Subjects Archives: History

In the last five years, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has gone from being a media darling to generating more bad press for itself than any other labor organization.  Some of SEIU’s negative publicity is a product of right-wing union bashing.  But a huge amount is self-inflicted — the result of conflicts with other […]

  Eric R. Dursteler.  Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean.  The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.  Maps, illustrations.  312 pp.  $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-8324-8. Eric R. Dursteler’s work, which examines Venetian-Ottoman coexistence in the late sixteenth and early […]

  Nelida Fuccaro.  Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  xvi + 257 pp.  $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-51435-4. In many ways, the city of Manama (now the capital of Bahrain) shares affinities with other Gulf city-states.  Like Dubai, Kuwait, and Muscat, the port city drew […]

As the contract impasse between the Twin Cities Hospitals (TCH) and the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) has heated up, journalists, commentators, and interested bystanders have looked increasingly to history for insights and lessons.  The participation of more than 12,000 nurses in the one-day strike of June 10 was widely described as the “largest” nurses’ strike […]

BP, the company responsible for what is already the worst single-source environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, is the largest corporation in Britain, fourth largest in the world, and the world’s third largest energy company.  Over the course of its 100-year history, this company has caused a number of environmental and workplace disasters. But the harm […]

  Caesarism.  Caesar, Napoleon I, Napoleon III, Cromwell, etc.  Compile a catalog of historical events which have culminated in a great “heroic” personality.  It may be said that caesarism is an expression of a situation in which the forces in struggle are balanced in a catastrophic way, that is, balanced in a way that continuation […]

  Nevertheless, today we can and must admit that the analogy of Thermidor served to becloud rather than to clarify the question.  Thermidor in 1794 produced a shift of power from certain groups in the Convention to other groups, from one section of the victorious “people” to other strata.  Was Thermidor counterrevolutionary?  The answer to […]

This is an exercise in historicization.  This lecture concerns the relation between feminism, the movements of second-wave feminism, and the recent history of capitalism.  My aim is to try to shed some light on where the feminist movement stands today in the current crisis of capitalism. So, I want to tell a story that has […]

  In a time of crisis apocalyptic desires and fantasies become pressing and real.1  Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) offers a secret history of the periodic emergence of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’ in the Middle Ages in response to a collapsing social order, immiseration, disease and war.  Responding to crisis these dreamers dared […]

TWO days ago, at almost six o’clock in the evening Cuban time and when, given its geographical location, night had already fallen in Haiti, television stations began to broadcast the news that a violent earthquake – measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale – had severely struck Port-au-Prince. The seismic phenomenon originated from a tectonic fault […]

  Celebrating Bologna?  We don’t think so. International Call for Participation On March 11 and 12, 2010, the education ministers of 46 European countries will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Bologna process in Vienna and Budapest. Given the current situation in many European universities and the ongoing protests for the freedom of education, this […]

AS the Revolution celebrated its 51st anniversary two days ago, memories of that January 1st of 1959 came to mind. The outlandish idea that, after half a century — which flew by — we would remember it as if it were yesterday, never occurred to any of us.

The United States has had four presidents who received the Nobel Peace Prize.  I haven’t checked, but I presume that’s a record for heads of state.  All four have left their imprint on Latin America, “our little region over here that has never bothered anybody.”  That’s how Secretary of War Henry Stimson described the hemisphere […]

  Dear Rethinking Schools friends, We’re pleased to announce our latest “publication,” The Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People’s History — www.zinnedproject.org — a new website with free downloadable teaching activities. The Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People’s History is a collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, supported by an anonymous donor (a […]

  A Historical Perspective We all know that when a glass of tea is three quarters full, it is also one quarter empty.  I would like to dismiss the empty part of this dialectic first, the history that pertains to the self, to me, and then to talk a bit more of the history concerning […]

  Daljit Dhaliwal: What do you make of Iran’s announcement to build ten new nuclear enrichment facilities? Ervand Abrahamian: It sounds impressive, but it should be taken as grandstanding for internal public opinion.  Iran is trying to look tough: it’s going to stand up tall against the United States.  The question is what Iran actually […]

The United States, in its struggle against the Revolution, had in the Venezuelan government its best ally: the choice specimen Mr. Romulo Betancourt Bello. We did not know it then. He had been elected President on December 7, 1958; he had not taken office yet when the Cuban Revolution triumphed on January 1st, 1959. Weeks later I had the privilege of being invited by the provisional government of Wolfgang Larrazabal to visit Bolivar’s homeland, which had been so supportive of Cuba.

  Abstract: Using Jowett and O’Donnell’s system of propaganda analysis, the present case study concentrates on America’s dominant propaganda messages, techniques, and media channels used in Iran during the time period between 1951 and 1953.  The chosen period is of historical significance since it entails the Iranian nationalization of oil crisis and the 1953 coup […]

  Notes of Anatoly S. Chernyaev Gorbachev: My intuition tells me — something is worrisome.  I am afraid we are losing time!  Everybody is getting used to it.  I guess they say, well, there is a war going on, everything in its turn, such is life.  “The strange war!” — soon they will attach this […]

Significant events have taken place in our country lately.