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Dec 26, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Adam Hochschild
We’ve seen many skirmishes in America’s culture wars over the decades; one recent round, over abortion, was on the ballot in ten states during the 2024 elections. But the most dramatic battle of them all, between two of the twentieth century’s greatest orators, took place in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, after the high school teacher John Scopes was accused of violating a new state law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution.
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Dec 19, 2024 | 
motherjones.com | Adam Hochschild
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Apr 28, 2024 | 
portside.org | Adam Hochschild
The Particular Cruelty of Colonial Wars Published April 28, 2024 Even the most well-read World War II enthusiast is likely unaware of one major military operation that happened in 1945. It involved Royal Air Force bombers, 24 Sherman tanks, and 36,000 troops—some of them British, the rest Indian and Nepalese Gurkhas under British command. More than 600 of these soldiers died, including a British brigadier general. Despite the year, the fighting happened after the war ended.
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Apr 28, 2024 | 
newyorkfolk.com | James White |Adam Hochschild |Alexandra Moe |Geoffrey Mak
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Occasionally you read a book that changes your sense of what a book can do. For me, that title was Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, which recounts the history of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule over the Congo and how an early-20th-century human-rights campaign managed to bring world attention to the atrocities taking place in the name of profit.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
msn.com | Adam Hochschild
Continue reading More for You
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
newsbreak.com | Adam Hochschild
E ven the most well-read World War II enthusiast is likely unaware of one major military operation that happened in 1945. It involved Royal Air Force bombers, 24 Sherman tanks, and 36,000 troops—some of them British, the rest Indian and Nepalese Gurkhas under British command. More than 600 of these soldiers died, including a British brigadier general. Despite the year, the fighting happened after the war ended. It took place in Indonesia.
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Nov 16, 2023 | 
nybooks.com | Adam Hochschild
In July the Florida Board of Education issued new standards for teaching public school students about slavery. Among other things, these declared that slaves assigned to certain types of work “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Outraged critics denounced this as one more egregious episode in the campaign against “woke” education that Governor Ron DeSantis hopes will carry him into the White House. But it was much more than that.
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Oct 29, 2023 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Adam Hochschild
The title American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis promises to instruct us that the cruel distempers of our times have happened before and that, if we pay attention, we will learn important lessons. And author Adam Hochschild has written wonderful books about other midnights in human history, including King Leopold’s Ghost (European exploitation of the Congo) and Bury the Chains (fighting the transatlantic slave trade). So, yes, attention should be paid.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
smithsonianmag.com | Adam Hochschild
When Dorothy Thompson disembarked from the ocean liner Leviathan in New York on September 14, 1934, it was the first time the reporters waiting at the dock seemed more interested in her than in her Nobel Prize-winning husband, the novelist Sinclair Lewis. He, too, had come to meet her, and was waiting at the side of the pier, quietly irritated by all the attention she was getting.
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Sep 5, 2023 | 
msn.com | Adam Hochschild
MSN Article RSS Frank Church and the committee that investigated the US intelligence agencies. This article appears in the September 18/25, 2023 issue. On November 3, 1791, in what today is western Ohio, some 1,400 US soldiers under Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair, accompanied by more than 100 wives, children, prostitutes, and other camp followers, stopped for the night on the banks of the Wabash River. The inept St. Clair failed to order his men to prepare any breastworks or defenses.
