Tag: history

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cohn’s feistiness, surly defiance and charm of a rogue lawyer

rrn69

Roy Cohen is a super-lawyer and political fixed, whose shocking exploits over four decades have shaped the modern political era, most prominently the ascent of Donald Trump. In October 1973, Donald Trump was an ambitious 27-year-old from Queens trying to push his way into the world of Manhattan real estate. He met Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer whose clients included mobsters and celebrities, one evening at the members-only Le Club Restaurant. Trump and his developer father had just been sued by the US government for discriminating against Black people seeking apartments in their properties. Trump asked Cohn “What … Continue reading Cohn’s feistiness, surly defiance and charm of a rogue lawyer

UncategorizedLeave a comment

New Dawn: Imperial wreckage, war’s chaos, and suffering supercharged anti-colonial movements

rrn69

Sinologist at the University of Cambridge, Hans van de Ven, in Blood Dawn, complains while Western histories of the second World War, focuses on the events in Europe, the US and the Russia, Asia remains “insufficiently examined, inadequately narrated, and rarely remembered in public discourse”.  In Blood Dawn, he offers a vital corrective restoring the Asian war to its proper place, and tracing the destruction of empires and the emergence of the nation-state in Asia. van de Ven tells the Asian story deftly, including the depression which helped finish off the parliamentary experiment of Taisho democracy in Japan, empowering soldiers for … Continue reading New Dawn: Imperial wreckage, war’s chaos, and suffering supercharged anti-colonial movements

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Diana: My Sister….

rrn69

In Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, a memoir by Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer  about his sister Lady Diana Spencer. Diana became the Princess of Wales when she married Charles III, then heir to the British throne. The book published by Michael Joseph an imprint of Penguin Random House, and released simultaneously in the United States and Canada ahead of the 30th death anniversary of Diana in August 2027 and translated into 12 languages. The memoir chronicles their childhood including their upbringing at the Spencer family estate, their parent’s divorce. It examines Diana’s marriage to Charles, her rise to global prominence, her humanitarian … Continue reading Diana: My Sister….

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Engage with the place to tend and to mend

rrn69

Amid women facing backlashes across the world, growing dangers for women, as their safety is being threatened and their freedoms are under attack, with authoritarian states, online misogyny and climate breakdown, wildfires burning in Europe and drought ravages harvests and apocalyptic summer of 2026. Academic and activist author Natasha Walter after decades of her advocacy work alongside refugee women: “When heat rises, so does male violence. The ecological crisis is amplifying every threat to women. Women’s bodies and the body of the earth in danger at one on the same time.” She wrote, The New Feminism ( 1998), an upbeat, … Continue reading Engage with the place to tend and to mend

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Legacy of a Mughal ruler

rrn69

Controversial Aurangzeb “Alamgir, last of the “Great Mughals”, whose empire touched Kabul on one side and Arakan on the other, was described by British Imperialists as “Crooked and Cruel, Dark and Devious”. The Raj-era historian Jadunath Sarkar described him as a bigotd despot who precipitated the “decay of Indian civilization”.  Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 left a divided legacy. India’s current Hindu nationalist government wants to send a bulldozer and raze his grave. His dynasty survived, in one form or another, until the British laid waste to its capital at Delhi in 1857, which lives on the political consciousness of over billion … Continue reading Legacy of a Mughal ruler

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Inequality linking of concentrated wealth, inherited hierarchy to the ideology of tech titans

rrn69

Kim Phillips-Fein, historian teaching 20th century American history at the Gallatin School of individualized Study at New York University, in Country of Lords, chronicles a “Shadow Tradition” who fought against America’s founding ideals, offers a critical re-examination of American history by focusing on inequality.  She challenges the belief that America has always moved greater equality, a persistent “Shadow tradition of anti-egalitarian thought published amid sharp anxiety over extreme wealth concentration. 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the book argues that doubts about equality run from John Adams through social Darwinists, slavery theorists and scientific racist to today’s tech elite Elon Musk’s … Continue reading Inequality linking of concentrated wealth, inherited hierarchy to the ideology of tech titans

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Empress Matilda: Female Lord of the English

rrn69

Henry I of England, King from 1100 to 1135, towards the end of his reign, had notoriously  at least 20 illegitimate offspring,  and found himself in a predicament related to the succession. His marriage had been unfortunately less fruitful. His first wife, the pious Anglo-Saxon princess Edith Matilda, produced only two babies before she “ceased to either have offspring or desire them”.  And his second, the much younger Adeliza of Louvain, failed to produce a replacement for his heir presumptive, William who drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120.  Consequently, Henry’s only legitimate  child was a daughter Matilda,  who in 1127 was formally recognised as … Continue reading Empress Matilda: Female Lord of the English

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Converts interpreted Rome to England

rrn69

The twentieth century is understood as an era of growing, inexorable secularism, yet in Britain between the 1890s and the 1960s there was a marked turn to Rome. In the first half of the century, Catholicism attracted more than half a million converts among them fascinating artists, writers and thinkers, after it became an intellectual and spiritual fashion. These men and women joined the church, and what difference did conversion make to them? Henry Scobie a Catholic policeman in wartime Sierra Leone finds himself mathematical blind, as it would be a mortal sin for him not to go to Mass … Continue reading Converts interpreted Rome to England

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Global economic reset

rrn69

Dennis Peacocke’s On The Destiny of Nations is designed to provoke a global reaction and a movement especially among leaders, which will help prepare and position people for once-in-a-century opportunity to advance God’s Kingdom amidst a major political-economic crisis lasting perhaps a decade. This is no mere recession, but the beginning stages of a global economic reset that will bring major disruptions and changes over the coming decade. The secular marginalisation of Judeo-Christian values from the public dialogue has helped drive this collapse by creating a values-vacuum prompting massive corruption throughout the financial management systems. Neither capitalism no any other economic … Continue reading Global economic reset

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Politicians who had lost the plot

rrn69

San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. San Francisco’s Doom since the Gold Rush of 1849 and Bust loop after the pandemic when business flight and surging homelessness appeared to threaten irreversible urban decline.  At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. It was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Lome Prieta earthquake, its economy struck in a post-industrial slump. Once considered to be the capital of the American West, and later … Continue reading Politicians who had lost the plot