History
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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Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to save communism, but buried it instead
The death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, under whose leadership the communist bloc was brought to ...
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How Hitler conspiracies and other Holocaust disinformation undermine democratic institutions
Godwin’s Law posits that any online argument, if it continues long enough, will inevitably invoke a comparison to Hitler. Perhaps there ...
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Why the Middle Ages have such a bad reputation
“People have the right to live as they wish, we are no longer in the Middle Ages.” This statement, made ...
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Moral ambiguity and the representation of genocide
On January 10 2022, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted unanimously to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus ...
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Ukraine as a ‘borderland’: A brief history of Ukraine’s place between Europe and Russia
One interpretation of the name ‘Ukraine’ is borderland. This needs to be taken seriously. Borderlands are all about diversity and ...
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Ukraine crisis: The Russian leader’s vision of the past
The day that Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine, President Biden spoke publicly about the sheer mendacity of Putin’s ...
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