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Boston -- With Virgil's ``Aeneid'' open on their desks, students at Boston Latin School enthusiastically respond to a barrage of questions about the Roman epic depicting the travels and travails of the Trojan warrior Aeneas. ``Who is disguised as a Spartan maiden?'' asks veteran teacher Catherine Wight, in a classroom bedecked with posters of Greek vases and models of the Parthenon and a gladiator's plumed helmet. Nearly all 31 students raise their hands, as several »
GULAM HUSSEIN, a 20-year-old Afghan with a bushy brush cut, hates Greece. He’d leave if he could—even if that meant returning to the imperiled village in eastern Afghanistan that he fled a decade ago. “Anywhere but Greece,” he told me one afternoon late this summer in Athens. “I’d heard it was bad here, but I didn’t know how bad.” About a week before we met, Hussein had gone searching for scrap metal in a central »
Abigail Fisher, a 22-year-old White woman hailing from a middle-class suburb, has been afforded a number of class and race based privileges by the sheer virtue of her birth. A graduate of Louisiana State University, a talented cellist and currently employed as a financial analyst, that is not to take away from the fruits of her labor throughout her academic and professional careers…but it is worth noting that the advantages of being White, female and »
Jared Diamond, "Race Without Color," Discover Magazine, November 1, 1994 Basing race on body chemistry makes no more sense than basing race on appearance--but at least you get to move the membership around. Science often violates simple common sense. Our eyes tell us that the Earth is flat, that the sun revolves around the Earth, and that we humans are not animals. But we now ignore that evidence of our senses. We have learned that »
Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose daringly innovative documentaries about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 earned her both acclaim as a cinematic genius and contempt as a propagandist for Hitler, died Monday night at her home in Pöcking, south of Munich. She was 101. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, she was pronounced a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies and never again found work as a »
More than 20,000 British men of military age refused the draft, and, as a matter of principle, many also refused the non-combatant alternative service offered to conscientious objectors, such as working in war industries or driving ambulances. More than 6,000 of these young men went to prison under very harsh conditions, as did some brave, outspoken critics of the war. This is one of the largest groups of people ever behind bars for political reasons »
When Europe marched to war in the summer of 1914, both sides thought the fighting would be over in a few weeks. Instead, by the close of December, World War I had already claimed close to a million lives, and it was clear the fighting would go on for a long time. Yet on Dec. 24, much of the Western Front fell silent as ordinary soldiers made temporary peace with the enemy. This was the »
The question whether war is ever justified, and if so under what circumstances, is one which has been forcing itself upon the attention of all thoughtful men. On this question I find myself in the somewhat painful position of holding that no single one of the combatants is justified in the present war [World War I], while not taking the extreme Tolstoyan view that war is under all circumstances a crime. Opinions on such a »
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4) Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind. Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the »