The Parthenon Marbles (formerly known as the Elgin Marbles), designed and executed by Pheidias to adorn the Parthenon, are perhaps the greatest of all classical sculptures. In 1801, Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Turkish government, had chunks of the frieze sawn off and shipped to England, where they were subsequently seized by Parliament and sold to the British Museum to help pay off Elgin’s debts. This scandal, exacerbated by the inept ha ...
An examination of the shifts in politics and revolution in China over the last century What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and in China’s Twentieth Century the country’s leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of politi ...
How the French invented the barricade, and its symbolic impact on popular protests throughout history In the history of European revolutions, the barricade stands as a glorious emblem. Its symbolic importance arises principally from the barricades of Eric Hazan’s native Paris, where they were instrumental in the revolts of the nineteenth century, helping to shape the political life of a continent. The barricade was always a makeshift construct ...
The poets’ Great War: violence, revolution and modernism The First World War changed the map of Europe forever. Empires collapsed, new countries were born, revolutions shocked and inspired the world. This tumult, sometimes referred to as ‘the literary war’, saw an extraordinary outpouring of writing. The conflict opened up a vista of possibilities and tragedies for poetic exploration, and at the same time poetry was a tool for manipulating th ...
The decisive role of the illegal slave trade in the making of the United States From 1501 to 1867 more than 12.5 million Africans were brought to the Americas in chains, and many millions died as a result of the slave trade. The US constitution set a 20-year time limit on US participation in the trade, and on January 1, 1808, it was abolished. And yet, despite the spread of abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic, despite numerous laws and t ...
An extraordinary memoir of exile and the impossibility of finding home After growing up in Britain following exile from Palestine in 1948, Karmi returns to her homeland in the hope of helping with the peace process and the possibility of a Palestinian state. She starts work within the Palestinian Authority ministry. Yet she finds her family home has now been occupied, and much of the West Bank militarized; meanwhile her encounters with fellow ...
What is life really like in Gaza and the West Bank? For more than six decades, Israel and Palestine have been the center of one of the world’s most widely reported yet least understood human rights crises. In Palestine Speaks men and women from the West Bank and Gaza describe in their own words how their lives have been shaped by the conflict. This includes eyewitness accounts of the most recent attacks on Gaza in 2014.The collection includes E ...
Author of the acclaimed Liberalism: A Counter-History dissects the revisionist attempts to expunge or criminalize revolutions. War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians, one that’s grown increasingly apparent in recent years. It’s a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolut ...
Forceful and detailed account of the struggle for “freedom” after the American Civil War. How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reinstating ex-slaves’ own “ ...
