Emily Redman is a PhD candidate in the history of science at the University of California at Berkeley who, when not distracted by enviro-political issues of yore, studies the history of mathematics education reform in the twentieth-century United States.

The planet is in the spotlight somewhat literally these days. Arguably interchangeable locutions of global warming, climate change, or "solar variations" have made headlines in the past decades—yes, those same decades that brought us An Inconvenient Truth and extreme storms. The underlying science has effectively bisected Washington, with the left and right offering partisan legislation aimed at the decidedly nonpartisan climate. Yet despite circular debates on Capitol Hill, options are being proffered to Americans for their fight to protect the global environment.

Efforts from Capitol Hill, you say? Given American's conflicted relationship with the regulatory powers of Washington, this fight is unsurprisingly politicized. Where the battlegrounds lie, however, is at once surprising and historically awkward.

Recently, media channels have brought to our attention the efforts underway to provide Americans with alternatives—federally mandated alternatives, no less—to the good ol' familiar light bulb. Scientists and engineers, tasked with developing eco-friendly light sources that mimic Thomas A. Edison's (1847-1931) incandescent bulb aesthetically while improving on it technologically have unveiled an LED version of the original with all the federal subsidies and fanfare that Washington can offer. This past summer, Philips, the Netherlands-based producer of consumer electronics, collected $10 million in prize money for developing a highly efficient alternative to the standard sixty-watt incandescent. The award, familiarly known as the L Prize, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in the wake of George W. Bush-era legislation that requires light bulb makers to improve efficiency of bulbs by twenty-five percent. The L Prize, then, was instituted as a government-sponsored nudge to spur lighting manufacturers to develop higher efficiency alternatives to Edison-era products disparaged as "dated" on the prize website. And in a dangerous flirtation with the "nanny state," the Website promises the prize will drive market adoption.

Apparently, however, Edison's familiar glass-bulb-meets-metal-filament is near and dear to many American hearts. Despite those years of thoughtlessly tossing cardboard boxes of replacements into our shopping carts, we've become inextricably connected to these devices. Edison, we shout, championing for our American-scientist-hero who bore innovation. We are sure that there is some mistake, that Edison could not have led us astray; his light bulb seems irreplaceable and must be compatible with modern-day America....

Toby Lester’s new book, Da Vinci’s Ghost, is about the history behind Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. You can read more of his work at tobylester.com.

In 1986, during a visit to the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, in Ferrara, Italy, an architect named Claudio Sgarbi called up an anonymous copy of the Ten Books on Architecture, written by the Roman architect Vitruvius. The only such treatise to have survived from antiquity, the Ten Books is a classic, studied by historians of architecture and antiquity alike. Early copies are of great interest to scholars, but few had any idea this one existed. Academic inventories made no mention of it, and the Ariostea catalog described it unpromisingly as only a partial manuscript.

When Sgarbi took a look at it, he discovered, to his amazement, that in fact it contained almost the full text of the Ten Books, along with 127 drawings. Moreover, it showed every sign of having been produced during the late 1400s, years before anyone was known to have systematically illustrated the work. “I was totally astonished,” Sgarbi told me. But then he made what he calls “a discovery within the discovery”: On the manuscript’s 78th folio, he found a drawing that gave him the chills. It depicted a nude figure inside a circle and a square—and it looked uncannily like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Everybody knows Leonardo’s drawing. It has become familiar to the point of banality. When Leonardo drew it, however, he was at work on something new: the attempt to illustrate the idea, set down by Vitruvius in the Ten Books, that the human body can be made to fit inside a circle and a square....

Roger Cohen is a columnist for the NYT.

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA — The “double genocide” wars that pit Stalin’s crimes against Hitler’s are raging in wide swathes of Europe and every now and again along comes a gust from the past to stoke them. The 70th anniversary this month of the Nazi adoption at Wannsee of annihilation plans for the Jews provided one such squall.

Yes, the past is still treacherous beneath Europe’s calm surface. Memory swirls untamed in the parts of the Continent that the American historian Timothy Snyder calls “Bloodlands,” the slaughterhouses from Lithuania to Ukraine that Hitler and Stalin subjected to their murderous whim.

To mark the Wannsee anniversary, over 70 European Parliament members, including 8 Lithuanians, signed a declaration objecting to “attempts to obfuscate the Holocaust by diminishing its uniqueness and deeming it to be equal, similar or equivalent to Communism.” It also rejected efforts to rewrite European school history books “to reflect the notion of ‘double genocide.”’...

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.

Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall.

The same thing is happening today: The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in.

