Writing and publishing a printed and bound book is like sending a postcard into the future. (Just possibly, releasing digital materials has the same capability, but I’m not sure?) So here, on my desk, is a postcard from the end of the last century in the form of a copy…

It is a fact, that I find pretty damned tragic, that I haven’t written anything about the earth-shaking developments in Ukraine, since I wrote this piece on February 24. To be honest, most of that piece still holds up fairly well. So what happened was basically that, energized by the…

By launching a broad military campaign against Ukraine today, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has also launched a strong assault against the norms of the sovereignty-based “world order” that has been in place since 1945 — or even, one might say, since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Of course, the…

In 1511 CE, Portugal became the first of the European empires to establish a presence in East Asia. That was the year in which conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque established the first of the Portuguese empire’s characteristically heavily-armed trading/raiding outposts at Malacca, a strategic choke-point in today’s Malaysia that has always…

Last week, I wrote three blog posts about the involvement of Quakers in various phases of the White-supremacist settler-colonial project here in Turtle Island (the United States.) But all those phases were after the allocation by England’s King Charles II of a huge chunk of land in Turtle Island to…

Earlier this week, I wrote about some of the activities undertaken by the Indian Affairs Committee of the Baltimore Society of Friends (Quakers), which amazingly has been in continuous (or sometimes, possibly a bit sporadic?) operation since 1795 CE. In that blog post, I interrogated the commonly voiced thought that…

On Monday, I wrote about the involvement of Quakers in William Penn’s settler-colonial project in Turtle Island in the 17th century CE. Now, I want to fast-forward to the early 19th century CE, and start looking at the involvement of Baltimore Quakers in various stages of the ongoing westward expansion…

On Friday, I sent out an “institutional” email blast on behalf of Just World Educational, the non-profit educational org that I founded in late 2015 and have headed ever since. That email/newsletter took me much longer than usual to write, hampered as I am by the eye problem that first…