Modern History (1800 – present)

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caltrek
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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In His Undelivered Final Speech, President Kennedy Warned the World Against ‘Voices Preaching Doctrines Wholly Unrelated to Reality.’
by Jeff Nussbaum
June 10, 2022

Introduction:
(Politico) Shortly before noon local time on Friday, November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy landed at Dallas’s Love Field as he neared the end of a two-day, five-city tour of Texas.

Kennedy had much he hoped to accomplish on that trip: He hoped to lay the groundwork for his nascent 1964 reelection campaign; he hoped to heal a schism among party leaders in Texas that he feared might jeopardize his success in that key state, and he wanted to road test themes and refrains he felt would define his 1964 campaign, including national security and world peace.

But as he disembarked from his 13-minute flight from Fort Worth, there was something else on his mind: domestic extremism, disinformation, and the corrosive effect it could have on the United States.

In Dallas he was prepared to decry, “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,” which he feared could, “handicap this country’s security.”

He planned to say that “We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.”
Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazin ... -00038627
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Sudanese museums seek return of artefacts taken by British colonisers
Mon 20 Jun 2022

Items include armour, banners, and two skulls taken from Omdurman battlefield

Museum officials in Sudan are hoping for the return of priceless artefacts and body parts taken by British soldiers, colonial administrators and travellers, saying they could help bring peace to the unstable east African country.

The items include valuable armour, weapons and clothing, and the banners of fighters who resisted the British force that invaded and colonised Sudan more than 120 years ago.

The most controversial items may be two skulls taken from the battlefield where Sudanese warriors tried to hold off the advancing British and Egyptian army. During the engagement at Omdurman in 1898, British commanders used early machine guns and artillery to inflict thousands of casualties on lightly armed enemies.

In Khartoum, the repatriation of the human remains of those who fought at the battle is seen as particularly significant.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... colonisers
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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US destroyer sunk during Second World War in 1944 off Philippines becomes deepest wreck ever discovered
Sunday 26 June 2022

Explorers have discovered the deepest shipwreck ever found - a US destroyer that sank during the largest sea battle of the Second World War.

The USS Samuel B Roberts was found, broken into two pieces, on a slope at a depth of 22,916ft (6,985m) off the Philippine island of Samar.

The battleship, popularly known as the "Sammy B", sunk during the final phase of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered its biggest loss of ships.

The US Navy destroyer USS Samuel B Roberts (DE-413) around June 1944, off Boston, Massachusetts. Pic: Wikicommons
The depth it was found at was 1,400ft (426m) deeper than the USS Johnson, the previous deepest wreck discovered last year.

Both were discovered by US explorer Victor Vescovo, founder of Dallas-based Caladan Oceanic Expeditions. He announced the latest find alongside UK-based marine travel specialists EYOS Expeditions.

Mr Vescovo, a former US navy commander, said: "It was an extraordinary honour to locate this incredibly famous ship, and by doing so have the chance to retell her story of heroism and duty to those who may not know of the ship and her crew's sacrifice."
https://news.sky.com/story/us-destroyer ... d-12640667
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caltrek
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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American Gun Culture is Based on Frontier Mythology – but Ignores How Common Gun Restrictions Were in the Old West
by Pierre M. Atlas
June 29, 2022

Extract:
(The Conversation) My analysis finds that gun culture in the U.S. derives largely from its frontier past and the mythology of the “Wild West,” which romanticizes guns, outlaws, rugged individualism and the inevitability of gun violence. This culture ignores the fact that gun control was widespread and common in the Old West.

Gun ownership was commonplace in the post-Civil War Old West, but actual gunfights were rare. One reason was that, contrary to the mythology, many frontier towns had strict gun laws, especially against carrying concealed weapons.

As UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler puts it, “Guns were widespread on the frontier, but so was gun regulation. … Wild West lawmen took gun control seriously and frequently arrested people who violated their town’s gun control laws.”

“Gunsmoke,” the iconic TV show that ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, would have seen far fewer gunfights had its fictional marshal, Matt Dillon, enforced Dodge City’s real laws banning the carrying of any firearms within city limits.
Read more here: https://theconversation.com/american-g ... st-184932
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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President Luis Echeverría Alvarez is Gone but Mexico is Still a Mess
by Erik Loomis
July 11, 2022

Introduction:
(Alternet) Luis Echeverría Alvarez has died at the age of 100. You’d think that this former president of Mexico lived a good century. But you’d be wrong. If you want to consider what’s wrong with Mexico today, a lot of it is at least partially the responsibility of Echeverría.

