History
Athens: A blueprint for 21st century democracy? (Part 1)
This article is the first in a two-part series. That the liberal democracies are floundering has been widely observed. That’s ...
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How Jefferson and Madison’s partnership shaped America’s separation of church and state
Few constitutional principles are more familiar to the average American than the separation of church and state. According to the ...
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Why it’s important to deal with the dark history of witch-hunting
In recent decades, governments the world over have increasingly taken action to address the dark history of witch-hunting. In western ...
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Anzac Day: Misconceptions and the real meaning of commemoration
In late October 1914, following a long period of rising tensions between the two nations, the Ottoman navy conducted a ...
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The dismissal: Truth at last
The dismissal of the Whitlam government in November 1975 was the most devastating and potentially dangerous constitutional crisis in Australia’s ...
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Marcus Aurelius and stoic politics
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) was one of the so-called Five Good Emperors of the Roman Empire – and the last ...
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Everyone can help forge a safe ending to what Oppenheimer began
The Oppenheimer film is a significant artistic work, and by all accounts – including of Kai Bird, the surviving author of the detailed biographical ...
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Reflecting on the Russian Revolution
The Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky famously remarked that the great Russian humanist intelligentsia, who included Pushkin and Herzen, Tolstoy and ...
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Beethoven, music and human progress
One morning a few days ago, a sublimely mild and sunny summer day, I was walking the several kilometres into ...
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Holocaust remembrance: We must beware of well-intentioned mythmaking
In ancient Rome, the saeculum, or ‘the age’, was the span of living memory, the telling of an event passed down ...
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The role of rituals in human history
Each December, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, among others, take over our thoughts and our wallets as we participate in ceremonies ...
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Gorbachev’s appeal for peace and freedom
As a world statesman and a student of world affairs, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perspective is worth having. His 2019 book, What ...
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