Legacy Modernization Quotes

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Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.
Samuel P. Huntington
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves?
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern)
Each time we use our cell phones, snap pictures with a camera, or use a search engine’s algorithms, we benefit from the legacy of Muhammad’s modern mindset. His mindset is not tied to Mecca or Medina, for as the Golden Age political philosopher Al-Farabi observed, “Medina is not a location but the manner in which a community comes together.” Indeed, people of any culture or race can establish a “place of flowing change.” As Muhammad declared in the final days of his life, “My progeny are those who uphold my legacy!
Mohamad Jebara (Muhammad, the World-Changer: An Intimate Portrait)
A legacy that powerful does not disappear. Next to the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans were babies. Our modern nations like Great Britain and America? Blinks of an eye...The very oldest root of civilization, at least of Western civilization, is Egypt. Look at the pyramid on the dollar bill. Look at the Washington Monument—the world’s largest Egyptian obelisk. Egypt is still.......very much alive.
Rick Riordan (The Red Pyramid (The Kane Chronicles, #1))
In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them. I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.
Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.
Jürgen Habermas
The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?
Steven Johnson (How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World)
No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied- including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it's hard to see how monogamy comes "naturally" to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers- even presidential legacies- for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.
Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality)
What is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated, and the same is true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture and of Egypt's amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even the central content of such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period). 7 The majority of Egyptologists will not consider the implications of Egypt's early sophistication. These implications are startling, according to a number of more daring thinkers. John Anthony West, an expert on the early dynastic period, asks: How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of `development'. But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start. The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a `development', it was a legacy.
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.
Edward Humes (Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash)
One thing becomes very clear; if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority.
Julius Evola (Revolt Against the Modern World)
When you can’t keep women out anymore, and you can’t force them all to become secretaries or teachers because modern social politics demand that you at least pretend to support gender equality in the workplace, what can you do to keep women out of powerful positions in business? You can set them up to fail—or, to be more accurate, you set them up to fall.
Ijeoma Oluo (Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America)
Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture’s basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains’ basic formation.
Jennifer Michael Hecht (Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson)
We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.) He has also emerged as the uncontested visionary in anticipating the shape and powers of the federal government. At a time when Jefferson and Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will, Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary, along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial system. Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
However, the most challenging comparison is that we—the United States of America, the leaders of the modern-day heretical kingdom of Christendom, one exceptional nation that for centuries has been thriving, growing, and expanding (supposedly) under God—are not that dissimilar from Nazi Germany.
Mark Charles (Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery)
Threaded through the reverie for carbon capture is a fantasy of industrial absolution—that a technology could be almost dreamed into being that could purify the ecological legacy of modernity, even perhaps eliminate its footprint entirely.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
The myth of Christian martyrdom and persecution needs to be corrected, because it has left us with a dangerous legacy that poisons the well of public discourse. This affects not just Christians, but everyone. We cannot use the mere fact that we feel persecuted as evidence that our cause is just or as the grounds for rhetorical or actual war. We cannot use the supposed moral superiority of our ancient martyrs to demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of our modern religious beliefs or ideological positions. Once we recognize that feeling persecuted is not proof of anything, then we have to engage in serious intellectual and moral debate about the actual issues at hand.
Candida R. Moss (The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom)
Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering.
Jung Chang (Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China)
We do have the ability to manifest things, but our purpose, our end, our legacy is also controlled by our destiny. So focus on what comes easy—that is your destined life.
Emma Mildon (The Soul Searcher's Handbook: A Modern Girl's Guide to the New Age World)
Racist legacy laws and modern racist practices are all part of the same system, and it needs to be changed now.
DaShanne Stokes
The experience bestowed a strange psychological legacy, leaving Steinbeck with a profound sense of vulnerability which shaped him as a writer.
Catharine Arnold (Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History)
The Goddess ethos is: living for love, light, and legacy.
Emma Mildon (Evolution of Goddess: A Modern Girl's Guide to Activating Your Feminine Superpowers)
Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.
William Barrett (Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy)
Leadership is not just about building an individual legacy. It is about creating a legacy that will benefit communities and many countries.
Gift Gugu Mona (The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader)
One could spend a lifetime reading the works of scholars like al-Bukhārī, al-Dhahabī, and Ibn Hajar, and two lifetimes trying to keep up with them.
Jonathan A.C. Brown (Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (The Foundations of Islam))
Dear Leader, Leadership is not about building your own empire. It is about building a legacy that can benefit the entire community.
Gift Gugu Mona (The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader)
The brain is the hungriest organ in the body, with a metabolic rate sixteen times that of muscle tissue per unit weight. In modern humans, it accounts for 20 to 25 percent of an adult’s energy needs.
