position:professor of history

  • Chaos, hope, change: stories from 70 years of the People’s Republic of China | World news | The Guardian

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/chaos-hope-change-stories-from-70-years-of-the-peoples-republic-of-chin

    had fought its way through two wars and was on its knees and battered – the idea that in 70 years it would be the second biggest economy in the world… and a major global player would have seemed very unlikely indeed,” said Rana Mitter, a professor of history and politics of modern China at Oxford University.

    But for those who lived through these years, the pace of change has been dizzying and at times jolting. Almost no other country has experienced shifts as dramatic as China has – almost as if each generation has lived in an entirely different country.

    #chine #histoire #mao

  • Des universitaires et des artistes israéliens mettent en garde contre une mise en équation de l’antisionisme et de l’antisémitisme
    22 novembre | Ofer Aderet pour Haaretz |Traduction J.Ch. pour l’AURDIP
    https://www.aurdip.org/des-universitaires-et-des-artistes.html

    Une lettre ouverte de 34 éminents Israéliens, dont des chercheurs en histoire juive et des lauréats du Prix Israël, a été publiée mardi dans les média autrichiens appelant à faire une différence entre critique légitime d’Israël, « aussi dure puisse-t-elle être », et antisémitisme.

    Cette lettre a été émise avant un rassemblement international à Vienne sur antisémitisme et antisionisme en Europe.

    L’ événement de cette semaine, « L’Europe par delà l’antisémitisme et l’antisionisme », se tient sous les auspices du Chancelier autrichien Sebastian Kurz. Son homologue israélien, Benjamin Netanyahu, devait y prendre part, mais est resté en Israël pour s’occuper de la crise dans sa coalition gouvernementale.

    « Nous adoptons et soutenons totalement le combat intransigeant [de l’Union Européenne] contre l’antisémitisme. La montée de l’antisémitisme nous inquiète. Comme nous l’a enseigné l’histoire, elle a souvent été l’annonce de désastres ultérieurs pour toute l’humanité », déclare la lettre.

    « Cependant, l’UE défend les droits de l’Homme et doit les protéger avec autant de force qu’elle combat l’antisémitisme. Il ne faudrait pas instrumentaliser ce combat contre l’antisémitisme pour réprimer la critique légitime de l’occupation par Israël et ses graves violations des droits fondamentaux des Palestiniens. » (...)

    #antisionisme #antisémitisme

    • La liste des signataires:
      Moshe Zimmerman, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University and a former director of the university’s Koebner Center for German History; Moshe Zukermann, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at Tel Aviv University; Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University emeritus professor in political science and a current Haaretz columnist; Israel Prize laureate, sculptor Dani Karavan; Israel Prize laureate, photographer Alex Levac; Israel Prize laureate, artist Michal Naaman; Gadi Algazi, a history professor at Tel Aviv University; Eva Illouz, a professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and former President of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design; Gideon Freudenthal, a professor in the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University; Rachel Elior, an Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Anat Matar, philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University; Yael Barda, a professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Miki Kratsman, a former chairman of the photography department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; Jose Brunner, an emeritus professor at Tel Aviv University and a former director of the Minerva Institute for German History; Alon Confino, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Israel Prize laureate, graphic designer David Tartakover; Arie M. Dubnov, Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University; David Enoch, history, philosophy and Judaic Studies professor at Israel’s Open University; Amos Goldberg, Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Israel Prize laureate and vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities David Harel; Hannan Hever, comparative literature and Judaic Studies professor at Yale University; Hannah Kasher, professor emerita in Jewish Thought at Bar-Ilan University; Michael Keren, emeritus professor of economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Israel Prize laureate, Yehoshua Kolodny, professor emeritus in the Institute of Earth Sciences at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Nitzan Lebovic, professor of Holocaust studies at Lehigh University; Idith Zertal, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Dmitry Shumsky, professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University; Israel Prize laureate David Shulman, professor emeritus of Asian studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Jewish philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University; Dalia Ofer, professor emerita in Jewry and Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus for Jewish thoughts at the Hebrew University; Jacob Metzer, former president of Israel’s Open University; and Israel Prize laureate Yehuda Judd Ne’eman, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University arts faculty

      #Palestine

  • Israeli academics and artists warn against equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism
    Their open letter ahead of a conference in Vienna advises against giving Israel immunity for ‘grave and widespread violations of human rights and international law’

    Ofer Aderet
    Nov 20, 2018

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-professors-warn-against-equating-anti-zionism-with-anti-se

    An open letter from 35 prominent Israelis, including Jewish-history scholars and Israel Prize laureates, was published Tuesday in the Austrian media calling for a distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel, “harsh as it may be,” and anti-Semitism.
    To really understand Israel and the Middle East - subscribe to Haaretz
    The letter was released before an international gathering in Vienna on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Europe.
    The event this week, “Europe beyond anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism: Securing Jewish life in Europe,” is being held under the auspices of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. His Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been due to take part but stayed in Israel to deal with the crisis in his coalition government. 
    “We fully embrace and support the [European Union’s] uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism. The rise of anti-Semitism worries us. As we know from history, it has often signaled future disasters to all mankind,” the letter states. 
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    “However, the EU also stands for human rights and has to protect them as forcefully as it fights anti-Semitism. This fight against anti-Semitism should not be instrumentalized to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel’s occupation and severe violations of Palestinian human rights.” 

