Andrey Chikatilo, one of the most gruesome serial murderers in the history of the world, grew up with stories of Holodomor. His mother said that his older brother, Stepan, whose birth and death have...
Families gathered across the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving together this week. For some it involved a great deal of travel and stress. Hours of labour were spent in an attempt to create the...
One late night during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, as the swimmer Michael Phelps smashed yet another world record, I walked through Philadelphia thinking over its history and was struck by how well...
YaleGlobal, the magazine of the Yale University Centre for Study of Globalization, describes globalization as a historical process that began with the first movement of people out of Africa into...
The other day, I came across a very interesting document - an account of Swami Vivekananda’s visit to Thiruvananthapuram in December 1892. It was written by K Sundarama Iyer, a senior officer in...
This is a review of 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris. Yale University Press. 2008. In 1980's, a group of Israeli historians including Tom Segev of Haaretz (a daily Israeli newspaper),...
I. Guards, sentries, guides, they stalk the halls like silent wraiths clad in their dead blue blazers and knee length skirts. To speak to them is to encounter monotony made woman: instructions...
This is a review of God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Levering Lewis. W.W. Norton. 2008 Islamic presence in Spain between the 7th and 14th centuries has long been...
I arrived in Warsaw by train from Krakow. I forgot to take a book for my train ride, but this was a blessing in disguise, because Polish people have devised a wonderful system for book promotion:...
The fifth most visited city in Europe is the dragon city, otherwise known as beautiful Krakow. Its name dates back to a legend of a terrible dragon, defeated when a simple shoemaker named Krak...