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The Beatles, upon their arrival at Kennedy International Airport in New York City on February 7,1964.

“I Want to Hold Your Hand”

… “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles was released in the United States on December … reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 a week earlier. When it was displaced from that position in mid-March, by …
A woman voting in the early 20th century.

Could We Postpone the Election — Even If We Wanted To?

… During the last four weeks, the Election Assistance Commission, the … Day. In 2000, roughly one-third of the electorate in Washington state cast ballots by mail. A substantial number … reasons. The commission should set clear criteria for when and how an election should be postponed. It also should …
Vice President Walter Mondale speaking with President Jimmy Carter.

Why the Vice-Presidential Nominees Will Be Presidential

… Unlike many of their predecessors, this year’s vice-presidential candidates won’t be chosen primarily because they’re from a large state or to balance the ticket’s … choice can be critical — as Jimmy Carter learned in 1976 when Mondale’s vice-presidential campaign helped the
US president Bill Clinton and Chinese leader Jiang Zemin holding a joint press conference at the White House, October 29, 1997

The Next Cold War?

… How do cold wars begin? The question is becoming more than academic as the Bush … the like called for difficult decisions. No single dispute was big enough, in itself, to cast the die for or against … for getting into a cold war no longer hold up, especially when weighed against the consequences. We know from past …
American flag fluttering in the breeze.

War Without End Brings Endless Dangers

The policy of President Bush and his administration appears … many informed observers doubt that the Iranian government was responsible for the recent arms shipment to Palestine. When faced with a dubious and partisan “endless enemies” …
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

… George W. Bush is talking about the most radical change in U.S. military strategy since … his eight years in office. The problem, Ike said, was that scientists kept inventing new “nukes” and new ways … allies continue splitting apart into separate power blocs. When they insist on missile defense, space-based weapons, …
school girls in class - Studying biology and physics from English textbooks presents challenges in understanding the material but is necessary because their state examinations will be in English.

A Postcard from Pakistan: Girls Education in Gilgit-Baltistan

… In the warm early autumn months of 2019, I visited Northern … a village with 500 registered female residents. While I was there, I met Raji Ahmed, a tour operator catering to … biology, English, math, physics, and Islamic studies. When I walked into their classrooms, they were shy to answer …
In order, India’s Indira Gandhi, Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and Bangladesh’s Mujibur Rahman

After Midnight

Review of Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia Since Partition, by John Keay (New York: Basic Books, 2014)
… Midnight’s Children features a memorable adventure through the jungles of the Sundarbans, in whose labyrinths of … and later Bangladesh stem directly from Partition, which was hasty, chaotic, and left many problems unresolved. After … versions of history and have turned violent, as when protestors demolished the sixteenth-century Babri …
illustration of Prince George IV

Unspoken Anxiety or Vivid Metaphor?

Review of Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination, by Noelle Gallagher (New Haven: Yale, 2019)
… Noelle Gallagher writes that fear of venereal infection was “lurking around every corner” in the Britain of the long 18th century (1660-1800). Unspoken … and not a medical history. The four chapters, especially when read as comprising two thematic arguments about the
“Aux amateurs de physique.” Likewise portraying the Tuileries flight, this cartoon mocks the unwashed masses who wished to see the spectacle without a ticket, but the scaling of the garden walls also illustrates how the balloon as a “people-machine” ignited the determination of the poorer, disempowered social strata to overcome restraints imposed on them by the authoritarian regime.

Public Perceptions: Ballooning and Political Culture

Review of The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe, by Mi Gyung Kim (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
… On December 1, 1783, an immense crowd gathered on the grounds of the Tuileries Palace in Paris to … to different people across the social spectrum, the balloon was a concrete example of abstract values which came to … however, for readers to follow her train of thought when she does not sequentially explain her reasoning. A …
Cover of A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China by Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder.

