Originally published 08/08/2013
John Lancaster is a British journalist.There are years whose impact on human history is apparent to everyone at the time—1776, say, or 1945, or 2001—and then there are years whose significance seems to grow in retrospect, as it becomes clear that the consequences of certain events are still being felt decades later. Everyone who was an adult in 1989 knew straight away that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a momentous event. What, though, if those events were contingent on things that had happened in another, even more momentous year? Christian Caryl’s book “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century” (Basic) asks the question, What if the really important year in recent history was 1979?
Originally published 05/09/2013
Christian Caryl, the editor of Democracy Lab, is a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy. He is also the author of a new book, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, to be published in May.It is inevitable, perhaps, that we tend to focus on leaders when we examine grand political and economic transitions. But they are not the only actors in these dramas. Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues triumphed precisely because they unleashed the creativity and the entrepreneurial urges of millions of Chinese. Many of them -- shocking though it might be to think -- were not even members of the Chinese Communist Party.
- New ISIS video shows militants smashing ancient Iraq artifacts
- How air conditioning helped Ronald Reagan become president
- Mount Vernon uses lasers to scan mansion down to the nail
- Ray Bradbury home's demise has LA re-examining its history
- Alan Turing’s family demands the UK pardon its convicted homosexuals
- German Historian: Rich Greeks Evade Taxes Since 1830
- UK teaching "invented" history as EU propaganda, says Cambridge professor
- The move accelerates to show that black people have a history
- Eric Foner says he insisted on his MOOC on the Civil War being free
- Ellen Schrecker backs “National Adjunct Walkout Day” as a brilliant tactic