Re: Modern History (1800 – present)
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2022 12:01 pm
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(Common Dreams) This weekend marked the surrender of the Confederate Army under "that genteel butcher Bobby Lee" to Ulysses S. Grant, and the end of a Civil War that in the sordid name of Southern white supremacy cost four years and 630,000 lives. On Sunday April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate Army of North Virginia, fighting for the unholy right to own other human beings as property, to General Ulysses S. Grant; the ceremony at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House, VA took an hour and a half. Days before, Grant had ridden west to ask Lee's cornered band to surrender, declaring any "further effusion of blood" would be solely on Lee's traitorous hands. Lee declined, but did ask about a possible peace agreement; the gentlemanly Grant offered a possible military surrender instead. On that Sunday, writes Heather Cox Richardson, admirably bringing the historic down to human scale, Grant woke with a migraine, having spent the night treating it with mustard plasters that didn't work: "In the morning, Grant pulled on his dirty clothes and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing." Lee, ever the brutal but elegant plantation owner, had dressed grandly in dress uniform, expecting to be taken prisoner; instead, under the surrender's generous terms, his military leaders were spared criminal trials, and handsomely fed. Notes Thomas Levenson, "Looking forward, not back, is no new trope in American politics."
Though the war dragged on for several months, Appomattox marked the inevitable victory of the Union. About 150 miles away, President Abraham Lincoln spent the day steaming up a peaceful Potomac River with a small family party. His guests recalled him sitting in the cabin, reading aloud from Macbeth and stopping to ponder a passage about the slain king Duncan:
"After life's fitful fever he sleeps well
Treason has done its worst
...Malice domestic, foreign levey, nothing
Can touch him further.
Five days later, Lincoln was killed. Appotomattox was lauded in one image with a noble eagle and the declaration, "Lee has surrendered! Slavery and treason buried in the same grave!"
If you place yourself at a certain distance, there is no clearer fact in American history than the fact of conquest. In North America, just as in much of South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, Europeans invaded a land fully occupied by natives. Sometimes, by negotiations and sometimes by warfare the natives lost ground and the invaders gained it. From the caves and lava beds of northern California, where the Modocs held off the United States Army for months, to the site along the Mystic River in Connecticut, where Puritans burned Pequots trapped in a stockade, the landscape bears witness to the violent subordination of Indian people. These haunted locations are not distant, exotic sights set apart from the turf of our normal lives.
And yet distance makes these facts deceptively clear. Immerse yourself in the story of the dispossession of any one group, and clarity dissolves. There is nothing linear or direct in these stories. Only in rare circumstances were the affairs that we call “white-Indian wars” only a matter of whites against Indians. More often, Indians took part in both sides, tribe against tribe of faction against faction.
(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) “One of the atomic reactors has been damaged,” a Radio Moscow broadcast announced about the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 28, 1986—nearly three days after the accident. “Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.”
World citizens did not know then that the event would register as the world’s worst nuclear disaster. They did not know that two plant workers had died in the explosion at Chernobyl, that 28 more would die within weeks from acute radiation poisoning, or that thousands would be diagnosed with thyroid cancer over time. They also did not know then that thousands of workers would need to continue decommissioning work at the plant for decades. And they likely could not have imagined how Chernobyl’s legacy would continue to change in dramatic ways over time.
In the 36 years since that day, nuclear experts have learned and incorporated many lessons about nuclear safety. Tourists now frequent the desolate town of Pripyat; some are respectful, others are not. A sizable radius around the plant has transformed into an ecological reserve in which animals and plants thrive. Chernobyl also now boasts a new logo. Then, last month, the beleaguered site appeared in headlines again when Russian forces seized control of the plant just days after invading Ukraine.
Since 1986, much has been written about Chernobyl—both the disaster and the place that lived on after the disaster. Below (see link above the quote box for referenced citation) are four Chernobyl stories published in the Bulletin that have endured. The fifth story offers evidence that Chernobyl’s story may always be a work in progress.
This is something long believed by radicals. I wonder if this means the idea is becoming more mainstream.(EurekAlert) Public primary schools were created by states to reinforce obedience among the masses and maintain social order, rather than serve as a tool for upward social mobility, suggests a study from the University of California San Diego.
The study in the journal American Political Science Review finds historical patterns from 1828 to 2015, across many countries, of education reforms, including the rise of mandatory primary schooling itself, being implemented after instances of social unrest. The research also sheds light on the current controversy in the U.S. over teaching critical race theory.
“The key prediction of the research is that when there are periods of internal conflict, states will introduce education reform that is designed to indoctrinate people to accept the status quo,” said the study’s author Agustina S. Paglayan, a UC San Diego assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science/School of Social Sciences and the School of Global Policy and Strategy.
Paglayan added that while some could interpret this as evidence that states were trying to solve people’s economic woes by investing in education after violent rebellions, historical documents tell a different story.
“My research reveals violence can heighten national elites’ anxiety about the masses’ moral character and the state’s ability to maintain social order. In this context, public education systems were created and expanded to teach obedience,” Paglayan said.
(Vox) If you asked me to name the most important political theorist of the 20th century, my answer would be Hannah Arendt.
You could make arguments for other philosophers — John Rawls comes to mind — but I always come back to Arendt. She’s probably best known for her reporting on the 1961 trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, and for coining the phrase “the banality of evil,” a controversial claim about how ordinary people can commit extraordinarily evil acts.
Like all the great thinkers from the past, Arendt understood her world better than most, and she remains an invaluable voice today. Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family in 1906, and she lived in East Prussia until she was forced to flee the Nazis in 1933. She then lived in Paris for the next eight years until the Nazis invaded France, at which point she fled a second time to the United States, where she lived the rest of her life as a professor and a public intellectual.
Arendt’s life and thought were shaped by her refugee experiences and by the horrors of the Holocaust. In massively ambitious books like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, she tried to make sense of the political pathologies of the 20th century. Reading her today can be a little disorienting. On the one hand, the way she writes, the regimes she describes, the technologies she’s worried about — it all feels very distant, from a totally different world, and she does have blind spots, namely on identity and race, that are glaring today.
And yet, at the same time, the threats she identifies and her insights about our inner lives seem as relevant today as they were 70 years ago. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, her 1951 book on totalitarianism was selling at 16 times its normal rate.
As very few human remains have been found from what was such a bloodied affair, killing thousands, it's a conclusion that a new study suggests is most probable.
However, publishing his findings today—exactly 207 years since the historic conflict—in the peer-reviewed Journal of Conflict Archaeology, lead expert Professor Tony Pollard states it isn't quite a situation of "case closed."
The Director of the Center for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow demonstrates original data comprising of newly found battlefield descriptions and drawings, made by people who visited in the days and weeks following Napoleon's defeat.
These included letters and personal memoirs from a Scottish merchant living in Brussels at the time of the battle, James Ker, who visited in the days following the battle and describes men dying in his arms. Together the visitor accounts describe the exact locations of three mass graves containing up to 13,000 bodies.
But will these new data lead to a mass grave discovery of the long-lost bones of those who gave their lives in this battle, which finally concluded a 23-year long war? It's unlikely states Professor Pollard.