Donald C. Johanson (Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins)
Children are told to humor their elders who still believe in such things and have never had the scientific and technical training that would show them how incompatible such notions are with modern science.
Walter J. Ciszek (With God in America: The Spiritual Legacy of an Unlikely Jesuit)
For at the beginning of the twentieth century, the nation had been struggling to find its way. Terror had raged, a second civil war had threatened to split the nation into new feuding armies, and the inequities of industrial life had brutalized too many lives. Three men who were caught up in those traumatic times, shaped by them, found with their talents, energy, and ideals a way out of it, both for themselves and for the nation. Darrow, Billy, D.W. were all flawed - egotists, temperamental, and too often morally complacent. But as their careers and lives intersected in Los Angeles at the tail end of the first decade of the twentieth century, each in his own way helped to move America into the modern world. They were individuals willing to fight for their beliefs; and the legacy of their battles, their cultural and political brawls, remains part of our national consciousness.
Howard Blum (American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood & the Crime of the Century)
The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism.
Diarmaid MacCulloch (The Reformation)
This book tells the imaginary origin of a ranch near Calgary where I worked as cook's helper. It is the first in a series about the fictional ranch family, progressing from the 1880's when this book is set, right up to modern times.
Gloria Dawn (Lawson's Legacy (Blue Canadian Rockies))
Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of "characteristic adaptations" can be sorted [...] into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society). Although it is generally good for you to pursue goals, not all goals are equal. People who strive primarily for wealth and achievement are [...] less happy, on average, than those whose strivings focus on the other three categories.
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
The Bible also commands you to kill a bride discovered not to be a virgin... and Jesus recommends plucking out your eyes if you lust after a woman (Mt 5:28-29). To be a good Christian and blend into modern society one must be very skillful at choosing one’s cherries.
Michael Paulkovich (Beyond the Crusades: Christianity's Lies, Laws and Legacy)
In many ways, it is hard for modern people living in First World countries to conceive of a pandemic sweeping around the world and killing millions of people, and it is even harder to believe that something as common as influenza could cause such widespread illness and death.
Charles River Editors (The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak)
These days the legacy newborn babies bring into the world with them isn’t a lack of nutrition, but the opposite. So they are not only being born into households where people eat more and exercise less, but have an innate and enhanced vulnerability to succumb to the diseases that poor lifestyles bring. It has been suggested that children growing up today will be the first in modern history to live shorter, less healthy lives than those of their parents. We aren’t just eating ourselves into early graves, it seems, but breeding children to jump in alongside us.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
But the modern Pharisees don’t see it that way. Instead, these critics put on their $100 blue jeans, leave their nice homes, drive their SUVs to the trendy coffee shop down the street, pull out their $1,000 MacBooks, sip their $8 coffees, and type blog posts about how wealth is evil.
Dave Ramsey (The Legacy Journey: A Radical View of Biblical Wealth and Generosity)
Bonhoeffer’s permanent legacy as a theologian has been to show that in the modern world, as in Josiah’s and Huldah’s Jerusalem, fostering the discomfiting yet life-giving practice of reading the Bible against ourselves is a major public responsibility of the Christian teacher and theologian.
Ellen F. Davis (Biblical Prophecy: Perspectives for Christian Theology, Discipleship, and Ministry (Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church))
Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. Modern
Abraham Joshua Heschel (God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism)
This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: “Let us rejoice.
Albert Camus
Operation Legacy allowed the British to nurture a memory of Empire that was deeply deceptive – a collective confabulation of an imperial mission that had brought nothing but progress and good order to a previously savage world, unlike the French, Italians, Belgians, Germans and Portuguese – those inferior colonial powers whose adventures had been essentially brutal, cynical and exploitative.
Ian Cobain (The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation)
Poverty thinking is always focused on other people’s money, and it often gets obsessively focused on an unbiblical notion of equality (which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next chapter). If there are two people in a room, one rich and one broke, then a modern-day Robin Hood should come in, take the rich person’s money, and give it to the broke person. The fact that Robin Hood was a thief isn’t important.
Dave Ramsey (The Legacy Journey: A Radical View of Biblical Wealth and Generosity)
Ironically, the inborn factor that is most likely to be making the major contribution to the savageries of modern war is the powerful human inclination to co-operate. This is a legacy from our ancient hunting past, when we had to co-operate or starve. It was the only way we could hope to defeat large prey animals. All that a modern dictator has to do is to play on this inherent sense of human group-loyalty and to expand and organize this group into a full-scale army. By converting the naturally helpful into the excessively patriotic, he can easily persuade them to kill strangers, not as acts of inborn brutality, but as laudable acts of companion-protection. If our ancestors had not become so innately co-operative, it might be much more difficult today to raise an army and send it into battle as an organized force.
