Feargal Cochrane— It is difficult to overstate the chaos, confusion and emotion that accompanied the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921. It was not a smooth transition. At the stroke of a political pen, a legal line was drawn across Ireland, separating six of Ulster’s nine northern counties from the
Mark Leopold— From the beginning of my research into the life of the notorious Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, I noticed the frequency with which contemporary commentators (especially but not only British ones) described him as a “buffoon.” So I was interested when, sometime around 2015, the same word became increasingly applied,
Christian Lund— In 2013, my friend Oji and I were talking to a group of villagers not far from Garut, in West Java. The land around had been the object of dispute and struggle for generations. It had been taken over from Javanese nobility and peasants by Dutch planters in
Susan Dunn— In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt SUGGESTED a two-year experiment: he proposed moving the date of Thanksgiving up one week from the customary last Thursday in November. The point was to help businesses and the economy by extending the lucrative shopping season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Most states agreed
Follow @yaleARTbooks Rebecca Levinsky— A Great Crowd Had Gathered: JFK in the 1960s, on view at the Yale University Art Gallery, captures the essence of Kennedy’s life in the public sphere and the effects of his assassination on the American public. The exhibition space itself creates a somber mood. The
Stein Ringen, author of the recently published Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience, writes here on the current state of American democracy in light of the recent shutdown, financial concerns driving policy, and the possible erosion of the government into “soft despotism.” His book addresses one of the primary
The Hebrew Bible, the twenty-four books that make up the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, tell the stories of the creation of the earth and the founding of the Jewish religion. In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, Michael Walzer engages in a decade-long process of researching how politics
On the heels of Mexico’s 2012 election, which found the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back in power after 12 years, questions remain about what this means for the drug wars, Mexican foreign policy, and its relationship with the US. In Mexico: Democracy Interruptedauthor Jo Tuckman explores the narcotics war, the
Ivan Lett— It has been observed many times, many ways, how late the United States entered World War II, much to the chagrin of its European friends fighting the Axis Powers. My favorite recap comes from Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill, where he imitates the arrival of a US cavalryman,