October 9, 2009 | WSJ | By CON COUGHLIN.

In History Lies All the Secrets of Statecraft
First Official Account of MI5 Released to Celebrate U.K. Security Service's Centenary

March 12, 2005 | WSJ | By BRET STEPHENS

The cliché is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades--the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining American crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany--would find most contemporary journalism useless. Perhaps a story here or there might, in retrospect, seem illuminating. But chances are it would have been nearly invisible at the time of publication: eight column inches, page A12.

The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight: They can and usually do. Nor is it that the facts are obscure: Often, the most essential facts are also the most obvious ones. The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts--facts with consequences--from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling....As for the media, it shouldn't be too difficult to do better. Look for the countervailing data. Broaden your list of sources. Beware of exoticizing your subject:

Apr. 08, 2012 | The Globe and Mail | Jane Urquhart.

Battle of Vimy Ridge

JOHN BARBER
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Apr. 25, 2012

Dixie lullaby : a story of music, race, and new beginnings in a new South
by Kemp, Mark.
Year/Format: 2004, Book, xxii, 296 p. :

TRL 781.66097 K25

May 14, 2007 | The New Yorker by Steven Shapin.

By KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD
Published: April 5, 2012

SUSAN KRASHINSKY - The Globe and Mail

by Malcolm Gladwell May 16, 2011

By JON GERTNER
February 25, 2012

Why study Bell Labs? It offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies — and our country’s longstanding innovative edge — actually came about. Yet Bell Labs also presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today. Its staff worked on the incremental improvements necessary for a complex national communications network while simultaneously thinking far ahead, toward the most revolutionary inventions imaginable.

Indeed, in the search for innovative models to address seemingly intractable problems like climate change, we would do well to consider Bell Labs’ example — an effort that rivals the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project in size, scope and expense. Its mission, and its great triumph, was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together....Consider what Bell Labs achieved. For a long stretch of the 20th century, it was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. On any list of its inventions, the most notable is probably the transistor, invented in 1947, which is now the building block of all digital products and contemporary life. These tiny devices can accomplish a multitude of tasks. The most basic is the amplification of an electric signal. But with small bursts of electricity, transistors can be switched on and off, and effectively be made to represent a “bit” of information, which is digitally expressed as a 1 or 0. Billions of transistors now reside on the chips that power our phones and computers.

Bell Labs produced a startling array of other innovations, too. The silicon solar cell, the precursor of all solar-powered devices, was invented there. Two of its researchers were awarded the first patent for a laser, and colleagues built a host of early prototypes. (Every DVD player has a laser, about the size of a grain of rice, akin to the kind invented at Bell Labs.)

Bell Labs created and developed the first communications satellites; the theory and development of digital communications; and the first cellular telephone systems. What’s known as the charge-coupled device, or CCD, was created there and now forms the basis for digital photography.

Bell Labs also built the first fiber optic cable systems and subsequently created inventions to enable gigabytes of data to zip around the globe. It was no slouch in programming, either. Its computer scientists developed Unix and C, which form the basis for today’s most essential operating systems and computer languages.

And these are just a few of the practical technologies. Some Bell Labs researchers composed papers that significantly extended the boundaries of physics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics. Other Bell Labs engineers focused on creating extraordinary new processes (rather than new products) for Ma Bell’s industrial plants. In fact, “quality control” — the statistical analysis now used around the world as a method to ensure high-quality manufactured products — was first applied by Bell Labs mathematicians.

January 19 2012 | Share News | Posted by Murphy Browne Thursday

At the Georgetown public library, after some probing, I unearthed a book I had read about on the Internet about Plaisance/Sparendaam on the East Coast Demerara, Plaisance From Emancipation to Independence and Beyond by Beryl Adams-Haynes, published in 2010. Further investigation yielded information that the book was also available at the University of Guyana Berbice Campus Library located at Tain on the Courentyne and could not be taken out but was available for a two-hour loan in the library.



I am still puzzled and disappointed at the lack of books about the Village Movement in the Guyana public library system. It was at the Toronto Reference Library that I eventually found a copy of Thompson’s 2002 book, Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice Guyana 1803-1831. In spite of the fact that it is the only copy in the Toronto Public Library system, I was happy to have the opportunity to read it since it yielded much information about the “Winkel slaves” and the area of Winkle, New Amsterdam.

JANUARY 17, 2012 | WSJ | By JOHN STEELE GORDON.

The industry may only date back a half-century, but purchases of distressed assets and leveraged buyouts are as old as capitalism.

December 16, 2005 | FT | By Christian Tyler.

ROUGH CROSSINGS: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
by Simon Schama
BBC Books £20, 488 pages

December 19, 2011

Share 9
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By Nigel Westmaas

Dec. 10, 2011 | Globe and Mail |JEFFREY SIMPSON.