Desmond Morris (Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language)
George W. Bush’s legacy will always be defined by the events of September 11, 2001, which provided him with something of a delayed mandate. Without 9/11, there would have been no unconstitutional Patriot Act, no Homeland Security Department, no decade-long occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and no open-ended “war on terror.” As such, it is important to look closely at exactly what really happened on 9/11/2001.
Donald Jeffries (Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics)
Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.
Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
Alexander emerges as an almost Hamlet-like figure, more sinned against than sinning. In a sense Alexander, too, was haunted and motivated by his father’s ghost... He may well have saved more lives than he destroyed and was rarely gratuitous in the use of violence... his legacy is enormous. He was the founder of the Hellenistic Age, which in turn has bequeathed us the foundations of our modern art, science and culture.
Andrew Chugg (The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great)
In a decade that would become known as the Roaring Twenties, a “Jazz Age” glamorized in the works of authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, the modern club was born. Five years into prohibition, there were between 30,000 and 100,000 speakeasy clubs in operation in New York City alone, and it was already evident that the dream of a dry America had crumbled. Put simply, the population´s demand for alcohol had superseded the need for sobriety. Another
Charles River Editors (The Prohibition Era in the United States: The History and Legacy of America’s Ban on Alcohol and Its Repeal)
While the psychiatric establishment was debating theories of toxic parenting and childhood psychosis, however, Asperger’s lost tribe was putting its autistic intelligence to work by building the foundations of a society better suited to its needs and interests. Like Henry Cavendish, they refused to accept their circumstances as given. By coming up with ways of socializing on their own terms, they sketched out a blueprint for the modern networked world.
Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
Historian C. John Sommerville calls the Puritans “the first modern parents”; anthropologist David Lancy, a little more pointedly, describes them as “the first anxious parents.” Either way, their legacy is clear. The Puritans simultaneously established two American traditions: (1) making child-rearing an all-consuming DIY activity, and (2) ruining things for everyone. Before, benign neglect was the norm. Now you had to either obsess over your children or feel guilty for failing to.
Jennifer Traig (Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting)
In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32
Caroline Alexander (The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War)
The urge to reproduce, once inextricably linked to sex, may have a connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating death by creating an enduring legacy. You can test the primal strength of this cultural idea by noting how no one questions the rationality of reproduction, even in a world of rapidly dwindling resources. Meanwhile, people who choose not to have children often receive both religious and secular disdain as selfish, the breakers of an unspoken social contract, or simply odd.
W. Scott Poole (Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror)
One thing becomes very clear; of the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority.
Julius Evola (Revolt Against the Modern World)
Pilgrims from all over the world were making their way to the place deemed the pearl of the Middle East. The city was reminiscent of a modern-day Persepolis. Its buildings, like towering pillars, tested the sky’s limit. The evenly paved roads belched with the smell of new tarmac, as if a million masons woke up every morning and by hand lay asphalt one grain at a time. People of all colors, ethnicities, creed and social statuses came bearing money, knowledge or experience in order to build their legacies in the new kingdom, sprouting out of the desert. Dubai had arrived.
Soroosh Shahrivar (The Rise of Shams)
Coke’s influence was direct, Bacon’s more subtle, but Williams built upon the grounding both provided him, adding his own insights and his own conclusions, leaving a legacy of his own. It would be he, not Thomas Jefferson, who first called for a “wall of separation” to describe the relationship of church and state which both he and Jefferson demanded. It would be he who created the first government in the world that built such a wall. And it would be he who first defined the word “liberty” in modern terms, and saw the relationship between a free individual and the state in a modern way.
John M. Barry (Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty)
Marathon In 490 B.C., a Greek messenger named Pheidippides ran twenty-six miles, from Marathon to Athens, to bring the senate news of a battle. He died from exhaustion, but his memory lives on thanks to the “marathon,” a twenty-six-mile footrace named in his honor. I thought it would be neat to bring Pheidippides to a modern-day marathon and talk to him about his awesome legacy.   ME: So, Pheidippides: What was it like to run the first “marathon”? PHEIDIPPIDES: It was the worst experience of my life. ME: How did it come about? PHEIDIPPIDES: My general gave the order. I begged him, “Please, don’t make me do this.” But he hardened his heart and told me, “You must.” And so I ran the distance, and it caused my death. ME: How did you feel when you finally reached your destination? PHEIDIPPIDES: I was already on the brink of death when I entered the senate hall. I could actually feel my life slipping away. So I recited my simple message, and then, with my final breath, I prayed to the gods that no human being, be he Greek or Persian, would ever again have to experience so horrible an ordeal. ME: Hey, here come the runners! Wooooh! PHEIDIPPIDES: Who are these people? Where are they going? ME: From one end of New York to the other. It’s a twenty-six-mile distance. Sound familiar? PHEIDIPPIDES: What message do they carry…and to whom? ME: Oh, they’re not messengers. PHEIDIPPIDES: But then…who has forced them to do this? ME: No one. It’s like, you know, a way of testing yourself. PHEIDIPPIDES: But surely, a general or king has said to them, “You must do this. Do this or you will be killed.” ME: No, they just signed up. Hey, look at that old guy with the beard! Pretty inspiring, huh? Still shuffling around after all these years. PHEIDIPPIDES: We must rescue that man. We must save his life. ME: Oh, he knows what he’s doing. He probably runs this thing every year. PHEIDIPPIDES: Is he…under a curse? ME: No.
