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Colonizing Mars: Practicing Other Worlds on Earth

… Congress in Adelaide, Australia. Musk spoke about his company's plans for interplanetary travel and his belief in … as a multi-planet species . His proposed first stop: Mars—sooner and cheaper than might be expected. In front of the … image of the Mars Pathfinder mission taken from its landing site in 1997 ( bottom ).  U.S. federal plans for planetary …
The image of a Thunderbird on top of a totem pole

“Allese Rondade”, that is to say, ‘Shoot!’”

Review of Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, by David J. Silverman (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016)
… them and Euro-Americans saying “Indian polities used commercial and military leverage to shape these … gift diplomacy to sway Native peoples towards or against one side during periods of conflict. Likewise, Indians used … or unwilling to participate in the arms race were the first ones to be overpowered by their rivals or by Euro-American …
Cover of Science under Fire Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America by Andrew Jewett.

Science Beseiged

Review of Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America, by Andrew Jewett (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 2020)
Under Attlee's direction, the Labour Party's position on foreign affairs in the 1930s was somewhat inconsistent. A believer in the "collective security" represented by the League of Nations, Attlee opposed rearmament even as he pushed for firmer measures against Nazi aggression.

A Sheep in Sheep’s Clothing

Review of Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain, by John Bew (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).
… demonstrated, not for the first time, that Attlee’s opponents had greatly underestimated him. Out of the … – the Labour Party emerged from the 1945 election with a commanding majority in the House of Commons – Attlee achieved what no other Labour leader had done before. For the first time in history, the United …
The Mars explorer Curiosity's view back at its own tracks after crossing a sand dune in 2014.

Mariner 9: Opening The Martian Frontier

… in 2003. Mars, the red planet so close to Earth, has become a tantalizing target for humans to visit. Noted space … today, we mostly hear about two rovers that trawl small zones of the planet: the Opportunity rover that exceeded a … below. Strange features were popping up above the dust in one area. When the dust began to recede, to scientists' …
The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865 Book Cover

Play, Paranoia, and American Childhood in the Great Outdoors

Review of The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865, by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014)
… Places, backyards, and basements filled with televisions, computers, and Playstations. Riney-Kehrberg describes how … growing up in the Midwest and Great Plains. Chapter One describes how rural children lived “premodern” lives … of newspapers, periodicals, television programs, films, websites, and published works to tell her story, but she also …
American soldiers making rolling barbed wire entanglements during World War I.

War Can Take On a Life of Its Own

… shot and killed the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, at point-blank … of the Marne. Both sides then dug in along what would become the great Western Front, a series of trenches extending … four years of slaughter unprecedented in human history. No one in the emotional days surrounding the initial terrorist …
Cover of All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals by David SchefferDavid S

Bringing Evil to Justice

Review of All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals, by David Scheffer (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)
… a test of how well the United States, and the international community could create institutions of governance after the … crimes tribunals were created: for Rwanda (1994), Sierra Leone (2002), and Cambodia (2003). While the specific … to Hell" describes his travels through atrocity zones around the world and his meeting with the victims of …
Some of the subjects in the Guatemalan experiments

The Guatemala Inoculation Experiments

… 1946-1948, around 1,500 people in Guatemala—including prisoners, soldiers, prostitutes, psychiatric patients, and … and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (which would later become the Pan American Health Organization) financed and … were unable artificially to provoke infection in the prisoners. Backed by the U.S. government’s need to control VD in …
Photograph of a mock-up of the Little Boy nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945. This was the first photograph of the Little Boy bomb casing to ever be released by the U.S. government (it was declassified in 1960).

Sowing Nuclear Seeds of Division

… inventing new “nukes” and new ways to deliver them. He felt compelled to build almost all of them, lest the Russians get … plan, and his summit meetings with Khrushchev all had one goal in mind: to convince the allies that the … against the Europeans. Will our laser-ray satellites one day be competing against the Europeans, too? An Ike-like …
 A Chinese laboratory technician conducting tests on SARS.

Corona in Context: Lessons from the SARS Pandemic (2003)

… discovered since the mid-1960s (four of which just cause a common cold in humans). A microscopic image of SARS-CoV It … 3. Such a high R0 gave SARS the potential to grow exponentially. However, its slow incubation period and lagging … it a sense of shock—both to the public and to public health officials. On May 5, TIME Magazine released a cover story, …
Sylvester I and Constantine in a 1247 fresco.

Top Ten Origins: Popes Before 1500

… The early version was small (around 30 clerics) and comprised only of “cardinal priests” who served parishes … died somewhere far from Rome, probably never having even visited.   Nevertheless, Christians in Rome from the third … pope and “anti-pope” pair.  As we all know, not everyone accepts the outcome of an election, including the popes. …
One of the McMinnville UFO photographs. Skeptics have concluded that the UFO was a small model suspended by wires or string from the power lines visible at the top of the photo.

The Air Force Investigation into UFOs

… investigating reports of UFOs. To this end it instituted a comprehensive study of UFOs.  This study, known as Project … it found that UFO sightings stemmed from “one or more of three causes”: mass hysteria, hoax, or … “misinterpretation of known objects.”  Nevertheless, it recommended continued investigation of all sightings.  Project …
Cover of A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century by William Chester Jordan.

To Serve God and the King?

Review of A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century, by William Chester Jordan (Princeton University Press, 2009)
"The Bosses of the Senate" (1889). Reformers like the cartoonist Joseph Keppler depicted the Senate as controlled by the giant moneybags, who represented the nation's financial trusts and monopolies.

The Dreary Science Meets Politics

… take care of everything. This economic formula was fashioned most thoroughly by economist Milton Friedman in the … They have imagined that era as a golden age of free-market competition and laissez-faire government.  Many of these … guards, federal troops.  They got it. Far from "leaving alone," government intervened in the economy during the late …
Cover A Revolution in Taste The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 by Susan Pinkard.

Bon Appetit, Historically Speaking

Review of A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800 , by Susan Pinkard (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009)
The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

Graduate Students Discuss Public Intellectualism

… as the case might be. If we really want to engage the community with historical thinking, a better model might be … television channels to hundreds, as well as thousands of websites and blogs, means that it may be a mistake to refer to … public, rather than a series of “publics,” plural. Thus one may be a public intellectual in one community, but …
The flag of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Critique of NATO’s Expansion

… to expand NATO is based on an outdated crusade against communism, a crusade launched against the Soviet Union in … even handling the tiny Baltic state of Lithuania, let alone dominating the Great Power club. In 1945, that club … NATO. Politicians and diplomats may make bad treaties, and one day the authors of expansionist military plans may have …
John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club.

Conservation — An American, and Republican, Tradition

… of personal virtue, but not a sufficient basis for a sound comprehensive energy policy,” he turned his back on a major … as to be inexhaustible.  Conservationists deflated what one historian has called “the myth of superabundance” and … grapple with the enduring issue of how we live on the land. One hopes that the Bush administration will yet be convinced …