If Richard Gwyn’s books were published in the United States, they’d be catapulted instantly onto all the bestseller lists and remain there for a long stretch....In Canada, Mr. Gwyn has produced a wonderfully researched, engagingly written two-volume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald, beautifully presented by Random House Canada. This is history on a grand scale, with a riveting central character and a country being literally built around him.

Nation Maker is an appropriate title for the second volume. Canada came together under Macdonald’s watch, and with his care. In the same time frame, the Meiji Restoration thrust Japan into the world, Bismarck united Germany and Il Risorgimento resulted in a united Italy. Canadian modesty aside, Canada has been a good deal less disruptive of the international order than these three countries for the past century and a half. Put that way, Canadian history is something to ponder, even celebrate.

December 6, 2011, 9:00 PM
Caught Out of Time
By KARENNA GORE SCHIFF

28 May 2005 | The Guardian | Edmund Fawcett who reviews Medici Money by Tim Parks


Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florenceby Tim Parks

Nov. 9, 2011 | The Financial Times p10.|Luke Johnson
*Study history:
*Avoid the news
*Spend time with the young:
*Remain rational:
*Avoid pessimists:
*Read the stoics:
*Admit mistakes and move on:
*Keep busy:
*Get fit:
*Focus on small wins:
*Ignore events over which you have no control:
*Concentrate on your micro economy
*Laugh: psychologists know that humour is healthy.

Nov. 5, 2011 | The Financial Times. p7 | Simon Kuper.
Assassinations are rare occasions when the fate of nations can seem to hang on a sandwich, a briefcase or a roll of fat - in other words, on chance....some assassins do genuinely seem to change the course of events. In their 2009 paper, "Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War",Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken identified 298 serious assassination attempts against leaders worldwide since 1875. They found: "A country whose autocrat is assassinated is 13 percentage points more likely to move toward democracy in the following year than a country where the assassination attempt on the autocrat failed." In democracies, the authors say, assassinations didn't make a noticeable difference, so perhaps Oswald really didn't change history. Jones and Olken also argue that assassinations can affect the course of conflicts.

In short, many assassinations matter. And because leaders are so well-protected, chance often determines whether the assassination succeeds.

By Kevin Baker
April 4, 2004

The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan

and the Forgotten Colony

That Shaped America.

By Russell Shorto.

Illustrated. 384 pp. New York:

Doubleday. $27.50.

''If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures,'' he writes, ''the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is the birthplace of that idea: This island city would become the first multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America's shores, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the world.''

Based on Leigh Buchanan and Andre
O’Connell, in Harvard Business Review,
Jan.2006, p.32-41

Sometime around the middle of the past
century, telephone executive Chester Barnard
imported the term decision making
from public administration into the business
world. There it began to replace narrower
terms, like “resource allocation” and
“policy making,” shifting the way managers
thought about their role from continuous,
Hamlet-like deliberation toward a
crisp series of conclusions reached and
actions taken.
Yet, decision making is, of course, a broad
and ancient human pursuit, flowing back
to a time when people sought guidance
from the stars. From those earliest days, we
have strived to invent better tools for the
purpose, from the Hindu-Arabic systems
for numbering and algebra, to Aristotle’s
systematic empiricism, to friar Occam’s advances
in logic, to Francis Bacon’s inductive
reasoning, to Descartes’s application of the
scientific method. A growing sophistication
with managing risk, along with a nuanced
understanding of human behavior and
advances in technology that support and
mimic cognitive processes, has improved
decision making in many situations.
Even so, the history of decision-making
strategies – captured in this time line and
examined in the four accompanying essays
on risk, group dynamics, technology, and
instinct – has not marched steadily toward
perfect rationalism. Twentieth-century theorists
showed that the costs of acquiring
information lead executives to make do
with only good-enough decisions. Worse,
people decide against their own economic
interests even when they know better. And
in the absence of emotion, it’s impossible
to make any decisions at all. Erroneous
framing, bounded awareness, excessive
optimism: The debunking of Descartes’s
rational man threatens to swamp our confidence
in our choices. Is it really surprising,
then, that even as technology dramatically
increases our access to information,
Malcolm Gladwell extols the virtues of gut
decisions made, literally, in the blink of
an eye?

Nov 25, 2004 | The Globe and Mail.pg. R.3 |Charlotte Gray

Last spring, I was a guest on CBC Radio. Callers were invited to phone in and describe the qualities that some mythical "great Canadian" should embody.

reviewed by ken mcgoogan
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Oct. 14, 2011
Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, Volume Two: 1867-1891, by Richard Gwyn, Random House Canada, 676 pages, $37

, Oct. 12, 2011

The War of 1812 will be well worth commemorating, 200 years on. If the American invasion had been successful, Canada would at best had a very different shape from the one it has today; quite possibly, no such country would have had come into being at all.