Simon Rich (Free-Range Chickens)
So why did strong, modern states not emerge in Latin America as they did in Europe? If there is a single factor that explains this outcome, it is the relative absence of interstate war in the New World. We have seen how central war and preparation for war were in the creation of modern states in China, Prussia, and France. Even in the United States, state building has been driven by national security concerns throughout the twentieth century. Though Europe has been remarkably peaceful since 1945, the prior centuries were characterized by high and endemic levels of interstate violence. Over the past two centuries, the major political acts that reconfigured the map of Europe—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the wars of unification of Italy and Germany—all involved high levels of violence, culminating in the two world wars of the twentieth century. There has been plenty of violence in Latin America, of course: today the region is infested with drug cartels, street gangs, and a few remaining guerrilla groups, all of which inflict enormous sufferings on local populations. But in comparison with Europe, Latin America has been a peaceful place in terms of interstate war. This has been a blessing for the region, but it has also left a problematic institutional legacy.
Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
Islamic tradition does not recognize such presumptuous and conceited preoccupation as "reviewing", which is now widely practised among scholars who regard highly this legacy of the Western tradition modern scholarship. a Muslim scholar, with the work of another before him, would either - according to Islamic tradition - refute it (radd), or elaborate it further in commentary (sharh) as the occasion demands. there is no such thing as "reviewing" it, whether the "review" is termed as such or as any other term which describes it. If there are petty mistakes they turn a blind eye to them; if there are obscurities they explain them in commentary - they polish a positive work and make it shine.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Comments on the Re-Examination of Al-Raniri's Hujjatu'l-Siddiq: A Refutation)
When Affirmative Action Was White is one result of this endeavor. It reveals how policy decisions dealing with welfare, work, and war during Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans. It also traces how inequality, in fact, increased at the insistence of southern representatives in Congress, while their other congressional colleagues were complicit. As a result of the legislation they passed, blacks became even more significantly disadvantaged when a modern American middle class was fashioned during and after the Second World War. Public policy, including affirmative action, has insufficiently taken this troubling legacy into account.
Ira Katznelson (When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America)
The most succssful monsters overdetermine these tansgressions to become, in Judith Halberstam's evocative phrase, 'technologies of monstrosity' that condense and process different and even contradictory anxieties about category and border. Some critics hold that the genre speaks to universal, primitive taboos about the very foundational elements of what it means to be human, yet the ebb and flow of the Gothic across the modern period invites more historical readings. Indeed, one of the princial border breaches in the Gothic is history itself- the insidious leakage of the pre-modern past into the skeptical, allegedly enlightened present. The Gothic, Robert Mighall suggests, can be thought of as a way of relating to the past and its legacies.
Roger Luckhurst (Late Victorian Gothic Tales)
What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism. Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages. When the technological bonanza began, Europeans could harness it far better than anybody else. So it is hardly coincidental that science and capitalism form the most important legacy that European imperialism has bequeathed the post-European world of the twenty-first century. Europe and Europeans no longer rule the world, but science and capital are growing ever stronger. The victories of capitalism are examined in the following chapter. This chapter is dedicated to the love story between European imperialism and modern science.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
A dizzying array of resources across multiple fields of human inquiry has been deployed to defend this belief. By far, the strongest were theological arguments that presented white supremacy as divine mandate. Particular readings of the Bible provided the scaffolding for these arguments. Black Americans, for example, were cast as descendants of Cain, whom the book of Genesis describes as physically marked by God after killing his brother, Abel, and then lying to God about the crime. In the white Christian version of this narrative, the original ancestor was a Black criminal, and modern-day dark-skinned people continue to bear the physical mark of this ancient transgression. This story implied that Blacks likely inherited both their purported ancestor’s physical distinctiveness and his inferior moral character. These teachings persisted in many white Christian circles well into the 20th century.
