Illustration by Kaela Chambers Antarctica is home to more than emperor penguins and a few dozen humans with science citizenship barricaded in small hermetic bases. It is also host to an estimated 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons, alongside large quantities of gold, silver, uranium, and many other rare metals underneath a pristine ice cap still virgin of commercial exploitation. Securing a territory with such a rich underground, in whole or i...
...d and decided to do something about it. The first unions in the United States essentially created the middle class in the 1930s, when they demanded higher wages and a greater share of the profit from industrial employers. The 1950s, when the proportion of unionized workers in the work force peaked at 35 percent, marked the halcyon days for America’s middle class. Consumption skyrocketed and productivity boomed. What is more, the gap between...
...ndigenous peoples of China’s Wild West consider themselves first Tibetan or Uyghur – being a PRC citizen doesn’t seem high on either group’s list of priorities. I would say that the situation faced by the Chinese in the early 1950s was akin to the situation faced by the Founding Fathers in 1783: The nation was technically founded and much territory had technically been won, but only by moving settlers west and meaningfully integrating them into o...
...ses, it highlighted the necessity of retaining a superpower patron for a country surrounded by hostile neighbors. Indeed, one could speculate that a more serious effort at a strategic partnership with the United States in the 1950s might have preempted the Chinese invasion in 1962 altogether (and perhaps, too, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 that soon followed). Instead, the latter sounded the death knell for the transient US-India friendship, wit...
...30s and 80s respectively, and were (for standard infantry rifles) replaced by fully automatic rifles, which fire continuously so long as the trigger is pulled, a technology that originated in 1887. Assault weapons During the 1950s and 60s, militaries also realized the high-power rifle rounds used in World War II, which today are the same rounds used to hunt large game such as deer or moose, were unnecessarily powerful for modern combat. If the v...
...back into their own hands. This tension between dual, opposite connotations of people-power and occupation stems from at least a half-century of political philosophy that emerged from Nasserism and the Arab nationalism of the 1950s. The idea of the leader as the head and the savior of the nation, deserving of loyalty, sacrifice, and unquestioned gratitude, grew out of the perpetual warfare and stagnation since the beginning of the Israeli conflic...
...the housewife. On the other hand, black women did not have the same luxury as the middle-class white women that of viewing jobs as mainly a venue for leaving behind the drudgery of household work. This was evident during the 1950s, when black women made up the highest percentage of married women compelled by dire economic circumstances to seek work outside the household. The 1970s abortion rights campaign merely invoked a privileged entitlement...
...sions throughout the Maghreb region and the wider Islamic and European world. In the 1920s, the Egyptian government called for unveiling as a precondition to modernizing the nation. This campaign was so successful that by the 1950s, the burqa had nearly vanished in Egypt’s cities and steadily waned in its countryside. Many key ideological interpretations of the veil began with the Egyptian campaign, interpretations that continue to saturate the v...
...by the Vietnam War, historians in the 1960s and 1970s were often similarly disturbed by the extent to which their own discipline had produced an account of history that seemed to justify aggressive American foreign policy. In 1950s textbooks, they found a single narrative of American triumphalism. Such accounts conflated Nazi and Soviet regimes, analyzing both exclusively through the lens of totalitarian theory. Moreover, such politicized narrati...
...to the strict gender roles of the past. The abrupt marriage-to his secretary, no less-s a sign that Don recognizes the need to conform to the 1950′s ideal of the husband. Further, Don also seems to be subscribing to the 1950s ideal of father. Jumping into the pool with his kids, he experiences some sort of West coast baptism and actually wants to spend time with his children. At night, he plans for their day at Tomorrowland with Sally and B...
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