Erin L. Thompson is a professor at the City College of New York.
‘Why are you crying, habibi?’ Mansoor Adayfi asked the elephant. He had got into the habit of talking to animals at Guantánamo Bay. Held in solitary confinement for years, he talked to the feral cats who prowled around his cage.
The Spanish garrotted Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor of what is now Peru, in 1533, but their control over their new territory was far from certain. One way they tried to solidify their claim was to promote alliances between those loyal to the Spanish crown and the remaining Inca aristocracy. When the conquistador Pedro Pizarro went to ask one Inca nobleman for permission to arrange a...
Ignoring the many ‘no pets’ signs, a man on the trail to the world’s largest Confederate monument was leaping from rock to rock with a ball python wrapped around his neck. I began to think I hadn’t really understood Stone Mountain at all.
Last winter, I visited a stolen goddess at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The label said she was carved in the mid-tenth century in the ‘style of Koh Ker’, an isolated site in northern Cambodia that was briefly the capital of the Khmer Empire. Its distinctive sculptures began to appear on the international art market in the late 1970s, during the Cambodian genocide.
On the evening of 22 August 1566, a crowd gathered in the town of ’s-Hertogenbosch to listen to an open air sermon by an itinerant Protestant preacher. Afterwards they rushed from church to church, singing psalms and smashing images. Two days later, the reformers held their first sermon in the town cathedral, now purified of the paintings and statues they believed tempted churchgoers...
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