August 2016

The Known World

Racial tensions in America have not gone away 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1954%E2%80%9368)), and there is much talk in the media and among pundits about the enduring legacy of slavery. The 2013 film 12 Years a Slave (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/?ref_=nv_sr_2) was an adaptation of the 1853 slave narrative memoir by Solomon Northup, a New York State-born free African-American man who […]

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The Reformation

2017 will be a significant year for readers of history, particularly religious history. It will be 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Church door at Wittenberg in Saxony. For convenience, the event in 1517  is taken to be the start of what came to be known as ‘The Protestant Reformation’.

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Bird Brain

As our knowledge of the natural world deepened from the mid nineteenth century onward it became increasingly implausible to think that humans were in any sense unique or special. Features that had been offered as uniquely human were complex communication, social organisation, capacity for suffering, personality and empathy. These are all now known to be

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