Many people watching the news coming out of the Near East would presume that Hebrew has been the language spoken by Jewish people throughout history. But for nearly 2,000 years, Hebrew was as dead as Latin – and much like Latin, was spoken fluently by only a tiny percentage of educated people, and then […]
“Harm” = mental or physical injury They say the taxes spent on the US military are essential for “protecting freedoms” and keeping Americans safe from harm. The leading cause of “harm” in the USA is poverty, not the actions of foreign powers. The lowest rates of premature death in the USA are in […]
I have written elsewhere about the Second Amendment of the US Constitution having its roots in two or three major aspects of USA history. On 15 Dec 1791, the second (of an initial ten amendments) was appended to the US Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary […]
Attempting to understand and decipher history – real history – is hard. We read, we question, we read some more, we check our sources for ideological bias, we read someone else’s revision of canonical sources, we sniff around for hidden motivations and contingencies… And when we think we’ve got to the deepest level of […]
Why is J. D. Vance misrepresenting his ethnic background? 1) Because he’s a man with limited knowledge of his own family? or is it because: 2) If he admitted his ancestors were once “not quite white” Appalachians, he would have to confront the real historical reasons for transgenerational poverty there? or maybe: 3) By […]
It is no coincidence that “Hillbilly Face” co-existed for decades alongside Blackface. To explain why, we need to step back in time… America’s earliest cultural foundations always involved a delicate tightrope walk between the forces of God (Puritans, Massachusetts Bay Colony) and Mammon (speculators, Virginia Colony). This delineation was of course not entirely clear-cut. […]
American History 101 (or 289?) “Mr. Potts, a Master of Arts, well practised in Chirurgerie and Physique, and expert also in distillinge of waters.” In 1623, Dr. John Potts, holder of a masters degree from Oxford University in England, prepared a poison to be served in wine to the Powhatan delegation to peace talks […]
Continuum… Our local once-a-year jazz project wrapped-up last night. When considering what the USA has given the world, you’ll usually hear things like Hollywood, rock & roll, cheeseburgers, or democracy. I’m not here to defend the merits or legitimacy of those claims. But jazz. As jazz legend Art Blakey once remarked “Jazz washes away […]
In the USA, skin color and phenotype (physical appearance) have been used for over 400 years as indicators of “race”. Even worse than this, “race” is then used as a proxy for “ethnicity”. But “White” is not an ethnicity. And “Black” is not an ethnicity. These “colors” are social caste categories which have become […]
Politics in the USA has been run under a two-party system over the past century. It is easy to forget that without combined state and corporate-funded violence and corporate media propaganda, the USA might still have a Socialist or Social Democratic Party. And no, we’re not talking about Communism or Soviet-style collectivism. We’re talking […]
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