Posts Tagged ‘History’
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Rafael Behr; 13/3/10;
The Invention of the Jewish People; by Shlomo Sand is published by Verso.
Shlomo Sand presses his thumbs together, palms outward, fingers stretching up like the branches of a candelabra. “If you can visualise it …” The air above our table is meant to be the Mediterranean region soon after the birth of Christ. Sand’s hands are rival monotheistic cults. “There are two kinds of Judaism: Christianity and a kind of Judaism that starts to close in on itself because of the success of Christianity.” The hands drift apart. The fingers on the right withdraw into a fist. “The vision that we have of Judaism today came out of this closedness because of fear; because of the conditions imposed on Judaism if it was to continue under Christianity.”
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Tags: History, Human Rights, Israel, Religion
Posted in Human Rights, Israel & Palestine, Religion | No Comments »
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
13/3/10; Pat Lowe with Jimmy Pike Magabala Books
This important book about the daily life of Aborigines in the Great Sandy Desert area of Western Australia first appeared in 1990. It is the result of an extraordinary partnership between Jimmy Pike, a Walmajarri man who was born in the Great Sandy Desert, and Pat Lowe, a writer who grew up in England and emigrated to Western Australia in 1972. Lowe lived in the desert for three years with Pike. She observed and was respectful of the traditions and the knowledge Pike had acquired.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History, Religion
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Jason Koutsoukis; 6/5/10
Israeli historian Shlomo Sand is looking for new friends. Since the publication of his book The Invention of the Jewish People, an unsparing assault on Jewish historiography and Israel’s Zionist edifice, Sand has felt the wrath of friends, colleagues and Jews everywhere. ”I knew it would not be easy for me. But now I have two, maybe three friends left,” says Sand. ”There have been many death letters.” We are chatting in the living room of Sand’s Tel Aviv apartment. Just home from Paris, where he has spent the previous semester teaching, Sand, who turns 64 in September, betrays the weariness of an ageing prizefighter. ”I’m not so fond of Paris, you know. It’s very beautiful, of course, but I don’t find it an easy life there.”… He sits me on one sofa, and himself on another. After making coffee and warming some chocolate pudding, Sand’s wife, Varda, plonks herself on the armrest alongside her husband and slides an arm across his shoulders. Tired he may be, but Sand has also become famous. Having sold 8000 copies in Israel, The Invention of the Jewish People has become an international bestseller and is already being translated into 17 languages.
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Tags: History, Israel
Posted in Australia, Israel & Palestine | No Comments »
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
22/2/10
The buried antiquities of Ur, the biblical birthplace of Abraham and one of the cradles of civilisation, could outshine those of ancient Egypt, archeologists believe. With Iraq ravaged by war and strife since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Baghdad’s struggling government has had greater priorities than funding large-scale digs at Ur, where only small teams have been working since 2005. “When the (large-scale) excavations restart, tonnes of antiquities will see the light of day, filling entire museum wings,” enthused Dhaif Moussin, who is in charge of protecting a site that has been prone to looting. “This site will become perhaps more important than Giza,” he added, referring to the plateau outside the Egyptian capital of Cairo where some of mankind’s most treasured antiquities have been unearthed, including the Sphinx and several notable pyramids.
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Tags: History, Iraq
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Saturday, February 13th, 2010
Anthony Sattin; 2000;
Anthony Sattin is a London-based history and travel writer.
The Arabs: A History; By Eugene Rogan Allen Lane,
In the aftermath of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre, an elderly Arab from the Gulf told me that he thought it was the work of American agents. The claim, however fantastic, seemed perfectly logical to him, for it gave the US an excuse to intervene in the Middle East and Asia’s oil-rich regions. Eugene Rogan’s book explains why that Arab, and Arabs generally, feel so suspicious of the West. There has been a plethora of books about the Middle East and its people as we have struggled to understand why the towers came down: biographies of the prophet.
