Linking the past and the present Interview with the historian Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University. By RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is one of the most celebrated historians of India, internationally acclaimed particularly for her immense contribution to the interpretative studies of early India. Professor Thapar obtained her PhD (1958) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, under the supervision of Professor A.L. Ranabir Chakravarti: When one reads your latest book, The Past as Present, one gets an impression that you are a little sad about the state of the study of history, and the general perception of history, in India. “ We are still using a completely outdated understanding of history and methods of teaching it. Romila Thapar: Your question is about where history has gone in the last few decades in India. What is sad is that people still think that history is only information about the past. Sanitised!
The US just partnered with China to build a bullet train between LA and Vegas Americans can look forward to zooming between LA and Las Vegas at 240 km/h in a new high-speed bullet train that’s set to whittle the 370-kilometre trip down, from 4 hours in a car to just 80 minutes by train. That’s only slightly longer than the hour’s flight it takes to get there, except you’ll have the added bonus of not having to deal with airport nightmares. Facilitated by a partnership between a private US venture and a China Railway Group-led consortium, construction on the so-called XpressWest is expected to begin in late 2016. The project, which took four years of negotiations to finalise, is tipped to cost more than US$7 billion - all of which is coming from the private sector right now, with US government loans yet to be approved. There’s no word yet on when the project is expected to be operational. This won’t be the first bullet train to run between major American cities.
"Pro-American" History Textbooks Hurt Native Americans | Shannon Speed I teach Native American Studies and virtually none of my university students has had any education whatsoever in the history of this country's treatment of the 10 million or so people who lived here before Europeans arrived. They generally believe that the continent was more or less wide-open and that the few people who were here aided the Pilgrims with a harvest fest and then after a few skirmishes with settlers complied with their destiny as the vanishing Indian. The Texas State Board of Education wants to reinforce this knowledge gap, forcing Texas high schoolers to learn a sanitized version of U.S. history in the name of being "pro-American." The Texas board recently voted to allow state-defined curriculum for the Advanced Placement History Exam to trump that of the federally-defined curriculum on which the exam will be based in order to sidestep aspects of U.S. history they find distasteful. Omission of the truth is, in fact, a form of lying. These are historical facts.
150918180310 A first draft of the "tree of life" for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes -- from platypuses to puffballs -- has been released. A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life -- some containing upwards of 100,000 species -- but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life. The end result is a digital resource that available free online for anyone to use or edit, much like a "Wikipedia" for evolutionary trees. "This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together," said principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University. "It's by no means finished," Cranston said.
This Columbus Day, Seeking the Real History of Native Americans | The GroundTruth Project A Q&A with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. By Mark Trecka CHICAGO -- When Howard Zinn published A People's History of the United States in 1980, historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz told Zinn that he had largely failed to include the narratives of Native Americans. Zinn replied that it was up to Dunbar-Ortiz to write that book. After three decades of work, she published An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States with Beacon Press last year, challenging the version of U.S. history most Americans learn in school, a version of history that proceeds from the concepts of Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery. Lakota spiritual leader Chief Arvol Looking Horse attends a demonstration against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico in front of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 28, 2015. Mark Trecka: You have always challenged the way that we do history. RDO: I think for sure.
Dark matter hiding in stars may cause observable oscillations (Phys.org)—Dark matter has never been seen directly, but scientists know that something massive is out there due to its gravitational effects on visible matter. One explanation for how such a large amount of mass appears to be right in front of our eyes yet completely invisible by conventional means is that the dark matter is hiding in the centers of stars. In a new study, physicists have investigated the possibility that large amounts of hidden mass inside stars might be composed of extremely lightweight hypothetical particles called axions, which are a primary dark matter candidate. The scientists, Richard Brito at the University of Lisbon in Portugal; Vitor Cardoso at the University of Lisbon and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; and Hirotada Okawa at Kyoto University and Waseda University, both in Japan, have published their paper on dark matter in stars in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. "The above results are quite generic.
Celebrating the Genocide of Native Americans The sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own history into a mythological fantasy. The concepts of liberty, freedom and free enterprise in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are a mere spin. The US was founded and became prosperous based on two original sins: firstly, on the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their land by European colonialists; secondly, on slavery. This grim reality is far removed from the fairytale version of a nation that views itself in its collective consciousness as a virtuous universal agent for good and progress. In rewriting its own history about Thanksgiving, white America tells a Disney-like fairytale about the English pilgrims and their struggle to survive in a new and harsh environment. Columbus and his successors proto-capitalist propensity for greed was foreign to Native Americans. Gilbert Mercier is the Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post.
