And we wonder why academics get the reputation for promoting obscure knowledge… The University of Ghent (Belgium) will be holding a conference this spring called “The Material Vehicles of the Circulation of Natural Knowledge in the Low Countries.” I wasn’t sure what this meant, exactly, so I went to the website for the meeting and,…
Tag: World History
Where the Present Lies Heavily on the Past (cont’d)
Yesterday I wrote about the Choeung Ek (Killing Fields) site of memory here in Cambodia. Today, I turn to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21 Prison) in downtown Phnom Penh. Tuol Sleng is in better shape than Choeung Ek, probably due to it’s location in the city rather than out in the countryside, and the…
Where the Present Lies Heavily on the Past
This past weekend I visited the main sites of memory from the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s—the Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison in Phnom Penh and the Choeung Ek extermination site just outside the city. For anyone who has spent as much time as I have teaching about the Holocaust of European Jewry, I thought I…
Mapping the World
Last year I wrote about the Worldmapper website—a site that helps users visualize the relationships between different data sets and world geography. In the January/February 2007 issue of The Atlantic, P.J. O’Rourke describes one way that Worldmapper might be used to answer a question about the contemporary world—in this case, how one might use the…