Tag: History

A history of self-immolation as ‘extreme’ act of protest

When US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington last month, he restarted long-standing debates over the impact of self-immolation. Bushnell, 25, said that he was protesting against “what people have been experiencing in Palestine”, and declared he would “no longer be complicit in genocide”. He doused […]

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New exhibits showcase trailblazing MIT women

This spring, two new exhibits on campus are shining a light on the critical contributions of pathbreaking women at the Institute. They are part of MIT Libraries’ Women@MIT Archival Initiative in the Department of Distinctive Collections. Launched in 2017, the initiative not only adds to the historical record by collecting and preserving the papers of […]

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Three Lincoln Laboratory inventions named IEEE Milestones

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) designated three historical MIT Lincoln Laboratory technologies as IEEE Milestones. The technologies are the Mode S air traffic control (ATC) radar beacon system, 193-nanometer (nm) photolithography, and the semiconductor laser. The latter recognition is shared by Lincoln Laboratory, General Electric, and IBM. As the world’s largest technical […]

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Amitav Ghosh’s Reckoning With Opium

Former poppy-growing areas “have had significantly worse long-term social and economic outcomes” than nearby districts. A comparison of these two opium economies forms the heart of the book’s compelling development thesis. Before the imposition of wide-scale opium production, the east was relatively prosperous, as evidenced by the nickname “Golden Bengal.” Following the infliction of opium, […]

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Harriet Tubman and the Most Important, Understudied Battle of the Civil War

To tell this story, Fields-Black relies on an underutilized archive. The pension files of former Union soldiers, housed at the National Archives, contain, Fields-Black tell us, thousands of pages of testimony from the dependents of Black Civil War veterans, of which there were 186,000, 75 percent of whom were formerly enslaved. Because dependents had to […]

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Harriet Tubman and the Most Important, Understudied Battle of the Civil War

To tell this story, Fields-Black relies on an underutilized archive. The pension files of former Union soldiers, housed at the National Archives, contain, Fields-Black tell us, thousands of pages of testimony from the dependents of Black Civil War veterans, of which there were 186,000, 75 percent of whom were formerly enslaved. Because dependents had to […]

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MLK Celebration Gala pays tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and his writings on “the goal of true education”

After a week of festivities around campus, members of the MIT community gathered Saturday evening in the Boston Marriott Kendall Square ballroom to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Marking 50 years of this annual celebration at MIT, the gala event’s program was loosely organized around a line in King’s essay, […]

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Edinburgh Castle and Scotland’s redcoats reckoning

Edinburgh Castle has said it will review the name of its cafe after claims that it is “deeply offensive to the Scottish people”. Almost 4,000 people signed a petition demanding that the Redcoat Cafe within the castle be renamed because of its links to the British Army’s crushing defeat of the Jacobites and the Highland […]

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Florida GOP Goes Full McCarthy—Joe, That Is—With Proposed School Change

And Vice President Kamala Harris offered her own aggressive defense of the president Friday, calling for the special counsel to have a “higher level of integrity” after the report accused the 81-year-old president of having a memory with “significant limitations.” “What I saw in that report last night, I believe, is—as a former prosecutor—the comments […]

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Florida Goes Full McCarthy With Proposed Change to Kindergarten Curriculum

And Vice President Kamala Harris offered her own aggressive defense of the president Friday, calling for the special counsel to have a “higher level of integrity” after the report accused the 81-year-old president of having a memory with “significant limitations.” “What I saw in that report last night, I believe, is—as a former prosecutor—the comments […]

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Illustrating India’s complex environmental crises

Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, and Sarnath Banerjee (no relation), an MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) visiting artist share a similar background, but have very different ways of thinking. Both were raised for a time in Kolkata before leaving India to pursue divergent careers, Abhijit as […]

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3 Students Reveal Secrets of 2000-Year-Old Scroll In Breakthrough Discovery

Image via Vesuvius Challenge ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. A “superteam” of three university students from across the globe have successfully revealed passages from a 2,000-year-old scroll that was badly burned after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, all without unfurling the delicate and damaged text.  Youssef Nader, […]

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Projects investigating Swahili, global media win SHASS Humanities Awards

Two projects — the Global Mediations Lab led by Paul Roquet and the MIT Swahili Studies Initiative led by Per Urlaub — have won Humanities Awards from the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The pilot program, launched in fall 2023, aims to support humanities-focused, collaborative projects that can have a broad impact within SHASS or […]

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A.I. Is Endangering Our History

We don’t have to imagine a world where deepfakes can so believably imitate the voices of politicians that they can be used to gin up scandals that could sway elections. It’s already here. Fortunately, there are numerous reasons for optimism about society’s ability to identify fake media and maintain a shared understanding of current events […]

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Archaeologists Keep Finding Strange Ancient Objects With a Mysterious Purpose

Image: Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group  Archaeologists have been unearthing mysterious 12-sided metal objects across Europe for some 300 years, but they’re no closer now to knowing what they were for.  So-called Roman dodecahedra are 12-sided shapes cast from some kind of metal alloy, with each having a hole connecting to a hollow center. They’re […]

