Roundup

Prussian King Frederick the Great's erotic poem found

An erotic poem written by Prussian King Frederick the Great has been discovered in a Berlin archive, more than 200 years after he died.The poem is called La Jouissance, which means pleasure in a general sense, but also has a sexual connotation.It was written in French in July 1740, a few weeks after Frederick became ruler of Prussia, a German kingdom.He said he had written the poem to show that northern Europeans were as passionate as southerners....

Alabama Inmate Sues to Read Southern History Book

The past is never dead, though at the Kilby Correctional Facility outside of Montgomery, Ala., it seems it is not particularly welcome.Last Friday, Mark Melvin, who is serving a life sentence at Kilby, filed suit in federal court against the prison’s officials and the state commissioner of corrections, claiming they have unjustly kept a book out of his hands....Last September, Mr. Stevenson sent Mr. Melvin a couple of books, including “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” by Douglas A. Blackmon, the senior national correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2009.

The Great Human Cost of the Great War: Historian Adam Hochschild on Militarists, War Resisters, and the Lost Generation of World War I

by Robin Lindley

What in the earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.  —Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry OfficerIt’s been almost a century since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo ignited an unexpectedly destructive war between the Great Powers in 1914.  It was referred to then as the “Great War,” and later described by President Woodrow Wilson as “the war to end all wars.”   Rather than ending war, the seeds of future conflicts were sown on the battlegrounds of this bloody conflagration that left millions of soldiers and civilians dead and empires in ruin.

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Jon Wiener: Pearl Harbor and 9/11: A fleeting day of infamy

Jon Wiener teaches history at UC Irvine and writes for the Nation magazine.

Eric Laursen, Review of Review of Bernard E. Harcourt's "The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press, 2011)

Eric Laursen is an independent journalist living in western Massachusetts. He is co-author of Understanding the Crash (Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, 2010) and author of the forthcoming The People’s Pension: The War Against Social Security from Reagan to Obama (AK Press, Spring, 2012). Last December, Wall Street's leading banks were fighting tooth-and-nail to keep federal regulators from setting rules governing the vast market in financial derivatives contracts – the market that helped turn the 2008 mortgage-backed securities meltdown into a global catastrophe. The regulators were developing rules to implement the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill – rules that, among other things, were supposed to make the derivatives market more transparent.Then an article appeared in the New York Times that seemed to blur the outline of this reform scenario. Titled “A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Derivatives Trading,” the article, by Louise Story, detailed how nine big banks had virtually captured the new regulatory regime before it even got started. One of Dodd-Frank's provisions called for most derivatives to be traded via clearinghouses, putting buyers and sellers in closer touch with each other and cutting out middlemen.

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Earliest Homo Erectus Tools Found in Kenya

One hallmark of Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans, was his stone tools, an advanced technology reflecting a good deal of forethought and dexterity. Up to now, however, scientists have been unable to pin a firm date on the earliest known evidence for his stone tool-making.A new geological study, being reported Thursday in the journal Nature, showed that tools from a site near Lake Turkana in Kenya were made about 1.76 million years ago, the earliest of their ilk found so far. Previous dates were estimates ranging from 1.4 million to 1.6 million years ago.Although no erectus fossils were found with the Turkana tools, a skull of that species was excavated last year in the same sediment level across the lake. This suggests that Homo erectus was responsible for these particular tools, which were made with what scientists refer to as Acheulean technology. The term connotes a type of oval and pear-shaped hand axes and other implements that were a specialty of early humans....

David Starkey says that if he was black, no one would have complained about his comments that ‘black gangster culture’ turned whites into looters

HISTORIAN DAVID Starkey, who sparked controversy by claiming that white rioters were influenced by ‘gangster culture’, said his comments wouldn’t have provoked public outrage if he was black.In an exclusive interview with The Voice, the Cambridge-educated academic hit back at his critics who dubbed the historian a ‘racist’ over his remarks on the BBC’s Newsnight show. His involvement in a discussion about what prompted the recent riots resulted in 700 viewer complaints to the BBC.However the 66-year-old who describes himself as an advocate of plain speaking said “I’m a white man not black , therefore I’m not allowed.” (to speak about race issues).On the programme, Starkey blamed ‘black gangster culture’ for turning white youngsters into looters and made reference to the late MP Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech....

Chinese paper's executives punished for quoting historian's opinion

A further example of the Chinese authorities clamping down on press freedom... a magazine's president has been demoted and its editor has been suspended.Chen Zhong, president of the Guangzhou-based bi-weekly Nanfeng Chuang (Window on the South), was removed from his post, though not dismissed, and editor Zhao Lingmin was suspended.They were punished for publishing an interview with a Taiwanese historian, Tang Chi-hua, that was critical of Sun Yat-sen, a revolutionary leader in the early 20th century."Punishing Chen Zhong and Zhao Lingmin for quoting a historian is absurd and a sign of the tightening restrictions on professional reporters across China this year," said Committee to Protect Journalists' (CPJ) deputy director Robert Mahoney."Some of China's best journalists are falling victim to the Communist party's sustained efforts to stamp out views it fears."...

