Tag: Historians

Will History (and people) love Barack Obama?

In a new 538 post, the author Nate Silver spends a lot of energy proving the unsurprising: that presidents who serve longer, and win larger re-electoral margins, are better regarded by history—or at least by historians.  If this is truth I suppose that the reelection of Barack Obama will confirm it.  The President of the U.S. is about one of the most loved Presidents we have had in the last decades and its correlated hate is also one of the highest.  In the time previous to his election I read hundreds of comments in my Facebook profile explaining how the “World as we know it was going to end if he got the reelection”.  Luckily, the world is still going on and chances are that the ideas of Obama & Co. will continue reigning and being popular.

Contemporary History (specially if read through the American lenses) is quite ridiculous.  Their exceptional-ism is impressive and how they read and understand history is also ludicrous.

More interesting is to read the article by Mr. Silver (whom many consider to be THE professional in his field).  Feel free to continue reading it and prepare yourself to laugh.  The world may not end with Barack Obama… it will just get a little sadder…

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The rankings I will refer to here come from a composite of the four most recent surveys in which presidential scholars were asked to rank the presidents. (The surveys were conducted between 2008 and 2011). I’ve averaged the rankings among the four surveys and then re-ranked the presidents from 1 to 43 accordingly. (Ties are broken by the best median ranking; Cleveland is counted only once for these purposes.)

We might divide the presidents into three basic groups: good (those who rank in the top 15), poor (those in the bottom 15) and average (everyone in between).

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Rendez-vous with History. Weimar, Germany (4-6 November, 2011)

City hall of Weimar

“Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today I’ll be traveling to Weimar, Germany to participate in the Festival “Rendez-vous de l’histoire”.  The theme of the 3rd. Year of this “Rendez-vous with history” in Weimar is: Human Violence, Human Violence.

AS the website of the conference reads,

‘Violence’ is complex and disturbing. It is a historical, present and future threat. “Violence” in all its forms, including counter-violence and non-violence as a deliberate departure from the traditional and new power relationships will be discussed at the Weimar festival. Human societies as always dream of peace – but at the same time, violence is a constant and seemingly unavoidable part of our personal and political relationships.

Weimar’s international history festival will address not only the cruel dimensions of violence in history, but also ask for their anthropological origins and its liberating potential.

In about 20 panel discussions and lectures be at Weimar history festival tensions between freedom and violence, beauty and violence, explored “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence – the relationship between media and violence, language, literature and violence, violence and reconciliation presented. The spectrum ranges from the Middle Ages to the year 2011, and is not geographically limited. But the focus is primarily on Europe – in particular the countries of the Weimar Triangle – and also to Weimar and Thuringia.
A film series and cultural evenings will complete the program.

Some of the lecturers are:

And many other wonderful lecturers!

I hope to share with you news and insights from this interesting event!

Why Globalization Matters?

“It was by making myself a Catholic that I won the war of the Vendee [the war of counter-revolution in western  France], by making myself a Muslim that I established myself in Egypt, in making myself Ultramontane [a devotee of the papacy] that I won men’s hearts in Italy. If I were to govern a Jewish people, I would re-establish Solomon’s Temple.” Napoleon Bonaparte

It is with Napoleon’s astonishing remark that I decided to give you some light of what Globalization refers to and why I choose to write about it as one of the two pillars of my research.

The term Globalization (also referred to as Globalisation) refers to what many different historians considered a process of interrelation (or unification) of the world. It was a process of cultural, political and economic relations that for the first time in history united all mankind.

It has been the aim of historians to identify When does Globalization begun and How it begun.  But also, it has been their aim to question if Globalization as a process has already concluded or if it is an ongoing process in the 21st. Century.  As well, historians are still trying to explain if Globalization should be judged (or not) as the result of only positive (good) results in regard to increasing the wealth, culture and technology of the world; while other historians argue that Globalization has also resulted in poverty, losses, conquest and cannibalization.

Globalization has been studied from different approaches in Social Sciences. Sociologists and Anthropologists have focused on the cultural effects that the transfer of technology, mass migrations, institutions and products has had in different regions of the world. Political Theorists studied how Globalization affects the institutions, norms and hierarchical authorities in specific regions and how changes in other regions may have had altered the status quo. Economists study how globalization increased the commerce and transactions between regions and territories through trade, investments, and flows of capital just to mention a few.

In this blog I’ll aim to discuss Globalization as a process and a result of the interconnectedness of human’s psycho-epistemology in specific contexts and periods of history.  My mission is to study how human behavior is not determined by nature and how human free will (action that results from rational or irrational reasonings chosen between opportunity costs) has shaped the course of history until the present.

Continue reading “Why Globalization Matters?” →