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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...
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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...
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Napoléon Bonaparte: Frenchman, Corsican, Italian, or Moor?—And the Last of...
[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...
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A Guide to the Perplexed: How to Identify Pseudo-Linguistic Articles in the...
[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,...
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Best Country To Be a Mother: Finland
[This post was originally published in June 2013] Among the world’s many social development indices is the 2013 Mothers’ Index recently published by the Save the Children charity. The index is a...
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Regional Differences in Swiss Cuisine
[This post was originally published in March 2013] My previous post discussed the differences in voting patterns between French-, German-, and Italian-speaking areas of Switzerland. Similarly,...
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Crimean Tatars, According to Gustav Radde—Part 2
(This post is part 2 of my overview of Gustav Radde’s Crimean Tatars, originally published in Russian in 1856-1857. Part 1 can be found here. The images in this post are from EncyclopediaOfUkraine...
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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...
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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...
View ArticleThe best books about how human language works
Do you like to read? Would you like some great book recommendations? Then check out Shepherd.com: here are my book recommendations, and there are recommendations by other book authors as well. Happy...
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