Sun Yatsen on Fundamentals of National Reconstruction, 1923
Mao on Classes in Chinese Society, 1926
Mao’s Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1927
Statement by General Marshall, January 7, 1947 (from The Department of State Bulletin, XV1, No. 394)
White Paper Excerpt: United States Position on China, August 1949
Mao’s Response to White Paper, “Cast Away Illusions and Prepare for Struggle”, August 14, 1949
Ted Grant on the Chinese Revolution
Students must be able to synthesize these documents. Establish connections between them.
In less than a decade China could be the world’s largest economy. But its continued economic success is under threat from a resurgence of the state and resistance to further reform.
The Economist offers another special report on China. I’ve excerpted the most relevant articles.
Ending the drug war is only half the battle for the candidates to replace Calderon in 2012; the second half will be convincing the rest of the world that Mexico’s not just a narco-state.
Read Malcolm Beath from FP Magazine
The Boxer Uprising, 11 years before the collapse of China’s last imperial dynasty, was portrayed in Western accounts as a savage outburst of primitive xenophobia directed at the West and its civilising religion, Christianity. The northern Chinese peasants with their red headscarves, who believed in a magic that protected them from foreign bullets and in the power of ancient martial arts that could defeat the industrial world’s most powerful armies, were described with a mixture of fear and racist scorn. But in China the Boxers are officially remembered as somewhat misguided patriots.
Great piece on how the Boxer Rebellion is (mis)remembered in China today.
It’s the year 2031–one generation removed from Sept. 11, 2001–and Americans are commemorating the 30th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. How well did America respond to that day, when viewed with the benefit of hindsight? How has history judged our leaders’ actions?
Here, a [hypothetical] historian looks back on that distant event and explains how 9/11 would change America, and the world, in ways that few could have imagined.
Niall Ferguson imagines the future in this Foreign Policy piece.
Check out this stunning piece on India’s caste system in the 21st century from the 2010 Economist end of year issue.
Warren Cohen of University of Maryland offers this concise summary of Sino-US policy during the Cold War.
Here is the response sheet
Few outside countries have more at stake in the evolution of Iran’s political situation than the United States, which has been in a state of open enmity with the Islamic Republic for more than three decades. Threats of Iran-backed terrorism, Tehran’s apparent nuclear ambitions, and its evident aim of destabilizing American allies—chiefly Israel—are perpetually high on the list of US concerns in the region. Why is Iran so important to the US? What explains the enduring animosity between the two countries? Answers to these and other questions about the United States’ position in the region today can be found by looking back to the Cold War.
Reagan continues to exercise an enormous fascination—as political leader of the free world at a critical moment in time; as a transformational president; and of course, as the man whose policies, it has been argued, contributed more than anything else to bringing about the demise of communism.
In 1680 the people known collectively as “Pueblos” rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. The Spanish had established and maintained their rule with terror, beginning with Juan de Oñate’s invasion in 1598. When the people of Acoma resisted, Oñate ordered that one leg be chopped from every man over fifteen and the rest of the population be enslaved, setting a pattern that lasted four-score years. Now, rising virtually as one, the Pueblos drove out Spanish soldiers and authorities.
No Native people affected the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history more than the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of present-day upstate New York. Historians have been attempting to explain how and why ever since, and central to their explanations is the remarkable political and diplomatic structure, the League of the Iroquois. The League has fascinated us for hundreds of years. In the seventeenth century, this Native confederacy united the Five Iroquois Nations—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—into something more than an alliance but something less than a single, monolithic polity.
Among Lundberg’s criticism of Burns’ Civil War series is that, “For all its appeal, however, The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns’ sentimental vision and the romance of Foote’s anecdotes. Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved. Confederates, you might need reminding after seeing it, were fighting not for the unification of the nation, but for its dissolution. Moreover, they were fighting for their independence from the United States in the name of slavery and the racial hierarchy that underlay it. Perhaps most disingenuously, the film’s cursory treatment of Reconstruction obscures the fact that the Civil War did not exactly end in April of 1865 with a few handshakes and a mutual appreciation for a war well fought. Instead, the war’s most important outcome—emancipation—produced a terrible and violent reckoning with the legacy of slavery that continued well into the 20th century.”
At the risk of being reductive, Pro-Con.org attempts to succinctly summarize both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Watch live or archived footage of Lords and Commons debates here.
Robert Malley is a lawyer and conflict resolution specialist. From 1998 to 2001, he was the special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs. During that time, he helped organize the 2000 Camp David Summit.
He discusses the impact and potential impacts of the Arab Spring on Israel and Palestine with Terri Gross.
Slate’s Steven Metcalf offers insight into the evolution of Nozick’s thoughts on libertarianism.
President Lyndon Johnson, domineering and manipulative, lives on in American memory as the classic power broker. He bullied opponents, sweet-talked skeptics, and chewed out subordinates. He oozed confidence as he passed one piece of landmark social legislation after another, even as his cockiness helped to mire the country in Vietnam. Yet this is not the Johnson who emerges from volumes seven and eight of The Presidential Recordings, a transcription of his phone conversations from June 1 to July 4 of 1964.