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What Holocaust Remembrance Forgets

Part of the Holocaust’s unknowability stems from its origins. Stone points in particular to the role of ideology in spurring the mass murder. We know well, naturally, that Adolf Hitler and other leading National Socialists were rabid antisemites. Hitler’s infamous autobiography Mein Kampf is an antisemite’s manifesto and Nazi propaganda was replete with antisemitic stereotype. […]

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Archaeologists Have Discovered Massive Lost Cities In the Amazon Jungle

ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Researchers have discovered multiple lost 2500-year old cities deep within the jungles of the Amazon. The highly complex organization of this city network is unlike anything uncovered before, and radically changes our view of ancient Amazonian culture. Historically, Amazonian cultures were thought […]

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Elephant-Sized Apes That Once Roamed the Land Mysteriously Vanished. Now, Scientists Have an Answer.

Mountains in Guanxi, China. Image: Mekdet via Getty Images ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Some 330,000 years ago, giant apes the size of elephants roamed the forests of southern China. Their massive teeth—once sold as a “dragon tooth” by a Hong Kong apothecary—gnawed tough leaves and devoured fruit. […]

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Scientists Just Made a 1.75 Billion-Year-Old Discovery About the Origin of Life

Image: Demoulin, Lara et. al.  ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. The origins of life on Earth are still mysterious, but scientists have just taken another step toward understanding how and when complex organisms emerged on our planet. As reported in a new study, scientists have found the oldest […]

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Mysterious Section of the Great Wall of China Isn’t What We Thought, Study Reveals

Image: Fung, Gantumur et. al. A mysterious section of the Great Wall of China has unveiled some of its secrets thanks to a years-long intensive survey. As it turns out, the new research raises more questions than it answers. A team of archaeologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the National University […]

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When Santa fought for the Union

How the bloodshed and turmoil of the Civil War helped make the modern American Christmas. Here’s everything you need to know.  What was Christmas like in the war? For a country locked in the bloodiest conflict of its history, Christmas was a moment of hope and pain. Its celebration of family togetherness tapped into the […]

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Minicourse open to the MIT community gives context to the Middle East crisis

MIT community members can learn more about the Israel-Hamas conflict through a recently developed online course organized by Middle East and North Africa (MENA)/MIT at MIT’s Center for International Studies. The three-session course, titled “Israel, Palestine, Gaza before and after October 7: Understanding historical context and contrasting narratives,” was first held between Nov. 29 and […]

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Fengshui in the Qing Dynasty courtroom

Disputes over mining were common in late imperial China, during the Qing Dynasty. For instance, in the 1870s, Wu Tang, the governor-general of Sichuan province, enacted an outright ban on mining, despite an apparent economic need for it. The rationale Wu Tang and other mining opponents often used to support their decisions? Fengshui. That’s right, […]

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Ancient Inscribed Bricks Contain Evidence of Mysterious Magnetic ‘Anomaly,’ Scientists Find

CREDIT: Matthew D. Howland ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. New research on ancient Mesopotamia has uncovered evidence of an ancient magnetic phenomena, providing a way to delve deeper into one of the most fascinating periods in human history.  Scientists have analyzed ancient bricks from Mesopotamia and revealed just […]

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Japan’s Incomplete Reckoning With World War II Crimes

Less well known in this country are the great cruelties practiced by Japanese forces in other countries in Asia. There were no equivalents of the Nazi death camps, but Japanese soldiers routinely raped, tortured, and murdered civilians in China, the Philippines, Korea, Burma, Indonesia, and other Asian countries. The “Rape of Nanking,” which began in […]

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Japan’s Incomplete Reckoning With World War II Crimes

Less well known in this country are the great cruelties practiced by Japanese forces in other countries in Asia. There were no equivalents of the Nazi death camps, but Japanese soldiers routinely raped, tortured, and murdered civilians in China, the Philippines, Korea, Burma, Indonesia, and other Asian countries. The “Rape of Nanking,” which began in […]

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Yes, Israel Is a Colonialist State. But Does That Matter Today?

Those who call for decolonization sometimes compare Israel’s situation to that of South Africa and Algeria—two countries that were decolonized. But in these countries, the settlers had only the most tenuous hold over the native inhabitants. In South Africa in 1990, as apartheid was about to end, whites made up only 17 percent of the […]

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3 Questions: Wiebke Denecke on a landmark project for Chinese literature

Nuns writing fine poetry. Centuries-old joke books. An epic travelogue ending with a visit to Genghis Khan. These are just a few things readers can experience through the new Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, published by Oxford University Press. The series is modeled on the Loeb Classical Library, which debuted in 1912 and features […]

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Archaeologists Discover Vast, Complex Prehistoric Society That Rewrites History

ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of a highly complex prehistoric society in Central Europe that thrived in a region experts previously believed was abandoned in 1600 BC. This sophisticated society was one of the “major cultural centers of southern Europe” and exerted “regional […]

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