Word: historians
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After noting that she embarked on a quest to piece together the mysterious past of her diplomat father Paul and his Ph.D. advisor Bartholomew Rossi, our historian eerily asserts: “we all found ourselves on one of the darkest pathways into history. It is the story of who survived that search and who did not, and why. As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw...
Lest we dismiss this story as, to borrow a line from one of its characters, “only literature,” our historian reminds us that it is a history; Kostova not-so-subtly tries to inject an aura of verisimilitude into the novel...
Opening the story proper, our historian sets the scene in Amsterdam, 1972. Sheltered, studious, and alienated from the “tough-talking, chain-smoking sophisticates” in the brat cohort of diplomats’ children, the protagonist spends long hours with the 19th century tomes in her father’s library during his frequent absences. She becomes captivated by a “much older volume” that breaks the collection’s uniformity: an enigmatic medieval text marked by a woodcut of a dragon and concealing a collection of yellowing letters...
...Kennedy administration should have capitalized on three secret diplomatic encounters with Cuban officials in the 1960s, which might have sidestepped the “dead-end” policy of embargo, esteemed Cuban historian Rafael M. Hernández argued last night during a presentation at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. The Kennedy visiting professor told a crowd of about 40 scholars and students that the three covert meetings could have matured into a more fruitful diplomatic relationship between the two countries. “The embargo became central in U.S. policy towards Cuba...
...With the Nixon trip as the leitmotiv, MacMillan, a University of Toronto historian, deftly weaves together biographies of all the principals (including their wives), contemporary geopolitics (China and the Soviet Union were at odds over their interpretations of communism), and a perceptive understanding of Chinese sensibilities. She explains, for example, the importance of that Nixon-Zhou handshake and a later one between Nixon and Mao that appears on the book's cover: the Chinese feared a replay of their humiliating snub at the 1954 Geneva conference on Indochina and Korea, when U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spurned Zhou...