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Tags: Arab, History
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Saturday, October 31st, 2009
31/10/09;
Bruce Elder: The Sydney Morning herald; No Internet Text
Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine University of Chicago Press,
Written by two German professors of Near Eastern studies, this is a balanced and detailed overview of the remarkable history of Mesopotamia and Iraq. It traces the history of the region from its vital role in the establishment of humanity’s first sedentary settlements (it is hard to imagine that before humans settled in the Tigris-Euphrates crescent there were only hunter- gatherers wandering the lands of the Middle East). It reminds readers that it was about 3200 BC at Uruk that humans started to use writing and then traces the rise of the city states, the evolving empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the invasions of Alexander the Great, the Parthians and the Sasanians, the Islamic conquest of the region, the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent creation of the Iraqi monarchy and the Republic of Iraq. Anyone who wants to place the recent events in Iraq and Iran in a larger, richer and more complex context will find this well-written short history of the region an excellent introductory primer.
Tags: History, Middle East
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Bernard Lane; 28/10/09
The Philistines were anything but. “They introduced Mycenaean, Greek-style pottery and iron-working, they were artistic and sophisticated,” says Louise Hitchcock, an archeologist from the University of Melbourne. On Monday she and a colleague won a $538,000 grant from the Australian Research Council to do serious digging with 25-30 students at a Philistine site in present day Israel. She says the ancient Israelites were the true philistines since they were rustics by comparison with the urban sophisticates who settled next to them about 1180 BC. But the Israelites were first-rate propagandists and used the Old Testament to bear false witness against the pagan Philistines. As for the epic struggle between David and Goliath, champion of the Philistines, Dr Hitchcock suspects it is “just a myth”.
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Tags: History, Israel, Scriptures
Posted in Israel & Palestine, Religion | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Nazir Khaja; 6/10/09; (2 Items)
Every Muslim talks about the Golden Age of Islam, and is nostalgic about it. Rightly so. In terms of science, medical progress, scientific achievements, and philosophical, religious inquiries, Islam and Muslim societies were recognized as the gateway to knowledge. While Muslims derive great satisfaction in recounting the past glory of Islam, no one is interested in answering the questions as to how these things ended. There must be a reason for this. Why Islam suddenly went into a deep freeze intellectually speaking? The process of going from religious commitment to religious confusion begs understanding and inquiry, especially by Muslims themselves.
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Tags: History, Islam, Religion, Visitors, Workers
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Friday, May 29th, 2009
Thomas Sullivan; 29/5/09
Thomas Sullivan grew up in Connecticut (epicenter of the financial crisis) and now lives in Seattle. His writing has appeared in Arts & Opinion, Bravado Literary Magazine, and Dogmatika.
Lately I’ve been reading Eduardo Galeano’s book, Open Veins Of Latin America. The early portion of the book discusses what happened to Spain in the 16th century following its conquest of Latin America. The Spanish created mines and drained the area of its gold and silver, so receiving a huge infusion of unearned money. One might suspect that this windfall turned Spain into an economic powerhouse. But some funny things happened when the easy money arrived. The Spanish king proceeded to spend a huge amount of the nation’s reserves on wars against the ‘enemies of Christianity’. The nobility and upper-classes poured vast sums into new estates, palatial homes, and luxury goods imported from other countries. Many in the lower classes, attempting to emulate the gilded, ostentatious lifestyle of those above them, abandoned productive jobs and rushed into speculative pursuits.
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Tags: Christianity, Colonialism, History
Posted in Aid / Trade, Christianity, Human Rights | No Comments »
Friday, April 24th, 2009
Joan Chittister; 24/4/09
Here’s a quiz for you: What are Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex and Inter Caetera and what do they have to do with us – to governments, to churches and synagogues and temples and mosques – and the Vatican? Answer: I didn’t know either. Then I got a handwritten copy of a letter from an Indian grandmother that not only answered the original question but made me think of a lot of other questions, as well. The letter reads: ‘I am Grandmother Beatrice Long-Visitor Holy Dance. I am from the Oglala Lakota Nation. My original homelands are the Black Hills of South Dakota. I want to speak to the issue of “Healing Our Relations.”… The question, of course, is, is the charge true? Unfortunately, yes. “Roman Pontifex,” written by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso of Portugal is clear and unequivocal. The decree reads: “We weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso – to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit… More than true, the content is also shocking.
