The famed French engineer of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, destroyed his career and the lives of twenty-ve thousand workers by insisting he could excavate across the mountainous Panamanian isthmus in the s. Learning from his mistakes, the Americans succeeded in the early s by taming the tropical insect-borne diseases and building an ingenious …
“This is the death of the poem as I have faithfully reported it, November 29, 1966, as I have faithfully reported it, this is the death of the poem” in-tones Canadian poet bpNichol one day after the Dominion Day celebrations marking Canada’s centennial year. Addressing a national television audi-ence, Nichol reads these lines with poets bill bissett an…
This pioneering study of the fate of Buddhism during the communist period in Cambodia puts a human face on a dark period in Cambodia’s history. It is the first sustained analysis of the widely held assumption that the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot had a centralized plan to liquidate the entire monastic order. Based on a thorough analysis of interview transcripts and a large body of contemporary m…
It was in November 2021 that we shared the intriguing idea of co-editing a book project on the historical figure of saxophonist Elise Hall. After sending several messages back and forth, we finally found a mutually agreeable time for a video meeting. Kurt was at his home in Brussels, while Adrianne was in Chicago, a sev-en-hour time difference. We had first met at a conference in 2016, “Prepo…
A million and a half Jews fought in the armed forces of the Allies during the Second World War. They served in the armies, navies, and air forces of their native lands. Many who were forced to flee the Nazis then joined the war effort in the countries that had given them refuge. Between 490,000 and 520,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Red Army.1Most of them were nat…
‘‘We look into history from motives of two kinds,’’ says the Oxford classicist Jasper Griffin. ‘‘There is curiosity about the past, what happened, who did what, and why; and there is the hope to understand the present, how to place and interpret our own times, experiences, and hopes for the future.’’1 As with the history of antiquity, the best contemporary history is usually dri…
Explanations for the onset of the Cold War must begin with World War II. A conflict that ranks, by any conceivable measure, as the most destructive in human history, World War II brought unparalleled levels of death, devastation, privation, and disorder. ‘The conflagration of 1939–1945 was so wrenching, so total, so profound, that a world was overturned,’ notes historian Thomas G. Paterso…
This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure maps an archaeology of failure in a culture seemingly ill-equipped to deal with it. To better understand failure, Kane argues, we must abstract from our subjective, personal disappointments and see them as meaningful symbols of a broader human struggle. By connecting twenty-first century digital aesthetics to critical issues in the history o…