The Last Time Democracy Almost Died
The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. What can we learn from the upheaval of the 1930s?
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The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. What can we learn from the upheaval of the 1930s?
In rock history, 1991 is most often seen as The Year Everything Changed. A procession of landmark releases from August to September 1991 helped transform alt.rock’s steadily growing snowball into an all-enveloping avalanche.
Hadrian’s Wall was a 73 mile barrier stretching from coast to coast, splitting the warlike north of Britain from the more docile south. It was the Roman Empire’s way of imposing peace in a hostile land.
Considering capitalism to be equal to colonialism, Africa’s founding fathers rejected it and adopted marxist-socialism in the 1960s. Foreign companies were nationalised, state-owned enterprises were created and all sorts of controls on rents, prices, imports and foreign exchange.
This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.
Four hundred years ago, Coffea arabica, a tropical shrub bearing glossy green leaves and bright-red berries, was virtually unknown outside of the Arab world and the corner of Ethiopia where it had been discovered in the ninth century.
Thirty-seven years ago, New York-based APF Electronics, Inc. released The Imagination Machine. APF’s playful computer never rivaled the impact of products from Apple or Atari, but they remain historically important because of the man who co-created them: Ed Smith, one of the first African-American electronics engineers in the video game industry.
Between the end of the Korean War and the early 1990s, more than one million Korean women were caught up in a state-controlled prostitution industry that was blessed at the highest levels by the U.S. military. They worked in special zones surrounding U.S. bases—areas licensed by the South Korean government.
Javier Peña, as a character, was popularized through the Netflix series ’Narcos.’ But the story of the real Peña—who lives in San Antonio—and his quest to end the reign of Pablo Escobar is bigger than a screen. Peña’s life, or death, was particularly valuable to Escobar—fear of the U.S. government made DEA agents a tough mark for hitmen.
A former Titan II missile complex, the complex is a fixer upper and ready to become one of the few homes that once stood ready to pummel America’s enemies with the destructive force of 9,000,000 tons of TNT. The realtor posted a listing price of just $395,000.
When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in the Pacific Ocean in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller which sold tens of millions of copies.
For or a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he’d been writing in hundreds of dime-store composition notebooks, their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.
Reading classic literature is like going for a 6am jog. It has its loyal fans but few enjoy it. Curious to learn about what classics people actually enjoy, Daniel Frank delved into the Goodreads data to find what classics users love and hate the most.
A 67 cent packet of gum has ballooned into an enormous industry, and five billion barcodes are scanned each and every day. But how did we get to this point, and who was responsible for the UPC barcode?
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre occurred when reputed members of the Al Capone gang disguised themselves as policemen and murdered members of the George “Bugs” Moran gang in a garage, located at 2122 North Clark Street in the Lake View community.
Since his involuntary retirement, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has raised money for worthy causes, attempted to make a comeback in Russian politics, and, notoriously, made an advertisement for Pizza Hut.
There was one more dire mission to complete; she had to return to Maryland and try once again to rescue her sister Rachel and her two children, Angerine and Ben. With the exception of these three people, Harriet had pulled her entire immediate family that remained in Maryland away from slavery’s hold.
Timgad is a lost Roman city on the edge of the Sahara desert in Algeria that remained hidden beneath the sand for nearly a thousand years. Positively obscure compared to the international notoriety of Pompeii, this ancient city is nonetheless one of the best surviving examples of Roman town planning anywhere in the historical Empire.
Around them, death was everywhere. Still, the lovers planned a life together, a future outside of Auschwitz. They knew they would be separated, but they had a plan, after the fighting was done, to reunite. It took them 72 years.
Illinois-born Young Chun thought a stint teaching English in Korea would be a quick and easy way to pay off his mounting post-college debt. He could not have been more wrong. Chun became a victim of a collision between unforgiving bureaucracy and the meddling of an unknown family member thousands of miles away.
Professional photographer Joe Samberg remembers how drugs destroyed Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue scene. Still, the hippies did end up having a lasting impact on American culture—even if it wasn’t quite the one they’d intended.
It’s practically an American pastime to blame cellphones for all sorts of societal problems, from distracted parents to faltering democracies. But the devices might have also delivered a social silver lining: a de-escalation of the gang turf wars that tore up cities in the 1980s.
For a short time in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Donald Trump owned an airline. In 1989, Trump raised $365 million to purchase the Eastern Shuttle. Within 18 months, the airline lost over $125 million, and by 1992, Trump decided it was time to walk away.
Nearly 30 years before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, engineers at Ford designed and made a 3/8 scale model of a car, which it said would be powered by a nuclear reactor in the trunk.
A century ago, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, as much of the world was still recovering from the devastation of World War I. Rebuilding was just beginning, refugees were returning home, orphans were being cared for, and a global influenza outbreak was being battled.
In John Brunner’s 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, for instance, he peers ahead to imagine life in 2010, correctly forecasting wearable technology, Viagra, video calls, same-sex marriage, the legalization of cannabis, and the proliferation of mass shootings.
In the Western imagination, sugar is pleasure, temptation, and vice — and in modern history, it is original sin. How a taste for sweetness, developed for survival, became a stand-in for everything good — and evil — about our culture.
In his new book, Jon Mooallem tells the story of the Great Alaska Earthquake and Genie Chance, the woman whose voice on the radio held everyone together. It’s a beautiful exploration of how people tell stories on the radio, on stage, in books, and generally to each other.
Big data is poised to transform society. Yet big data also exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think. Nothing underscores the consequences of data analysis gone awry more than the story of Robert McNamara.
When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo got to China, he saw many wonders. One of the things that astonished him most, however, was a new invention, implemented by Kublai Khan, a grandson of the great conqueror Genghis. It was paper money, introduced by Kublai in 1260.
They wanted a spy at the center of the industry. He had bigger ambitions. The wild true story of wheeling and dealing double agent Boris Morros and the woman who became his nemesis.
Sony Corp. opened an exhibition Monday in Tokyo’s bustling Ginza district to mark the 40th anniversary of its signature Walkman. The handheld audio player debuted on July 1, 1979, offering portable music to ears across the world. In the years that followed, over 400 million units would be sold.
Once seen as cutting edge, many of yesterday’s gadgets are – surprisingly – still in use or are making a comeback. But why is it that we are turning to retro solutions more frequently?
When Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson passed away on February 3rd, 1959 after a small plane crash, rock and roll lost some of its most notable early pioneers. Singer-songwriter Don McLean called this moment in music history “The Day the Music Died,” in his song “American Pie.”
Thirty years ago, the world wide web was a way for scientists to share data. Since then, it’s become a critical force for industry, and how the world connects. But this didn’t happen all at once. The web’s evolution has been shaped by the geography of its creators and users.
The legend of Gus Weiss, hero of the Cold War, ends 11 stories below the balcony of his condo at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, on November 25, 2003. A broken corpse on the sidewalk. He was a shrewd intelligence insider, pulled off an audacious tech hack against the Soviets in the last century. Or did he?
The fascists came for Eva Szekely in the winter of 1944, when she was 17. She escaped and became swimming royalty, breaking six world records, winning 44 national titles, a gold in the 200m breaststroke at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 and a silver in the same event at Melbourne in 1956.
The Glen Grey Act was the first piece of legislation to enshrine in law the residential separation of the races. It was also the basis for the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913, which in its final form allocated a mere thirteen percent of all arable land to the black majority.
Sex, showering, breaking up: Tanya Corrin and her boyfriend Josh Harris set up cameras all over their apartment for an internet project that pre-empted everything from influencer culture to digital sex work and reality TV.
