When it comes to news involving Muslims, the top headlines are overwhelmingly about extremism. “Terrorist attacks committed by Muslim extremists receive 357% more US press coverage than those committed by non-Muslims, according to new research from the University of Alabama… Terrorist attacks committed by non-Muslims (or where the religion was unknown) received an average of…

“America rules the world— by force.” — Harry Browne, American writer For those of us in humanities core, this past quarter has conditioned many to immediately associate quotes like this with related historical situations ranging from Spanish atrocities in the Andes to British conquest in India. Today’s blog post centers around the idea that the…

When it comes to the conversation of empire, the story is mostly told with two sides in mind: the oppressor and the oppressed. In the story of physical conquest specifically, these sides refer to the conqueror and the conquered respectively. What’s often looked over, though, is the middle ground— a person or group with characteristics…

“History repeats itself”. Today we will discuss this common pithy statement in terms of the behaviors of the 16th and 21st century superpowers, which, I argue, have been consistently exploitative over the course of many centuries. To do so, we shall analyze and compare two images involving the indigenous peoples of the Americas, one depicting…

Society tends to agree on certain universal ideas of which actions or ideas are considered good and which are considered bad. We have thus created a hierarchy in which a good person— an honest, kind, and generous one— dominates in morality over a bad one— who, for instance, lies and steals. Yet, social arguments emerge…

Last blog post we discussed the lifespan of an empire. Today’s topic is centered around what happens after an empire has established itself as a dominating force and has conquered other areas. Rather than discussing these effects in terms of the empire in relation to other empires as explored before, we will consider the primary…

In the previous blog post, we discussed the effects of a powerful empire and its ever-expansive nature. However, upon close evaluation of this phenomenon, many of us are prompted to consider: how do thoughts or corporations attain such authority over society in the first place? In other words, how does an empire come into being?…

The Persians surrendered to the Greeks, barbarians sieged Rome, and the Ottomans lost WWI. Although history’s most legendary empires have fallen, empire still lives on in countless forms in the modern world. Rather than referring simply to the reign of a supreme geographical entity, “… empire is in many ways about power,”1 and it can refer to…