The Trump presidency has brought American democracy to the breaking point. The president has encouraged violent extremists; deployed law enforcement and other public institutions as weapons against rivals; and undermined the integrity of elections through false claims of fraud, attacks on mail-in voting and an apparent unwillingness to accept defeat.
Howard University history professor Ana Lucia Araujo and Carnegie Mellon French professor Mame-Fatou Niang discussed recent debates regarding the removal of statues that depict slave traders and owners in Europe at an event Wednesday afternoon.
Hans-Helmut Kotz comments on the German Wirecard scandal.
Between 1814 and 1831, French slave traders trafficked approximately 200,000 individuals. Among those, a small but still surprising number stopped over in Haiti on their return voyage after selling captives elsewhere in the Americas.
Would anything about this strange moment have surprised H.G. Wells? He was called “the man who invented tomorrow” because he seemed to have the future figured out.
Maya Jasanoff Reviews, Sarah Cole's new book: Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century
They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.
An interview with Derek Penslar about his upcoming book “Zionism: An Emotional State.”
Published in Jüdische Geschichte & Kultur, #4, 2020, pp.46-47. (In German)
Can President Trump's appeal to ethnonationalism succeed in the 2020 elections? Two research studies by CES faculty Peter Hall and former affiliates Noam Gidron and Moritz Schularick are cited in this opinion piece by Thomas Edsall, The New York Times.
CES Affiliate Rosemary Taylor delves into comparisons of Covid-19 with other major diseases in world history, from the Spanish Flu to SARS. She notes that history often fails to teach leaders and experts the “lessons” we might expect. She notes that new popular understandings about diseases (such as animal-human transition) have led to complicated policy responses with mixed results. While history may not always clearly tell us what to do, it can warn us.
