R.I.P. Norman Borlaug: Forgotten Benefactor

The man who sparked the Green Revolution has just died. Gregg Easterbrook profiled him in the January 1997 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Here’s an excerpt.
AMERICA has three living winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, two universally renowned and the other so little celebrated that not one person in a hundred would be likely to [...]

WW2: National Armies vs. Imperial Armies

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 516-518:
The Axis powers were fighting not only against the British, Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men [...]

Sudetenland, Ireland, and Rand Uitlanders

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 346-347:
The term Sudetenland was not much used before the 1930s. At the end of the First World War an attempt had been made to associate the predominantly Germanophone periphery of Bohemia and Moravia [...]

Japan Through Ethiopian Eyes, early 1900s

From Mutual Interests? Japan and Ethiopia before the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-36, by J. Calvitt Clarke III, presented at the Florida Conference of Historians in 2000 (endnote references omitted):
Many Japanese wished to join the West in Africa’s exploitation, and some saw Ethiopia as a potential gateway. In 1899, Dr. Tomizu Hirondo, a professor of law at [...]

Mosquitoes to Mars?

A few weeks ago, RIA Novosti reported on a type of mosquito that seems preadapted to the possibility of suspended animation during long space flights.
Cosmonauts who might fly to the Red Planet are learning how to survive in a forest outside Moscow. Scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medical and Biological Problems [...]

Funereal Language Revival in Northern Ghana

The occasion of the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation seems an appropriate moment to note a recent post by Mark Dingemanse of The Ideophone about an encouraging bit of language revival in Siwu, spoken in the Volta region of Ghana: the return of traditional funeral dirges. (Note that Siwu is the language, [...]

Practical Problems of Genocide Tribunals

From After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide, by Craig Etcheson (Texas Tech U. Press, 2006), pp. 183-187 (footnote references omitted):
When one examines the details of how tribunals are structured, it becomes clear that no solution can yield a completely satisfactory outcome on all the competing values at stake. We see, for example, [...]

Slave Diasporas Within Africa

From “Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora,” by Pier M. Larson in Journal of World History 19: 438-440, 463-464 (Project MUSE edition, footnote references removed):
According to published estimates, roughly the same number of sub-Saharan Africans—some eleven to twelve million—were coercively moved across the Sahara and into the Indian Ocean and were [...]

Wordcatcher Tales: Brown brown, Poda poda, Upline

Among the more interesting words of Sierra Leone Krio that I learned from reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), were the following.
I took turns at the guarding posts around the village, smoking marijuana and sniffing brown brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which was [...]

India’s Diverse Diasporas

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 233-235:
The cultivation of sugar-cane in colonies such as Mauritius and the Natal province of South Africa, in Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam in the Caribbean and Fiji in the Pacific Ocean created settlements of Indian labourers as many stayed on [...]