Nano-trapped molecules are potential path to quantum devices Single atoms or molecules imprisoned by laser light in a doughnut-shaped metal cage could unlock the key to advanced storage devices, computers and high-resolution instruments. In a paper published in Physical Review A, a team composed of Ali Passian of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Marouane Salhi and George Siopsis of the University of Tennessee describes conceptually how physicists may be able to exploit a molecule's energy to advance a number of fields. "A single molecule has many degrees of freedom, or ways of expressing its energy and dynamics, including vibrations, rotations and translations," Passian said. "For years, physicists have searched for ways to take advantage of these molecular states, including how they could be used in high-precision instruments or as an information storage device for applications such as quantum computing." Explore further: Standoff sensing enters new realm with dual-laser technique
These Are Words Scholars Should No Longer Use to Describe Slavery and the Civil War Michael Todd Landis, an Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University specializing in the intersection of slavery and politics in the 19th century United States, is the author of Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis (Cornell, 2014). Plantation or slave labor camp? Let’s face it: a new generation of scholarship has changed the way we understand American history, particularly slavery, capitalism, and the Civil War. Legal historian Paul Finkelman (Albany Law) has made a compelling case against the label “compromise” to describe the legislative packages that avoided disunion in the antebellum era.1 In particular, Finkelman has dissected and analyzed the deals struck in 1850. Likewise, scholar Edward Baptist (Cornell) has provided new terms with which to speak about slavery. I suggest we follow the lead of Finkelman and Baptist and alter our language for the Civil War.
Religious belief: A natural phenomenon Suppose the government runs random screening for a very rare mutation – Mutation X – present in 1 in every million. The test is 99% accurate. If your result is positive, does this mean that you probably have Mutation X? No. Imagine that there are 100 million people, of which 100 are X-carriers and 99,999,900 are not. On average, 99% of the X-carriers, that is 99 people, will test positive. This is a secular, quantitative, and imaginary application of the simple and devastating critique of religion that we find in David Hume’s great 1748 essay ‘Of Miracles’. Its real secular applications are widespread. Turn now to religion. Practically none, said Hume, because which is more likely: that the Red Sea should – magically – part just long enough for the escape of an enslaved people, or only that they should preserve such a myth? But in truth, and as Hume knew, religious belief is no miracle but a natural phenomenon with natural causes. But neither are they irresistible.
Was Moses a Founding Father? Last Tuesday, the Texas State Board of Education held a public hearing to choose which new social studies textbooks will be recommend to school districts in the state. The board was expected to vote to approve the majority of proposed textbooks and smooth the way for what should have been a final procedural vote on Friday. Instead, complaints by right-wing groups torpedoed the adoption process. Because the 15-member board voted not to adopt any books, publishers were forced to ignore historical fact and make last minute changes to their books to cater to the conservative activists. The problems with this textbook adoption process began in 2010, when the education board passed new history standards that require students to “identify the individuals whose principles of laws and government institutions informed the American founding documents, including those of Moses,” and establish how “biblical law” was a major influence on America’s founding.
Shakespeare and film around the world From the birth of film, Shakespeare’s plays have been a constant source of inspiration for many screenwriters, directors, and producers. As a result, hundreds of film and television adaptations have been made, each featuring either a Shakespearean plot, theme, character, or all three. Although the most frequently-produced and well-known adaptations are filmed and directed in the United Kingdom and the United States, Shakespeare’s work has traveled all around the world. From Mexico to Australia, Tibet to Russia, and Italy to Japan, Shakespeare has been translated into many languages and adapted onto screens in many ways. Take a look at these various films from around the world, all of which provide unique insight into their individual cultures by their respective filmmakers. Featured Image: Hollywood Playhouse presents “Will Shakespeare” by Clemence Dane.
South Korea to control history textbooks used in schools Image copyright EPA South Korea's government has announced controversial plans to control the history textbooks used in secondary schools. Currently, secondary schools can choose from textbooks published by eight different publishing companies. However, the government says that from 2017, all secondary schools must only use history textbooks issued by the state. The move has sparked fierce criticism from academics and opposition parties. The government has argued that current history textbooks are too left-leaning and encourage anti-American and pro-North Korea feelings, the BBC's Kevin Kim in Seoul reports. The new textbook, which will be called The Correct Textbook of History, will be written by a government-appointed panel of history teachers and academics. Opposition politicians and some academics have protested against the move, accusing the government of "distorting history".