On February 6, 2019, Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and
Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford, gave a
lecture on "War and the Making of a New World Order in Asia, 1937
to the Present."
Western—European and North American—historiography generally
portrays the years between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the
Congress of Vienna in 1815 as having given birth to the modern
world—a republican world founded on rational discourse and...
Wolfram Wette is one of Germany’s foremost military
historians and Professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in
Freiburg. He is the author or editor of over forty books,
including The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Harvard
University Press...
In 1987, in my third year as a graduate student in anthropology,
I arrived in the small California town of Livermore, host to one of
two nuclear weapons design laboratories in the United States.
Thanks to an indulgent dissertation committee, which...
Images that convey the essence of war are more likely to
resemble the frenzied, merciless, mutual slaughter between the
Aegeans and the Trojans as told in The Iliad, the rapes
depicted in Goya’s The Disasters of War, the torture
portrayed in The...
How can historians contribute to investigating the
relationships between climate change, ecology, and human activity?
Scientific research is making available volumes of data on the
possible correlations between environmental change and
social...
Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, discusses how the increasing use of drones has become the most controversial aspect of the U.S. “war” on terrorism—more so than even the failure to close Guantanamo.
On December 11, 2003, when asked in a press conference whether
his Iraq policy was consistent with international law, President
George W. Bush joked, “International law? I better call my lawyer;
he didn’t bring that up to me.”
Human beings have waged war or engaged in violent conflict with
each other since ancient times, an observation that prompted a
Member at the Institute to suggest in the course of a casual
conversation that surely it was a waste of time and
resources...
“Freedom is the ultimate virtue of mankind”; “Democracy is the
only political system of modern man and modern society”;
“Therefore, Egypt must be committed to freedom and democracy.”
These are the words of ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad in his book
Hitlar...
