Laura Spinney

Tag: cliodynamics

  • Le chaos qui vient

    —

    by

    lauraspinney
    in , , ,

    DANS les années 1990, à l’heure où les historiens jetaient le marxisme par-dessus bord, beaucoup proclamaient la fin des révolutions. La lutte des classes et les soulèvements de masse semblaient derrière nous, rangés parmi les vestiges d’un autre siècle… Cet article a paru dans Le Point le 3 mars 2026. Pour continuer à lire, cliquez ici (abonnés…

  • War of the worlds

    —

    by

    lauraspinney
    in , , , ,

    WHEN Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found monarchs, cities, roads, markets, schools, astronomers, law courts and much else that also existed in his native Spain. Put another way, two cultural experiments had been running in parallel for 15,000 years, and when they came into contact, each recognized the other’s institutions……

  • History as a giant data set

    —

    by

    lauraspinney
    in , ,

    IN its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to…

  • History lessons

    —

    by

    lauraspinney
    in , , , ,

    “MY NAME is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” So run the famous lines of Percy Shelley’s poem about Ramses the Great, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt’s New Kingdom in the 13th century BC, when it was the world’s most sophisticated society. But the poem’s theme is the transience…

  • Human cycles

    —

    by

    lauraspinney
    in , ,

    SOMETIMES, history really does seem to repeat itself. After the US Civil War, for example, a wave of urban violence fuelled by ethnic and class resentment swept across the country, peaking in about 1870. Internal strife spiked again in around 1920, when race riots, workers’ strikes and a surge of anti-Communist feeling led many people…