    The signatories accuse Netanyahu of suggesting an equivalence between anti-Israel criticism and anti-Semitism. The official declaration by the conference also notes that anti-Semitism is often expressed through disproportionate criticism of Israel, but the letter warns that such an approach could “afford Israel immunity against criticism for grave and widespread violations of human rights and international law.”
    The signatories object to the declaration’s alleged “identifying” of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. “Zionism, like all other modern Jewish movements in the 20th century, was harshly opposed by many Jews, as well as by non-Jews who were not anti-Semitic,” they write. “Many victims of the Holocaust opposed Zionism. On the other hand, many anti-Semites supported Zionism. It is nonsensical and inappropriate to identify anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.”
    Among the signatories are Moshe Zimmerman, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University and a former director of the university’s Koebner Center for German History; Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University emeritus professor in political science and a current Haaretz columnist; sculptor Dani Karavan; Miki Kratsman, a former chairman of the photography department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; Jose Brunner, an emeritus professor at Tel Aviv University and a former director of the Minerva Institute for German History; Alon Confino, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and graphic designer David Tartakover.

    Ofer Aderet
    Haaretz Correspondent

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    • La liste des signataires:
      Moshe Zimmerman, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University and a former director of the university’s Koebner Center for German History; Moshe Zukermann, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at Tel Aviv University; Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University emeritus professor in political science and a current Haaretz columnist; Israel Prize laureate, sculptor Dani Karavan; Israel Prize laureate, photographer Alex Levac; Israel Prize laureate, artist Michal Naaman; Gadi Algazi, a history professor at Tel Aviv University; Eva Illouz, a professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and former President of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design; Gideon Freudenthal, a professor in the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University; Rachel Elior, an Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Anat Matar, philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University; Yael Barda, a professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Miki Kratsman, a former chairman of the photography department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; Jose Brunner, an emeritus professor at Tel Aviv University and a former director of the Minerva Institute for German History; Alon Confino, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Israel Prize laureate, graphic designer David Tartakover; Arie M. Dubnov, Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University; David Enoch, history, philosophy and Judaic Studies professor at Israel’s Open University; Amos Goldberg, Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Israel Prize laureate and vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities David Harel; Hannan Hever, comparative literature and Judaic Studies professor at Yale University; Hannah Kasher, professor emerita in Jewish Thought at Bar-Ilan University; Michael Keren, emeritus professor of economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Israel Prize laureate, Yehoshua Kolodny, professor emeritus in the Institute of Earth Sciences at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Nitzan Lebovic, professor of Holocaust studies at Lehigh University; Idith Zertal, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Dmitry Shumsky, professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University; Israel Prize laureate David Shulman, professor emeritus of Asian studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Jewish philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University; Dalia Ofer, professor emerita in Jewry and Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus for Jewish thoughts at the Hebrew University; Jacob Metzer, former president of Israel’s Open University; and Israel Prize laureate Yehuda Judd Ne’eman, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University arts faculty

  • Donald Trump Spell-Check : Why Does Our Leader Insist on Capitalizing ’Country’ ? | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-spell-check-why-does-our-leader-insist-capitalizing-country

    Trump’s bizarre spelling choices may seem amusing. But stop laughing: His use of “Country” has a hidden meaning

    By Chauncey DeVega / Salon
    October 26, 2018, 3:06 AM GMT

    There is nothing funny about Donald Trump. Like other autocrats and political thugs he thrives on being underestimated. Last week there was another example of this error by Donald Trump’s detractors and others who oppose him.

    On Twitter, his preferred means of communication, Donald Trump proclaimed last week:

    When referring to the USA, I will always capitalize the word Country!

    Trump was mocked by comedians on late night television for this supposed gaffe. Other prominent voices pointed to Trump’s “misspelling” as further proof that he is a dolt and a fool. By implication, his voters are fools and dolts as well. This version of liberal Schadenfreude is a defining feature in the Age of Trump.

    It is small comfort which ignores the fact that Donald Trump’s grammatical errors and odd spelling are — as admitted by White House insiders some months ago — strategic choices designed to make him appear more “folksy” and “authentic.” Trump’s faux-populist appeal depends upon his ability to relate to his supporters by sharing their grievances and hostility toward those liberals and progressives they perceive as looking down on “real Americans.”

    To understand Donald Trump, one must begin with the fact that he is an American fascist — an autocrat and authoritarian by instinct, behavior, and values. This is the nucleus of his being. This is the prism through which to best understand Donald Trump.

    I asked several leading experts on fascism and authoritarianism to help me understand Trump’s conversion of “Country” into a proper noun.

