historical-and-contemporary-political-dynamics

Rob Jetten acknowledges grief and pain of Moluccan families as crowdfunded monument unveiled in Rotterdam The Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten, has formally apologised for the “heartless” mistreatment of thousands of Moluccan soldiers who fought for the Dutch colonial army during Indonesia’s struggle for independence. About 12,500 men from a group of Indonesian islands who served in the Royal Dut…

Beneath a quiet German field, researchers have uncovered signs of a medieval town that historians had been unable to locate for generations.

Plague is often linked to medieval Europe, crowded cities, and rats carrying infected fleas. However, a new study published in the journal Nature shows that the disease was already killing people thousands of years earlier. Researchers have discovered that plague caused deadly outbreaks among hunter-gatherers in Siberia about 5,500 years ago, long before cities and […] The post Ancient plague was…

Ms Janmoni Gogoi, Research Scholar, Apex Professional University, Arunachal Pradesh Prof. (Dr) Jyotsna Raj, Professor, Apex Professional University, Arunachal Pradesh ABSTRACT The evolution of industrial laws in India is deeply intertwined with the historical growth of trade unions and the broader socio-economic transformations that shaped labour relations from the colonial period to the contempo…

José Fernando BonaparteOne of the hardest-working, most intense and multi-faceted palaeontologists to ever grace our planet was José Fernando Bonaparte (14 June 1928 - 18 February 2020).We often imagine the great scientific pioneers as figures lo...

A genetic study of 2,000-year-old grape seeds is shedding new light on ancient winemaking. For centuries, the vineyards of Tuscany have been associated with some of the world’s most celebrated red wines. But a cache of grape seeds buried in ancient wells is revealing a very different story about what people were growing and drinking [...]

A new study suggests plague was already a deadly threat 5,500 years ago, striking small hunter-gatherer communities long before cities and agriculture emerged. For centuries, plague has been remembered as the disease that devastated medieval Europe, killing millions and reshaping societies. But new research suggests its deadly history stretches much further back than previously thought. [...]

Villains, tyrants and heroes alike are immortalized in the scientific literature as researchers don each new species a unique scientific name -- and rename geographic sites with a settlers' mindset. If you pick through the literature, it is a w...

Two vanished posts suggest ancient Britons tracked solstices before Stonehenge rose.

(NYT) – The oldest known cases, discovered among hunter-gatherers in Siberian graves, contradict the theory that the disease once was mild. In ancient Siberian graves, scientists have discovered the oldest traces of one of humanity’s greatest enemies. Examining skeletons of … Read More

This is the second half of the second part (I, IIa, IIb) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. While I hope this will be of great interest to the history nerds out there, I’ve opted to structure this specifically as a … Continue reading Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, …

A student dig near Cambridge exposed skulls, severed remains, and one strange surgical clue buried inside a violent Viking-era pit.

When we look at the massive scale of today’s Artificial Intelligence boom, it is easy to forget that the foundations of this trillion-dollar industry were laid down over 30 years ago in Munich. Today, the world's top tech companies are investing hundreds of billions into scaling up Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Yet, outside of a few history buffs or old-school folks in the Machin…

For European and American slave traders, iron shackles were considered tools that helped run the slave trade. Shackles were made for wrists, ankles, waist and the neck.

‘We have come too far to turn around now,’ the monument on Alabama’s Montgomery Square reads At the recently opened Montgomery Square in Alabama , bronze hands rise from the pavement, holding a placard against the sky. It reads 7053, the booking number displayed in Rosa Parks’s 1956 mugshot after she and other leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott were arrested. Often with booking numbers and mug…

From Arkansas to Washington DC, museums across the US are grappling with what it means to celebrate the country As the United States of America reaches its semiquincentennial this 4 July, museums across the country are grappling with what being American and celebrating the US means. Cultural institutions are digging deeper, highlighting American artists, imagery and artifacts to explore the natio…

While some enslaved people did not know about Lincoln's order, many learned of it while the fighting was still ongoing through informal networks, rumors and sometimes from slaveholders themselves.