Talking History

Historia y Guerra en la Niebla: Historical Vagueness in Disney’s Encanto

Miguel Ángel Torres Yunda Encanto (2021) details the lives of the Madrigal family and the struggle to heal from generational trauma. From the beginning of Encanto, the film focuses on setting the location of Encanto as a Colombian town by displaying items such as arepas, sombreros vueltiaos, mochilas Wayuu, ajiaco soup, or with Colombia written on maps or painted on the side of a house. … Continue reading Historia y Guerra en la Niebla: Historical Vagueness in Disney’s Encanto

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Talking History

A Triangle of Impossibilities: The Israeli Lebanese Maritime Border

Rawan Chaker Globalization, advances in technology, and intensifying economic competition between states have amplified oceans’ importance in international affairs. Access to maritime spaces means access to natural resources and foreign direct investment. While clearly defined borders are one of the foundations for national sovereignty, these borders become much more ambiguous in maritime spaces. The unique cultural and geopolitical history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has produced … Continue reading A Triangle of Impossibilities: The Israeli Lebanese Maritime Border

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Talking History

Reckoning with the Past: Nazi-Looted Art Restitution in Austria

Kathleen Walsh In 2015, the Austrian Commission for Provenance Research announced that a painting by the famous Austrian artist Gustav Klimt had been restituted to the wrong family. The initial research confused two Klimt paintings that Nazis stole from Jewish families during World War II: “Apple Tree II” and “Roses Under the Trees.” While the heirs of Nora Stiasny–an Austrian Jewish art collector killed in … Continue reading Reckoning with the Past: Nazi-Looted Art Restitution in Austria

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Making History

How One Missing Data Point Can Illustrate a History of Amazigh Exclusion

Elizabeth Pantaleon While many would say that a picture is worth a thousand words, I would argue that one data point can be just as powerful. For that matter, so can the absence of data. An elusive yet illustrative finding that would pack such a punch is the exact cancer incidence rate among Amazigh patients from the Rif region compared to other areas in Morocco. … Continue reading How One Missing Data Point Can Illustrate a History of Amazigh Exclusion

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Writing History

A Conversation with Michael Kazin

Mariam Aiyad Michael Kazin is a historian of US History, writer, and professor in the History Department at Georgetown University. Journalism has always been a key factor in Michael Kazin’s life. Throughout middle school, high school, and college, Kazin wrote and edited for his school newspaper. Later in his early career, he wrote for Leftist underground newspapers. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of … Continue reading A Conversation with Michael Kazin

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Making History

What is Liberia to a US Historian? Bicentennial Reflections Part II

Casey Donahue Few nations’ founding loom so large in the American imagination. In US historiography, the pursuit of the Liberian Republic—begun in the early 1820s and realized in 1847—is perhaps the most highly symbolized origin story of any nation that is not the United States. It appears in our national narratives not as a critical study of African state-building, but as a palimpsest, on which … Continue reading What is Liberia to a US Historian? Bicentennial Reflections Part II

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Making History

An Agreeable Liberian History: Bicentennial Reflections Part I

Casey Donahue Liberia is putting a new spin on an old story. A bicentennial marking the arrival of the republic’s first American settlers has elicited proud nostalgia for the civic values they brought with them; but it also conjures painful memories of the unequal and ethnically stratified society they launched. In their quest to reconcile the anniversary’s contentious dual meanings, Liberian leaders have promoted a … Continue reading An Agreeable Liberian History: Bicentennial Reflections Part I

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Talking History

The NBA and the War on Drugs

Mariam Aiyad In July, the NBA dismissed the Toronto Raptors’ rookie guard Jalen Harris for violating the league’s Anti-Drug Program. While reports never specified which “drug of abuse” Harris tested positive for, it is notable that he was not accused of using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to gain an unfair advantage over other players. The NBA targeted him for recreational usage. Harris’s dismissal does not reflect … Continue reading The NBA and the War on Drugs

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Writing History

Romance and Nostalgia in the Coffeehouse

Kathleen Walsh On the website for the European Historic Cafés Association, one can find the itinerary for a nostalgic tour of the continent’s historically preserved coffeehouses. The tour spans Western, Central, and Southern Europe, stretching from Greece to Malta, Spain to Denmark. Most of Europe’s historic cafés, however, are within the confines of the former Austro-Hungarian empire—Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary—and they project a nostalgia … Continue reading Romance and Nostalgia in the Coffeehouse

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Making History

Contextualizing “Space” from a Historical Perspective: Tracing the Construction of Cartographic Designs delineating “Us” and “Them”

Krystel von Kumberg Nation-states, as historical sociologist Anthony Smith observed, are “so easily recognizable from a distance, [yet] seem to dissolve before our eyes the closer we come and the more we attempt to pin them down.” As humans, much of how we perceive the world is cartographically suffocated, overly informed by both natural and artificial geographic boundaries. A central feature of the nation-state system … Continue reading Contextualizing “Space” from a Historical Perspective: Tracing the Construction of Cartographic Designs delineating “Us” and “Them”

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