James Moore, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, is right to say that the bicentennial “is an opportunity for all of us to take pride in our history.”

SEPTEMBER 21, 2011 | WSJ | By NORM AUGUSTINE.

We lag in science, but students' historical illiteracy hurts our politics and our businesses.

Jan. 29, 1990 | TIME | By ROBERT HUGHES

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 26, 201

Jul 15, 2011. Financial Times. pg. 10 Morgen Witzel.
In their book Built to Last , Jim Collins and Jerry Porras identified a
strong and enduring system of values rooted in a company's history and
culture as one of the distinguishing features of long-lived successful
businesses.

But there are few companies and executives that have such awareness of
the past. ...The Tata group, for example, stresses the importance of
history and continuity. Its executives often look back to the examples
of Jamsetji Tata, the founding leader, and J.R.D. Tata, the last leader
but one. Faced with the problems of today, what would those leaders have
done?

JULY 19, 2011 | WSJ | By MICHAEL FITZGERALD.

May 26, 2011, 8:30 PM
Queen Bee of the Confederacy
By CATHERINE CLINTON

July 20, 2005/ WSJ/ op-ed by LAURENCE H. SILBERMAN on the corruption within the FBI.

May 20 2011 | FT.com / FT Magazine | By Simon Schama. What
Kissinger took from Elliott was that without grasping the long arc of
time, any account of politics and government would be shallow and
self-defeating....And you get the feeling that Kissinger believes that
it would do them no harm if they did. Instead he laments that
“contemporary politicians have very little sense of history. For them
the Vietnam war is unimaginably far behind us, the Korean war has no
relevance any more,” even though that conflict is very far from over and
at any minute has the capability of going from cold to hot. “This [the
United States of Amnesia as Gore Vidal likes to call it],” he sighs, “is
a tremendous handicap … when I talk to policy­makers and I cite some
historical analogy they think, ‘There he goes again with his history.’”

Look too at `A World Restored', “ The Brothers Karamazov.”

JEFFREY SIMPSON | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Apr. 16, 2011

GEOFFREY YORK
SIYU, KENYA— From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Mar. 30, 2011

March 13, 2011, 6:00 pm
A Letter from the Postmaster
By JAMIE MALANOWSKI

Perhaps the cabinet member most distressed by the news of Sumter’s
vulnerability was the postmaster general, Montgomery Blair. An ardent
Union man and a West Point graduate, Blair was one of the attorneys who
represented Dred Scott. ...The action of the President in 1833 inspired
respect whilst in 1860 the rebels were encouraged by the contempt they
felt for the incumbent of the Presidency. But it was not alone upon Mr.
Buchanan’s weakness the rebels relied for success. They for the most
part believe that the Northern men are deficient in the courage
necessary to maintain the Government. … No men or people have so many
difficulties as those whose firmness is doubted.”

March 1, 2011 | By KNews | Filed Under Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

OCTOBER 28, 2010 By ANA CAMPOY

February 28, 2011

February 23, 2011| Kaieteur News| Sherwood Lowe

By KATE TAYLOR
Published: January 22, 2011

By MITCHELL TRINKA
December 6, 2010

That project is HistoryStrips — poster-size timelines that feature
colorful depictions of the bills, battles, politicians and patriots that
have shaped the nation. Each strip chronicles a 50-year block of
American history.

“Most Americans know very little about our country, our heritage,” he
said. “It bugs me.”

History buffs have greeted the strips with enthusiasm. When Marty Maher,
the Brooklyn Parks Department chief of staff who participates in
colonial-era re-enactments in his spare time, saw the first strip, which
covers 1763 to 1812, he knew that it was just the teaching tool needed
to familiarize generations of Americans raised on television and video
games with their history.

December 4, 2010 | New York Times | By STACY SCHIFF

MARCH 7, 2006 By LOUIS P. GALAMBOS

October 21, 2010 | Stabroek News | By Estherine Adams

Jun 2, 2004| Wall Street Journal. pg. B.1 | Cynthia Crossen.

