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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Jussi M. Hanhimäki American media has been exercised in the last week over “newly released” documents from Henry Kissinger’s archives that reveal his position on Vietnam. Specifically, reports have appeared on NBC news and on the pages of The New York Times about how Henry Kissinger told Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai in 1972 that […]
Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Monday, 30 August 1773 Boswell: Wednesday, 1 September We came to a rich green valley, comparatively speaking, and stopped at Auchnashiel, a kind of rural village, a number of cottages being built together, as we saw all along in the Highlands. We passed many many miles today without seeing […]
Allen Barra, author most recently of a biography of Paul “Bear” Bryant, interviewed Steven Lubet for the American Heritage blog. In the interview, Lubet discusses some of the great poker players, writers, and trial lawyers that influenced the lessons in his book. Michael Webster continues his discussion of Lawyers’ Poker with a positive review on […]
By Rachel Bronson The United States and Saudi Arabia form one of the world’s most misunderstood partnerships. The Saudis are a longtime oil supplier for the U.S. economy but on 9/11 their kingdom accounted for 15 of the 19 hijackers. The Bush family and the House of Saud are close yet Secretary of State Condoleezza […]
Continued from last week’s post: Johnson: ‘Loch Ness’ Boswell: Monday, 30 August 1773 This day we were to begin our equitation, as I said, for I would needs make a word too. We might have taken a chaise to Fort Augustus. But we could not find horses after Inverness, so we resolved to begin here […]
by Bart Ehrman The Da Vinci Code is a murder mystery set in modern times, but its intrigue for many people has been its historical claims about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. I won’t summarize the entire plot here, as it is familiar to nearly everyone—there are only six people in the English-speaking world who have […]
Continued from last week’s post: Johnson: ‘Inverness’ Johnson: ‘Loch Ness’ Near the way, by the water side, we espied a cottage. This was the first Highland hut that I had seen; and as our business was with life and manners, we were willing to visit it. To enter a habitation without leave seems to be […]
by Saul Cornell Mayor Bloomberg’s recent summit on gun violence has revived an issue that many pundits and political soothsayers have written off as moribund. Few issues in American public life are more controversial than guns. Yet, even among hot button issues in American public life there is something perverse about the dynamics of the […]
Last month, Jill Quadagno was invited to present her take on the US healthcare system, specifically addressing the question ‘why do so many Americans not have healthcare?’, to a group of leading Democratic senators. Prof. Quadagno has graciously allowed us to publish the text of her presentation below. A few years ago my friend Connie’s […]
In his 2000 book, Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, which was named one of the 25 Books to Remember by the New York Public Library, Jonathan Petropoulos laid bare the motives of the thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women who went to work for Hitler “repatriating” to Nazi Germany artwork from across […]
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1773; ed. F. A. Pottle, 1961) A young and enthusiastic James Boswell befriended Samuel Johnson (1709-84), England’s most famous man of letters, in London in 1763. Soon Boswell was urging […]
by John-Peter Pham Spurred on no doubt by The Da Vinci Code hoopla, Dan Brown’s fans continue to push his less intricately crafted Angels & Demons to the top of the bestseller lists. A “prequel” to The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons chronicles Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon’s first foray into the world of the […]
With the world-wide release of The DaVinci Code movie fast approaching, as a service to our readers, we post Bart Ehrman’s list of the 10 historical errors contained in the book. 1. Jesus’ life was decidedly not “recorded by thousands of followers across the land.” He didn’t even have thousands of followers, let alone literate […]
The discovery of the Gospel of Judas has created quite a stir at OUP. Bart Ehrman, whose book on Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene was just released, wrote significant sections for both of the best-selling books (1, 2) brought out by National Geographic on the subject. Now, Philip Jenkins has written an essay at Beliefnet […]
by Don Ritchie It is richly ironic that during the same week the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting was awarded to Susan Schmidt, James V. Grimaldi, and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, for their coverage of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, news reports also revealed that the FBI has been seeking to comb […]
by David Brion Davis I’m concerned with the erosion of interest in history — the view expressed by even some leading teachers and intellectuals that we should “let bygones be bygones,” “free” ourselves from the boring and oppressive past, and concentrate on a fresh and better future. I’m passionately committed to the cause that distinguishes […]