" When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the first president of Turkey in 1923, he set about transforming his country into a secular republic where nationalism sanctified by science--and by the personality cult Atatürk created around himself--would reign supreme as the new religion. This book provides the first in-depth look at the intellectual life of the Turkish Republic's founder. In doing so, it frames him within the historical context of the turbulent age in which he lived, and explores the uneasy transition from the late Ottoman imperial order to the modern Turkish state through his life and ideas."

This looks extremely promising, not least because Barfield was studying Afghanistan _before_ 2001: "introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite [their[ regional, cultural, and political differences.... [G]overning these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite ... delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed...."

"In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man. After the communist revolution of 1949, Peking Man became a prominent figure in the movement to bring science to the people. In a new state with twin goals of crushing “superstition” and establishing a socialist society, the story of human evolution was the first lesson in Marxist philosophy offered to the masses. At the same time, even Mao’s populist commitment to mass participation in science failed to account for the power of popular culture—represented most strikingly in legends about the Bigfoot-like Wild Man—to reshape ideas about human nature. The People’s Peking Man is a skilled social history of twentieth-century Chinese paleoanthropology and a compelling cultural—and at times comparative—history of assumptions and debates about what it means to be human."

"In the decade before World War I, a wave of democratic revolutions swept the globe, consuming more than a quarter of the world’s population. Revolution transformed Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and China. In each case, a pro- democracy movement unseated a long-standing autocracy with startling speed. The nascent democratic regime held elections, convened parliament, and allowed freedom of the press and freedom of association. But the new governments failed in many instances to uphold the rights and freedoms that they proclaimed. Coups d’état soon undermined the democratic experiments."

Speaking here on 11 Sept.

"depicts a scene from Fasanella's famous painting ... about a dramatic 63-day strike by textile mill workers in Massachusetts. ... also known as the 'bread and roses strike' "

"After 1945 our parents' generation set aside the problem of evil because —for them—it contained too much meaning. The generation that will follow us is in danger of setting the problem aside because it now contains too little meaning. How can we prev"

Not _entirely_ serious

One of the better reviews of that ridiculously stupid book.

Nice point about Christian Democracy (though my understand was that they had very little pre-war political traction...)

David Rosner reviews Werner Troesken's _The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster_; critical remarks on the use of statistics on bad data and over-generalization, but sounds interesting

Another review, more critical and detailed

Adina Levin review's _The Box_, on the rise of container shipping, and convinces me I definitely need to read it

an example of the previous

Jonathan Mirsky reviews a new book on Xinjiang

101 = modern political economy; 113 = American economic history