History Readings

When I see a commercial building under construction today, I see nothing like this in the materials and workmanship, perhaps because it is simply a function of finance, expected to survive only until it is fully amortized in a company’s budget.

This is not the fault of homeowners, but of the industries whose practices favor the use of inferior products and labor that drive modern construction: the developers, lenders, builders and Realtors who, to make quick money, have created a stock of domestic and commercial infrastructure that is a waste of resources and will not last.

this experience, multiplied by those of millions of homeowners, affects how we as a country view our public infrastructure. We have seen short-term fixes and shoddy workmanship at home, and we see our bridges and roads the same way.

For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war.

“The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,” Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals.

Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939, when restraint was costly, and miss the lessons of 1914, when restraint could have avoided the war? Continue reading the main story Recent Comments AR 3 hours ago So exactly 100 years ago Baghdad and Damascus were sleepy, almost forgotten provincial cities of the Ottoman Empire. Too bad they didn't... AHS 3 hours ago Thanks for this thoughtful and challenging article. We Americans, in particular, are often unaware of the context of our lives and politics... Kevin Cahill 3 hours ago World War I showed that politics doesn't always work well. Vietnam and W's invasion of Iraq showed that it often doesn't work well. See All Comments Write a comment

There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and German minorities in line.

these are ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.

The Hapsburg rulers might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.

along the way the authors raise important questions. “The state is in trouble,” they note. “The mystery is why so many people assume that radical change is unlikely.” They’re right to see this as a mystery: If the last 500 years have shown us anything, it is that radical change happens, repeatedly.

Yet in their cheery tour of the last few centuries, they never grapple with a still more troubling truth: The evolution of the “ever-­improving” Western system of governance is inextricably bound up with mass carnage.

it’s time to kill this mistaken idea once and for all. Basically everything in modern agriculture is unnatural. “The cereal crops we eat bear little resemblance to their naturally selected ancestors, and the environments in which we grow them are equally highly manipulated and engineered by us,” she writes. “We have, over the last 10,000 years, bred out of our main food plants all kinds of survival strategies that natural selection put in.”

“Agriculture is the invention of humans,” she adds. “It is the deliberate manipulation of plants (and animals) and the environment in which they grow to provide food for us. The imperative is not that we should stop interfering with nature, but that we should interfere in the best way possible to provide a reliable, sustainable, equitable supply of nutritious food.”

I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly.

It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.

the assumption of that "something new" is happening "racially," that these terms are somehow constant is one of the great, and underestimated, barriers to understanding the case for reparations.

Conventional computing is based on a bit that can be either a 1 or a 0, representing a single value in a computation. But quantum computing is based on qubits, which simultaneously represent both zero and one values. If they are placed in an “entangled” state — physically separated but acting as though they are connected — with many other qubits, they can represent a vast number of values simultaneously.

In the approach that Microsoft is pursuing, which is described as “topological quantum computing,” precisely controlling the motions of pairs of subatomic particles as they wind around one another would manipulate entangled quantum bits.

By weaving the particles around one another, topological quantum computers would generate imaginary threads whose knots and twists would create a powerful computing system. Most important, the mathematics of their motions would correct errors that have so far proved to be the most daunting challenge facing quantum computer designers.

rather than a respectful salutation of Europe’s triumph over parochial nationalism, the conference set off an ethnic firestorm in the Balkans that reached the highest political circles. The controversy speaks to how the scholarly interpretation of a crucial turning point like the Great War remains disputed and entangled in present-day politics.

Princip’s nationalist politics and the Serbs’ role in the war remain highly contentious issues, particularly in the Balkans. The Serbs tend to consider Princip a hero who struck a blow against the repressive Habsburg monarchy, which ruled Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time. In recognition of the centennial, monuments to Princip are being constructed in downtown Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and in Serb-dominated eastern Sarajevo.

In contrast with that view, most historians from the region and elsewhere in Europe have tended to see Princip as a terrorist, rather than a hero.

the cozy world of German publishing has been slow to adapt to the Internet age, whether in online sales or digital publishing. That has left a vacuum, which Amazon, which is based in Seattle, has swiftly moved to fill. According to industry estimates, it controls as much as 70 percent of the German market for online sales of printed and electronic books.

Germany is the company’s largest market outside the United States. Its earnings in Germany reached 1.9 billion euros, or $2.6 billion, last year.

The antitrust agency on Tuesday confirmed receipt of the 22-page formal complaint. After reviewing it, the government will decide whether grounds are sufficient to find that Amazon holds a market-dominant position and as a result may be investigated for potential antitrust violations.

More than a million homes and businesses along the nation’s coasts could flood repeatedly before ultimately being destroyed. Entire states in the Southeast and the Corn Belt may lose much of their agriculture as farming shifts northward in a warming world. Heat and humidity will probably grow so intense that spending time outside will become physically dangerous, throwing industries like construction and tourism into turmoil.

That is a picture of what may happen to the United States economy in a world of unchecked global warming, according to a major new report released Tuesday by a coalition of senior political and economic figures from the left, right and center, including three Treasury secretaries stretching back to the Nixon administration.

The former Treasury secretaries — including Henry M. Paulson Jr., a Republican who served under President George W. Bush, and Robert E. Rubin, a Democrat in the Clinton administration — promised to help sound the alarm. All endorse putting a price on greenhouse gases, most likely by taxing emissions.

The site in Happisburgh was 900,000 years old, a time when mammoths and hippos still roamed in these parts. No human bones or prints that old had ever been found in Britain.

Standing on the ridge above Cardigan Bay in Borth, Dr. Bates described what the area would have looked like at the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago: more than half a mile of ice overhead and dry land stretching across today’s North Sea. The sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.“You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,”

suggest that they walked upright and looked much like modern humans, though their brains were smaller. If they had language, it was primitive. Living at the tail end of an interglacial era, as winters were growing colder, they may have had functional body hair. So far, there is no evidence that they used clothes, shelter, fire or tools more complex than simple stone flakes.