Catherine II[a] (born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst; 2 May 1729 – 17 November 1796[b]), most commonly known as Catherine the Great,[c] was Empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796—the country's longest-ruling female leader. She came to power following a coup d'état that she organised—resulting in her husband, Peter III, being overthrown. Under her reign, Russia was revitalised; it grew larger and stronger, and was recognised as one of the great powers of Europe and Asia.
In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.
Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.
Francis Gavin, the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS, argues that history can be employed to better understand and improve statecraft and strategy. It is not a history of a particular event, person, place, or process. Nor is it strictly a discussion about methodology, or how to do historical work effectively. Instead, he explores something he calls “historical sensibility.” Visit www.jhu.edu/hopkinsathome/ to see more lectures.
What a fascinating lecture with some questions and answers. I managed to catch it among many others in the JHU YouTube feed, but I’ll have to take a look at some of their other upcoming programs.
There’s a lot of hope subtly hiding in this lecture.
I’m hoping that even once the crisis of the pandemic is over that Johns Hopkins will realize what an awesome program this is and continue it on afterwards. It manages to put together the ideas of blogging, vlogging, thought pieces in magazines, academic lectures, and even the idea of Public Television programming into an interesting and engaging format. I like that there are some fascinating broad ideas and themes to delve into.
The broader themes of historical sensibility, chronological proportionality, and historical revisionism deserve a lot more attention and thought.
I’m not as well-versed in the history of educational technology as those like Audrey Watters, but after reading the opening of chapter 10 of The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, I’m prepared to call Pierre de La Ramée (aka Petrus or Peter Ramus) as the godfather of EdTech for his literal iconoclastic removal of the artificial memory from rhetoric and replacing it with his ‘dialectical order’.
To be clear, “Godfather of EdTech” is a perjorative.
While Roman elites viewed the sack of Rome as a turning point that changed the world forever, the event itself lasted only three days and served more as a catalyst for change than a cataclysm in its own right. In this lecture, you'll find out why the sack was so monumental, and how it inspired Augustine to write The City of God.
When did America become polarized? For leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, it all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
I’m 31% done with Fault Lines. Finished chapter 8 to page 220.
This last section covered the turmoil of the Supreme Court during the late 80’s Reagan era.
When did America become polarized? For leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, it all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
I’m 29% done with Fault Lines (page 207/Location 3173)
Discussion of the tail end of Reagan’s presidency, Iran/Contra, and the beginning of the fall of USSR.
Every time I hear someone say, "We are a nation of immigrants," as Biden did, I'm hearing someone erase the history of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. #DemDebate
I’m curious what Erin Meyer’s Country Mapping Tool would look like if the United States were broken out into the eleven nations delineated by Colin Woodard in American Nations.
Listened toTwo Schools in Marin County by Kai Wright and Marianne McCune from The United States of Anxiety | WNYC Studios
Last year, the California Attorney General held a tense press conference at a tiny elementary school in the one working class, black neighborhood of the mostly wealthy and white Marin County. His office had concluded that the local district "knowingly and intentionally" maintained a segregated school, violating the 14th amendment. He ordered them to fix it, but for local officials and families, the path forward remains unclear, as is the question: what does "equal protection" mean?
Thank you Kai and Marianne. Hearing stories like this really makes me furious that we haven’t figured out how to do these things better. Having some common stories and history to help bring out our commonness certainly helps in getting us past the uncomfortableness we all must feel. Perhaps once we’re past that we might all be able to come up with solutions?
I’m reminded of endothermic chemical reactions that take a reasonably high activation energy (an input cost), but one that is worth it in the end because it raises the level of all the participants to a better and higher level in the end. When are we going to realize that doing a little bit of hard work today will help us all out in the longer run? I’m hopeful that shows like this can act as a catalyst to lower the amount of energy that gets us all to a better place.
This Marin county example is interesting because it is so small and involves two schools. The real trouble comes in larger communities like Pasadena, where I live, which have much larger populations where the public schools are suffering while the dozens and dozens of private schools do far better. Most people probably don’t realize it, but we’re still suffering from the heavy effects of racism and busing from the early 1970’s.
All this makes me wonder if we could apply some math (topology and statistical mechanics perhaps) to these situations to calculate a measure of equity and equality for individual areas to find a maximum of some sort that would satisfy John Rawls’ veil of ignorance in better designing and planning our communities. Perhaps the difficulty may be in doing so for more broad and dense areas that have been financially gerrymandered for generations by redlining and other problems.
I can only think about how we’re killing ourselves as individuals and as a nation. The problem seems like individual choices for smoking and our long term health care outcomes or for individual consumption and its broader effects on global warming. We’re ignoring the global maximums we could be achieving (where everyone everywhere has improved lives) in the search for personal local maximums. Most of these things are not zero sum games, but sadly we feel like they must be and actively work against both our own and our collective best interests.
The paper's series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous.
Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, historians like Gary Nash, Ira Berlin and Alfred Young built on the earlier work of Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin and others, writing histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras that included African Americans, slavery and race. A standout from this time is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, which addresses explicitly how the intertwined histories of Native American, African American and English residents of Virginia are foundational to understanding the ideas of freedom we still struggle with today. ❧
These could be interesting to read.
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 09:12PM
Scholars like Annette Gordon-Reed and Woody Holton have given us a deeper understanding of the ways in which leaders like Thomas Jefferson committed to new ideas of freedom even as they continued to be deeply committed to slavery. ❧
I’ve not seen any research that relates the Renaissance ideas of the Great Chain of Being moving into this new era of supposed freedom. In some sense I’m seeing the richest elite whites trying to maintain their own place in a larger hierarchy rather than stronger beliefs in equality and hard work.
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 09:22PM
One of the world’s oldest artworks has been discovered inside a working Indonesian mine. It survived this long – Krithika Varagur ventures to Sulawesi to find out if it has a future
This painting was discovered in the Bulu Sipong cave on Sulawesi in 2016 and recent analysis has shown that it is the “oldest pictorial record of storytelling” and the “earliest figurative artwork in the world”, and is at least 43,900 years old. (The oldest known drawing in the world, a 73,000-year-old abstract scribble, was found in South Africa in 2018.) ❧
Program files and sound recordings from the award winning radio documentary, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: An Audio History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Communities and the Music of Those Times," produced by the Southern Regional Council (SRC). The collections consists of interview transcripts, audiovisual materials, scripts, program research files, and production files.
Clare Corbould (Harvard University Press)
