History

By David J. Wasserstein | – Be careful of the company you keep. In a threat delivered over Twitter on Jan. 4, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he is prepared to “HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD” culturally important targets in Iran should the country retaliate for the American killing of its top general. […]

Environment

Did Undersea Volcanoes Hasten Fall of Eastern Rome and Pave way for Rise of Islam?

The Watchers

By Julie Celestial ( The Watchers) – Researchers presented underwater volcanism as a new interpretation of why the sky mysteriously went dark for over a year beginning 536 A.D., with some parts of Europe and Asia seeing the Sun for only about four hours a day and accounts saying the Sun gave no more light […]

Christianity

Knights Templar: still loved by conspiracy theorists 900 years on

The Conversation

By Patrick Masters | – On Christmas Day, 1119, the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II persuaded a group of French knights led by Hugh de Payne II to save their souls by protecting pilgrims travelling the Holy Land. And so the Order of the Knights Templar was formed. This revolutionary order of knights lived as […]

Colonialism

When an Imperial U.S. first Tried to Crush a Muslim Movement: Massacres in the Philippines

Danny Sjursen

(Tomdispatch.com) – For a decade and a half, the U.S. Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar? As it happens, that war unfolded half a world away from the Greater Middle East and more than a century ago in the southernmost islands of the Philippines. Back then, American soldiers […]

Christianity

White Anxiety and Imperial Christianity: The GOP Pathologies that Twin them with Trump

Rebecca Gordon

(Tomdispatch.com ) – On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast, Carl Bernstein. It was Bernstein, with fellow Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting broke open the story of how the Committee to Re-elect the […]

Archaeology

Did Ancient Iraq’s Huge Assyrian Empire Rise and Fall on Climate Change?

The Conversation

By Ashish Sinha and Gayatri Kathayat | – Ancient Mesopotamia, the fabled land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, was the command and control center of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This ancient superpower was the largest empire of its time, lasting from 912 BC to 609 BC in what is now modern Iraq and Syria. […]

Chemical Weapons

On Armistice Day: How WW I is at the Root of our Total Wars– Poison Gas, Aerial Bombing, Machine Guns

H. Patricia Hynes

Watching Londoners reveling in the streets on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the war critic and pacifist Bertrand Russell commented that people had cheered for war, then cheered for peace –“ the crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror.” (1) (Informed Comment) – World War 1 was the first […]

History

The First Inscriptional Evidence for the Wife of the Prophet Muhammad, Aisha

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Saudi archeologist Muhammad al-Maghthawi has published a photograph of an inscription in the vicinity of Medina that seems to be the first to mention the Prophet’s third wife, `A`isha. It seems to date from the first century of the Muslim era (A. H.), and is probably from the late […]

Assyrians

When Christians First Met Muslims (Emir-Stein Center Talk)

Emir-Stein Center

Michael Penn | Emir-Stein Center | Video Clip and Transcript | – If history matters, then getting right the history of the first encounters of the world’s two largest religions—Christianity and Islam—really matters. In this fascinating video, Prof. Michael Penn, the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, sheds light on the […]