Robert P. Jones (White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity)
While poorhouses have been physically demolished, their legacy remains alive and well in the automated decision-making systems that encage and entrap today's poor. For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management - automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analysis - retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation. The digital poorhouse deters the poor from accessing public resources; polices their labor, spending, sexuality, and parenting; tries to predict their future behavior; and punishes and criminalizes those who do not comply with its dictates. In the process, it creates ever-finer moral distinctions between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, categorizations that rationalize our national failure to care for one another.
Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor)
The ancient Numantians are to this day Spain’s paragons of heroism and patriotism, cast as role models for the country’s young people. Yet Spanish patriots extol the Numantians in Spanish – a romance language that is a progeny of Scipio’s Latin. The Numantians spoke a now dead and lost Celtic language. Cervantes wrote The siege of Numantia in Latin script, and the play follows Graeco-Roman artistic models. Numantia had no theatres. Spanish patriots who admire Numantian heroism tend also to be loyal followers of the Roman Catholic Church – don’t miss that first word – a church whose leader still sits in Rome and whose God prefers to be addressed in Latin. Similarly, modern Spanish law derives from Roman law; Spanish politics is built on Roman foundations; and Spanish cuisine and architecture owe a far greater debt to Roman legacies than to those of the Celts of Iberia. Nothing is really left of Numantia save ruins.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Paul Robin aimed at a higher ideal than merely modern ideas in education. He wanted to demonstrate by actual facts that the bourgeois conception of heredity is but a mere pretext to exempt society from its terrible crimes against the young. The contention that the child must suffer for the sins of the fathers, that it must continue in poverty and filth, that it must grow up a drunkard or criminal, just because its parents left it no other legacy, was too preposterous to the beautiful spirit of Paul Robin. He believed that whatever part heredity may play, there are other factors equally great, if not greater, that may and will eradicate or minimize the so-called first cause. Proper economic and social environment, the breath and freedom of nature, healthy exercise, love and sympathy, and, above all, a deep understanding for the needs of the child—these would destroy the cruel, unjust, and criminal stigma imposed on the innocent young.
Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)
As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it.
Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds)
In a move that is at odds with what I am calling the Unmooring thesis, Heidegger wants to show that modern philosophy is the “logical” consequence of Plato’s humanistic legacy. For Kant, as for the Greeks, [A5] thinking (as Logos—forms of judgment—categories—reason) gets the upper hand in establishing the perspective for interpreting beings as such. Additionally, following Descartes’s procedure, thinking as “thinking” comes to dominate; and beings themselves become [A1] perceptum (represented) or object, in accordance with the same [legacy] historical reason. Therefore thinking cannot get to a [ICS] ground of Da-sein; i.e., the question of the [A2] truth of be-ing is unaskable here.45 The Greeks allowed thinking to get “the upper hand” in the correct ascertainment of the Forms until it came to dominate interpretation completely, eliminating A2 Unconcealment Truth (rendering it “unaskable”) and radically altering man and Being. The very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. . . . Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes. (Heidegger, QT 128; see also 151; Heidegger, PR 76–77)
Lee Braver (A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Topics In Historical Philosophy))
As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.
Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds)
he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science.
Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species)
No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.
Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
John Law left us with a legacy that continues to have a profound impact in the spheres of economics, public policy, finance, and, as a result, the very foundations upon which modern society has been constructed.
Gavin John Adams (John Law: The Lauriston Lecture and Collected Writings)
The burning desire of the Founder in establishing aikido was to keep the most valuable legacy of budo alive in the modern world. In order to accomplish his goal he went beyond differences in outward form to grasp the essence of each martial art and to bring it to life in a new form. The motivating force was his intense spiritual quest to discover a life-giving and life-affirming philosophy in budo. The result was the transformation of the heart of budo into the heart of aikido, the way of harmony and love.
Kisshomaru Ueshiba (The Spirit of Aikido)
The Soviet system had left many valuable legacies—a huge network of large industrial enterprises (though stranded in the 1960s in terms of technology); a vast military machine; and an extraordinary reservoir of scientific, mathematical, and technical talent, although disconnected from a commercial economy. The highly capable oil industry was burdened with an ageing infrastructure. Below ground lay all the enormous riches in the form of petroleum and other raw materials that Gorbachev had cited in his farewell address
Daniel Yergin (The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World)
Before the Mauryans  The geographic area known today as “India” is a modern concept that was created by the United Kingdom when the British partitioned south Asia along religious lines in 1947; the predominantly Hindu south became India, while the predominantly Muslim areas became Pakistan. For most of its history, India was divided along religious and ethnic lines with scores of kings and princes claiming authority over relatively small regions. Languages too were widely dispersed, with the north being home to more Indo-European-descended people and the south being home to the Dravidians (Thapar 2002, 13).