John R. Hubbard dies at 92; USC president, historian and diplomat

John R. Hubbard, a historian and former U.S. ambassador to India who was president of USC in the 1970s, died Sunday at his Rancho Mirage home after a long illness, the university announced. The broad-shouldered and outspoken Texas native, widely known as "Jack," was 92. During his decade-long presidency, Hubbard was credited with helping to boost the University of Southern California's finances and academic reputation. But his term also was marked with controversies over donations from the shah of Iran and from corporations doing business in Saudi Arabia.

Human precursors went to sea, team says

Early manlike creatures may have been smarter than we think. Recent archaeological finds from the Mediterranean show that human ancestors traveled the high seas. A team of researchers that included an North Carolina State University geologist found evidence that our ancestors were crossing open water at least 130,000 years ago. That’s more than 100,000 years earlier than scientists had previously thought. Their evidence is based on stone tools from the island of Crete. Because Crete has been an island for eons, any prehistoric people who left tools behind would have had to cross open water to get there.  The tools the team found are so old that they predate the human species, said Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist from Providence College who led the team.

Russia 'intentionally withheld' information on Raoul Wallenberg

Russia has been accused of intentionally withholding information on the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust before his arrest by the Soviet Union in 1945.

Humans Crowded Out Neanderthals

Europe's neanderthals were outnumbered by humans, forcing them into extinction.  A swell of modern humans outnumbered Neanderthals in Europe by nearly 10 to one, forcing their extinction 40,000 years ago, suggests a study of French archaeology sites. Scientists have long debated what caused the Neanderthals to die off rather suddenly, making way for the thriving population of more advanced Homo sapiens who likely moved in from Africa. The latest theory, published in the journal Science, is based on a statistical analysis of artifacts and evidence from the Perigord region of southern France, where lies the largest concentration of Neanderthal and early modern human sites in Europe..... 

Feathers fly in first bird debate

A chicken-sized dinosaur fossil found in China may have overturned a long-held theory about the origin of birds. For 150 years, a species called Archaeopteryx has been regarded as the first true bird, representing a major evolutionary step away from dinosaurs. But the new fossil suggests this creature was just another feathery dinosaur and not the significant link that palaeontologists had believed. The discovery of Xiaotingia, as it is known, is reported in Nature magazine. The authors of the report argue that three other species named in the past decade might now be serious contenders for the title of "the oldest bird". Archaeopteryx has a hallowed place in science, long hailed as not just the first bird but as one of the clearest examples of evolution in action....  

Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in tiny French village

Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in a tiny southwestern French village, where three researchers have revealed the entrance to a cave they insist contains King Solomon's gold, and possibly the Holy Grail.  Police have been called in to patrol the area near the village of Sougraigne, population 82, in the Aude region over fears the startling claims will lead to a sudden, massive influx of unwanted treasure hunters.The cave's whereabouts on a rocky, wooded hillside were a long kept secret by the three would-be "raiders" and only made public last week because of an acrimonious dispute between the men.  But the three researchers, Michel Vallet, Didier Héricart de Thury and Franck Daffos, believe hunters were looking in the wrong place all that time, and that the treasure lies in a cave on a tiny hill called Pech d'En-Couty.They kept their excavations, using hi-tech equipment from the US, secret for the past three years. However, their search was suddenly brought to public attention following the publication of a book on July 12 by two of the trio, called "The Gold of Rennes", which offers clues...  

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The great teddy bear shipwreck mystery

In 1903, 3,000 teddy bears were sent by ship from Germany to America only for them to disappear. Some claim the bears were the first ever made and would now be the most valuable in the world. So what happened to them? In the Steiff museum, in the German town of Giengin, the mystery of the missing bears is explained to the visiting children with a tale that they were lost at sea. The idea of shipwrecked teddy bears captures the imagination, but is it true?   So how about that theory about the bears being lost at sea? Gunther Pfieffer, author of four books about Steiff bears, does not believe it. "The mystery first appeared in 1953 with the 50th anniversary of the teddy bear. A clever employee of the marketing department was writing a little festival book and that's the first time this story came up...  

Jim Cullen, Review of Terry H. Anderson's "Bush's Wars" (Oxford, 2011)

[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.]It is often said that journalism is the first draft of history. Bush's Wars is presented as the first major comprehensive study of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an effort to weigh the foreign policy legacy of President George W. Bush. This is how the blurbs and publicity for the book position it, and the way Terry H. Anderson puts it in his introduction: "to 'figure out,' in Bush's words, the history of the defining policies of his presidency -- and to do it during his lifetime."