In a wide-ranging conversation, Bahiyyih Nakhjavani reflects on the unsettled nature of identity, the limits of historical truth and the moral responsibility of writing about people who can no longer speak for
Flush with my newly minted university degree, I sat down for breakfast with my entrepreneurial grandfather who met me with the question, “So you want to study to be an archaeologist, go
MoreDid Hitler enter into a contract with the devil somewhere in 1928 for the conquest of the world like Dr. Faustus, who it was said , signed a written agreement with the
MoreThe motives that drove archaeologists of the past included a thirst for glory, a taste for treasure, and a desire to enshrine a new political era with the legitimacy of the ancient
MoreWhen I began studying human prehistory in the mid-1990s, little did I know that I would witness a paradigm shift in our understanding of when the first humans settled in Western Eurasia firsthand. At
MoreExactly 52 years ago today, on the morning of February 28, 1972, then-President Richard Nixon and his team, including his wife Pat and his assistant, Dr Henry Kissinger, left Shanghai to head
MoreThe stories we do and don’t tell about ourselves and these times in which we’re living shape the direction of our lives and our cultures. Stories have the power to alter how
MoreOur species stands out from the animal kingdom in many ways. Some of them are obvious: we are big-brained primates who use tools and language, a social species with symbols, culture, and
MoreThe modes of communication that a society uses can tell us a lot about its political structure. A research study we published in 2022 revealed distinct modes of communication and administrative recordkeeping in autocratic
MoreWho is the big winner from the inauguration of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya on January 22? The hindutvist PM, of course. Yet, is not the bigger winner Muhammad Ali Jinnah? For
MoreThe following excerpts adapted from Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky and published in Stanford University Press Between the 1850s and World War I,
MoreSHOULD EUROPE BE AFRAID OF THE RISE OF FAR-RIGHT MENACE? While examining the fear of Europe of the emergence of far-right we may refer to the report by BBC’s Katya Adler that
MoreAs we rightly remember the Auschwitz death camp and the rest of the Jewish Holocaust, let’s take a moment to recall the greatest mass killer of prisoners during World War II, the by now forgotten
MoreLenin died 100 years ago. He was one of the towering figures in the Marxist tradition, who translated ideas into action by building a revolutionary party and leading a working-class revolution. It
MoreWe had a Miracle on 34th Street. I believe now we have had a Miracle on the Hudson. ~ New York Governor David Paterson on the successful rescue of all persons on
MoreAn international team of scientists from China, Australia and the United States unraveled the mystery of when and how the largest ape ever known on Earth went extinct. The Gigantopithecus blacki, or
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