Charles River Editors (The Maurya Empire: The History and Legacy of Ancient India’s Greatest Empire)
The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a ‘development’, it was a legacy.
Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: Evidence for an Ancient Apocalypse)
Kirkus (starred review): A lucid, expertly researched biography of the brilliant Nikola Tesla. (Readers) will absolutely enjoy (Munson’s) sympathetic, insightful portrait. Booklist: Celebratory, comprehensive profile. ….A well-written, insightful addition to the legacy of this still-underappreciated visionary genius. Library Journal: Entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and futurists will find this biography inspiring. Gretchen Bakke (author of "The Grid"): Munson has provided us with an intimate tapestry of Tesla's life, personality, and inventions. Filled with quotes, and clearly researched with great care, Munson brings Tesla to life, not as a superhero but as a man—both ordinary and extraordinary. What surprised me, and proved to be one of the great pleasures of the book was to realize how much Tesla’s story is an immigrant story. Anne Pramaggiore (CEO of Commonwealth Edison): Tesla is an exactingly-researched history and wonderfully crafted tale of one of the most important and fascinating visionaries of the technological age. This book’s teachings have never been more relevant than in today’s world of digital transformation.
Richard Munson (Tesla: Inventor of the Modern)
Carto’s other legacy to American politics, the Barnes Review, named for his hero, is available for purchase on the Internet. Leading Review articles have included items such as “Of Teutonic Blood: German and German-American Contributions to Civilization as We Know It Have Been Massive,” and the intriguing-sounding “Adolf Hitler: An Overlooked Candidate for the Nobel Prize.” Carto’s erstwhile publishing company, Noontide Press, was responsible for publishing, among other books, The Myth of the Six Million, by a David Hoggan, which, as the title suggests, was a rejection of the historical truth of the Holocaust.
David Aaronovitch (Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History)
One of the Young Ottomans’ most prominent figures, Namik Kemal (1840-1888), derived from early Islamic traditions and practices the idea of a representative assembly that would balance the power of the Sultan. Both the idea that the Sultan’s power needed to be checked along with their support for the enshrinement of Islamic tradition as the core of the Ottoman tradition led the Young Ottomans to see the necessity for the drafting of a Constitution. This Constitution would be the cornerstone of the new Ottoman identity, along with the Ottoman state and institutions.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
The decree was largely inspired by proposals made by France and Britain who assisted the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean war (1853-1856) against Russia. Both Britain and France used their status as allies to encourage further Westernization of the Empire, as the impact of the initial wave of reform was seen as limited. The second wave of reform was also partly the result of some frustration among the Ottomans regarding the limited results of the initial reforms, which introduced a series of new concepts, yet were either hardly implemented as a whole, or had only an impact on the most central areas of the Empire. The decree affirmed more clearly the equality of all subjects of the Empire without distinction of race or religion, thus largely expanding the scope of the previous edict. It also differed by creating a new political mechanism that, to a certain extent, limited the power of the Sultan.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
One of these was the perception that the Tanzimat had not tried to find compromise between the Islamic heritage and the European reforms and laws. The blind acceptance of European ideas and laws was criticized by members of the Young Ottomans, along with the lack of effort to overcome the differences between Islam and the West. Interestingly, this criticism did not come from conservative elements within the Ottoman society, but rather liberal and secular intellectuals.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
Looking at the reforms, technological advances and modernization efforts made by the Ottoman elite between 1826 and the beginning of World War I, one could really wonder why such a thirst for change failed to save the Ottomans when similar measures taken by other nations, such as Japan during the Meiji era, did in fact result in the rise of a global power in the 20th century. During
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
During the same time, it was faced with the first series of wars with Russia, as the new Tsar, Peter the Great implemented a new policy of “access to the sea.” This prevented the Ottoman’s Crimean allies, who usually sent cavalry reinforcements to fight alongside regular Ottoman troops, from supporting Ottoman forces in central Europe. Despite several Russian defeats, the conflict ended with the capture of Azov, the Ottoman’s stronghold in Crimea in 1696, and was a sign of the growing threat Russia posed to the Ottomans. Russia increasingly saw the Ottoman Empire as its objective rival in its quest to assert control over the Black Sea.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
