Author Valerie Hansen demonstrates that the concept of international trading networks and linkages goes back a very long way
Valerie Hansen is an American academic who teaches history at Yale. She also writes books, of which 2012’s The Silk Road is perhaps the best known. Hansen’s latest book is The Year 1000. Provocatively subtitled When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began, it’s a recounting of interconnectedness in the five centuries between 1000…
Disney’s 1950s version of the life of King of the Wild Frontier was, well, mostly historically correct
If you were a child in the 1950s, the chances are that Davy Crockett was briefly a part of your life. On December 15, 1954, the ABC television network broadcast the first episode of a new Disney mini-series loosely based on his exploits, two more episodes followed in January and February 1955, and a concluding…
Liberal bias among researchers has implications for the quality of the research
When it comes to discussion of public policy, the term evidence-based has assumed mantra status. Those who deploy it immediately grab the high ground, inoculating their views against criticism from the less informed – which generally translates into anyone who disagrees with them. It’s a neat trick if you can pull it off. Contrarians, mind…
Primary, a 1960 documentary, shows Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey battling it out in the Wisconsin primary trenches
I recently came across a gem on the Turner Classic Movies schedule. Called Primary, it’s a 1960 documentary. The film is ostensibly a fly-on-the-wall record of the final days of Wisconsin’s 1960 Democratic presidential primary. In an era with far fewer such contests, it pitted U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts against U.S. Sen.…
Who defines what’s essential and should thus be sourced domestically, even if it’s more expensive to do so?
Autarky is an uncommon word that’s become a lot more common lately. It defines the extent to which a country chooses to be self-sufficient, thereby abjuring international trade. Typically, autarky is seen as an impoverishing thing. And it usually is. But in the current debate, it’s a red herring of the highest order. In order…
Recognizing the devastating consequences of allowing the COVID-19 lockdown to go on indefinitely, Austria is gingerly moving forward
Sebastian Kurz is Austria’s 33-year-old chancellor. He’s also one of Europe’s most interesting political leaders. And as Austria takes its first steps towards exiting the COVID-19 lockdown, he’s putting himself out front again. First, a backgrounder on Kurz. With his youth, charisma and all-round media savvy, Kurz may superficially strike Canadians as an Austrian version…
We need to put the numbers in context, take a close look at Germany's health-care system and be prepared to exit the lockdown
Last week’s column was my first on COVID-19. Here are some further thoughts. Numbers in context A perpetual peeve relates to raw numbers being headlined without reference to the relevant denominator. If you don’t have that context, you get a potentially misleading story. COVID-19 deaths are a striking example. There’s been much focus on the…
In the wake of COVID-19, we need to reconfigure our economy and society so they are less vulnerable to external shocks
American historian Frank Snowden pulls no punches. He says the “coronavirus is emphatically a disease of globalization.” And the most severe blows strike at cities that are “densely populated and linked by rapid air travel, by movements of tourists, of refugees, all kinds of businesspeople, all kinds of interlocking networks.” In this respect, the virus…
Their experiences in gaining traction as presidential candidates certainly suggest so, even if their ideologies are markedly different
Despite appearing to be polar opposites, do U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders actually have a lot in common? Are they perhaps two sides of the same coin, two peas in a pod? Let’s consider. The hostile takeover Neither Trump nor Sanders emerged as presidential candidates with the blessing of party establishments.…
One hundred years ago, a flu pandemic swept across the world, killing tens of millions of people, particularly those in the prime of life
From the wet and windswept northwest of Ireland to rural southwestern Ontario, the flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 was remorseless. My mother and my wife’s father lost siblings to an illness where death might come within 24 hours of first symptoms. And sometimes it was particularly brutal. Historian John Barry has described it this…
Valerie Hansen is an American academic who teaches history at Yale. She also writes books, of which 2012’s The Silk Road is perhaps the best known. Hansen’s latest book is The Year 1000. Provocatively subtitled When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began, it’s a recounting of interconnectedness in the five centuries between 1000…
