In an era when technology has revolutionised our daily existence – even the nature of life itself – understanding the past may seem irrelevant when planning the future. But history does matter. And many academics are anxious to explain why. Read Here – The New Statesman
The birth of the violent supra-individual is unavoidable. Religion helps in his nurture. In the organised state, he takes his flock and occupies a sequestered space where he can mould his followers’ conduct without being challenged. Because he uses violence, he gets into trouble with the organised state sooner or later, is attacked in his […]
As China’s power and influence continue to grow in Asia and beyond, many analysts look to Chinese history to understand how a strong China will behave and view the world in the future. Many of these attempts to apply an historical lens engage in gross simplifications and misreadings of the relevance and meaning of hundreds […]
Historians have long battled to get into Hitler’s mind to figure out why he did what he did, but there are no answers. Perhaps, there never will either. Read Here – Financial Times
Whatever the reasons for observed differences in social adaptive capacities, it follows that some societies will be roiled more and others less when significant change and associated accelerated pluralization occur on a planetary scale, as is occurring today. Some societies are thus bound to be seen as causing or “owning” the sources of change while […]
The new 48 episode series, which began airing on August 8, is the first officially-sanctioned dramatization of Deng’s rise to the position of paramount leader from 1976 to 1984 during one of the most tumultuous periods in contemporary Chinese politics. Befitting its subject matter, the series appears to have buy-in at the highest levels: It […]
A muscular, Hindu-dominant India is re-creating its Gods in its attempt to show the new, raw power that many Indians would want to associate with the new government that in it own way espouses a different set of social paradigm. Read Here
Why would China fear a nation it could traumatize tomorrow by dumping its debt or shifting its iron ore, coal and copper orders elsewhere? That’s a good question for the United States to ask itself. Read Here – Bloomberg
Iraq is really three separate geographical regions, now contested by Kurds and Arabs ethnically, Arabic and Kurdish speakers linguistically, and Sunni and Shiite Muslims religiously. Ethnically Iraqis are approximately 75 percent Arabs, 20 percent Kurds, and 5 percent Turkmen and Assyrians. Religiously they are 65 percent Shiite Muslims, 30 percent Sunni Muslims, and 5 percent […]
What’s in a name? Place names often change, and those changes stem from a tangle of politics and language. A fun tool from Google, the Ngram Viewer, lets us watch those changes play out across history. The Ngram Viewer charts how often a particular word appears in some five million books digitized as part of the […]
looking beyond borders 