Abraham Lincoln has an almost saintly place in U.S. history: the “Great Emancipator” whose leadership during the Civil War preserved the Union and abolished slavery. Often overlooked among his achievements is legislation he signed June 30, 1864, during the thick of the war – but only marginally related to the conflict. The Yosemite Valley Grant...
People act on their expectations about the future and beliefs about their ability to change outcomes. Policies directed at altering these expectations and beliefs can have stabilizing effects. Editor’s Note: When conflict breaks out, civilians inevitably suffer. But they do not react uniformly, with some fleeing, others staying, and still others joining the fray. Aidan Milliff...
Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women. The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men....
Myint Swe, the acting president of Mynamar’s military government, has warned that the country “will be split into various parts” after his armed forces suffered huge territorial losses to resistance fighters recently. His response was to call on Mynamar’s people to support his military forces, a call that is likely, based on previous experience, to...
Over 100 letters sent to French sailors by their fiancées, wives, parents and siblings – but never delivered – have been opened and studied for the first time since they were written in 1757-8. The messages offer extremely rare and moving insights into the loves, lives and family quarrels of everyone from elderly peasants to...
The U.N. body formed to promote respect for and protect people of African descent around the world says in its first report that they continue “to be victims of systemic racial discrimination and racialized attacks” and calls for reparations. The report, which was delivered to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, says reparations are essential to...
The Day of the Dead in Mexico smells like cempasuchil flowers and copal incense. It has a sweet taste. Sounds and colors abound. There are photos, candles and music all over. The hands of artisans prepare the altars to honor their ancestors. Although it is an intangible tradition, borne down from pre-Hispanic cultures, Day of the Dead...
On April 13, 1944, thousands of people clashed with police on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago. The melee was unrelated to U.S. participation in World War II, labor unrest or President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s controversial move to seize control of local Chicago industries. Rather, a massive, impatient art crowd overwhelmed the museum’s...
Spanish conquerors did not themselves bring inequality to the Aztec lands they invaded, they merely built on the socio-economic structure that was already in place, adapting it as it suited their plans. This is the subject of an article by Guido Alfani of Bocconi University, Milan, and Alfonso Carballo of NEOMA Business School in France....
During the Later Stone Age in what is now Namibia, rock artists imbued so much detail into their engravings of human and animal prints that current-day Indigenous trackers could identify which animals’ prints they were depicting, as well as the animals’ general age and sex. Andreas Pastoors of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, and colleagues report these...
