Subjects Archives: History

It was 2006. I was really very ill but very much aware of what was happening. During those days around the middle of September, the XIV NAM Summit where Cuba was elected to the Presidency was ending. I could barely sit up and take my place at a table. That’s how I received some important heads of state or government. The Prime Minister of India was among them. The highest ranking visitor I received in that emergency room in the Presidential Palace was the Ghanaian Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, who a few days later would be ending his mandate.

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.

Dear Mr. President,

Your election as the President of the United States of America has opened a new and promising chapter in the history of the USA and created a strong wave of enthusiasm and hope across the world.

New Orleans — Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophic event that forced many people in New Orleans to start over.  Since then, several hurricanes, such as Ivan and Gustav, continued to damage some of the oldest and most significant historical sites in the United States.  One of the sites in jeopardy is the Wesley United Methodist […]

“Israel continues to show admirable restraint in dealing with her hostile neighbors, even in the face of increasing rocket attacks, kidnappings, and threats to her people. I support her actions in defense of her people, and I pray for a swift and just conclusion to the fighting.” — Jerrold “Progressive” Nadler, DEMOCRAT, July 13, 2006.

  “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]

An Open Letter to Those Seeking to Build a World from Below, in Which Many Worlds Are Possible We call on all anarchists, horizontalists, autonomists, anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians, and others organizing a world from below to bring our best creative spirits to the project of a “Celebrate People’s History and Build Popular Power” bloc on January […]

  Rudolph Peters.   Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century.   Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.  xi + 219 pp. $30.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-79670-5; $74.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-79226-4. In his Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law, Rudolph Peters has provided an excellent, accessible, clearly delineated, […]

  Karin Hunn.   “Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück. . .”: Die Geschichte der türkischen “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik.  Moderne Zeit: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.  Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. 598 pp. Tables, bibliography.  EUR 46.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-89244-945-4. Karin Hunn’s meticulously researched, highly informative, and well-structured study is a […]

It is a spiritual force. In the critical moments of Russian history it played an important role. When the Great Russian War began after the treacherous Nazi attack, Stalin turned to it in support of the workers and peasants that the October Revolution made owners of the factories and the land.

The intensity of the actions by the small group of MiG-21 pilots was related by the author as follows:

The Korean nation, with its unique culture that differentiates it from its Chinese and Japanese neighbors, has existed for three thousand years. These characteristics are typical of societies in that Asian region, including those of China, Vietnam and others. There is nothing like it in Western cultures, some of which are less than 250 years old.

Any autobiographically-tinted writing forces me to clear up any doubts about decisions I made more than half a century ago. I am talking about subtle details, since the essential points are never forgotten. This is true for what I did in 1948, sixty years ago.

  On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa.  The raid  — officials boasted — was “the largest single-site operation of […]

I basically drew these data from statements made by William Brownfield, US ambassador to Colombia, from that country’s press and television, from the international press, and other sources. It”s impressive the show of technology and economic resources at play.

Seven days ago I wrote about one of the great men in history: Salvador Allende, a man the world remembered with deep emotion and respect on his first centennial. However, no one quivered or even recalled the date of October 24, 1891, when the Dominican despot Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was born, eighteen years before our admired Chilean brother.

He was born one hundred years ago in Valparaiso, in southern Chile, on June 26, 1908. His father, a middle-class lawyer and notary, was a member of Chile’s Radical Party. When I was born, Allende was already 18 years old. He was pursuing secondary studies in high school in his native city.

Labor and political cartoonist Mike Konopacki — close friend and collaborator of UE’s cartoonist Gary Huck — has produced a brilliant book-length graphic adaptation of a major portion of Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States. Created in collaboration with Zinn and historian Paul Buhle, Konopacki’s A People’s History of American Empire tells, in pictures and text, the story of U.S. government and corporate policies of controlling other people’s countries — from the seizure of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in the Spanish-American War, to George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But it also shows that U.S. foreign policy is and always has been inseparable from domestic policies that have stolen land from and massacred Native Americans, crushed workers’ movements, and employed racism and immigrant bashing to divide and conquer working people.

When World War I broke out in 1914, China joined the allies. As recompense, China was promised that the German concessions in the province of Shandong would be returned to them at the end of the war. After the Treaty of Versailles, which President Woodrow Wilson imposed on friends and foes alike, the German colonies were transferred to Japan, a more powerful ally than China.

James L. Gelvin.  The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x + 294 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliographies, glossary, time line, biographical sketches, index. Those who have noted, but not read, James Gelvin‘s The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War may well ask themselves, “do we need another […]