The Historian

"Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace"-Eugene O'Neill, American playwright Women have held sacred sexuality since time immemorial. In Paleolithic times, the sacred feminine was captivated in her representation. She had no voice, no soul, just a body from which all life sprung. This body was round, curved, voluptuous, and the center of worship by both men and women. But it was within this context of sexual power that woman came to be defined, her ability to give birth and nurture creation made her the ultimate icon of worship. But she was also a force to be feared. By the Neolithic era, man learned that the only way to survive and sustain his progeny, was by controlling the natural resources around him. Hydraulic engineering became necessary for civilizations to develop and produce--irrigation for floods, boats for transport, dams for storing water--were just some of the many ways men learned to control resourc...

"Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road." - Francois-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire (1694-1778) Political scientists often credit our modern-day world with the outward signs associated with Americanization. Let's face it, where there is a McDonald's there is bound to be freedom, equality, and justice! But is this necessarily true? How do we account for the lack of women's rights in the Middle East that boast a McDonalds in the streets of Bahrain or Cairo? Or present-day Communism in China, where KFC and Pizza Hut appear in big cities like Hong Kong or Beijing? In order to trace the modernization of the world, historians take a look back at a time of timultuousness, huge economic disparity, and desperate voices turned silent from below. We refer to the French Revolution, a movement that first appeared in the early American colonies in the 'Spirit of '76', but solid...

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is a name and persona not fully understood by the West. Today, we often refer to him as the 'thin man in the loin cloth, who helped bring his country to independence', but we know little to nothing about his beliefs, his struggles, and his ability to transcend cultural and religious barriers. Here in the west, we carry no comparable measure to the 'man in the loin cloth', but we often briefly reference him when we discuss civil disobedience or nonviolence. Sure, we had Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s and Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s, but whom do we admire today? Where is the man or woman who speaks truth against the majority? Can he or she be found in the political scene today? I argue no. A man like Gandhi would be killed, labeled a heathen or unconscionable liberal with little or nothing to offer today's political scene. In fact, during his second civil disobedience campaign of the 1930s, Winston Churchill spoke of Gandhi in the...