Ramblings of a History Nerd

     Stephen Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men follows the story of how the US backed a coup in Iran, overthrowing a democratic government, and replacing it with a more authoritarian regime. This event has led to rather divided opinions about the American foreign policy in the Middle East, both during and after the Cold War. Many Islamic fundamentalists argue that American foreign policy is not anything new, and is in fact a rebranding of older Western Imperialism. This raises the question, is it? Is American foreign policy in the Middle East just a discount form of Imperialism? Well, before we go any further, it is important to consider how both democracy and western imperialism got to Iran in the first place.       Firstly, it is important to note that European imperialism in Iran was different compared to other Western Imperial ventures. Western Imperial ventures in the 19th century can be divided into two major camps. It was either direct rule, whic...

     Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an important book if one wants to understand both European colonialism of Africa, and Africans’ response to such colonization. This is done mostly through analyzing how European imperialism perpetuated stereotypes of Africans, and also by Achebe trying to counter such stereotypes. This of course requires background contexts, and yes I wrote “contexts”.       The first context is that of the story itself. The story takes place in Igboland, in what is now modern day Nigeria, during the tail end of the 19th century. Its central focus is on one Igbo clan, and in particular, one warrior of that clan, Okonkwo. It follows both before (major) European contact, as well as after a certain point, when Igboland became a major investment for British colonial efforts.       The second context is that of when the book was written. It was written in 1958, and published in 1959. At the time, Nigeria gained s...

     At the beginning of my sophomore year's fall semester, I was told to write a background guide for USU’s Model UN club. We were planning to host a  conference for High Schoolers, and since I was to be in charge of the Historical Crisis committee, I was told to write the background guide for it. The topic was that of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the start of the First World War. While researching it, I found a lot of evidence that the dual monarchy was not as backwards as often stereotyped in pop history. Later, while beginning to research for this very essay, I stumbled across an article entitled “ Holocaust revisionism and its Political Consequences ”, by Jurgen Graf. As I started reading this, I quickly got the impression that this essay was the work of holocaust deniers. I looked up Jurgen Graf, and surprise, the bastard was one of the premier Holocaust deniers, which is a criminal offense in some countries as well.       While both exper...

     If you were to walk down the streets of Europe in 1910, and said which war would have been the conflict that would have been centralized around speed, the first or the second world war, they might say the first world war, after they ask questions about “what world wars, and why will we have two of them?” That being said, with hindsight, the answer quickly switches to the second world war being the one that had a need for speed.       Fundamentally, Germany formed their main strategic and tactical doctrine around speed and aggression, enabling both a rapid expansion, an ability to exploit any tactical gains, and intense psychological damage to frontline troops, which in turn deals damage to their opponent’s society. However, a speed based-doctrine would ultimately lose out against the remaining Allied powers through a mixture, of doctrine and tactical changes (British and Commonwealth), the ever-changing scale of the fronts (the Soviets), mental co...