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Tags: Christianity, History, Human Rights, Religion
Posted in Christianity, Human Rights, Terrorism | No Comments »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Martin Flanagan; 28/3/09;
- The Dreaming And Other Essays; By W. E.H. Stanner with an introduction by Robert Manne; Black Inc
- An Appreciation Of Difference: W. E. H. Stanner And Aboriginal Australia; Edited by Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett; Aboriginal Studies Press
Writing in The Monthly magazine in August 2007, Robert Manne said anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner was “certainly the most interesting writer on Aboriginal society Australia has ever seen”. Stanner (1905-81) certainly figures among the most interesting white fellas to have engaged with Aboriginal society but is he the most interesting non-Aboriginal writer on the subject? Stanner coined some fine phrases but his voice is still that of the man trapped in the iron mask of objectivity. He’s from a time when anthropology still had some idea of itself as a science. Stanner’s trajectory is interesting because it leads him to unscientific conclusions to do with being human and what might be learnt from human beings as different from himself as those he encountered around Wadeye, then Port Keats, in the 1930s and, during a second spell, in the 1950s.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History
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Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
Maya Sela;1 8/3/09
Professor Shlomo Sand, the Tel Aviv University history professor and author of a controversial book on the genetic origins of the Jews, this week received a top critics prize from French journalists. Sand, whose book “When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?” ignited controversy in Israel and in Jewish circles, is the recipient of the Aujourd’hui Award, which is given to the best non-fiction political or historical work. The book, which was published by the Resling imprint, spent 19 weeks on the bestseller list in Israel. Though it has been in bookstores for just six months in France, it has thus far sold 25,000 copies, good enough to remain on the bestseller list. Sand’s book deals with questions that remain taboo in Israeli society, among them the ancestral origins of the Jewish people and the genetic lineage shared with modern-day Israelis.
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Tags: History, Israel
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Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Aban Contractor; 11/3/09
Smoke-filled opium dens populated the tiny lanes and alleys running off Little Bourke Street in Melbourne’s Chinatown during the late 19th century. Frequented by Chinese, European and Australian gold-diggers, they were the archetypal dens of iniquity so beloved by crime writers and their followers. One character who caught the public’s attention in the 1880s was Fook Shing, the detective. A notorious figure, he led police investigators and reporters through the dark and murky streets and fantan gambling houses in pursuit of criminals. But he was no figment of the imagination. Fook Shing, a headman of the Chinese community in Bendigo, was Victoria’s longest serving Chinese detective, a man called on to help hunt the notorious Ned Kelly after rumours circulated that the Chinese community was hiding the Kelly gang in Beechworth.
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Tags: Australia, China, History, Migrants
Posted in Australia, China, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2009
Toby Davidson; 27/2/09; Toby Davidson is an associate lecturer in literary studies and professional writing at Deakin University. His research seeks to address the gap in Australian scholarship regarding Australian Christian mystical poetry in line with the literary criticisms of other traditions. He is also a published poet. Fremantle Press
The recent Victorian bushfires have caused many Australians to ponder the nature of land, love, community and identity. Aside from the paroxysms of some in the conservative press, it has been a time of reflection with few instant answers. Fremantle Arts Centre Press’s new anthology Heartsick for Country is profoundly relevant in the current climate because its 16 Indigenous authors answer in a rich variety of ways the question of what it means to belong to ‘country’. Their country is one whose ancient landscape and traditions of custodianship were violently disrupted well before the 2009 fires.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights, Racism | No Comments »
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Babette Smith’ 24/1/09; Babette Smith is author of Australia’s Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era. This article had its origins in a speech to the Independent Scholars Association of Australia.
As historians consider their draft for the national history curriculum, it is important they find a place for close study of the convict era. Not just the First Fleet. Not just NSW. Australians need to understand there were convicts somewhere on the continent for more than 80 years, a reality with lasting implications for our society. Let me explain what we will lose if convict history is not given due weight.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
Nicolas Rothwell; 29/11/08;
First Australians: An Illustrated History; Edited by Rachel Perkins, and Marcia Langton;
Superimposed on a series of lovely landscape vistas, the invocations that began each episode of the First Australians television series also open this majestic book: “Before the dreaming the Australian continent was a flat, featureless place, devoid of life. Then a myriad of beings came down from the sky …” This, though, is a history book, history related from an Aboriginal perspective, and it forms a bitter complement to the master narrative of Australia’s steady, tranquil advance.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History, Reconciliation
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Racism | No Comments »
