Livia Gershon is a freelance writer in Nashua, New Hampshire. Her writing has appeared in publications including Salon, Aeon Magazine and the Good Men Project. Contact her on Twitter @liviagershon.
The leaders of the Mongol empire never abandoned their nomadic lifestyles, but they created organizational structures capable of ruling a huge part of the world.
A rising middle class built up the notion of a distinct Bengali way of eating that claimed ancient origins while also incorporating European cooking styles.
Lesbian relationships among government workers were seen as a threat to national security in the 1950s. But what constituted a lesbian relationship was an open question.
In the twenty-first century, dictators are less likely than their predecessors to use violence to suppress dissent, cultivating instead “informational autocracies.”
Many read the novels of George Orwell as pro-capitalist/anti-socialist propaganda, but his work has become a resource for all kinds of political arguments.
Along with teachings on liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition contains guidance on removing impediments to compassion.
In the 1980s, people from across the US used civil programs and other direct connections with Salvadorans to build opposition to El Salvador’s oligarchy.
As the Ottoman Empire became a world power in the fifteenth century, it also became a center of culture, producing original political literature and philosophy.
In recent decades, celebrations of Valentine’s Day have become common in Egypt. But, as anthropologist Aymon Kreil found, opinions on the holiday are mixed.
At the time of the Civil War, many Americans revered the nation’s Founding Fathers, and both supporters and opponents of slavery recruited them to their sides.
Published in 1963, Thompson’s influential The Making of the English Working Class quickly led to questions about the nature of the American working class.
In the early twentieth century, reformers united with capitalists to promote high-interest lending, overthrowing opposition to usury rooted in Christian tradition.