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, author of the forthcoming book “Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall,” and featured commentator in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9”:

    Trump’s statement that he’ll capitalize the word Country represents yet another attempt to polarize the American population and set up one half as “moral,” "just" and politically and, above all, racially acceptable. It is a technique used by every authoritarian leader, often with success. Some may look at this tweet as just another quirky Trump language proposition, but nothing he does is accidental, including his capitalization strategies.

    Richard Frankel, professor of modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, an expert on the rise of Nazism in Germany whose work has also been featured in Newsweek and on the History News Network:

    I see it as another way of saying “America First.” He’s putting the emphasis on country, on nation, on America before anything else. He’s contrasting himself and his followers with those who see America as part of a much larger community of nations, in which cooperation, not confrontation, is what is what’s best for everyone. Those who see it his way are the “real Americans.” Those who don’t are the enemy. It’s the pitting of “America Firsters” against the dreaded “Globalists.” It’s another way to divide the country — inclusion through exclusion.

    Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Propaganda Works” as well as the new book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them”:

    Via linguistic style and repetition, Trump is inculcating his followers with an ethic of authoritarian nationalism. Organized religion is a local authoritarian structure; the authority of God is signaled linguistically, by capitalizing “God” or not completely spelling out the word. According to Trump, like “God,” "Country" should be capitalized. This is a linguistic means of signalizing the quasi-religious authority of the nation. And since the nation is not a person, or even a person-like figure, that religious authority should be transferred to its leader, Donald Trump.

    It (again) reminded me of this quote from Victor Klemperer’s “Language of the Third Reich”: “Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously … language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it.”

    Several days after Trump made his declaration about the correct spelling of our “Country,” he announced that he was a proud “nationalist.” Because Trump is a racial authoritarian — and a student of “alt-right” guru Steve Bannon as well as White House adviser Stephen Miller, principal architect of his nativist immigration policy — his brand of nationalism is in no sense “neutral.” It is in reality white nationalism, whether called by that name or not. Donald Trump may evade or deflect from that fact. But it is true nonetheless. This is evident through his repeated and overt hostility toward nonwhites and Muslims.

    An embrace of nationalism by Donald Trump fits neatly within his logic for capitalizing the word “Country” when referring to the United States of America.

    Benjamin Hett, professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of “Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery” as well as the new book “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic”:

    This is language I do not remember hearing from any other president. And this is where the significance of “Country” comes in. Trump the “nationalist” with his capital C in “Country” uses “globalist” as a pejorative. He is step by step dismantling the international infrastructure which the United States created after the Second World War to maintain a democratic and prosperous global order. Just recently he has begun dismantling the key INF treaty with Russia, another horrifically dangerous step. This is all reminiscent of the nationalism of the German administrations of the early 1930s, up to and including Hitler — turn away from the world, turn away from crucial international connections, turn away from peace and democracy. We know, or should know, that this cannot and will not lead anywhere good.

    *

    Some people laugh when they are terrified. It is not that the situation is funny; rather, their brains process existential dread through the physical act of laughter. This is why so many of us laugh at Donald Trump’s supposed gaffes and misspellings, and his other crude and boorish behavior. Donald Trump’s America is a real thing. We are stuck in it and many of us still cannot believe this has all come to pass. In the final analysis, laughter provides some short-term relief during the walk to the political gallows. The laughter feels good. The noose is still waiting.

    #Trump #Fascisme #Typographie #Histoire #Linguistique

  • How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion | Science | Smithsonian
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculosis-shaped-victorian-fashion-180959029

    By the mid-1800s, tuberculosis had reached epidemic levels in Europe and the United States. The disease, now known to be infectious, attacks the lungs and damages other organs. Before the advent of antibiotics, its victims slowly wasted away, becoming pale and thin before finally dying of what was then known as consumption.

    The Victorians romanticized the disease and the effects it caused in the gradual build to death. For decades, many beauty standards emulated or highlighted these effects. And as scientists gained greater understanding of the disease and how it was spread, the disease continued to keep its hold on fashion.

    “Between 1780 and 1850, there is an increasing aestheticization of tuberculosis that becomes entwined with feminine beauty,” says Carolyn Day, an assistant professor of history at Furman University in South Carolina and author of the forthcoming book Consumptive Chic: A History of Fashion, Beauty and Disease, which explores how tuberculosis impacted early 19th century British fashion and perceptions of beauty.

    During that time, consumption was thought to be caused by hereditary susceptibility and miasmas, or “bad airs,” in the environment. Among the upper class, one of the ways people judged a woman’s predisposition to tuberculosis was by her attractiveness, Days says. “That’s because tuberculosis enhances those things that are already established as beautiful in women,” she explains, such as the thinness and pale skin that result from weight loss and the lack of appetite caused by the disease.

    The 1909 book Tuberculosis: A Treatise by American Authors on Its Etiology, Pathology, Frequency, Semeiology, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Prevention, and Treatment confirms this notion, with the authors noting: “A considerable number of patients have, and have had for years previous to their sickness, a delicate, transparent skin, as well as fine, silky hair.” Sparkling or dilated eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips were also common in tuberculosis patients—characteristics now known to be caused by frequent low-grade fever.