However, while Western principles were the major source of inspiration for Hatt- I Serif of Gulhane, the document itself made a notable effort to place the reforms in the context of the Ottomans Islamic heritage. In fact, it started by placing the Islamic law (Sharia or Şeriat) as a central source of inspiration, and alleging that the Empire’s decline was due to its lack of observance of the Şeriat: “All the world knows that since the first days of the Ottoman State, the lofty principles of the Qu’ran and the rules of the Şeriat were always perfectly observed. Our mighty Sultanate reached the highest degree of strength and power, and all its subjects [the highest degree] of ease and prosperity. But in the last one hundred and fifty years, because of a succession of difficulties and diverse causes, the sacred Şeriat was not obeyed nor were the beneficent regulations followed; consequently, the former strength and prosperity have changed into weakness and poverty. It is evident that countries not governed by the laws of the Şeriat cannot survive.”[6]
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
France’s foreign policy in the 19th century was one of expansion and revenge. The idea that the French needed to seek revenge, initially against England and later against Prussia/Germany, was at the heart of France’s colonialism.  France lost almost all of its colonies in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). The Napoleonic wars also served to show the limits of France’s continental strategy, and the importance of building a potent navy to counter England.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
This policy, viewed positively by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck as a way to shift the focus outside of Europe, was backed by Jules Ferry. Ferry supported what he called “the duty to civilize inferior races.” This led to a French expansion both in North Africa with the establishment of a protectorate in Tunis (1881); Africa, with the occupation of Madagascar and the expansion of France’s possession in Congo and Niger, and more importantly the development of the French “Indochine” in present-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
Pulp devotees did not invent the word fan (derived from the Latin fanaticus, "possessed by divine madness") but they established the first fandom in the modern sense with its own elaborate customs, art forms, specialized jargon, conventions, and absurdly bombastic internecine warfare. Sam Moskowitz's 1954 chronicle of the early days of fandom, The Immortal Storm, inspired one critic to quip, "If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anti-climax.
Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
the support of inspiring figures such as Lord Byron, who fought alongside the rebels, helped grow the revolutionaries’ support among the European nations. Britain, France and Russia signed the Treaty of London in 1827, calling for a cessation of hostilities, and stipulating that in case the Sultan would refuse, the powers could act to enforce such a cessation of hostilities. After the Sultan refused, Britain, France and Russia sent their fleets to the Peloponnese to pressure the Sultan. While it was initially only meant to prevent the Ottoman fleet from reaching the island of Hydra, an initial incident between a British boat and an Egyptian one triggered broader confrontations, resulting in the destruction of the Ottoman fleet during the Battle of Navarino. France later sent an expeditionary corps and, alongside the reorganized Greek forces, defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Petra, in central Greece, leading eventually to the full independence of Greece in 1832.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
For the first time, the Ottoman Empire was forced to recognize the full independence of a nation, not because of a war with a foreign power or an ambitious governor, but because of the aspirations of its people.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
Pan-Islamism was seen as a way to counter Europe’s colonialism, and presented the heart of Islam as outside of Europe’s reach. The development of other similar ideologies by the Empire’s rival, namely the Pan-Hellenism supported by the Greeks, and Pan-Slavism used by Russia to fight the Ottomans, also served to increase the influence of Pan-Islamism among the ruling Ottoman Elite. The
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was often described as a dwindling power, mired by administrative corruption, using inferior technology, and plagued by poor leadership.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
In 1825, however, Sultan Mahmud II issued a fatwa stating that it was the duty of every Muslim to serve in the Ottoman military while reinstating the Nizam-ı Cedid Army in 1826, in an attempt to replace the Janissaries. When the Janissaries revolted in 1826 and sacked parts of Constantinople, the Sultan crushed the revolt, leading to the death of 4,000 Janissaries, and the subsequent dismantling of the old military force.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
seems to be a rule of nutritionism that for every good nutrient, there must be a bad nutrient to serve as its foil, the latter a focus for our food fears and the former for our enthusiasms. A backlash against protein arose in America at the turn of the last century as diet gurus like John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher (about whom more later) railed against the deleterious effects of protein on digestion (it supposedly led to the proliferation of toxic bacteria in the gut) and promoted the cleaner, more wholesome carbohydrate in its place. The legacy of that revaluation is the breakfast cereal, the strategic objective of which was to dethrone animal protein at the morning meal. Ever since, the history of modern
Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)
In Dublin in 1852, Newman delivered a series of nine discourses intended to set the tone for a proposed Catholic university in Ireland. These discourses represent, to my mind, the finest modern attempt to unite the twin legacies of Athens and Jerusalem. Though the university was never built, the discourses were published as The Idea of a University, and in this form they continue to beckon believers in the Christian revelation to consider the legacy of the ancients.
