World

Coups, corporations, and classified information

By Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu

The Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947 under the National Security Act. The act allowed for “functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security,” in addition to intelligence gathering. Initially, the scope of the CIA was relegated to intelligence, though a substantial and vocal group advocated for a more active role for the agency. This culminated in National Security Council Directive No. 4, which ordered the CIA to undertake covert actions against communism.

Why is Darwin still controversial?

By George Levine
How could Darwin still be controversial? We do not worry a lot about Isaac Newton, nor even about Albert Einstein, whose ideas have been among the powerful shapers of modern Western culture. Yet for many people, undisturbed by the law of gravity or by the theories of relativity that, I would venture, 99% of us don’t really understand, Darwin remains darkly threatening. One of the great figures in the history of Western thought, he was respectable and revered enough even in his own time to be buried in Westminster Abbey, of all places. He supported his local church; he was a Justice of the Peace; and he never was photographed as a working scientist, only as a gentleman and a family man. Yet a significant proportion of people in the English-speaking world vociferously do not “believe” in him.

Political violence and PRI

The conversation in the new and old media over the last several weeks has been dominated by reports about uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt and violent clashes in Bahrain, Yemen, the Ivory Coast, Iraq and elsewhere. In Libya, fighting currently is reported to take place close to strategic oil installations. Because of the scarcity of claims arising out of similar events in investor-state arbitration, political risk insurance claims determinations by the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) can play an important role to develop this area of law and fill these gaps in future investor-state arbitral arbitrations.

17 March and all that

By S. J. Connolly

The approach of St Patrick’s day brings to mind once again the ambivalent relationship that historians have with festivals and anniversaries. On the one hand they are our bread and butter. Regular commemorations are what keep the past alive in the public mind. And big anniversaries, like 1989 for historians of the French Revolution, or 2009 for historians of Darwinism, can provide the occasion of conferences, exhibitions, publishers’ contracts, and even invitations to appear on television.

Failures of the Modern Discovery Mission

In his latest book Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China, journalist and author Patrick Wright tells the story of the British delegations that took up Prime Minister En-lai’s invitation to ‘come and see’ the New China on the fifth anniversary of the communist victory in 1954. Here, Wright answers a few questions I had about this intense era of diplomacy – when it ended and how it went wrong.

Spies for Peace?

By Nigel Young
By the time I first moved into peace research in 1963, I had become aware of the State’s interests (or often several States’ interests) in the anti-war movement: McCarthyist informers, Cold War agent provocateurs, intelligence sniffers, as well as plain opportunists, con-men, the confused, and mavericks – it was not only phone taps and men in macs. And then there were some odd characters in the peace movement itself, like Bertrand Russell’s secretary, R. Schoenman, and on the margins Pergamon Press’ Robert Maxwell, or the MP John Stonehouse in the U.K. The Quakerly dictum, “think the best of everyone you meet”, was certainly the one that many of us aspired to, but how many “strikes” before someone was out of the reach of trust and credibility? During the anti-draft movement in the U.S.A., the “plants” were obvious, their jeans and denim didn’t fit, they were awkward and not very with it, and their sunglasses were not cool. But they sowed mutual suspicion and that was enough. Many groups broke up. And during and after McCarthyism, in the 1960s, I directly experienced the entry of agents, often ex-military, into peace studies and action roles – not so much to gain information as much as to disrupt, divide and dismantle.

This Day in History: Burmese Independence

By David A. Steinberg
London essentially determined Burmese independence, although the cry for an independent Burma by the Burmese was long, loud, and clear. Following World War II, there were thousands of Burmese with arms who might have made retention of British control very tenuous. Winston Churchill said he was not about to see the dissolution of the British Empire, but the Labour Party won the postwar elections. India was bound to become independent, and Burma would certainly follow. England was exhausted by the war; holding onto their colonies in the face of rising nationalism seemed impossible. Inevitable independence, then, should be gracefully granted. What kind of independence, and whether independent Burma would be divided between Burma Proper and a separate minority area was unclear. Some in England wanted to try Aung San as a traitor because he backed the Japanese before and during most of the war,

When a Language Dies

By David Crystal
There’s a language dying out somewhere in the world every two weeks or so. It’s a far greater crisis, proportionately speaking, than the threat of extinction facing plants and animals. Half the world’s languages are so seriously endangered that they are likely to disappear this century. That’s 3000 languages, maybe.

Perceiving Death in the News

Images of people about to die surface repeatedly in the news and their appearance raises questions: What equips an image to deliver the news; how much does the public need to know to make sense of what they see; and what do these images contribute to historical memory? These images call on us to rethink both journalism and its public response, and in so doing they suggest both an alternative voice in the news – a subjunctive voice of the visual that pushes the ‘as if’ of news over its ‘as is’ dimensions – and an alternative mode of public engagement with journalism – an engagement fueled not by reason and understanding but by imagination and emotion.

In About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Barbie Zelizer suggests that a different kind of news relay, producing a different kind of public response, has settled into our information environment.
Click through to watch a video from the Annenberg School for Communication.

Cleopatra’s true racial background (and does it really matter?)

By Duane W. Roller

Racial profiling and manipulation have existed for a long time. It has become an issue in modern politics, and over 2500 years ago the Greek historian Herodotos wrote that ethnicity was often turned to political ends. Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt, is often a victim of racial profiling.

Genius!

Where do geniuses come from? What makes a genius? Are all geniuses interesting people? Who’s more amazing, Shakespeare, Darwin or Einstein?

There are many questions about genius, and in his newest book, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs, Andrew Robinson answers all these and more. Click through to view the videos.

The Centennial of the World’s First Social Revolution in Mexico

Tweet By William H. Beezley November 20, Mexicans everywhere will celebrate the centennial of their epic revolution. A century ago, a generation of young, largely provincial Mexican men and women initiated and carried out a social revolution that preceded the Russian Revolution (1917), had greater educational and public health successes than the Chinese Revolution (1948), […]

Happy 75th Birthday Monopoly!

By Philip Carter
This month is the 75th anniversary of the London version of the popular board game, Monopoly. To mark the anniversary, editors at the Oxford DNB wondered what a historical version of the game might look like. The Oxford DNB includes the stories of more than 57,000 men and women from British history, of whom nearly half had ties to the capital city.

Witchcraft!

In 2004, workmen digging in Greenwich, near London, uncovered a sealed stone bottle that rattled and splashed when they shook it. It was sent to a laboratory where X-rays revealed metal objects wedged in the neck, suggesting that it had been buried upside down, and a scan showed it to be half filled with liquid. Chemical analysis confirmed this was human urine containing nicotine and brimstone. When the cork was removed, scientists discovered iron nails, brass pins, hair, fingernail parings, a pierced leather heart, and what they believed might be navel fluff.

When the Stasi Came for the Doctor

Gary Bruce is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. His newest book is The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. The book is based on previously classified documents and interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens and is the first comprehensive history of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. In the excerpt below Bruce looks at how the Stasi impacted one ordinary man’s life.

The State of ‘Judenpolitik’ Before the Beginning of the War

Peter Longerich is Professor of Modern German History at Royal Holloway University of London and founder of the College’s Holocaust Research Centre. His book, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, shows the steps taken by the Nazis that would ultimately lead to the Final Solution. He argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of Nazi political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses. Rather, from 1933 onwards, anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement’s attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule. In the excerpt below Longerich analyzes the state of Jewish citizens of Germany right before the start of the war.