Hanover Historical Texts Project is a collection of primary source texts from ancient times to the modern era in English translation. There is a great number of interesting texts, for instance accounts of
Zeno, he of the paradoxes,
the diary of Lady Sarashina, a lady-in-waiting in Heian era Japan,
a letter from Count Stephen of Blois and Chartres, a crusader writing to his wife,
Arthur Young's travels in France before and during the Revolution,
a report by the American ambassador in St. Petersburg on March 20th, 1917, immediately after the February Revolution, and finally
Petrarch's letter about his graphomania. That last one is from what is perhaps my favorite part of the website, a trove of
Petrarch's Familiar Letters. But there's much more in the Hanover Historical Texts Projects besides what I've mentioned.
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 24, 2011 -
6 comments
Dance dance:
Iceland,
Switzerland,
Finland,
Spain,
Greece,
Lithuania,
Canada,
England,
France,
Austria,
Prussia,
Russian Revolution,
Italian Revolution,
German Revolution,
Japanese Revolution,
Chinese Revolution,
American Revolution.
posted by twoleftfeet
on Sep 9, 2011 -
12 comments
The Battle For Tripoli Begins:
In the last few hours, news outlets and Twitter have been abuzz with reports of fighting around Tripoli. The Libyan rebel council is claiming that “zero hour” has started and a major offensive to take the city is beginning.
[more inside]
posted by metaplectic
on Aug 20, 2011 -
403 comments
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of
this comprehensive study.
More on the Declaration: full transcript and
ultra-high-resolution scan,
a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft,
the little-known royal rebuttal,
a thorough history of the parchment itself,
a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document
by the people of NPR and
by a group of prominent actors,
H. L. Mencken's "American" translation,
Slate's Twitter summaries, and
a look at the fates of the 56 signers.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2011 -
72 comments
From Vice Magazine (NSFW photos in sidebar):
The New Libyans: Knee-deep in the Shit with Benghazi's New Rebels, by Trevor Snapp. (warning: gory photo)
More photos of the New Libyans from
Trevor Snapp. Also from Vice, on Libya:
Big Muammar's House. Also on Vice, on Libya:
Notes from a Libyan Lurker,
part 2,
part 3,
part 4,
part 5,
part 6,
part 7,
part 8,
part 9,
part 10,
part 11.
posted by Sticherbeast
on May 3, 2011 -
4 comments
Mapping Petersburg "..explores the everyday life and the material, political, and literary culture of St. Petersburg
[..] at the beginning of the twentieth century. It maps eleven itineraries through the city with the purpose of creating a palpable sense of life in Russia's late imperial capital on the eve of the 1917 revolution and during the subsequent decade." [
About] [
via]
[more inside]
posted by peacay
on Apr 6, 2011 -
8 comments
Tahrir Documents is an ongoing effort to archive, translate, and make available printed matter from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath. We are not affiliated with the papers’ authors nor with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise. [more inside]
posted by jng
on Mar 28, 2011 -
6 comments
"
Towards a Sustainable Global Golden Age" (four youtube links) is a talk by Carlota Perez comparing the current revolution in information and communications technologies (ICT) to four prior technological revolutions. She argues that each revolution has started with a long phase of experimentation driven by finance, which leads to a financial bubble and subsequent crash. The short phase of recovery from the crash is followed by a long phase of consolidation driven by concrete productivity gains and government policy. She believes that NASDAQ was the crash in the ICT revolution, and that we are still in the recovery phase, partly because cheap oil and manufacturing labor facilitated a reemphasis on unskilled-labor- and energy-intensive means of production. She speculates on what may come out of the consolidation phase she hopes we're now entering.
[more inside]
posted by Coventry
on Mar 3, 2011 -
4 comments
What if the egyptian protesters were democrats? "In short, if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have undertaken no revolution. The Democratic Party represents the pervasiveness of elite corporate power; its liberal supporters represent the appropriation of oppositional politics into the neoliberal economies of electoral hegemony; the Egyptian protesters represent a determined, collective will to social justice and legitimate freedom. If those protesters were American liberals, they would have sided with the state while professing support for the people."
posted by Duug
on Feb 21, 2011 -
106 comments
How to Hack the Dictatorship. "Gene Sharp is an American intellectual whose ideas can be fatal to the world's despots. For decades, Mr. Sharp's practical
writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt." His fame is
spreading.
posted by storybored
on Feb 17, 2011 -
21 comments
Deacon Dodge has a couple of posts (
here and
here) about religion, freedom and democracy amid the turmoil of Egypt.
[more inside]
posted by KMH
on Feb 4, 2011 -
4 comments
Why Mubarak is Out by Jadaliyya, an independent Ezine produced by ASI (Arab Studies Institute) —
Many international media commentators are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events. This confusion is driven by the binary “good guys versus bad guys” lenses most use to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate. There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage: (1) People versus Dictatorship: This perspective leads to liberal naïveté and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising. (2) Seculars versus Islamists: This model leads to a 1980s-style call for “stability” and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist “Arab street.” (3) Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth: This lens imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures. [more inside]
posted by heatherann
on Feb 2, 2011 -
78 comments
"The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance?"
Slavoj Žižek on the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia.
posted by klue
on Feb 1, 2011 -
118 comments
The Dancer and the Terrorist. When Peru’s most wanted man,
Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, was captured in 1992, a young ballerina,
Maritza Garrido Lecca, went to jail
too, for harbouring him at her studio. The story was turned into a
novel and
film, “
The Dancer Upstairs” (
trailer). This year, the author of the novel,
Nicholas Shakespeare, flew to Lima to meet the dancer at last — and to ask her whether she was guilty.
posted by zarq
on Jan 20, 2011 -
13 comments
Since the attack on the Togolese national team in Angola (
previously), soccer in Togo has descended into a freefall. In a strange turn of events, a fake national team recently represented the country in a tournament in Bahrain. The soccer loving people of Togo were outraged when
the truth about the situation came out.
posted by reenum
on Oct 8, 2010 -
4 comments
Russian Satirical Journals of 1905. MeFi's own
peacay presents a selection of the amazing images produced after the lifting of censorship in Russia following the
1905 Revolution: "For a few brief months the journals spoke with a great and unprecedented rage that neither arrest nor exile could silence. At first their approach was oblique, their allusions veiled, and they often fell victim to the censor’s pencil. But people had suffered censorship for too long." Much more available at
Beinecke,
USC, and
Wisconsin.
posted by languagehat
on Aug 6, 2010 -
8 comments
We think it’s normal to work all day every day at a dead-end job. It’s normal to fight with our spouses and our children. It’s normal to eat and drink and drug ourselves to escape, to veg out and stare at a screen for hours a day just to dull the pain. It’s normal to hate our lives and be miserable, it’s normal to be lonely, it’s normal to feel hollow. The Freak Revolution Manifesto.
posted by fiercecupcake
on Oct 2, 2009 -
97 comments
Three part BBC documentary analyzes and documents the revolution and the long struggle of Iran and the West to come together ever since the revolution. The documentary shows interviews with a wide range of world leaders who reveal the inner dealings of all governing adminstrations from the past thirty years, both from within Iran’s own adminstration and from the Western counterparts.
posted by semmi
on Aug 5, 2009 -
8 comments