    “We also begin to see elements in fashion that either highlight symptoms of the disease or physically emulate the illness,” Day says. The height of this so-called consumptive chic came in the mid-1800s, when fashionable pointed corsets showed off low, waifish waists and voluminous skirts further emphasized women’s narrow middles. Middle- and upper-class women also attempted to emulate the consumptive appearance by using makeup to lighten their skin, redden their lips and color their cheeks pink.

  • Don’t be fooled by the comforting rhetoric coming from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/11/08/dont-be-fooled-by-the-comforting-rhetoric-coming-from-saudi-arabias-

    The younger generation of Al Saud rulers — represented by the recently appointed crown prince — have created the illusion of a “new” Saudi Arabia, one defined by youth, moderation and liberalization. But far from embodying a break with “traditional” Saudi rule, the new generation has simply doubled down on the tried and tested approaches to modern Saudi statecraft.

    Like its predecessors, the current regime uses great repressive force to maintain its rule. It relies on the very same programs of reform and modernization to shore up international support while exacerbating sectarian tensions and violently crushing all forms of political opposition, including the very forces of moderation it purports to support.

    The timing of these announcements speaks to the regime’s desperate need for a victory to cover up its many domestic and regional failures, to increase confidence in the regime’s commitment to reform and to provide fodder for its all-out war against domestic opposition and regional rivals. This is not to say that change in Saudi Arabia is not possible, nor to discount the efforts of thousands of Saudis who have risked so much to improve their living situations. But in the hands of relentless dictators in such an authoritarian context, “change” is elusive at best.

    • Ouf, c’est juste une opinion libre, pas un édito du WaPo !

      Even as Western governments and media outlets sing his praises, the young crown prince is viewed domestically as an incompetent and corrupt ruler who hides behind liberalism, tolerance and anti-corruption rhetoric. This view is shared by ruling members of the monarchy, economic elites and the population at large, who see Mohammad as someone who has disturbed the status quo for the sake of massive personal enrichment and political aggrandizement.

  • Historians Question Trump’s Comments on Confederate Monuments - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/arts/design/trump-robert-e-lee-george-washington-thomas-jefferson.html

    President Trump is not generally known as a student of history. But on Tuesday, during a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in New York, he unwittingly waded into a complex debate about history and memory that has roiled college campuses and numerous cities over the past several years.

    Asked about the white nationalist rally that ended in violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump defended some who had gathered to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee, and criticized the “alt-left” counterprotesters who had confronted them.

    Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Mr. Trump said. “So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down.

    George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the president noted, were also slave owners. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Mr. Trump said. “And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?
    […]
    Mr. Grossman [executive director of the American Historical Association] noted that most Confederate monuments were constructed in two periods: the 1890s, as Jim Crow was being established, and in the 1950s, during a period of mass Southern resistance to the civil rights movement.

    We would not want to whitewash our history by pretending that Jim Crow and disenfranchisement or massive resistance to the civil rights movement never happened,” he said. “That is the part of our history that these monuments testify to.

    How the events in Charlottesville, and Mr. Trump’s comments, will affect the continuing debate over Confederate monuments remains to be seen. Mr. Witt [a professor of history at Yale], for one, suggested that white nationalist support might backfire.

    He noted that it was the 2015 murder of nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist that led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse.

    The amazing thing is that the president is doing more to endanger historical monuments than most of the protesters,” he said. “The alt-right is producing a world where there is more pressure to remove monuments, rather than less.

    • Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues in Overnight Operation | 2017-08-16

      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/baltimore-confederate-statues.html

      [...]


      Workers removed the Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson monument in Baltimore.

      Beginning soon after midnight on Wednesday, a crew, which included a large crane and a contingent of police officers, began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, tearing the monuments from their pedestals and carting them out of town.

      [...]

      Small crowds gathered at each of the monuments and the mood was “celebratory,” said Baynard Woods, the editor at large of The Baltimore City Paper, who documented the removals on Twitter.

      [...]

      The statues were taken down by order of Mayor Catherine Pugh, after the City Council voted on Monday for their removal. The city had been studying the issue since 2015, when a mass shooting by a white supremacist at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., prompted a renewed debate across the South over removing Confederate monuments and battle flags from public spaces.
      The police confirmed the removal.

      [...]

      By 3:30 a.m., three of the city’s four monuments had been removed. They included the Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson Monument, a double equestrian statue of the Confederate generals erected in 1948; the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, erected in 1903; and the Roger B. Taney Monument, erected in 1887.

      [...]

      Taney was a Supreme Court chief justice and Maryland native who wrote the landmark 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, ruling that even free blacks had no claim to citizenship in the United States. Although Taney was never part of the Confederacy, the court’s decision was celebrated by supporters of slavery.

      The fourth statue, the Confederate Women’s Monument, was dedicated in 1917. Pictures showed that it too had been taken down early on Wednesday.

      [...]

      One Twitter user, James MacArthur, live-streamed the removal of the Lee and Jackson monument as it was unceremoniously torn from its pedestal and strapped to a flatbed truck. At street level, lit by the harsh glare of police klieg lights, the two generals appeared small.

