A Guide to the Perplexed: How to Identify Pseudo-Linguistic Articles i...

Nov 8, 2015 by

A Guide to the Perplexed: How to Identify Pseudo-Linguistic Articles in the Media

[The title of this post is inspired by the title of a famous work by one of my favorite scholars of all time, Moshe ben Maimon, aka Maimonides, an extremely influential Jewish philosopher, astronomer, Torah scholar, and physician....

read more

Napoléon Bonaparte: Frenchman, Corsican, Italian, or Moor?—And the Las...

Oct 30, 2015 by

Napoléon Bonaparte: Frenchman, Corsican, Italian, or Moor?—And the Last of the Romanovs

[This post was originally posted in July 2012.] While population genetics typically focuses on migration and settlement patterns of relatively large groups of people, sometimes a genetic signature of just one person tells an...

read more

Count Sollogub on the 1824 flood in St. Petersburg

Sep 26, 2015 by

Count Sollogub on the 1824 flood in St. Petersburg

[Note: the following is primarily for the benefit of the students in my current courses.] From the Memoirs of Count Vladimir Sollogub, on the 1824 flood in St. Petersburg [translation mine]:   “And I remember with horror that...

read more

Are the Black Jews Jewish?

Sep 4, 2015 by

Are the Black Jews Jewish?

[A recent discussion of the “Lost Tribes” prompted me to repost this piece below, originally published on GeoCurrents in July 2012] The South African University of KwaZulu-Natal has recently hosted a conference on black...

read more

The “Russian World”—What And Where Is It?

Dec 7, 2014 by

The “Russian World”—What And Where Is It?

In the past five weeks or so, my students in “Russia Beyond the Russians” course at the Santa Clara University’s Osher Institute and I have grappled with the notion of ethnicity (or “nationality”) as it is understood—and has been...

read more

Maps as an Instrument of Propaganda, Part 1

Nov 16, 2014 by

Maps as an Instrument of Propaganda, Part 1

[This post was originally published in December 2012.] Maps are ideally supposed to be objective depictions of reality, but they can also be used as an instrument of propaganda, portraying the world not as it is but as it is imagined...

read more