Category: Politics
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Hughes Is Proving an Effective Campaigner
Compare the description of the Republican presidential candidate in 1916 to the Republican presidential candidate in 2016: The campaign as conducted by Hughes himself lacks little in vigorous utterance, biting sarcasm, and systemized attack upon Democratic policies and Democratic leaders. Those were the days. Hughes Is Proving an Effective Campaigner: His Vote-Getting Methods Compared With […]
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Big Decline in Total Vote in New York State
The voter turnout rate dropped in New York state, as a percentage of the population, between 1900 and 1915. Two main reasons were listed by the New York Times: Two principal reasons are given by politicians for the steadily decreasing vote, in proportion to population, during the last decade. The first is the law of 1906 […]
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Germany Not Seeking Conquest, Says German
Yeah, about that… Perhaps Germany was not seeking conquest in 1916, but if only that claim was as true in the 1940s, the world would be an immeasurably better place. At the time this article was written, Adolf Hitler was a lowly soldier fighting for Germany during World War I. His subsequent attempts at establishing […]
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The Allies of the Future
Harvard professor Hugo Muensterberg wrote this essay about how the world order might look post-World War I. Some of his predictions or warnings seem relevant today, such as his hope that economic concerns would trump war-mongering. That is the overarching theory behind the Obama Administration’s significant easing of economic sanctions as part of the Iranian […]
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Mount McKinley Three Weeks from New York
The mountain had been colloquially referred to as Mount McKinley since 1896 and had clearly achieved widespread usage by this article’s publication in 1916, becoming the official name one year later in 1917. But indigenous Alaskans had long called it Mount Denali and never stopped doing so. Last September, President Obama announced that the name would once […]
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Sir Edward Grey
The meeting of two great minds. George Bernard Shaw was one of the most acclaimed writers of his day as a journalist and playwright, and nine years after this article in 1925 he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sir Edward Grey was the 11-year Foreign Secretary for Great Britain (their equivalent of the […]
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Sir Edward Grey – George Bernard Shaw profile about the foreign secretary of Britain
The meeting of two great minds. George Bernard Shaw was one of the most acclaimed writers of his day as a journalist and playwright, and nine years after this article in 1925 he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sir Edward Grey was the 11-year Foreign Secretary for Great Britain (their equivalent of the […]
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Why Not Educational Experiment Stations?
Today the issue of federal versus state control looms large over the issue of education. For example, some states mandate teaching intelligent design or creationism in which God created the world in seven days during public school science classes, while others forbid the practice. (Here’s a state-by-state map.) Meanwhile, the Common Core curriculum adopted by most states in […]
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Japan’s Powerful Place Among the Allies
A notable Japanese diplomat and professor named Takuma Kuroda gave an interview which included this ironic quote in light of Japan’s and Germany’s alliance during World War II about 25 years later: “Japan owed her success in the Russian war to the German military system, not to the entity, but to the ideas of military […]
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Co-operative Union of Europe After War
In light of the United Kingdom voting Friday to exit the European Union, the so-called “Brexit” which sent world markets into tumult, this piece from 100 years ago this week is particularly striking. Alfred Fried was an Austrian thinker and writer who advocated more globalism over nationalism, helping create the idea which eventually became the […]