Ah, the 1950’s – a quaint decade of peace and prosperity. We compare it the 60’s, and mourn our nation’s lost hygiene, oops I mean innocence. Ok, so maybe that sort of nostalgia is overblown and a wee tad derogatory. Yet Dwight Eisenhower warned us of America turning into Amerika and we just didn’t get it. So Paul Krugman rides again to sell us his typically origami* version of economic events.
Read More »THE REIGN OF RAMESSES III has long intrigued scholars and laypersons alike, both because this pharaoh’s reign took place during a watershed period in history, and because of the remarkable preservation of his majestic “Mansion of a Million Years” at Medinet Habu. With Ramesses III: The Life and Times of Egypt’s Last Hero (University of Michigan Press, 2012), volume editors Eric H. Cline and David | Read More »
THE ISOLATIONIST MODEL of looking at ancient civilizations, from Pharaonic Egypt to Kassite Babylonia to Classical Greece, has increasingly fallen out of fashion in recent years as more and more scholars have begun to realize, and to study, the deep interconnections between ancient civilizations, particularly from the Late Bronze Age onward. In The Mediterranean Context of Early Greek History, Nancy H. Demand, professor emerita of | Read More »
The voluminous Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia, which boasts five sections, 52 chapters, and 54 authors, truly covers every topic that can be dealt with in 1,174 typewritten pages. Unfortunately, the attempted geographic and temporal scope – the entirety of the Anatolian peninsula over the course of nearly 10,000 years – would require several volumes this length to cover in full. As a result, some | Read More »
I have a confession to make. I am a thirty-something pundit on television and radio and I am frequently aggravated by many twenty and thirty-something pundits on television and radio. It is even a non-partisan aggravation. We all make mistakes and I am sure someone can be critical of me for the same reason I find so many up and coming political pundits so aggravating, | Read More »
WHAT ROLE DO culture myths – the stories civilizations tell about the beginning of law, medicine, arts and sciences, and civilization itself – have in defining a group’s legitimacy within society? In Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, Will McCants, a Middle East expert at CNA’s Center for Strategic Students and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, addresses this issue with | Read More »
There seems to be some confusion over why the Israelis should be so hostile to President Obama’s suggestion that the two-state solution be achieved by returning the Jewish state to its 1967 borders. The President’s supporters argue that since these borders were previously acceptable to Israel, they should be acceptable now. After all, pre-1967 Israel fought to defend those borders and they were on the table | Read More »
The plain pulverizing fact is that our war is religious war. It matters not one lick how much our modern mind recoils from this; it matters not one lick that Liberalism barely even has the vocabulary to talk about it, and will react with blind fury against most anyone who does want to talk about it. Looking over the modern world and all its proliferating | Read More »
In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, the German newspaper editor Josef Joffe contributes an intriguing if somewhat ungainly little essay; its subject is the mosque in Hamburg where Mohamed Atta and other September 11th conspirators plotted their treachery. German authorities recently shut it down. One of its jihadist preachers was finally tried and imprisoned. “This is where Imam Muhammad al-Fazazi used to preach venom and murder | Read More »
George Santayana is oft-quoted for his statement “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. It seems that those in the Obama administration are serial abusers of this violation. If for some reason you doubted this, look no farther than this political cartoon from 1934: Read the sign in the lower left closely. Sound familiar? There is some question as to whether | Read More »
Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, converted by St. Paul, along with Sts. Barnabas and Mark, on his first missionary journey. It remained Roman (and Byzantine) for 800 years, excepting a brief period of Arab occupation, until its conquest by the Crusaders under Richard Coeur de Lion, who in turn | Read More »
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