In the old system, most blue-collar and white-collar workers held stable, lifetime jobs with defined benefit pensions, and a career civil service administered a growing state as living standards for all social classes steadily rose. Gaps between the classes remained fairly consistent in an industrial economy characterized by strong unions in stable, government-brokered arrangements with large corporations—what Galbraith and others referred to as the Iron Triangle. High school graduates were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that provided a comfortable lower middle-class lifestyle; college graduates could expect a better paid and equally secure future. An increasing "social dividend", meanwhile, accrued in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, more social and literal mobility, and more diverse forms of affordable entertainment. Call all this, taken together, the blue model.

In the heyday of the blue model, economists and social scientists assumed that from generation to generation Americans would live a life of incremental improvements. The details of life would keep getting better even as the broad outlines of society stayed the same. The advanced industrial democracies, of which the United States was the largest, wealthiest and strongest, had reached the apex of social achievement. It had, in other words, defined and was in the process of perfecting political and social "best practice." America was what "developed" human society looked like and no more radical changes were in the offing. Amid the hubris that such conceptions encouraged, Professor (later Ambassador) Galbraith was moved to state, in 1952, that "most of the cheap and simple inventions have been made." If only the United States and its allies could best the Soviet Union and its counter-model, then indeed—as a later writer would put it—History would end in the philosophical sense that only one set of universally acknowledged best practices would be left standing.

Life isn’t this simple anymore...

Dominic Tierney is assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore College. He is the author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War.

On June 5, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote down a message, carefully folded it, and placed it in his wallet. It contained a public statement in case the D-Day invasion failed. Twenty-five years later, in 1969, Richard Nixon's White House drafted a speech to use if the moon landing was unsuccessful and the astronauts were trapped on the lunar surface. This is not alternate history. This is very real history, about leaders preparing for a contingency that never transpired. More than anything, the messages reveal the fine line between triumph and disaster.

Publicly, Eisenhower radiated confidence about the liberation of Europe. But privately, he was deeply worried that the Germans would push the invaders back into the sea. After all, the Allies could initially propel only five divisions by sea and three divisions by air against an area held by 58 German divisions. If the Allies had been defeated, Eisenhower planned to issue a statement.

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

Jon Wiener teaches U.S. history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor at the Nation.

This week, a forgotten work of political art is being reconstructed on Sunset Boulevard. But it is unlikely that the new Tower of Protest, going up as part of the months-long, Southern California-wide Pacific Standard Time art initiative, will spark the kind of reaction it did during its first appearance in 1966.

The skirmishes back then began before the tower even existed. One day in January 1966, a group of artists announced their intention on a billboard-sized sign on Sunset near La Cienega Boulevard. "Stop War in Vietnam," it screamed in 3-foot-tall letters. "Artists' Protest Tower to Be Erected Here."

The very night the sign went up, vandals knocked it down. The artists put up a new one, which was knocked down again, and this time the attackers tried to burn it. A months-long battle had begun....

...[P]olitical art today rarely stirs up the kind of sentiments that the tower did in 1966. These days, we have "street art" — but we don't have hundreds of people fighting in the streets over art. Instead of attacks by ideological opponents, "we expect attacks on the work — in the form of weather," says Glenn Phillips of the Getty Research Institute.

What made the Artists' Tower of Protest so potent in 1966 was not so much the art but rather the politics. It was the intensity of feeling about the war that made people care about the art — and fight. It was a time when political art mattered in a way that's hard to imagine today.

Willis G. Regier is the director of the University of Illinois Press. His most recent book is Quotology (University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

Erasmus quoted the Iliad in a time of widening war:

Men get their fill of sleep and love, of beautiful singing and carefree dance, but they never get enough of war.

And they never get enough of the Iliad. In his anthology, Homer in English, George Steiner asked in 1996, Why are there so many Iliads in English? His answer: notions of noble manliness. "There shines throughout the Iliad an idealized yet also unflinching vision of masculinity, of an order of values and mutual recognitions radically virile."

Small wonder the epic has appealed to warrior nations like England and the United States. William Blake warned, "It is the Classics & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars."

According to The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, the Iliad is among the most translated works in English, and English has more versions than any other language. They include their share of casualties. Lord W.E. Gladstone, four-time prime minister of England, tried to squeeze the Iliad into ballad stanzas. He foresaw his fate: "I have involuntarily conceived of the poem as a fortress high-walled and impregnable, and of the open space around as covered with the dead bodies of his translators, who have perished in their gallant but unsuccessful efforts to scale the walls."

In the depths of digital libraries lie dead Iliads. Who remembers the English translations of William Sotheby (1831), J. Henry Dart (1865), or Charles Bagot Cayley (1876)? And I doubt we will ever see another like The Iliad of Homer in the Spenserian stanza by Philip Stanhope Worsley and John Conington (1866-68). Samuel Butler's prose Iliad (1898) still gains praise, and T.E. Lawrence's Iliad (1932) has its following, while the couplets of Edgar Alfred Tibbetts (1907) and hexameters of George Ernle (1922) gather dust. For those that fall, new Iliads rush in....

Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale University.

As Steven Pinker observes, we recall the twentieth century as an age of unparalleled violence, and we characterize our own epoch as one of terror. But what if our historical moment is in fact defined not by mass killing but by the greatest levels of peace and safety ever attained by human­kind? By way of this provocative hypothesis, the acclaimed psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist aims to liberate us from the overblown victimhood-by-contiguity of the present moment, maintaining quite credibly that we ought to be grateful for living when we do.

In his vivid descriptions of the distant and recent past, Pinker draws from a wide range of fields beyond his own to chart the decline of violence, which he says "may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history." He argues that prehistory was much more violent than early civilization and that the past few decades have been much less violent than the first half of the twentieth century. He is opposing two common and related presumptions: that the time before civilization was a golden age and that the present moment is one of unique danger. Pinker rejects the idea that violence is "hydraulic," a pressure within individuals and societies that at some point must burst through. He prefers to see violence as "strategic," a choice that makes sense within certain historical circumstances. Thus, he describes two fundamental transitions: from the anarchy of hunting and gathering societies to the controlled ­violence of early states and then from a "culture of honor" associated with these states to a "culture of dignity" characteristic of the better moments of modernity. In Pinker's view, the state monopolizes violence and creates the possibility of fruitful trade and intellectual exchange, which in turn permit the development of a new, irenic individuality.

Pinker's first target is the tendency to romanticize the distant past. Since he believes that people fantasize about a peaceful prehistory, he deliberately over­emphasizes its violence, dwelling at length on the bloodiest passages of the Old Testament. His cheerful admission of this writerly tactic presages not only the friendly tone of the entire book but also one of its shortcomings. Although Pinker writes as a scientist, his approach in this book is discursive rather than deductive, charmingly but not quite persuasively advancing his ex cathedra views about life in general. The research of others, although abundantly and generously cited, too often seems to footnote Pinker's own prior assumptions. He is most likely correct that prehistoric life was more violent than life in agrarian civilizations and modern states, but the way he pitches the evidence raises suspicions from the very beginning. He provides horrifying descriptions of premodern killings, but not of their modern counterparts, which generates a certain narrative bias. The evidence of strikingly brutal premodern warfare and sacrifice is less conclusive than he suggests, since archaeologists are more likely to find the remains of people who die in unusual ways, beyond the reach of communal cremation or at the center of a communal ritual. The book features neat charts showing the relative decline of violence over time. But the sources Pinker cites for the numbers of dead are themselves just aggregates of other estimates, the vast majority of which, if one follows the thread of sources to the end, turn out to be more or less informed guesses.

Yet even if Pinker is right that the ratio of violent to peaceful deaths has improved over time (and he probably is), his metric of progress deserves a bit more attention than he gives it. His argument about decreasing violence is a relative one: not that more people were killed annually in the past than are killed in a given year of recent history but that more people were killed relative to the size of the overall human population, which is of course vastly larger today than in earlier eras. But ask yourself: Is it preferable for ten people in a group of 1,000 to die violent deaths or for ten million in a group of one billion?..

Heather Horn is a writer based in Chicago. She is a former features editor and staff writer for The Atlantic Wire, and was previously a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There's something deeply distasteful about the news out of Germany this week. It's not that the latest edition of a British publisher's excerpts of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has sold 250,000 copies in just a few days. It's that the Bavarian state government, which technically owns the copyright, is considering fighting it.

Hitler's ideological dumping ground of an autobiography isn't technically banned in Germany. But it might as well be. The finance ministry of the state of Bavaria, in the south, holds the copyrights to Mein Kampf and has simply refused to let it be republished. It's done the same for other Nazi works. This same British publisher, Peter McGee of Albertas Ltd., reprinted parts of Nazi newspapers in 2009 with accompanying historical commentary, and the Bavarian government, holding the copyrights to those papers as well, had police seize the publications....

To put it simply: fighting reprints is no protection against fascism, or even against poor taste and inflammatory rhetoric. Quite the contrary. This latest debate has a particularly nonsensical ring, as the attention has already been drawn -- and the entire work is available on the internet anyway. But don't let the nonsense obscure what is truly an important point: either you believe in liberalism or you don't. And even if the letter of the German law isn't one of censorship -- though legislating against the swastika and Holocaust denial suggests otherwise -- the Bavarian state is misusing its power. This sort of illiberal policy made even the postwar  occupying powers pretty squeamish when they removed propaganda from public libraries -- and that was when the wounds were still fresh, and onetime Nazis plentiful. Today, there's no excuse.