Word: humanities
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Whether a higher power exists is debatable, but widespread belief in one has helped humanity advance for millennia. Wade, a New York Times reporter, defends that provocative thesis with evidence drawn from biology, archaeology and anthropology. Humans may be innately selfish, he argues, but early hunter-gatherers needed to subordinate self-interest to the will of the group in order to survive, and "the solution that evolved was religious behavior"--humankind's best organizing principle. Ritual chants and dances fostered kinship and inspired tribes to battle outside threats. As language developed, people ascribed their good fortune to the supernatural...
...dozens of memoirs about the horrors inflicted during China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution line the bookcase of human evil, next to diaries from the Soviet Gulag and Holocaust concentration camps. But when Nien Cheng's harrowing Life and Death in Shanghai was published in 1986, the bamboo curtain was just lifting on the decade of madness that had seized the People's Republic beginning in the mid-1960s. Cheng was an improbable survivor of Chairman Mao's brutal campaign, a porcelain-boned diplomat's wife who spent the precommunist years swathed in silk. Yet as she recalled...
...Dear Harvard Community,” they wrote in an email. “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with the Undergraduate Council, common sense requires them to declare the causes which impel them to the separation: Considering the recent complications in regard to the UC elections, we, Weld Thirty-Four (hereinafter WTF) and associates, declare null and void the authority...
After more than five months of going it alone, Iran's opposition Green Movement is reaching out to the United States for help. Via public and private channels, the Obama Administration has received several appeals in recent weeks to take a stronger stand against human-rights abuses in Iran, avoid military action and impose more aggressive and rapid-fire sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards and its vast business interests...
Making India harder for would-be terrorists to penetrate would require reform not just of the bureaucracy but also the police. Local and international human-rights groups have exhaustively documented the crisis in Indian policing, criticizing the Indian police for everything from taking bribes to engaging in torture and extrajudicial killing. Eight national commissions have also recommended wide-ranging police reforms, few of which have been implemented...