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Archive: March 2015 (4 Posts)

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

Who Writes History? Romila Thapar and the Textbooks of India

Posted by: Jason Steinhauer

When historian Romila Thapar first reviewed student textbooks in her native India, she was surprised. “I was appalled by the quality of the information that was being conveyed in these books,” she wrote in a 2009 journal article recalling the experience. Particularly, she was struck by “an adherence to outdated ideas and generally colonial views …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

The Indians’ Capital City: Native Histories of Washington, D.C.

Posted by: Jason Steinhauer

As a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa is researching his forthcoming book “The Indians’ Capital City: ‘Secret’ Native Histories of Washington, D.C.” He sat down with Jason Steinhauer to discuss the facts, myths, and contradictions of Native presence in the nation’s capital. The Chesapeake has a rich indigenous history that …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

Astrobiology and the Religious Imagination

Posted by: Jason Steinhauer

In December, NASA announced that its Mars Curiosity rover measured a tenfold spike in methane in the martian atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill. Then last week, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft provided scientists clear evidence that Saturn’s moon Enceladus exhibits signs of present-day hydrothermal …