By Ronald Bleier. A  New York Times  feature story, “FDR and Jews: Book Tries for Balanced View on Roosevelt and Jews” March 9, 2013, took up a subject I addressed some seven years ago. As suggested by the Times headline, the new book [...]

Posted  by Juan Cole. Lior Sternfeld writes in a guest column for Informed Comment 2013 marks the sixtieth anniversary to the most atrocious intervention of the US in the Middle East. On August 19, 1953 the CIA conspired with the British [...]

  By Ronald Bleier. Note:   I wrote the following brief letter to the  London Review of Books in reply to Cambridge  Professor Richard J. Evans’s  review of a new book on Hitler’s illnesses.  I had occasion to think Evans an [...]

  By Khaled Fahmy. In 1977 Lawrence Durrell revisited Alexandria to participate in a BBC film about the city. Titled Spirit of Place, the film, we are told, shows “palatial villas overgrown with bougainvillaea… abandoned, confiscated [...]

By Marce Cameron. Fidel Castro is no longer Cuba’s head of state. Is this a critical moment in the life of the Cuban Revolution as it approaches its 54th anniversary in January 2013, or merely a symbolic changing of the guard? The revolution’s [...]

By Melanie Nathan. “ Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Harry have kindly written to us to celebrate 30 years of our fight against HIV,” notes the Terrence Higgins Trust, beside a heartwarming picture on the charity’s [...]

by Andrew Hartman.   Leo P. Ribuffo The death of a favorite teacher in his or her late old age typically evokes strong emotions from former students in their early old age.  In this case the emotions are mine and the teacher is Gene [...]

  By Alexander Sodiqov. On September 21, 1991, less than two weeks after Tajikistan proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union, angry crowd toppled a monument to Vladimir Lenin in the center of Dushanbe. The removal of the monument [...]

  By Ronald Bleier. Note: In connection with my research on WWII, specifically, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s collusion with Hitler, I had occasion to quibble with an excellent review article in the New York Review of Books [...]

  by Andrew Hartman. Readers of this blog don’t need convincing that the current political landscape is bleak. Faced with a choice between centrist austerity-mongers led by chief austerity-monger Obama, and nihilistic anti-government [...]

  By Subodh Rana. Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana was the toast of London town. A prince from the Orient captured the popular imagination of Victorian England. A newspaper account of the period describes him as athletic, dark and handsome; [...]

By Subodh  Rana. “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity”, Sir Winston Churchill. The burden of defeat carried many of the mutinous Indian leaders and their near and dear ones all the way to the Nepal Terai. [...]

By Andrew Hartman.   David Hollinger will be the keynote speaker for this year’s S-USIH annual meeting, with a talk intriguingly titled, “Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Survivalism, and the Question of Secularization.” This topic fits [...]

By Subodh Rana.   Marital alliance was just a means to an end in those days of the feudal nation states spreading across the vast Indian subcontinent; underage daughters were given in marriage by their parents to foster alliances, ingratiate [...]

By Rana Subodh. The largess brought by the envoy from Nepal was fit for a king. The treasure trove consisted of a bejewelled dagger renowned as the Khukri, the fearsome weapon of the Gurkhas so potent during close combat; the tiger skin with [...]

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins. French-Russian relations have often been taut. So it is again today. Yet, today, it has nothing to do with Soviet nuclear missiles aimed at Paris, but it is all about a church. Not just any little inconspicuous church [...]

By Jaime Ortega. Video: Ocean City, Maryland Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy      [kaltura-widget uiconfid=”10255051″ entryid=”1_8gr2acnk” width=”600″ height=”282″ style=”text-align: center;” [...]