Luis Echeverría was born in 1922 in Mexico City. Part of the post-revolutionary generation, Echeverría became an academic, teaching political theory at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1947. He soon became a rising star in the one-party state, becoming personal secretary to PRI’s President Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada. From a young age, he was on the fast track to power.

There was a time when the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) was genuinely revolutionary. Originating at the end of the Mexican Revolution, the PRI quickly sought to institutionalize itself as the legitimate inheritor of the Revolution, quite successfully at least for awhile, with real benefits to the Mexican people.

When Lazaro Cardenas governed in the 1930s, Mexico was home to thousands of Spanish Civil War refugees, not to mention Leon Trotsky, which was a mistake given that there were so many Stalinists in Mexico ready to kill him. In any case, Cardenas went far to deliver the promises of the revolution to the nation’s poor.
Conclusion:
Now he (Echeverría) is gone. But Mexico is still a mess. Decade after decade of ineffective government and violence have continued to undermine that nation. Each president since World War II deserves some level of blame for this situation. Few deserve more than Echeverría.
Read more here: https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/luis- ... o-mess/
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caltrek
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Haiti’s 1860 Jour de Pâques Earthquakes May Have Released Strain in Key Fault Zone
July 12, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Using details from historical newspaper accounts and letters, seismologists have learned more about Haiti’s 1860 Jour de Pâques (Easter Sunday) earthquake sequence, and how it might have impacted the country’s most recent devastating earthquakes.

The new analysis published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America suggests that the 1860 sequence may have released strain in an unusual gap between the 2010 magnitude 7.0 Léogâne earthquake and the 2021 magnitude 7.2 Nippes earthquake.

The 2010 and 2021 earthquakes, both of which caused significant deaths and damage, took place on the same fault systems in southern Haiti. Satellite observations collected after the 2021 earthquake showed that the rupture zones for the two earthquakes were separated by a roughly 50-kilometer gap.

Stacey Martin, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University, noticed the gap while preparing for a presentation on the 2021 earthquake for the seismology group at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the ANU. Further discussions with U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough led the two to look for more information on the 1860 event, which might have taken place in the gap.

Previous studies concluded that there was only one Jour de Pâques event. “However, after locating the first of the newspapers … it quickly became clear that there were two large events and it would be possible to say something more definitive about each,” said Martin. “Working together with Sue to track down accounts and then model the event, it gradually became clear to us that there was a lot more to the 1860 story.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/958566
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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Hidden Van Gogh self-portrait discovered behind earlier painting
Thu 14 Jul 2022 06.00 BST

Image

It was on a Friday afternoon that they found him, staring intently from the back of a canvas in a wide-brimmed hat and loose neckerchief: a previously undiscovered self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, one of the most popular and influential figures in western art history, which had been hiding in plain sight in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland for more than half a century.

“It was absolutely thrilling,” says Lesley Stevenson, senior paintings conservator at the National Galleries of Scotland, of the moment that a routine conservation X-ray of another Van Gogh painting, Head of a Peasant Woman, revealed this extraordinary find on the back of the canvas, hidden for more than 100 years beneath layers of glue and cardboard.

“We weren’t expecting much,” says Stevenson of the “modest little painting” that was donated in 1960 by an Edinburgh lawyer, Alexander Maitland. It was being X-rayed as part of a cataloguing exercise and in preparation for the Royal Scottish Academy’s summer exhibition of French impressionism – although Van Gogh was Dutch, he spent much of his artistic career in France.

The X-ray plates were processed in an old-fashioned darkroom, and when Stevenson looked at the images she realised she was staring at the face of Van Gogh himself.

“Lo and behold! We don’t see much of the peasant woman, but what we have is the lead white, the much heavier pigment he used for his face, showing up after the X-ray goes through the cardboard.”
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... r-painting
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Re: Modern History (1800 – present)

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How has the average new U.S. house floor area changed over the decades?
1950s : 983 square feet, 3.37 people
1960s : 1200 square feet, 3.33 people
1970s : 1500 square feet, 3.14 people
1980s : 1740 square feet, 2.76 people
1990s : 2080 square feet, 2.63 people
2000s : 2266 square feet, 2.62 people
2010s : 2392 square feet (143.3% more than in the 1950s), 2.59 people (23.15% less than in the 1950s)

source: https://compasscaliforniablog.com/have- ... ke-a-look/

Although the differences in floor area per person used to be changing more rapidly up to the 1990s, new homes since the 1990s still have increases in floor space. An average 2010s U.S. home has 3.17x more space per person than an average 1950s U.S. home, which is a very significant improvement.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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