Louis A. Markos (From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics)
This period also saw the Yeni Ceri (“New Soldiers” or Janissaries) win their war of influence against the Ottoman nobility. There was a natural rivalry between the Turkish nobility who formed the Ottomans’ cavalry (the Sipahis), and the Janissaries, the Ottoman foot soldiers who were initially foreign slaves coming from Christian villages under Ottoman occupation. This rivalry, also largely fueled by the Sultan who saw it as a way to prevent both sides from allying against him, turned in the Janissaries’ favor during the mid-sixteenth century, leading to the confiscation of the Sipahis’ lands, and the consolidation of their power.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
After the British victory against Napoleon, Britain was indisputably the leading global power. The British Empire expanded significantly toward Asia, driven by the advances of the East India Company, as well as the development of the steamship and telegraph.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
England acted to maintain the “Pax Britannica” in British colonies, and global stability in British areas of influence. Under the leadership of Conservative leaders such as Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, the British Empire adopted a foreign policy known as the “Splendid Isolation.” This policy sought to maintain the global balance of power while limiting the need for any sort of British intervention in other powers’ internal affairs along with any alliance that would demand a British intervention.
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
It is futile to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and hope that it will go away. Yet, absurdly, this has been American policy since the September 11 attacks. U.S. officials seem to believe that if they act as if Islam is a religion of peace and the Koran a book of peace, Muslims will feel themselves compelled to behave accordingly. An extreme example of this bizarre assumption came in President Obama’s heralded speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, 2009.16 Obama was extremely anxious to appear sympathetic and accommodating to Muslim grievances—so much so that he not only quoted the Koran (and did so ham-handedly and out of context, as we have seen), but also signaled in several ways, whether by ignorance or by design, that he was Muslim himself. For example, Obama extended “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum”—that is, peace be upon you. According to Islamic law, however, this is the greeting that a Muslim extends to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided”—in other words, “Peace be upon the Muslims.” Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naïve, non-Muslim, Islamophilic presidents offer the greeting to Muslims. Obama also said the words that Muslims traditionally utter after mentioning the names of prophets—“peace upon them”—after mentioning Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Does he, then, accept Muhammad as a prophet? No reporter has asked him, but that was decidedly the impression he gave, intentionally or not, to the Islamic world. Obama spoke of a “relationship between Islam and the West” marked by “centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars.” He then named three sources of present-day tensions between Muslim countries and the United States: the legacy of Western colonialism; “a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations;” and “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization,” which “led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Significantly, Obama only listed ways in which the West has allegedly mistreated the Islamic world. He said not a word about the Koran’s doctrines of jihad and religious supremacism. Nothing at all about the Koranic imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that arises from Koranic teachings and which existed long before the ostensibly harmful spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world. Obama did refer to “violent extremists” who have “exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The idea that Islamic jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, born of ignorance of the Koran’s contents. The jihadists may indeed be a minority of Muslims, but there is no solid evidence that the vast majority of Muslims reject in principle what the jihadists do—and indeed, how could they, given the Koran’s explicit mandates for warfare against Infidels?
Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran)
On the military level, the first period of reforms was marked by the introduction of conscription along with a fixed period of military service introduced in 1843 and based on the Prussian Conscription Law of 1814. The Ottoman military was then divided into five Imperial Armies garrisoned in different regions of the Empire. The military service was established as a period of five years between the ages of 20 to 25 along with an additional seven years of reserve duties. The first and second military reforms also saw the emergence of a new, more educated class of middle to high ranking officers and cadets, who progressively became involved in the Ottoman palace politics, as illustrated by the May 1876 coup (see the First Constitutional Era). The
Charles River Editors (The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: The History and Legacy of the Ottoman Turks’ Decline and the Creation of the Modern Middle East)
Therefore, the legacy of pan-Arabism as a phase in postwar Arab politics lies not in its failure over half a century to achieve Arab unity but in the way it captured the high ground of all politics: the language and fundamental categories it is conducted in.
Kanan Makiya (Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Updated Edition))
It is, indeed, one of the basic moral blindspots of American conservatism that its intellectual and leadership energy have never been focused in a proactive way on America's racial-caste legacy. This represents a fundamental moral crisis of modern American conservatism.... American conservatives typically ignored the authoritarian and violent racial-caste practices and values arrayed against black Americans in southern states where the vast majority of blacks live. On the other hand, American conservatives have, throughout this century, often embraced freedom movements elsewhere in the world --in Europe, Latin America, East Asia-- but always firmly resisting a proactive embrace of the black American civil rights movement as a bona fide freedom movement fully worthy of their support. So it is in the shadow of this dismal record of mainstream American conservatism vis-a-vis black Americans' long and arduous quest for equality of status that new black conservatives have emerged.
Martin Kilson
modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, parts of Russia, and stretched all the way up to Finland. Lasting until the middle of the 13th century, at its peak the Kievan Rus spanned the land
Charles River Editors (Ukraine: The History and Legacy of Ukraine from the Middle Ages to Today)