The View from the Countryside

Review of A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China, by Dong Guoqiang & Andrew G. Walder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)
… According to official accounts from the Chinese Communist Party, “The ‘cultural revolution,’ which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest … that shaped the conflict in Feng County. For example, when the first study classes in Beijing ended in May 1970, …
Admiral William D. Leahy in 1944.

Hiroshima: Military Voices of Dissent

… Almost six decades after the fact, the 1945 unleashing of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima … of one mind in believing that the use of the atomic bomb was unquestionably the right decision at the time.  Relayed … to the question of what soldiers in the Pacific believed, when the relevant historical question is what decisionmakers …
This 1878 engraving shows the chaos at the scene of the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre

… On the night of March 5, 1770, a man and a British sentry … This event, popularly referred to as the “Boston Massacre,” was a turning-point in relations between American colonists … of Bostonians the threat of British military occupation. When tensions began to rise again in 1773 and 1774 with the
President Theodore Roosevelt helped solidify conservation as a national agenda item along with preservationist John Muir.

Executive Conservation

Review of Presidents and the American Environment, by Otis L. Graham, Jr. (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2015)
… I was lucky enough to grow up on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. To thethe American Environment arrives at a perfect moment, one when conservatives have launched a state-by-state effort to …
Pledging his support, President George W. Bush talks via telephone to New York Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Wilson and Bush: Unready Internationalists

… over what is fast becoming a foreign policy disaster. The war in Iraq is a quagmire. The Iraqi constitution faces … the United States’ role in the world, President-elect Bush was that man. Like Wilson before him, Bush cannot be blamed … policy will save us from having to toss a policy together when events intervene. The failures of Woodrow Wilson and …
Last Supper By Simon Ushakov, 1685

Reverence and Relics: The Holy Dead in the Pre-Modern Christian World

Review of Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, by Robert Bartlett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)
… and women be revered and seen as a conduit to God, or are they polytheistic distractions that turn Christians away … discusses actual literature about the saints. Hagiography was written both to celebrate the saints and to provide … miracles. The closest he comes to this is in chapter nine when he writes, “Either these miracles really took place or …
Depiction of General Scott capturing Mexico City during the Mexican-American War.

Getting Away from the “Quagmire” Cliché

… Many Americans look no further into their past than the Vietnam War for instructive … on which to draw in the case of Iraq. The Vietnam War was fundamentally different from Operation Iraqi Freedom. It … political action, we must look elsewhere in our history. When American troops left Mexico in 1848, they left it in …
Escobar: Paradise Lost, directed by Andrea Di Stefano

2/6/2015: At the Movies: Escobar

… Escobar: Paradise Lost is the directorial debut of Andrea Di Stefano, who also wrote … the United States via Panama. By the early 1980s, Escobar was a millionaire, the head of the powerful Medellín Cartel, … who had been reading to his children from The Jungle Book when Nick calls, answers that, like the hero Mowgli, one …
soldiers patrolling in Iraq

The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, 10 Years Later

… do we—and how should we—remember this war? Tactically, it was one of the most successful military operations in history, but many … took place precisely during the “Surge” campaign in Iraq , when U.S. troop levels were at their highest. — All photos …
Miklós Horthy, Hungarian regent, and Adolf Hitler in 1938.

Hitler’s Gamble with Destiny, 1941

… Sixty years ago, in August and September of 1941, the fate of the world appeared to hang in the balance. Adolf … the Soviet Union.  The German invasion of the Soviet Union was probably the most important event of World War II. There … because we see more clearly the kind of world we live in when we understand how that world came to be. Michael …
a can of Spaghetti-Os

Spaghetti in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

… Have you ever met someone who has skinned their own SpaghettiO? On May 12 th , 1965, Donald Goerke … that can fit on your spoon/Uh Oh, SpaghettiOs”) every piece was in place for this circular pasta to become a staple of … fresh over great distances and for long periods of time. When the war ended, companies unloaded new foodstuffs as …