7 October 2010 | The Guardian | Angus Batey

May 15, 2009 | Stabroek News | Hamilton Green, JP

September 23, 2010 | Stabroek News | By Dr Mellissa Ifill

| FORA.tv | by Frank Gavin

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: September 16, 2010 "What happened in Africa in the early
20th century that let a mild monkey disease move into humans, mutate to
become highly transmissible and then explode into one of history’s great
killers, one that has claimed 25 million lives so far? "

By Aparna Mathur and Rohan Poojara
August 18, 2010, 1:19 pm

September 6, 2010 | The New Yorker | by Jill Lepore who
reviews “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration” (Random House; $30); Isabel Wilkerson;

Aug. 21, 2010|G & M |by Allan Levine. Teaching history is
only partly about instructing students about dates, names and the
significant events of the past. Of more importance is teaching them how
to think critically – to analyze, critique, synthesize and evaluate the
evidence objectively before arriving at any conclusions. This may be the
most useful skill they acquire during their high-school years,
preparing them to become thoughtful adults and discriminating citizens.
“Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which
attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded
way,” explains Linda Elder, president of the Foundation for Critical
Thinking. “People who think critically consistently attempt to live
rationally, reasonably and empathically. They work diligently to develop
the intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual
humility, intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual
sense of justice and confidence in reason.”

August 12, 2010 | Stabroek News | By Shammane Joseph

July 27, 2010 | Newsweek | Jessica Ramirez

August 1, 2010 | Stabroek News | Editorial

July 29, 2010 | Stabroek News | By Cecilia McAlmont

March 2010 | The ATLANTIC MAGAZINE | By Christopher Hitchens.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a service to the history it depicts, and
puts the author in the very first rank of historical novelists.

June 22, 2010 | The New Republic | Edward Glaeser. Reviews
The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 by
Joel Mokyr Yale University Press, 564 pp., $45. The Industrial
Revolution is the inflection point of economic history. During all the
millennia before that revolution, incomes were static and humans were
poor—often hungry, inadequately clothed, ill-housed. But somehow, in the
2.5 centuries since humanity learned to mass produce, a large number of
ordinary people have acquired more material comfort than even the
wealthiest magnates of the pre-industrial era....Joel Mokyr (The Lever
of Riches) a distinguished economic historian, explores England’s early
industrial age. Mokyr's overarching thesis is about the power of ideas.
His grand idea is that the practical, avaricious inventors of the
industrial revolution owed much to the academic, but worldly,
philosophers of the Enlightenment.

June 20, 2010 | New York Times | By JOEL WEICKGENANT

May 13, 2010, 5:00PM EST text size: TT
Building an Empire, One Goldman Brick at a Time
An intimate history of the man who made Goldman Sachs

By Charles D. Ellis

April 25, 2010 | Stabroek News | A Donald Augustin. Obit for Uncle Clarence.

Apr. 08, 2010 | - The Globe and Mail

Apr 16 2010 | The Atlantic | Ta-Nehisi Coates.

April 12, 2010 | Stabroek News | Dave Martins

APRIL 13, 2010 | Wall Street Journal | By BRET STEPHENS. The
Fog Over Katyn Forest. Poland's struggle of memory against forgetting.

April 9 2010 | Financial Times | Niall Ferguson

March 29, 2010 | Stabroek News | Dave Martin. Op-ed on Caribbean unity--or lack thereof.

Mar. 17, 2010 | Globe & Mail | by SIRI AGRELL. Toronto
historian Natalie Zemon Davis was named yesterday as the recipient of
the Holberg International Memorial Prize - awarded by the Norwegian
parliament and worth about $785,000.

U of T president David Naylor said the international recognition is a
"fantastic boost" to the school's arts, social science and humanities
faculties, and validates a continued focus on areas of studies that have
suffered a decline in public funding and support.

MARCH 13, 2010 | Wall street Journal | by Robert Louis Wilken who reviews Holy Warriors By Jonathan Phillips
Random House, 434 pages, $30 and The Crusades By Thomas Asbridge Ecco, 767 pages, $34.99

MARCH 9, 2010, By ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE who reviews
The Lords of Strategy

By Walter Kiechel III
Harvard Business Press, 347 pages, $26.95

By Stabroek staff | February 25, 2010 in Guyana Review

Feb. 18, 2010 | Globe & Mail | Michael Valpy. Note on the
passing of John Babcock at 109, the last known Canadian veteran of the
First World War – the last of the 650,000 men and women to serve in the
uniforms of their country's armed forces in the conflict of 1914-1918.

July 09, 2008 | unlearning 101 | by Jack Uldrich. " I say that
I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state
the argument against my position better than the people who support it. I
think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak.” "
F. Scott Fitzgerald who once said: “The test of a first rate mind is the
ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and
still function.”"

January 10, 2007| Indo Caribbean World pg. 19 | by Bernard Heydorn

Jan. 16, 2010 |Globe & Mail | by Konrad Yakabuski. “I'm
skeptical that any kind of religious belief system is antithetical to
development,” Raj Desai, a professor of international development at
Washington's Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, insisted in an interview. “I'm more inclined to think that
the arrow runs the other way around. It is the lack of stability, the
lack of economic development, the chaos, the poverty, the corruption and
the lack of opportunities that are more likely to turn people to voodoo
rather than the other way around.”