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In 1992, when I was working as an architectural historian for an architectural firm located in Berlin, I stumbled across the name of architect Ernst L. Freud. At that time, my task was to conduct research for an architectural historic report on a large country house, located high above Lake Schwielow, to the south-west of Berlin, two-thirds on the way to Potsdam.
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This February marked the 350th anniversary of an important but forgotten war: the Sino-Dutch War of 1661-1662. The Dutch, who’d defeated the British, the Portuguese and the Spanish, whose guns and military practices were famous throughout Europe, found themselves outfought, out-led and outmaneuvered by a Chinese warlord named Koxinga, son of a pirate.
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The centennial anniversary of the First World War provides a fitting opportunity to review the literature devoted to the origins of the conflict. In his third book in four years, Sean McMeekin, an assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey), rekindles interest in Russia’s responsibility for unleashing the great catastrophe of 1914.
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Why, in 2011, think about empires? We live in a world of nation-states — over 200 of them, each with their seat in the UN, their flag, postage stamps and governmental institutions.
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It was only after her husband, the German Emperor Frederick III, had finally died on 15 June 1888 that his widow, Empress Victoria, allowed herself to buckle under the weight of almost unbearable grief.
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On Thursday November 17, a few days after Occupy Wall Street protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park, a poster emerged declaring “mass non-violent direct action” to “shut down wall street,” “occupy the subways,” and “take the square.” While the reference to “non-violent direct action” reminded me of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, it was the image that accompanied the text that most warmed my historian’s heart.
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A desperate nun, thrust against her will into a convent by cruel parents, cannot obtain release. Such is the prevailing image of involuntary female monachization in early modern Europe.
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With every year, the US naval base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay becomes less of a place and more of a concept, one that seems to have sprung from a vacuum on January 11, 2002, when twenty of the earliest detainees in the “war on terror” arrived there in orange jumpsuits, blackened goggles, shackles and earmuffs.
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To call it a parchment page does not capture what it is. More a scrap, almost a mere tag that could be pinned to something, to define it, name it, give it a history. In crabbed, but not unclear handwriting, a scribe – perhaps a cleric or confessor – recorded the simple donation: alms of oats in return for women’s prayers offered up annually on the anniversary of a death.
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In the 1950s, in the midst of what came to be known as the Economic Miracle, West Germany was positively deluged with other wonders: mysterious healings, mystical visions, rumors of the end of the world, and stories of divine and devilish interventions in ordinary lives.
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What could possibly link Britain’s Catholic Relief Act of 1829, the first in a series of Parliamentary reforms leading to full Catholic emancipation, with the horrific Burke and Hare anatomy murders? The answer is a series of contemporary images associated with the verb, coined in 1829, “to burke,” meaning to smother, suffocate or cut short.
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Centuries after his death, the name of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) can still trigger shudders. To non-specialists, it evokes Catholic zealotry, reaction incarnate, the taste for violence and the praise of war.
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In 1559, a ship sailed from Venice to the Dalmatian coast. On board were a mother and her four children, including her young daughter, Beatrice Michiel. As they crossed the Adriatic, corsairs waylaid the ship and took the family captive. The mother and daughters were ransomed; however the boys were enslaved and soon converted to Islam.
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The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary transformation in the writing of early American history. Where historians once assumed the exceptionalism of the new United States kept it hermetically sealed from the outside world, they now believe the early republic existed on the periphery of an Atlantic world.
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The press has various ways of describing the current crisis afflicting many countries, including Italy. The first is usually to call it a finance crisis and blame the banks and financial intermediaries; there is talk of problems in the real economy, industry producing less and exports dwindling, thus causing unemployment; or of structural problems, the need to create new infrastructure suited to the times.
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“We Are All Socialists Now: The Perils and Promise of the New Era of Big Government” ran a provocative cover of Newsweek on 11 February 2009. The financial crisis had swept through the economy, and the state had intervened, pumping money into the economy, bailing out larger banks and other failing financial institutions, and taking shares and part ownership in private companies.
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The fast-approaching secular year 2013 will mark the centennial of a modest building at 180 Stanton Street, on New York City’s Lower East Side, that houses Congregation Bnai Jacob Anshei Brzezan. I first entered its doors and re-learned how to place tefillin on my arms and head in order to join the daily morning minyan on November 9, 1983.
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John Hammett, a Newport clerk, schoolmaster, and wife beater, may not be the most typical early American, but his experience suggests how braided law and life actually were in the era.
