OBRA MAESTRA

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First ‘Human Rights Charter’ is Persian

A 2,500-year-old clay cylinder bears what has been called the world’s “first human rights charter” and was inscribed under the direction of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE. In [...]

Michael Sandel
“Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history”
Copyrights: WGBH Boston and Harvard University

“Sandel has opened up an important area of debate at a time when some of the unquestioned assumptions underlying economic policy and praxis of the last few decades have been exposed as fraudulent and are being questioned. What happens [...]

09/10/2009
NEWS
The Nobel Peace Prize 2009
awarded to:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA…

“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”

Photo: Pete Souza, Obama-Biden Transition Project, licensed by Attribution Share Alike 3.0

Barack Obama

USA

44th President of the United States of America

b. 1961

“His diplomacy is founded in the concept that [...]

Excerpts from
The Mind in the Making by
James Harvey Robinson (June 29, 1863–February 16, 1936) was an American historian.
Robinson was born Bloomington, Illinois. He taught history at the University of Pennsylvania (1891–95) and Columbia University (1895–1919), becoming a full professor in 1895.
In 1919, he was one of the founders of the New School for Social [...]

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
by Steven Pinker
Introduction
Once [...]