      Residents were seen celebrating on the pedestal, on which someone had spray-painted “Black Lives Matter.”

      [...]

      A team of police cars escorted the statues out of town. Ms. Pugh suggested on Monday that the statues might be relocated to Confederate cemeteries elsewhere in the state. (Although Maryland never seceded from the Union during the Civil War, there was popular support for the Confederacy in Baltimore and Southern Maryland, where Confederate soldiers are buried.)

      [...]

      trouvé en cherchant au réseau

      #Baltimore #Charlottesville #statues #États_Unis
      #suprématisme_blanc #iconoclasme #Confédération #histoire #racisme #esclavage

    • Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues After Activists Gave City Ultimatium | (#vidéo 7’15’’) TRNN 2017-08-16

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A38qI75uwQE

      [...]

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Sure, I think it’s exciting, and the culmination of intense, years-long grassroots organizing and pressure that was a flashpoint, like you said, when white supremacist violence occurred in Charleston and then again in Charlottesville, but also in response to ongoing white supremacist violence here in Baltimore City. And so Fredrick Douglass said, “Power yields nothing without demand.” And that’s exactly what happened here. It was, “Oh, this is too expensive. This will take too long,” and ultimately, when push comes to shove, the government will respond when we force the government to respond and not before.

      Jaisal Noor: And so defenders, even liberal defenders I talk to say, “This is history. We can’t remove history. It needs to be preserved. We shouldn’t take them down.” How do you respond to those arguments?

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Sure. The Lee/Jackson monument is not history. It’s a false narrative. It’s the Lost Cause mythology. It was put up in the 1940s, not to honor fallen Confederate veterans like some of the older monuments supposedly were alluding to, but it was put up as a triumphant symbol of rising white supremacy and resurgent white power. And so leaving the Lee/Jackson statue in place is the erasure of history, not the removal of it. If you look at the way Nazi Germany, for example, has dealt with their past, they do not leave statues of Hitler and Eichmann in place. They remove them and put up plaques and said, “Jewish families lived here,” and that’s the way to remember history. Not to leave up triumphant statues of genocidal maniacs.

      Jaisal Noor: Yeah, and you didn’t hear those same people defending the statues of Saddam in Iraq.

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Exactly. Exactly. It’s a false logic, and it’s a defense mechanism of people who can’t grapple with either their own privilege or internalized white supremacy, and so we can remember history without celebrating slavery and genocide and rape.

      Jaisal Noor: And so is the work now done now that this is down?

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Columbus is next. There are two Columbus statues in Baltimore, One in Druid Hill Park, and another in Little Italy. And if those don’t come down based on government action from the City, then they’ll come down based on #grassroots_action. So those are the next two, Columbus in Druid Hill and Columbus in Little Italy. Columbus started the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He brought syphilis to the hemisphere. He was a rapist who took indigenous women to Europe and had sex with them against their will, and so we’re planning a funeral for Columbus to lay him to rest, and to move onto the next chapter so we can celebrate people like Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and hold up those leaders who struggled against that type of oppression instead of honoring those who initiated it.

      ||

      trouvé en cherchant dans le réseau

      #air_du_temps #goût_du_jour
      #bouleversement
      #séquelles #activisme

  • How Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be #Pro-Israel — and Anti-Semitic at the Same Time
    http://forward.com/news/israel/354402/how-steve-bannon-and-breitbart-news-can-be-pro-israel-and-anti-semitic-at-t

    Yet though it would seem impossible to hate Jews but love the Jewish state, these two viewpoints are not as contradictory as they appear.

    There is actually “little correlation” between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, according Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. To be sure, anti-Semitism is found among the anti-Zionist left. But it is also found among the Zionist right.

    “Many people who dislike Jews like Israel and many people who are critical toward Israel are affectionate toward Jews,” said Cohen.

    [...]

    This duality is a central component of “Trumpism,” said Yael Sternhell, a Tel Aviv University professor of history and American studies.

    #trumpisme

  • The surprising history of abortion in the United States - CNN.com
    http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/23/health/abortion-history-in-united-states

    There was a time when abortion was simply part of life in the United States. People didn’t scream about it in protest, and services were marketed openly.

    Drugs to induce abortions were a booming business. They were advertised in newspapers and could be bought from pharmacists, from physicians and even through the mail. If drugs didn’t work, women could visit practitioners for instrumental procedures.

    The earliest efforts to govern abortions centered on concerns about poisoning, not morality, religion or politics. It was the mid-19th century, long before abortion became the hot-button issue it is now.
    All of this is according to historian Leslie Reagan, whose 1996 book on abortion history in the United States is considered one of the most comprehensive to date.

    Today, as we await a U.S. Supreme Court decision in what’s been called the biggest abortion case to hit the high court in two decades, many states still clamor to ramp up restrictions.

    Since 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion across the United States, states have enacted more than 1,074 laws to limit access to the procedure, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive rights organization. More than a quarter of these laws passed between 2010 and 2015.

    It wasn’t always like this, says Reagan, a professor of history, medicine, gender, women’s studies and law at the University of Illinois.

    So how did we get here?

  • Ukraine’s Complicated History | World Affairs Journal
    http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/ukraine%E2%80%99s-complicated-history

    The following is an interview with George Liber, a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

    MOTYL: Your forthcoming book, Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954, promises to revise much of the conventional wisdom about Ukraine. What are your main arguments?
    […]

    MOTYL: Most students of nationalism assume that nationalists form nations. You’re arguing the opposite: that cataclysms do. Is it time to rethink our general understanding of how and why nations form?

    LIBER: Not exactly. My point is that wars and revolutions are social accelerators of ideas and political movements. I believe in human agency. In periods of historical flux, individuals often have some options—not a full range of options, just some. Oftentimes they pick what they consider the best of several bad ones.

    MOTYL: Several bad options? That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of human agency.

    LIBER: Although we are all constrained by our environment, we make choices in that environment. Human agency exists. During these total wars, people had the choice to stay or flee. Those who stayed had the choice to fight or submit. Collaboration or resistance did not constitute the only possible responses to foreign occupation. Other possible responses included passivity, withdrawal, neutrality, passive resistance, passive cooperation, alliance-seeking, or merely the hope to survive. Sometimes people responded with a contingent mix of these reactions. Not everyone could consistently or consciously resist over a long, brutal occupation. Most people do not and did not engage in heroics; most sought to do the best they could in dangerous circumstances. Under conditions of such widespread violence, anyone who stood out could be arbitrarily detained or shot. 

    MOTYL: How does your thesis connect with events in today’s Ukraine?

    LIBER: The current Russian war against Ukraine and the problems of the Donbas are not a recent phenomenon, but the product of a long evolution, dating back to the late czarist period, if not before.

  • Two maps that show the evolution of global shipping

    An assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, Ben Schmidt, has put together a few rather cool-looking maps that display the world’s modern shipping routes. What’s interesting is that, viewed together, the routes create an inverted map of the world—a reminder of the broad reach of global trade.
    The map above displays shipping routes from 1980 to 1997, based on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By contrast, the map below is based on shipping routes from the 19th century. It shows routes principally around North and South America, Europe, and Africa. Just a few routes, depicted by faint lines, run to Asia.

    http://qz.com/193847/two-maps-that-show-the-evolution-of-global-shipping

    #cartographie #visualisation #carte #mer #transport_maritime #commerce

  • Jenniffer Schuessler, In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

    The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a “cohort”: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the cold war cleared some ideological ground, inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questions — like, why didn’t socialism take root in America? — that animated previous generations of labor historians.

    Instead of searching for working-class radicalism, they looked at office clerks and entrepreneurs.

    “Earlier, a lot of these topics would’ve been greeted with a yawn,” said Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” “But then the crisis hit, and people started asking, ‘Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?’ ”

    In 1996, when the Harvard historian Sven Beckert proposed an undergraduate seminar called the History of American Capitalism — the first of its kind, he believes — colleagues were skeptical. “They thought no one would be interested,” he said.

    But the seminar drew nearly 100 applicants for 15 spots and grew into one of the biggest lecture courses at Harvard, which in 2008 created a full-fledged Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism. That initiative led to similar ones on other campuses, as courses and programs at Princeton, Brown, Georgia, the New School, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere also began drawing crowds — sometimes with the help of canny brand management.

    After Seth Rockman, an associate professor of history at Brown, changed the name of his course from Capitalism, Slavery and the Economy of Early America to simply Capitalism, students concentrating in economics and international relations started showing up alongside the student labor activists and development studies people.

    “It’s become a space where you can bring together segments of the university that are not always in conversation,” Dr. Rockman said. (Next fall the course will become Brown’s introductory American history survey.)

    While most scholars in the field reject the purely oppositional stance of earlier Marxist history, they also take a distinctly critical view of neoclassical economics, with its tidy mathematical models and crisp axioms about rational actors.

    Markets and financial institutions “were created by people making particular choices at particular historical moments,” said Julia Ott, an assistant professor in the history of capitalism at the New School (the first person, several scholars said, to be hired under such a title).

    To dramatize that point, Dr. Ott has students in her course Whose Street? Wall Street! dress up in 19th-century costume and re-enact a primal scene in financial history: the early days of the Chicago Board of Trade.

    Some of her colleagues take a similarly playful approach. To promote a two-week history of capitalism “boot camp” to be inaugurated this summer at Cornell, Dr. Hyman (a former consultant at McKinsey & Company) designed “history of capitalism” T-shirts.

    The camp, he explained, is aimed at getting relatively innumerate historians up to speed on the kinds of financial data and documents found in business archives. Understanding capitalism, Dr. Hyman said, requires “both Foucault and regressions.”

    It also, scholars insist, requires keeping race and gender in the picture.

    As examples, they point to books like Nathan Connolly’s “World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida,” coming next year, and Bethany Moreton’s “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Harvard, 2009), winner of multiple prizes, which examines the role of evangelical Christian values in mobilizing the company’s largely female work force.

    The history of capitalism has also benefited from a surge of new, economically minded scholarship on slavery, with scholars increasingly arguing that Northern factories and Southern plantations were not opposing economic systems, as the old narrative has it, but deeply entwined.

    And that entwining, some argue, involved people far beyond the plantations and factories themselves, thanks to financial shenanigans that resonate in our own time.

    In a paper called “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery,” Edward Baptist, a historian at Cornell, looked at the way small investors across America and Europe snapped up exotic financial instruments based on slave holdings, much as people over the past decade went wild for mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations — with a similarly disastrous outcome.

    Other scholars track companies and commodities across national borders. Dr. Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, traces the rise of global capitalism over the past 350 years through one crop. Nan Enstad’s book in progress, “The Jim Crow Cigarette: Following Tobacco Road From North Carolina to China and Back,” examines how Southern tobacco workers, and Southern racial ideology, helped build the Chinese cigarette industry in the early 20th century.

    #capitalisme
    #histoire_économique

  • 13 août 2011
    International Herald Tribune
    Robert Zaretsky HOUSTON, TEXAS is a professor of history at the University of Houston, Honors College, and the author of ‘‘Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.’’

    *For Camus, a last brush with the absurd

    "A nonsensical theory about the existentialist author’s fatal car crash says much about his times, and ours.

    How absurd. What better response to the news that, a half century after the death of Albert Camus, an Italian scholar claims that the car accident that took his life was not an accident at all, but instead the work of the K.G.B.? According to the account, a well-known Czech poet confided to his diary that he had learned that Camus, a consistent and courageous critic of Communism, died after Soviet spies punctured a tire of the car he was traveling in, which then swerved off the road and wrapped itself around a plane tree.

    It may be surprising that no such rumors existed at the time. In the bleak atmosphere of the Cold War, the incredible seemed all too credible. The Soviet Union had recently tested its first atomic bomb. The French Communist Party, loyal to Moscow, was the dominant opposition in France. Few doubted it when the philosopher Roger Garaudy predicted, ‘‘Without any doubt, the 20th century will go down in history as the century of the victory of Communism.’’

    Conspiracy theories abounded in this hothouse atmosphere. Communists accused the government of allowing the Coca-Cola Company to buy the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in order to transform it into a billboard.

    The government arrested a Communist leader, Jacques Duclos, whose car contained two pigeons — carriers, the police claimed, for flying messages to Moscow. That Duclos, whose stomach remained French even while his heart had gone over to Moscow, meant those pigeons to go no further than his dinner table was, of course, overlooked in the passions of the moment.

    It would have been perfectly normal, in that context, for a rumor of Soviet malfeasance to flare once news of Camus’s death flashed across France. Instead, most people latched on to a different contemporary obsession à la française: fast cars and spectacular accidents.

    From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a deep preoccupation with cars throbbed through French popular culture. When novelists, musicians and film directors were not busy using the car and road as metonyms or signifiers, they were instead busy dying, or being maimed, in real cars on real roads. The ‘‘French James Dean,’’ the novelist Roger Nimier, predicted he would die on a highway and fulfilled this forecast in a spectacular accident in 1962; Françoise Sagan, author of ‘‘Bonjour Tristesse,’’ nearly said au revoir la vie after she demolished her Aston Martin in 1957; the adventurer André Malraux’s two sons died in a car accident in 1961. Even Roland Barthes, who rhapsodized over the cathedral-like nature of the Citroen DS, was eventually taken down in 1980 Paris by a laundry van run amok.

    By the early 1960s, France’s yearly toll of traffic fatalities dwarfed those of comparable countries.

    It was in the midst of this piston-driven devastation that the sporty Facel Vega, driven by Camus’s close friend Michel Gallimard, veered off the road. Who needed Moscow to explain the event? An engine with too much horsepower on a road designed not for cars, but horses, sufficed.

    ‘‘There is grim philosophical irony in the fact that Albert Camus should have died in a senseless automobile accident,’’ an article in The New York Times following his death began, ‘‘victim of a chance mishap.’’ But to those Camus left behind, death by car was not exactly senseless. While his contemporaries were turning to religion or ideologies to escape the absurd, they were also turning to, well, cars. Going fast — going too fast — in slim cars with seductive names like Citroën’s ‘‘The Goddess’’ seemed to offer a ticket to eternity, and to many onlookers, a high-speed death seemed a sensible, almost poetic, end for the era’s brightest stars.

    In its allusion to the absurd nature of Camus’s death, The Times got it only half right. A death, Camus noted, is not absurd or meaningless because it results from chance or a mishap, but instead because we refuse to accept the very possibility of senselessness. We insist upon meaning, even when we invent or impose it. It is our confrontation with the universe, not something inherent to the universe itself, that leads to absurdity. ‘‘The absurd,’’ he insisted, ‘‘depends as much on man as on the world.’’ It occurs when one combines the world’s silence with our need for understanding.

    And it can occur at any moment, even or perhaps especially in cars. ‘‘At any street corner,’’ Camus warned, ‘‘the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.’’ When a friend warned him about driving on highways, he replied, ‘‘Don’t worry, I hate speed and don’t like automobiles.’’ Owner of a rarely used Citroën, his attitude to speed matched his attitude to religious or ideological faith: They were false methods of relieving ourselves of the weight of our lives. Life, he believed, precisely because it is absurd, is our most precious and weighty possession.

    When the police reached the wrecked Facel Vega, they found Camus’s briefcase flung several yards from his body. Inside was the unfinished manuscript for his autobiographical novel, ‘‘The First Man.’’ In its pages we discover neither faith nor Facel Vegas. ‘‘Life,’’ he wrote, ‘‘so vivid and mysterious, was enough to occupy his entire being.’’

    As we near the centenary of Camus’s birth, we should listen to him and ignore the cloak and dagger theory now spackling the Web. Life, thank the silent heavens, holds mystery enough.

    ROBERT ZARETSKY

  • 10 août 2011
    International Herald Tribune
    * David Clay Large BOZEMAN, MONTANA is a professor of history at Montana State University, and the author of ‘‘Nazi Games’’ and the forthcoming ‘‘Munich 1972.’’
    The games the Nazis played

    “‘Hitler’s Olympics’ disprove the notion that the Games have a salutary effect on repressive regimes.

    Few Olympics are as famous as the 1936 Berlin Games, whose 75th anniversary falls this month. The publicity that accompanied the competition, held under the watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, supposedly tamed the Nazi regime, if only temporarily — a story that has since justified awarding the Games to places like Soviet Moscow, Beijing and Sochi, Russia, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics.”

    “But much of that story is myth. Indeed, the Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.

    When the committee awarded the Olympics to Berlin in 1931, Hitler was not yet in power. But by 1936 there was little question that anti-Semitism and racism lay at the heart of the Nazi ideology: the so-called Nuremberg Laws, which codified policies to isolate Jews and other minorities from German life, had been approved the year before.

    The committee soon came under pressure from Jewish and leftist groups, which threatened to boycott the Games if they remained in Germany. The committee held firm, but promised that the Games would ‘‘open up’’ the Third Reich, that international attention would force it to tone down its repressive measures.

    While it’s clear that the Games failed to ‘‘open up’’ the Third Reich, it remains widely believed that, to placate visitors, Hitler’s government cut back its persecution of Jews during the summer — in other words, that the Games achieved some of what the committee promised.

    But the truth is more nuanced. Although the regime did discourage open anti-Semitism, this directive pertained only to Berlin. Outside the capital, the Nuremberg Laws remained in full effect.”

    “The Games were even counterproductive in this respect: not only did such cosmetic steps assuage criticism of the Nazis, but they taught the regime how easy it was to mislead the global public.

    Perhaps the most famous myth involves Jesse Owens, the black American track-and-field athlete. In popular mythology, the impressive performances of America’s blacks, especially Owens, so infuriated Hitler that he refused to shake Owens’s hand after his victory in the 100-meter dash.

    It’s a good story, and one widely disseminated at the time to show that the Olympic spirit had triumphed over Nazi racism. The problem is, it never happened. Before Owens even stepped onto the track, the Olympic committee president, Henri de Baillet-Latour, had told Hitler to stop congratulating victors in the stadium, something he had been doing repeatedly, unless he congratulated every winner. Fearing that Owens might be one of those winners, and determined never to press the flesh with a black man, Hitler stopped inviting athletes to his box for a public handshake.

    But Owens didn’t mind — he claimed that Hitler, whom he called ‘‘a man of dignity,’’ treated him to a friendly wave. In fact, Owens said it was not Hitler but President Franklin D. Roosevelt who had snubbed him by neglecting to send him a congratulatory telegram.

    Of more lasting importance than the Owens fable is the contention, still widely propagated today, that the African-American victories in 1936 forced people everywhere to rethink their assumptions about black inferiority in high-level track-and-field athletics. Supposedly even German commentators conceded the superiority of America’s ‘‘ black auxiliaries’’ on the athletic field.

    In reality, the publicity surrounding black athletes’ success simply taught the Nazis how to refine existing stereotypes. Instead of arguing that those athletes were physically inferior, they disparaged them as freaks who, because of their ‘‘jungle inheritance,’’ were able to jump high and run fast.

    But it was not just the Nazis who held such views. Many American commentators put forth similar explanations. While certain ‘‘inherited physical advantages’’ might make blacks good sprinters and jumpers, the thinking went, they could never compete successfully with whites in disciplines requiring strategy, teamwork or stamina. Thus, the experts assured America, blacks could never play quarterback, or excel in sports like long-distance running or basketball.

    The truth behind the 1936 Games casts a harsh light on the notion that the Olympics can have a salutary effect on repressive regimes. Indeed, there is little evidence so far that the 2008 Beijing Olympics did anything but show the Chinese government how to maintain its clamp on freedom while supposedly opening its doors to the world.

    This is not to say that the Games should be held only in politically ‘‘clean’’ countries. But instead of blindly celebrating the alleged openness of repressive regimes that host the event, the international community should use it as an opportunity to hold them to the values that the Olympics claim to represent.”

    DAVID CLAY LARG