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What are the choices when a family member converts to another faith (or non-faith)? Or, takes a path that upsets the family’s perceived traditions?
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On the morning of 21 May 1925, a dog known as Hachikō walked with his master to a Tokyo railway station just as they had done each weekday morning for over a year since he had been adopted as a two-month-old puppy.
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What aspects of the human condition do we risk sacrificing or distorting should we allow humanistic study to flounder in the face of the imperatives of globalization: the ever-expanding quest for the accumulation of wealth and technical expertise?
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When enslaved Americans confronted the intensifying market economy of the nineteenth-century United States, they faced ominous changes and serious challenges.
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In the early 1820s the Russian troops under General Aleksei Petrovich Ermolov marched through Chechnya leaving behind a wide swath of destruction: Villages razed to the ground, crops burned, captives and cattle seized, forests cut down, and land taken away for forts and settlements.
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by Talia Schaffer
Gay marriage supposedly interferes with “traditional marriage,” say its opponents. “We have at least 6,000 years of recorded history on our side,” remarked Kris Mineau, president of the conservative group Massachusetts Family Institute. People like Mineau assume that the traditional definition of the family is stable, unvarying and ancient.
by Sebastian Normandin
So this is the thing. I’ve been breathing a long time but, driven by the objective of writing a book, only recently started deliberately thinking about it. We commonly view breathing as a pedestrian automatism, but I try to imagine how this simple physiological function was once perceived as miraculous. Always that fine but-oh-so-definitive line between breathing and not. 
by Alexander McGregor
In the construction of a genuinely socialist state, shaped upon Bolivarian principles, arguably little has been achieved in the last fifty years and the regime, apparently, withstands the inevitable decay of popular support through both repression and an almost mystical, religious prosecution of the ‘eternal possibility’: keep fighting, oh sons of Cuba, one day we shall be finally rid of our enemies and then we may be truly free.
by Dylan J. Montanari
For anyone who has ever heard Fried lecture, it is easy enough to hear his voice as one reads his writing. He is unafraid of the “I,” using it so earnestly that his work seems to take on the mode of confession at times, especially when he is at his most enthusiastic or urgent. 
by Jenny Diski
I am awkward around art. Not at all confident about how I should look and what I should feel. I stand both pleased and helpless in front of this painting and look, think about what I’m looking at, and wonder about it, in as much as I can, because I’m not an art historian. Often, standing in front of paintings I wonder what it is I am supposed to be feeling beyond the looking and thinking. 
by Masha Tupitsyn
In America, we aim to raise children who can do things — anything — not children who can’t. Ruthless competition and competence is at the heart of the American dream. However, when it comes to contemporary America, and contemporary American masculinity in particular, what exactly does it mean to be capable of “anything” now?
by Daniel Tutt
Alain Badiou’s translation of Plato leaves us with the rare sense that politics can once again be associated with truth, courage and justice. We have an agency at our disposal that comes in the passionate work of bringing the idea of equality (communism) into existence. 
by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
Oddly enough, many analysts forget that when Chávez won the presidential elections in 1998, his populist discourse did include references neither to anti-neoliberalism nor to radical socialism. Instead, the role model that he had in mind was that of Tony Blair’s Third Way. Chávez wanted to rebuild the economy by finding a new balance between the state and the free market.
by Russell Bennetts
1. John Barrowman.
3. Music I listen to for pleasure being used for pain. (I know this happened IRL, but nonetheless.)
6. Maya’s Lana Del Rey impression in the final scene of the movie. 
by Joanna Walsh
What are dreams for? Elliptical, intimate, (seemingly) significant; from predicting the future to returning the repressed, these least fathomable experiences have always had an interpretive function laid on them. A similar question lies at the heart of the Oulipo. 
by Daniel Bosch
It could very well be that Harvard University Press is smart enough to recognize a Harvard edition of LTYP will have an imprimatur. Whatever its relative virtues, the Harman translation out of Cambridge, as Banville points out, is “likely to become the standard one.”
by Leo Tolstoy
An elder sister came to visit her younger sister in the country. The elder was married to a tradesman in town, the younger to a peasant in the village. As the sisters sat over their tea talking, the elder began to boast of the advantages of town life: saying how comfortably they lived there, how well they dressed, what fine clothes her children wore, what good things they ate and drank, and how she went to the theatre, promenades, and entertainments.Most Popular
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