Author: TheConversation

By Meredith Oyen, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Before U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had confirmed when, or even if, she would visit Taiwan, the mere suggestion ruffled feathers. Such was the sensitivity over the island’s status that reports of her possible trip resulted in a warning by China of “serious consequences,” and a suggestion by President Joe Biden that the visit was “not a good idea.” Amid the rhetoric and heightened tensions, Taiwan began conducting military drills. The comments followed a report by the Financial Times that Pelosi had planned to...

By Joshua Holzer, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Westminster College The city of Białystok, which was once Polish, then Prussian, then Russian, in the late 1800s and is today again part of Poland, was a hub of diversity, with large numbers of Poles, Germans, Russians and Yiddish-speaking Ashkanazi Jews. Each group spoke a different language and viewed members of the other communities with suspicion. For years, L.L. Zamenhof – a Jewish man from Białystok who had trained as a doctor in Moscow – had dreamed of a way for diverse groups of people to communicate easily and peacefully. On...

By Jonathan Entin, Professor Emeritus of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Case Western Reserve University Over the past seven decades, longtime Alabama civil rights lawyer Fred Gray represented Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and the victims of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the U.S. Public Health Service refused for decades to provide readily available treatment to Black men who had the disease. Gray played important roles in landmark Supreme Court decisions that outlawed segregated public transit and affirmed the strategy of the Montgomery bus boycott organizers. He protected the freedom of association guaranteed by...