … White Sox players into conspiring to throw the Series. When the deception was revealed, major league owners created …

Public Debt, Private Wealth: A History of Central Banks

… At the end of 2020, the U.S. government’s debt roughly equaled … virus (late September 2019) an additional $3 trillion was pumped into “unnamed trading houses on Wall Street” by … states, just like kingdoms and empires, flounder and fail when they have chronic and enormous obligations. Debt is a …
1911 portrait of King George V, ruler of the British Empire.

The Risks of Unilateralism

When a nation — the United States — begins to regard itself as "the sole … in the Napoleonic Wars early in the 19th century, Britain was the dominant force in the world. So vast was its reach … until the Boer War in South Africa between 1899 and 1902 when the descendants of Dutch settlers, the Afrikaners, …
The Great Wall of China: Perhaps the greatest collection of walls in human history.

Top Ten Origins: History's Great Walls, Good Neighbors or Bad Policy?

… In the midst of a migration crisis in Europe and strident talk … deep ditch. It is hypothesized that the Wall of Jericho was constructed not only for defensive purposes, but also to … Athens and her ports for farming and transportation. When Sparta would ravage Attica and attempt to draw them …

1989 Twenty Years On: The End of Communism and the Fate of Eastern Europe

… where the word "opposition," unheard of under communism, was expressed publicly; the dismantling of the barbed-wire … economic situation continued to deteriorate, strikes in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk led to the establishment of … revolution mobilized the population against the regime. When reformers within the Communist Party changed the
The London meeting to discuss NATO military intervention in Libya, March 29, 2011.

Secretary Clinton — Leader or Figurehead?

… accompanied Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to Pakistan. This was a wake-up call in more ways than one. The moment had come for Clinton to act more boldly as the … or the hits. But there may come a day in the near future when her profile sinks too low to recover.   If so, she …
An MP looking north from South Korea in the Demilitarized Zone, 2008.

The War That Never Ended: The Legacy of the Korean War

… and neither side gained much territory. A peace treaty was never signed; the Korean War has never officially ended. … of the Japanese Empire, but this period was indeed when Kim gained his nationalistic credentials as a Korean … orthodoxy. The regime mixed elements of ethnic chauvinism, Leninist centralism, Third Worldism, and revolutionary …
view looking up into treetops

Climate Change: Insights from History

… John Brooke, Jennifer Eaglin and Samuel White about the historical context of climate change. ( Image Source ) … all's questions. Many of you already submitted questions when you registered, others, we welcome that you all … culture and nature. And so the question of climate, what was the nature of climate? How did it change was of interest …
Cover of Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer by Wendell E. Pritchett.

Invisible Man

Review of Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer , by Wendell E. Pritchett (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
… of hard-hitting campaigning and nationwide discussions on the need for change, the United States elected an African … in economics from Harvard University (p. 30).  Although he was highly qualified for a number of positions, his color … and the transformation of the American city at a moment when civil rights was viewed largely as a Southern issue.  …

The Politics of International Adoption

… will rely on a fair amount of data to discuss what I see as the significance of international adoption. However, I want … to constitute or re-constitute families, to provide homes when birth parents could not or would not do so, to serve as … back to the early years of white settlement, the practice was long governed informally and on an ad hoc basis. …
A map of northern Ireland

Ending the War in Northern Ireland

… Hurrah! The war in Northern Ireland is over. There will be … and Protestants to end. The very weekend agreement was reached by the Northern Ireland political parties theThe pattern has continued to the present day. In 1969, when Cathal Goulding, the chief of staff of the IRA, and his …
The colorful buildings of Tirana, viewed from the steps of the National Museum.

A Postcard from Tirana: Overcoming the Past

… call the city home. What is now a bustling metropolis was until quite recently a grim Soviet-style city. In fact, … it was not officially established as a town until 1614, when a mosque, bazaar, and Turkish baths were built at what … to make way for government buildings, and statues of Lenin and Hoxha himself were erected. Aerial image of …
The Norwegians Land in Iceland 872 by Oscar Wergeland (1877).

Why We Love the Vikings

There’s no denying that the Vikings and Norse mythology are … were bound by strict legal and societal expectations that, when broken, could have dire consequences, from fines to … requires further examination. Viking Age Scandinavia was an oral society, and writing was limited to runic …
Space Shuttle Columbia launching

Can We Boldly Go There Any More?

… is dangerous. And, consequently, expensive. That first fact was brought painfully home the morning of Feb. 1 as the space shuttle Columbia … receives much attention. Who can remember where they were when Intelsat IVA F-5 failed to reach orbit on Sept. 29, … Can We Boldly Go There Any More? …
Photo of a nuclear explosion.

The Dawn of the Second Cold War

… intercontinental ballistic missile on July 5 only delays the inevitable. Soon Pyongyang will have a missile that can reach the United States and when it does a Second Cold War will begin. The failed launch … advertisements openly solicit suicide bombers. Deterrence was also effective in the first Cold War because the
Raising a Flag over the Reichstag by Yevgeny Khaldei (1945).

The Living Ghosts of the Second World War and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

… perpetrated by the Kiev regime.” His mission, he claimed, was “to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”  In Putin’s … of the Jews of Kyiv in the fall of 1941, until 1976. When a monument was finally erected, it honored the … TV Rain who “disrespected” the anniversary of the Siege of Leningrad in January 2014 by asking whether it would have …
A memorial to the Heaven’s Hundred in Kyiv. Serhii Kemsky’s photo is in black and white under the words Nebesna sotnia.

Heroes Never Die

… It was February 2014 in Kyiv , Ukraine. I stood in the wet cold with Ukrainians of all ages, from all over thethe mood of the protests changed at the end of the month when students who came to sleep on Maidan were violently …
President George H.W. Bush shaking hands with Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Kremlin.

Russia — Ten Years After the Fall

… It was on Christmas day ten years ago that Kremlin guards hauled down the Soviet flag for the last time and Mikhail Gorbachev … last decade by reconsidering several faulty assumptions. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many influential … Russia — Ten Years After the Fall …
A rendering of the Battle of Fort Pillow, also known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, which was fought on April 12, 1864 in Tennessee.  It ended with a massacre by Confederate soldiers of at least one hundred surrendered black troops serving the Union, exemplifying one of the Civil War's transgressions of the norms of warfare.

The American Civil War, Then and Now

Review of The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters, by James McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)
… Coming to terms with the American Civil War is no easy task. The scale of its … intervention and the question of whether the Civil War was a "just" war and a "total" war. Other chapters reflect … slave states that foreshadowed the political breakdown." When gold was discovered in California, tens of thousands of …
A crowd of Syrian refugees in the Vienna airport

Road to Europe: The 2015 Migration Crisis

… Over the past months, the news media has presented dramatic scenes of desperate … in Serbia and elsewhere. But many more refugees find themselves in Middle Eastern countries like Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. This is hardly the first time that Europe or the Middle East has …
Official Program: Woman Suffrage Procession, Washington DC March 3, 1913

I have many things to say (Prologued, Season 1, Episode 2)

… At the heart of the suffrage movement was a shared belief that … on little else. From the beginning, the suffrage movement was splintered into different organizations that advocated … suffrage organization that I mentioned in Episode 1, and when women were excluded from the Civil War Amendments and …
Top view of engineer at desk with laptop, hardhat, and blueprints

Origins interviews the American Society of Civil Engineers

… of our episode on infrastructure and public investment in the United States, host Patrick Potyondy interviews Tom Smith, the Executive Director of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who describes the … that is actually, in 2013, higher than it was in 2009, when it was at a D.  Patrick Potyondy   Okay, so there has …