Tag: histories
Caleb Carr, Autor von Dark Histories, stirbt im Alter von 68 Jahren
Seine eigene dunkle Vergangenheit veranlasste ihn, über die Wurzeln der Gewalt zu schreiben und sie zu untersuchen, insbesondere in seinem Bestseller-Roman „Die Einkreisung“.
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Die Afro-Atlantic Histories der National Gallery sind zu groß und verlieren an Fokus, aber die Kunst ist großartig
Kuratorische Estriche lenken von guten Künstlern ab, viele aus Brasilien, die den Amerikanern unbekannt sind.
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The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize
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At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow
Why King Tut Is Still Fascinating
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Not long ago, in my sister’s elementary-school classroom, I met a second grader who seemed well on his way to a doctoral degree in Egyptology. After describing the mummification process in recondite detail—not only why the brain was removed through the nose but how exactly natron dried out the rest of the body—the child drew an elaborate cartouche with the hieroglyphs used to spell my name. He
Should We Believe the Stories of Men Mistaken for Gods?
“Dear Sir,” the letter from Lord Sandwich to the English naturalist Joseph Banks began, “poor Captain Cooke is no more.” That was about all the Earl or anyone else could say with certainty, since word of the explorer’s demise had only just reached England’s shores, nearly a year after he died on the black-sand beach of Kealakekua Bay, on the island of Hawaii, on Valentine’s Day, 1779. Yet the passage of time did not clarify the matter: although thousands witnessed
How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives
In a sagging desk drawer crammed with Magic Markers that have lost their magic, a rubber-banded collection of expired passports, and user manuals for printers I no longer use or even own, I keep a stash of decades-old wallet-size leather-bound appointment books marked with now meaningless meetings, obsolete assignations, assorted obligations, and inscrutable notes to self: Dept mtg, lunch w/Leah, S to dentist, cancel $14.9. The books have printed, on the left-hand page, the days of the week from
Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out
Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate—tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soup-to-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens.” The first asserts that everything has been on the
America Was Eager for Chinese Immigrants. What Happened?
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, settlement of America’s western frontier generally reached no farther than the Great Plains. The verdant land that Spanish conquistadors called Alta California had been claimed by Spain and then by Mexico, after it secured its independence, in 1821. In 1844, James K. Polk won the Presidency as a proponent of America’s “manifest destiny,” the belief that it was God’s will for the United States to extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific,