position:historian

Fake news is a red herring | World | DW.COM | 25.01.2017
▻http://www.dw.com/en/fake-news-is-a-red-herring/a-37269377

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Fake news, propaganda and “disinformatzya” are changing the media landscape - in the US, Russia and Turkey and across the world. The question is how to combat them.

Par Ethan Zuckerman (une véritable analyse des diverses composantes du monde post-truth)

Different types of fake news

It’s tempting to say that Trump is using “fake news” to mean “news I don’t like”, but the reality is more complicated. “Fake news,” in this usage, means “real issues that don’t deserve as much attention as they’re receiving.” This form of fake news was likely an important factor in the 2016 campaign. There’s a compelling argument that the release of Clinton and Podesta’s emails by Russian hackers - and the media firestorm that ensued - were key to the outcome of the US election. While media outlets overfocused on the non-scandal of the emails, this wasn’t “fake news” so much as it was “false balance,” with newspapers playing up a Clinton “scandal” to counterbalance an endless sequence of Trump scandals.

There’s another type of “fake news” that surfaces during virtually every political campaign: propaganda. Propaganda is weaponized speech that mixes truthful, deceptive and false speech, and is designed explicitly to strengthen one side and weaken the other. Propaganda has been around for a long time, preceding the era of mass media.

A third category of “fake news,” relatively new to the scene in most countries, is disinformatzya. This is news that’s not trying to persuade you that Trump is good and Hillary bad (or vice versa). Instead, it’s trying to pollute the news ecosystem, to make it difficult or impossible to trust anything. This is a fairly common tactic in Russian politics and it’s been raised to an art form in Turkey by President Tayyip Erdogan, who uses it to discredit the internet, and Twitter in particular. Disinformatyza helps reduce trust in institutions of all sorts, leading people either to disengage with politics as a whole or to put their trust in strong leaders who promise to rise above the sound and fury. The embrace of “fake news” by the right wing in America as a way of discrediting the “mainstream media” can be understood as disinformatzya designed to reduce credibility of these institutions - with all the errors news organizations have made, why believe anything they say?

One of the best known forms of disinformatya is “shitposting,” the technique of flooding online fora with abusive content, not to persuade readers, but to frustrate anyone trying to have a reasonable discussion of politics on the internet.

Solving the problem of sensationalistic, click-driven journalism likely requires a new business model for news that focuses on its civic importance above profitability. In many European nations, public broadcasters provide at least a partial solution to this problem - in the US, a strong cultural suspicion of government involvement with news complicates this solution. A more promising path may be to address issues of filtering and curation. Getting Facebook to acknowledge that it’s a publisher, not a neutral platform for sharing content, and that its algorithmic decisions have an impact would be a first step towards letting users choose how ideologically isolated or exposed they want to be. Building public interest news aggregators that show us multiple points of view is a promising direction as well. Unbalanced news is a problem that’s always been with us, dealt with historically by shaping and adhering to journalistic standards - it’s now an open question whether social media platforms will take on that responsibility.

Surprisingly, our best bets for fighting propaganda may come from a return to the past. Stanford historian Fred Turner wrote a brilliant book, “The Democratic Surround,” on how US intellectuals had tried to fight fascist propaganda in the 1940s through reinforcing democratic and pluralistic values. Rather than emphasizing critical reading or debate, the thinkers Turner documents designed massive museum installations intended to force Americans to wrestle with the plurality and diversity of their nation and the world. While exhibits such as “The Family of Man” might be an impossibly dated way to combat fake news, the idea of forcing people to confront a wider world than the one they’re used to wrestling with goes precisely to the root of the problems that enable fake news.

#fake_news #post-truth #passionnant

’You were supposed to die tonight’: US anti-terror strategy linked to torture in Africa | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/09/you-were-supposed-to-die-tonight-us-anti-terror-strategy-linked-to-tort

Just before his torturers pushed him out of the van, barely conscious, on to the Nairobi pavement, Abdi was told he was one of the lucky ones: “You were supposed to die tonight.”

The security operatives who picked him up were Kenyan, but new research from the Angaza Foundation for African Reporting suggests they are part of a US-funded counter-terrorism strategy across Africa that is leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Since Kenya invaded Somalia in 2011 in an effort to dislodge the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab, thousands of ethnic Somalis like Abdi living in Kenya have been detained, many on dubious grounds.

Les #amis des #Etats-Unis

The Hamilton Hustle | Matt Stoller
▻https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilton-hustle-stoller

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most of Hamilton’s legacy is astonishingly counter-democratic. His central role in founding both the financial infrastructure of Wall Street and a nascent military establishment (which supplanted the colonial system of locally controlled democratic militias) was rooted in his self-appointed crusade to undermine the ability of ordinary Americans to govern themselves. We should be grateful not that Hamilton structured the essential institutions of America to fit his vision, but that he failed to do so. Had he succeeded, we would probably be living in a military dictatorship.

(…) Within this context, it’s useful to recognize that Hamilton the play is not the real story of Alexander Hamilton; rather, as historian Nancy Isenberg has noted, it’s a revealing parable about the politics of the finance-friendly Obama era.

#États-Unis #démocratie #histoire #comédie_musicale

Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality over the millennia
▻http://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/24/stanford-historian-uncovers-grim-correlation-violence-inequality-mill

La disparition (momentanée) des inégalités ne vient jamais d’une modification volontaire du comportement de l’ordre établi, mais seulement d’une perturbation radicale de ce dernier.

Surveying long stretches of human history, Scheidel said that “the big equalizing moments in history may not have always had the same cause, but they shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order.”

This idea is connected to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), a New York Times bestseller Scheidel admires. Piketty found that “inequality does not go down by itself because we have economic development,” Scheidel said. “His book covers only 200 years and argues that only violent intervention can make that happen.”

But Scheidel, who has taught a freshman seminar on long-term inequality, wanted to know if this insight can be applied to all of history. He enlisted the help of Andrew Granato, a senior majoring in economics, to compile a bibliography of more than 1,000 titles. The result is a sweeping narrative about the link between inequality and peace that harkens back to the beginning of human civilization.

#inégalités #violence #ordre_établi

The pretend gardener: student discovers hidden life of Renaissance spy | Education | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/26/cambridge-student-discovers-hidden-life-renaissance-spy

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Something odd emerged as a Cambridge student began to research the work of a Renaissance garden designer: although the 16th century Italian artist, sculptor and designer Costantino de’ Servi travelled constantly and never seemed to be short of a bob, he seemed to have completed very few gardens - or any other kind of work.

Wherever there was trouble in Europe, however, be it wars rumbling, alliances being forged, or regime change threatened, de’ Servi seemed to pop up. Then the historian discovered that wherever the supposed gardener travelled and whoever he was nominally working for – and he got as far west as the court of James I in London, and as far east as Persia – he remained on the payroll of one of the richest and most powerful families in Europe, the Medici of Florence. Like any good modern spy who keeps a low profile, there is no known portrait of him.

#cartographie_historique et histoire assez marrante

A Prescription for Awe - Issue 43: Heroes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/a-prescription-for-awe

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Heads down, we plodded along a coastal path into an almost gale-force wind that came howling straight up the English Channel, driving the rain into our faces and making it hard to steal more than an occasional glance ahead of us to the west. Somewhere up there was Durdle Door, a spectacular natural arch over the sea and our first destination for today. For now, however, it was all we could do to make out a curve of white limestone cliffs facing out to sea. Still, even this exceptionally rainy day in a record-breakingly wet English summer only added to our sense of adventure. Along with my wife, Harvard University historian of science Anne Harrington, I was co-leading 15 students from the Harvard Summer School study abroad program on an exploration of England’s Jurassic Coast: a (...)

Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/world/americas/brexit-donald-trump-whites.html

Whiteness, in this context, is more than just skin color. You could define it as membership in the “ethno-national majority,” but that’s a mouthful. What it really means is the privilege of not being defined as “other.”

Whiteness means being part of the group whose appearance, traditions, religion and even food are the default norm. It’s being a person who, by unspoken rules, was long entitled as part of “us” instead of “them.”

Whiteness is becoming less valuable

Michael Ignatieff, a historian and former Liberal Party leader in Canada, said that in much of the West, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”

The formal rejection of racial discrimination in those societies has, by extension, constructed a new, broader national identity. The United States has a black president; London has a Muslim mayor of Pakistani descent.

But that broadening can, to some, feel like a painful loss, articulated in the demand voiced over and over at Trump rallies, pro-Brexit events and gatherings for populist parties throughout Europe: “I want my country back.”

The mantra is not all about bigotry. Rather, being part of a culture designed around people’s own community and customs is a constant background hum of reassurance, of belonging.

The loss of that comforting hum has accelerated a phenomenon that Robin DiAngelo, a lecturer and author, calls “white fragility” — the stress white people feel when they confront the knowledge that they are neither special nor the default; that whiteness is just a race like any other.

Fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. And it can trigger a backlash against those who are perceived as outsiders.

Even some conservative analysts who support a multiethnic “melting pot” national identity, such as the editor of National Review, Reihan Salam, worry that unassimilated immigrants could threaten core national values and cultural cohesion.

The whiteness taboo

For decades, the language of white identity has only existed in the context of white supremacy. When that became taboo, it left white identity politics without a vocabulary.

If you are a working-class white person and you fear that the new, cosmopolitan world will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.

Some of these people have instead reached for issues that feel close to their concerns: trade, crime, the war on drugs, controlling the borders, fear of Islamist terrorism. All are significant in their own right, and create very real fears for many people, but they have also become a means to have a public conversation about what society’s changes mean for white majorities.

#White_Fragility #whiteness #White_Identity #Malaise_blanc

What `Watergate’ meant, before it meant scandal
▻http://www.watergatenotes.net/pages/wbeforescandal.html

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I had joined the Army the year before — Regular Army, thank you — and was strolling along the tow path of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal one Saturday afternoon. It’s a lovely old canal almost lost to the ages half a century ago when local road planners wanted to pave it over and make it a freeway.

Had they done so, they would have wiped out nearly two centuries worth of American history. In 1754, George Washington had envisioned the C&O Canal as a way to link the Chesapeake Bay to the Midwest. The plan was to build a canal from Georgetown on the Potomac River to Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, and on to the heartland via the Mississippi.

The canal would begin just about where Rock Creek empties into the Potomac River, with a canal and locks system paralleling the Potomac River valley. President John Quincy Adams broke ground for the canal in 1828. Builders got as far as Cumberland, Md., 184.5 miles upstream.

It was profitable for a time, but the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, roughly paralleling the canal, ultimately doomed it. Floods took their toll as well, though the railroad continued operating parts of the C&O canal until 1924. The government bought it in 1938, and by the early 1950s had hatched the parkway plan.

Then Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an outdoorsman and historian, went to work. He recruited a party of editorial writers from The Washington Post, which had backed the plan to pave over the canal, and led them on a hike along the entire length of the C&O canal. By the end of the trip the writers had changed their minds, and eventually Congress preserved it as a National Historical Park.

Without that designation, the canal would have disappeared, and so might the little-known area around the canal’s Milepost 0. When we first saw it that afternoon in 1969, it was little more than an old jumble of stones and timbers. But it was, we later learned, the water gate — the last lock, where water coming downstream along the C&O canal could empty into the Potomac. It was the place where canal boats could move on and off the Potomac River. With the water gate closed and the channel filling with water, they could begin the long process of locking up through the C&O.

When a new complex with a hotel, condominiums, offices, restaurants and shops was built just across Rock Creek Parkway, it took its name from that old water gate — and became the Watergate.

#histoire #USA #politique #ouvrage_hydraulique

Mapping the World’s Great Cities in a Most Unusual, Yet Visually Arresting, Fashion | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian
▻http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sculptor-norwood-viviano-maps-worlds-great-cities-180960706/?no-ist

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Part urban planner, part cartographer, sculptor Norwood Viviano uses state-of-the-art mapping tools to make powerful works of art
By Alex Palmer
smithsonian.com
October 7, 2016

Norwood Viviano prides himself on impeccable accuracy in his sculptures, which draw on topographical and census data to create models of cities at particular times and across centuries. But he finds this data interesting not in its practical use (say for the historian or the traveler), but in the deeper investigations that it presents.

#cartographie #art #métal #verre #cartographie_3D spécialement pour @jcfichet

HIV’s Patient Zero exonerated : Nature
▻http://www.nature.com/news/hiv-s-patient-zero-exonerated-1.20877

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But an analysis of HIV using decades-old blood serum samples exonerates the French Canadian [Gaétan Dugas], who died in 1984. The paper, published on 26 October in Nature, shows that the virus had been circulating in North America since at least 1970, and that the disease arrived on the continent through the Caribbean from Africa.

Richard McKay, a historian at the University of Cambridge, UK, and study co-author, says that scientists have always questioned the idea of a single #Patient_Zero, because some evidence suggested that the virus entered North America several times.

(...) When scientists examined those genetic sequences in detail, they found them to be similar to HIV strains present in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti, in the early 1970s. However, the strains were different from one another, suggesting the virus had already

pour les lecteurs de And The Band Played On…

#sida #histoire #épidémie

Yes, Benny Morris, Israel did perpetrate ethnic cleansing in 1948 - Opinion - Israel News | Haaretz.com
The Israeli historian is right about one thing: The understandings that the Arabs should be expelled in 1948 were not carried out in full.

Daniel Blatman Oct 14, 2016
read more: ▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.747508

A good historian always examines his conclusions. If he comes to the conclusion that things he wrote previously require a reassessment, he is obligated to face that. But a historian who, at the start of his career, determined that Israel is responsible for the mass flight of the Palestinians in 1948 and later changed his views until he became the darling of the settler right, is a pathetic phenomenon. Benny Morris has followed that path.
He has betrayed two key duties of the historian: to be open-minded and recognize the extensive research literature that directly relates to his own areas of research; and not to distort his own previous conclusions due to current political insights. [Morris’ “Israel conducted no ethnic cleansing in 1948,” Haaretz, October 10, was in response to Daniel Blatman’s “Netanyahu, this Is what ethnic cleansing really looks like,” Haaretz, October 3.]
On March 10, 1948, the national Haganah headquarters approved Plan Dalet, which discussed the intention of expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state. Morris wrote about it in his book “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” (2010). He stated that the plan aroused a historiographical dispute, with pro-Palestinian historians claiming it was a master plan for expelling the Arabs living in Israel. He claimed that a careful examination of the plan’s wording leads to a different conclusion.
Whose different conclusion? That of scholars who are experts on ethnic cleansing? Or legal experts who grappled with the problem? No, that of Morris, of course. He does not accept the definition of ethnic cleansing that was carried out by the Jews in 1948. Perhaps there was a “mini” ethnic cleansing in Lod and Ramle. Perhaps some marginal massacre (Deir Yassin), which caused the panicked flight of Palestinians.
The problem is that these are precisely the circumstances that lead to ethnic cleansing. Had Morris bothered to properly study the documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, he would understand why his statements would be considered absurd at any serious scientific conference.
The following was stated by the prosecutor in the trial of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian-Serb leader who was convicted of responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia: “In ethnic cleansing ... you act in such a way that in a given territory, the members of a given ethnic group are eliminated. ... You have massacres. Everybody is not massacred, but you have massacres in order to scare those populations. ... Naturally, the other people are driven away. They are afraid ... and, of course, in the end these people simply want to leave. ... They are driven away either on their own initiative or they are deported. ... Some women are raped and, furthermore, often times what you have is the destruction of the monuments which marked the presence of a given population ... for instance, Catholic churches or mosques are destroyed.”

Stories From the Black Panthers’ Unfinished Revolution
▻http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/stories-from-the-black-panthers-unfinished-revolution/?_r=0

In “The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution,” the photographer Bryan Shih and the historian Yohuru R. Williams tell the rarely heard stories of the rank-and-file members of the organization through portraits, interviews and scholarly essays. Source: The New York Times

#MindYourOwnBusiness
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/09/mindyourownbusiness

I shook #Paul_Kagame’s hand yesterday. A colleague and I were discussing the difference between historical and anthropological approaches to politics, there was a bit of hush, and there he was – a person of world historical importance, hand outstretched. I am historian of 20th century Africa; I teach and work at #Yale University and […]

#ESSAYS #Academy #Rwanda

Gender and International Migration | RSF

▻https://www.russellsage.org/publications/gender-and-international-migration

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In 2006, the United Nations reported on the “feminization” of migration, noting that the number of female migrants had doubled over the last five decades. Likewise, global awareness of issues like human trafficking and the exploitation of immigrant domestic workers has increased attention to the gender makeup of migrants. But are women really more likely to migrate today than they were in earlier times? In Gender and International Migration, sociologist and demographer Katharine Donato and historian Donna Gabaccia evaluate the historical evidence to show that women have been a significant part of migration flows for centuries. The first scholarly analysis of gender and migration over the centuries, Gender and International Migration demonstrates that variation in the gender composition of migration reflects not only the movements of women relative to men, but larger shifts in immigration policies and gender relations in the changing global economy.

#genre #migrations #droit_des_femmes

Ilan Pappé in book launch with Jonathan Cook: “Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid”
▻http://mondoweiss.net/2016/07/colonialism-apartheid-palestinian

(...) However, launching his new collaborative book in East Jerusalem on Saturday night, esteemed Israeli historian Ilan Pappé abandoned any pretence of restraint and made the intrepid and timely case that the use of apartheid descriptors when engaging in Israel/Palestine discourse should be an indisputable starting point, not an equivocal theory up for debate. The collection which Pappé has edited, ‘Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid’, has assembled contributions from a wide range of respected academics, politicians, journalists and lawyers, that are all rooted in a fundamental position that recognises that the relationship the Israeli state has manufactured with its Palestinian subjects, in Israel and the occupied territories, equates to a form of apartheid.

Providing introductory remarks to the vast audience that had gathered in the garden, Pappé commented on the necessity of ensuring the paradigm shift, which has been evident over the last 10 or 15 years within marginal spheres of academia and peripheral political systems around the world, gain credence among those Western elites who actually hold power.

“For about 40 or 50 years in many places like this – institutes, universities, academic centres, media and so on – there was one dominant way or paradigm through which the conflict in Palestine had been analysed and this was the paradigm or model of a conflict between two national movements,” he said, explaining the orthodoxy in western thought, “there is one country for which two national movements are fighting for; they have equal right to the land, they have an equal attachment to the land, and hence what you need is to find a compromise that would answer the aspirations of both national movements, given the fact that they both have a justified claim to the land.”

Given that this is the central paradigm for peace that the Quartet (United Nations, USA, European Union and Russia), the main stream media and influential “peace” politicians continue to use, Pappé considers it entirely unsurprising that the main outcome remains the unworkable two-state solution.

What the book endeavours to do, Pappé expounded, is to expose this manifestly deceitful paradigm, and establish a new paradigm, already common amongst activists and marginalised academics, that relates to the reality on the ground; one of “settler-colonialism and its connection with apartheid.” In essence, the conflict is not between two competing national movements with an equal claim to the land, but between a movement of settler-colonialists and a native people.

The theoretical framework for the book is formed around this concept and the belief that the natural consequence of settler-colonialism is a system of apartheid which ensures the native people are separated from the settler race.

(...)

“Any peace paradigm that retains Israel as a Zionist state has no chance in the world of succeeding,” said Pappé, summarizing, “Similarly to the way that we had to get rid of apartheid, we have to get rid of Zionism before we talk about reconciliation. No other solution will work in this place.”

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#palestine #israël #boycott #bds

I Love My Country But Hate What They Are Doing
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/i-love-my-country-but-hate-what-they-are-doing

The lies that lead us to never ending war - and real solutions to change this fate

32 minute short film featuring prominent Swiss historian and researcher Dr. Daniele Ganser, Tommy Hansen, Gerald...

Painful memories of civil war purge live on in southern Spain - France 24

LA ALGABA (SPAIN) (AFP) -

“They would say: ’We have to eliminate the red seed’,” said Rogelia Beltran as she recalled how her grandfather died in a purge against leftists in southern Spain during the country’s civil war.

The bloody conflict pitted forces loyal to the elected Socialist-led government known as Republicans against rebel Nationalist troops that rose up under General Francisco Franco in a military putsch.

After Nationalist troops staged a coup on July 18, 1936, large landowners in the southern region of Andalusia aided the revolt by persecuting day labourers who they believed backed the government.

In Beltran’s hometown of La Algaba the pro-Nationalist landowners were led by a matador, Jose Garcia Carranza, also known as “El Algabeno”, who became known as the “killer of bulls and reds”.

Civilian supporters of the military uprising like “El Algabeno” received “carte blanche” from the military men who quickly seized control of the region, historian Francisco Espinosa told AFP.

“They were members of the rural bourgeoisie” who offered to repress opposition to the coup “mounted on their own horses and using their own weapons”, he said.

Eighty years after the war began, the memory of the purge carried out against leftists in Andalusia, known today for its sandy tourist beaches, lives on.

– Hunted like animals -

Paramilitaries and the rebel troops “carried out clean-up operations in the mountains” where leftists and unionists sought sanctuary, said Juan Jose Lopez, a member of an association of victims of the civil war and the dictatorship that followed.

His great uncle was killed in November 1936 in a raid near the village of El Madrono.

“It was like a deer or wild boar hunt. The raiders would sweep the mountains so the prey would flee” and then shoot them, he said.

As he speaks he holds a photo of his relative which is part of a travelling exhibition called “The DNA of Memory” which aims to give visibility to victims of the conflict eight decades after it started.

A 1977 amnesty law prevents Spain from investigating and trying the crimes of the civil war era and the repressive right-wing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco that followed until his death in 1975.

“They did horrible things. They would leave bodies scattered in the streets as an example and would prevent them from being collected so they would be eaten by animals,” said Antonio Narvaez, 83, a retired steelworker.

He was just three-years-old when his father was killed in Marchena. A day labourer who did not belong to a union and had no political affiliation, his only crime was that he knew how to read, said Narvaez.

“He would read the press to his colleagues,” he said with a toothless smile.

Widows were also punished. Supporters of the right-wing coup would confiscate their homes and goods, leaving them without work and stigmatised with young children to raise.

“They would shave their hair off and parade them around the town,” said Antonio Martinez, 80, a retired hotel worker whose father was repressed during the war in the town of Escacena del Campo.

– ’Ideological purge’ -

Beltran, a 53-year-old nursing assistant, said the idea was “’if you don’t think like me, I will eliminate you’ and that is called genocide”.

“It was an ideological purge which also included teachers, lawyers, journalists, writers with a liberal ideology,” added Paqui Maqueda, 52, a social worker whose great-grandfather and three great-uncles were killed in the town of Carmona near Seville.

She gave the example of the celebrated Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, known for works including the play “Blood wedding”, who was shot for his suspected leftist sympathies by supporters of the military uprising near the southern city of Granada in 1936.

“But the lower classes were the most repressed,” said Maqueda.

Plagued by high levels of illiteracy and miserable living conditions, farm workers had formed a strong union movement.

And wealthy landowners like “El Algabeno”, who is said to have speared day labourers as if they were bulls, decided to quash their movement, historians and victims say.

“Many of Garcia Carranza’s crimes were gathered and detailed by witnesses and contemporaries,” said Diego Aguera, the mayor of La Algaba, the matador’s hometown.

In a narrow street of white houses near the bougainvillea-lined main square of the town, a plaque reads: “Jose Garcia Carranza Street”.

Aguera in March got the town hall to approve changing the name to “Equality Street” because of the “countless murders he carried out, the majority in cold blood, the countless detentions and tortures he practiced”.

Several family members of the late matador, contacted by AFP, refused to be quoted about his legacy.

“Sometimes you think you are doing good and you are doing bad,” said one of his great-nieces who declined to be named.

But for now, the street sign bearing Carranza’s name remains in place as local authorities wrestle with the bureaucracy needed to change it.
by Anna Cuenca

▻http://www.france24.com/en/20160713-painful-memories-civil-war-purge-live-southern-spain

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#espagne #memoire #guerre_d'espagne

The Significance of Celia Sanchez & Rachel Carson
▻http://cubaninsider.blogspot.de/2012/09/the-significance-of-celia-sanchez.html

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Je découvre ce blog étatsunien. Il y a quelques articles historiques mais on y trouve surtout beaucoup de nouvelles du jour commentées.

Celia Sanchez (...) was the overall most important figure in the Cuban Revolution, and her passion as a rebel fighter and revolutionary leader all revolved around the abysmal treatment of children during the Batista-Mafia dictatorship from 1952 till 1959. The last straw for Celia Sanchez, heretofore an angelic doctor’s daughter, was the kidnapping of peasant girls as young as ten so they could be used to lure rich pedophiles to the Mafia-run gambling casinos that proliferated on the island. A ten-year-old girl that Celia loved, Maria Ochoa, succumbed to that dreadful practice.

And that’s why it would not be incorrect to state that the fate of little Maria Ochoa constituted the biggest mistake Batista, the Mafia, and the United States ever made on the island of Cuba. It transformed the angelic doctor’s daughter into history’s all-time greatest female guerrilla fighter and revolutionary leader. She was not deterred by the well-known fact that no one had ever come close to overthrowing a U. S. - backed dictatorship. She believed love of children was a superior motivation than the love of money and, deep inside her, she believed a fiercely motivated guerrilla force could defeat a vastly stronger army motivated by greed. In the end, that belief predicated the outcome of Cuba’s revolutionary war.

Years later when Celia Sanchez [supported 100% by Fidel Castro] was the top decision-maker in Revolutionary Cuba, she told Cuban historian Pedro Alvarez Tabio why the rebels won: “For us it was a do-or-die fight. I knew that the top 40 or 50 of the Batista and Mafia leaders had already stolen so much money from Cuba that they were determined to live and spend it. For them, it was do-and-run. Even as we raced from Santiago de Cuba to Santa Clara to Havana, they were stronger than we were. But, just in case, they had their airplanes and ships and boats at the ready. Batista fled first to his pal Trujillo’s Dominican Republic; Lansky and the other Mafia kingpins fled mostly to Miami and Union City, where the banks were already stuffed with their loot. I still wish they had somehow mustered the guts to stay and fight us. But they didn’t, and that’s where it stands today. We are still here. The rich cowards and their rich children are there.” [That Celia Sanchez quotation dates to Feb., 1978, but in essence it is also where Cuba and the U.S. “stand” in the closing days of 2012, except now there are six unchallenged (when it comes to Cuba) vindictive Cuban-Americans in the U. S. Congress from Miami and Union City (NJ)]

With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January of 1959, three exceptional female rebels — Vilma Espin, Celia Sanchez, and Haydee Santamaria [left to right above] — comprised a decision-making trio more powerful than the three most notable male rebels [Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos].

#Cuba #révolution #femmes

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?

Did Jesus Have a Wife ? - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/485573

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/2016/06/08/Opener/1920.jpg

... the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves when an eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented it in September 2012 at a conference in Rome.
...
She said that if her own panel of experts agreed with the skeptical reviewer, she would abandon her plans to announce the find in Rome. She knew how high the stakes were, for both history and her own reputation. Some of the world’s most prestigious institutions—the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre—had been hoodwinked by forgers, and she didn’t want Harvard added to the list. “If it’s a forgery,” she told The Boston Globe, “it’s a career breaker.”

Il y a de tout dans cette histoire : Dan Brown, la Stasi, tous apôtres (enfin prèsque), des services secrets et plein de mystères de Berlin-Ouest pendant le mur ... à mourir de rire.

#Berlin #religion #faux

A Brief History of Children Sent Through the Mail | Smart News | Smithsonian
▻http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-children-sent-through-mail-180959372

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This Feminist Is #Still Sanders
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/this-feminist-is-still-sanders

I write as a feminist, a well-seasoned historian of American women, and a die-hard supporter of Bernie Sanders. Long-time colleagues disparage my loyalty to the Sanders campaign and chastise me...

Racial nationalism and the political imagination
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/05/racial-nationalism-and-the-political-imagination

In 1976 the historian and activist Walter Rodney spoke at Howard University on the then-unfolding civil war in Angola. Noting that in the late 1960s and early 1970s many African-Americans had been compelled by the then-nascent UNITA movement’s seemingly Africanist-centered opposition to the socialist-aligned MPLA, Rodney cautioned that “we must of course admit that to […]

#POLITICS #education #pan-Africanism #racism #Radical_Politics #USA

Interactive map: Loss of Indian land
▻http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/06/17/interactive_map_loss_of_indian_land.html

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/the_vault/2014/06/17/newmap.gif

Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans

This interactive map, produced by University of Georgia historian Claudio Saunt to accompany his new book West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, offers a time-lapse vision of the transfer of Indian land between 1776 and 1887. As blue “Indian homelands” disappear, small red areas appear, indicating the establishment of reservations. (Above is a GIF of the map’s time-lapse display; visit the map’s page to play with its features.)

▻http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org

#terres #colonisation #États-Unis #Indiens #peuples_autochtones #cartographie

Sykes-Picot 100 years on

THE MODERN frontiers of the Arab world only vaguely resemble the blue and red grease-pencil lines secretly drawn on a map of the Levant on May 16th 1916, at the height of the first world war. Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were appointed by the British and French governments respectively to decide how to apportion the lands of the Ottoman empire, which had entered the war on the side of Germany and the central powers. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, was also involved. The Allies agreed that Russia would get Istanbul, the sea passages from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and Armenia; the British would get Basra, Hafia and southern Mesopotamia; and the French a slice in the middle, including Lebanon, Syria and Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey). Palestine would be an international territory. In between the French- and British-ruled blocs, large swathes of territory, mostly desert, would be allocated to the two powers’ respective spheres of influence. Italian claims were added in 1917. But after the defeat of the Ottomans in 1918 these lines changed markedly with the fortunes of war and diplomacy. Sykes-Picot has become a byword for imperial treachery. George Antonius, an Arab historian, called it a shocking document, the product of “greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity”. It was, in fact, one of three separate and irreconcilable wartime commitments that Britain made to France, the Arabs and the Jews. The resulting contradictions have been causing grief ever since.

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