Shawn Liu Central Asia has long been imagined less as a place and more as a passage. In travelogues, school maps, and even much scholarship, it appears as a corridor—the Silk Road that carried goods and ideas between “centers” like China, Persia, or Europe. Historian Adeeb Khalid warns against this flattening: to see Central Asia only as a “road between somewhere and somewhere else” erases … Continue reading A Local History of Hong Kong
Luca Barison Today (October 14, 2025) is the 959th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings (AD 1066), a turning point in Norman history. The question I pose in the title of this piece has been very important to me in the last few years. Since I am aware that it won’t be as equally pressing to the majority of readers, I am going to explain … Continue reading Is it a good time to be a Normanist?
Patrick Grey To celebrate the start of Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, The Footnote reviewed some classic and recent works spotlighting the history, culture, and work of Latinx people. Diaspora, resistance, and solidarity are some of the major themes in this book list. We hope that our readers can use this list to explore the contributions of Latinx people within and outside of the academy, in the … Continue reading A Reading List in Honor of Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month
As the year comes to a close, The Footnote invited graduating MAGIC students to reflect on their academic and personal journeys at Georgetown. Hear from four of them below! Having made it to the finish line, what advice would you give to incoming students? Maddie Densmore: Everybody gets imposter syndrome at some point here. Don’t let it get to you; everyone grows so much during … Continue reading Graduating MAGIC Students Reflect on their Experiences
Patrick Grey On September 30, 1919, Black sharecroppers throughout Phillips County, Arkansas convened in a church in the town of Elaine to discuss fairer cotton prices for the fall sale and plan how to increase Black land ownership among Black farmers. Armed guards stood just outside of the church while white police officers were in a car parked nearby. Not long after the meeting began, … Continue reading An Oral History of a Native Son: The Elaine Massacre and its Living Memory
Rosie Click Donald Trump spoke about transforming Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” in a joint press conference with Israel in February of this year. His idea for the “redevelopment” involved forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza while hotels, casinos, beachside resorts, and restaurants were built, presumably by foreign companies. Later in the month, Trump posted an AI-generated video to his Truth Social account … Continue reading Foreign Tourism Development in Colonized Spaces: From Gaza to the Caribbean
Aidan Pritchard From its humble beginnings as an unnamed language in 1887, to the forefront of the League of Nations’ debate on auxiliary languages, Esperanto – meaning ‘one who hopes’ – has aimed to promote global peace and cooperation. The artificial language’s inventor, Ludwik Zamenhof, had grown up in Bialystok, Poland, a city populated by Poles, Russians, Germans, and Jews. The city’s linguistic barriers exacerbated … Continue reading Esperanto, Nationalism, and Bureaucracy in the League of Nations: A Language Caught in the Crossfire
In honor of the closing of Women’s History Month, we asked our editors and readers to share their favorite works that highlight women’s contributions throughout history and ongoing struggles. The following is a brief list of books that bring to life untold and overlooked stories of and by women, past and present. History & Nonfiction A Woman’s World, 1850–1960 by Marina Amaral and Dan Jones … Continue reading A Reading List for Women’s History Month
Shawn Liu The Taiping Rebellion is infamous for being one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, but it was also an ecological catastrophe. While historian John Fincher has described the conflict as a “heavily saturated topic” in historical scholarship, its ecological dimensions remain strikingly underexplored. Beyond the well-documented clashes of ideologies and armies, another form of destruction took place, one measured not in human … Continue reading Jianbi Qingye: The Environmental Warfare of the Taiping Rebellion: Walls of War, Fields of Fire
Maddie Densmore “I must confess that I did not witness the ship strike the rocks or the crew tie up the captain. Nor did I see firsthand the acts of deceit and murder.” So go the opening lines in the preface of The Wager by David Grann. Instantly engrossing readers into what lies ahead, Grann tells the story of the 1741 shipwreck off the coast … Continue reading Review of The Wager
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