Category: History
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Before there was television or the Internet, in the days of pamphleteering, public health announcements were often made available through posters. Dangers of malaria, dog bite, bad dental hygiene, poor sanitation and STDs were advertised through eye catching imagery and pithy messages. Some of these posters are now on display at the National Academy of…
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The weather is hot, blog traffic is down and I am out of ideas. So it’s links time again. The stories here range from extra terrestrial thrills to earthly narrow mindedness, with a bit of not so well known history thrown in the mix. Enjoy! Phoenix Mars Lander unearths (un-Martiates?) Martian polar ice. LOS ANGELES…
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It is always gratifying when a powerful entity apologize to a weaker one for past wrongs. It doesn’t happen often. The US government has paid reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and issued apologies for the infamous Tuskegee Study, but not for the plight of Native Americans or for slavery. Japan refuses to…
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Frank Rich explains.
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It’s not often that a book or a movie makes me cry. A few weeks ago I watched Fateless, a film that brought tears to my eyes. For quite some time afterwards I could not get over the sepia tinted images of melancholy, gloom and suffering. Even more difficult to shake off was the impression…
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My hometown Houston is a modernist city. By that I don’t mean its shiny new suburbs and exurbs but the older public buildings that are all lines, angles and occasionally, futuristic domes. Unfortunately, local politicians and the builders who line their pockets, can’t wait to tear something down that is more than three or four…
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A few days ago I posted a Brazilian professor’s impressions of India’s erstwhile Portuguese colony of Goa on India’s west coast. Today’s New York Times travel section has an article on Pondicherry, a tiny town in south India on the Bay of Bengal which was once colonized by the French. AS colonies go, Pondicherry was…
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Ron Rosenbaum ponders over Hiroshima in Slate: My Amex itinerary listed my room in the Hotel Hiroshima this way: "1 KING BED SMOKING CITY." SMOKING CITY! Turns out "CITY" was shorthand for "city view." But do I need to spell out why I find the name Hotel Hiroshima so resonant? Sure, you hate the Eagles.…
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A Brazilian in Goa – Arthur Ituassu reflects on the cultural pasts of two Portuguese colonies continents apart, that in many ways mirror each other. Their present challenges he notes, though similar, are independent of their shared history. "Our food is Goan. It is not Indian, nor Portuguese. It is Goan. We are not Portuguese.…
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India’s bloody partition in 1947 (into India, Pakistan and now Bangladesh) has been recorded in scholarly books. Mostly the emphasis is on history, politics and religious tensions. Eye witness personal accounts of partition victims, especially women, are few and far between. In her book, The Other Side of Silence, Indian author Urvashi Butalia was the…
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