The Washington Post reports variously today that the U.S. government is either “privately encouraging” or more actively “pushing” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reconsider his stance against negotiating with Russia so long as Vladimir Putin remains President. The more deeply reported of those accounts, the “privately encouraging” one, is sourced to “people close to the … Continue reading Thoughts for Armistice Day 2022
I am already looking forward to the coronation of Charles Windsor, to presumably be held during peak tourist season in 2023? This gives us enough time to do more research into the provenance of the obscenely extensive holdings of the House of Windsor (known until a speedy 1917 name-change as the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha)… and … Continue reading Britain’s Crown Jewels: Time to decolonize, repatriate!
I’ve been re-thinking how to proceed with my Project 500 Years. (Actually, as of now, Project 607 years, but who’s counting?) I have a number of ideas of new approaches I might use. But since I’m currently a little fixated on how the era of Western hegemony of the world order is currently ending, I … Continue reading Learning from Gen. Douglas MacArthur
The image above shows some of the victims of the RAF’s “Battle of Hamburg” As we know, when U.S. Pres. Harry Truman and his advisors decided on the first-ever use of an atomic bomb, in early August 1945, they were well aware that the main victims of this explosion would be the large civilian population … Continue reading When the ‘West’ decided it was good to bomb whole cities
In 1511 CE, Portugal became the first of the European empires to establish a presence in East Asia. That was the year in which conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque established the first of the Portuguese empire’s characteristically heavily-armed trading/raiding outposts at Malacca, a strategic choke-point in today’s Malaysia that has always been a major node of … Continue reading European empires competing in 16th-century East Asia
Earlier this week, I wrote about some of the activities undertaken by the Indian Affairs Committee of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM) of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.) Amazingly, that committee has been in continuous– or sometimes, possibly a bit sporadic?– operation since 1795 CE. In that blog post, I interrogated the commonly voiced … Continue reading White settlers with “good intentions”
On Monday, I wrote about the involvement of Quakers in William Penn’s settler-colonial project in Turtle Island in the 17th century CE. Now, I want to fast-forward to the early 19th century CE, and start looking at the involvement of Baltimore Quakers in various stages of the ongoing westward expansion of the project, which was … Continue reading Baltimore Quakers & westward expansion in the early United States
In the past few months I have, I confess, fallen very seriously off the writing wagon atop which, back in 2019, I had vowed to ride into the future. My only defense is that I keep getting carried away by other kinds of broadly educational projects that seem at the time to be both urgent … Continue reading The 500-year project
Last week, I was busy with a large number of things, including diving deep into studies of Britain’s historic role in the West Indies for a biggish think-piece I’m working on. But my friends at Boston Review asked if I’d be interested in writing something about Beirut; and for some reason I said ‘Yes’. Of … Continue reading My piece “The Beirut That Was”
