It is one of the 20th century’s most memorable images: a naked girl, screaming, running from a napalm bombing during the Vietnam War. More than a half-century later, a new documentary is calling into question who took it — and the retired Associated Press photographer long credited for the photo insists it was his, while…
Thousands of demonstrators, predominantly women, marched in Washington DC on Saturday to protest against President-elect Donald Trump, just two days before his inauguration.
The People’s March – previously known as the Women’s March – has taken place every year since 2017.
A coalition of groups organised the movement with the stated aim of confronting “Trumpism”, according to its website. Smaller protests against Trump were held in New York City and on the other side of the country in Seattle.
The rallies coincide with Trump’s arrival to the nation’s capital for a series of weekend events in the lead-up to his swearing-in ceremony on Monday.
Saturday’s People’s March in Washington DC drew smaller numbers than its predecessors.
Organisers had expected 50,000 people. About 5,000 turned up.
The protesters gathered at three parks before marching to the Lincoln Memorial for the rally.Related News:
The groups behind the march are described on its website as holding “intersecting identities” and having “varied issue-based interests” with different causes such as climate change, immigration and women’s rights.
Women who gathered in Washington to join the People’s March told the BBC they had a variety of motivations.
One protester, Brooke, said she wanted to show her support for abortion access.
“I’m really not happy with the way our country’s voted,” she said. “I’m really sad that our country’s leaned towards a president that’s already failed us once and that we did not nominate a female candidate.”
Another woman, Kayla, said it’s a mix of emotions that brought her out to the streets of the nation’s capital.
“Honestly, I’m just mad, I’m sad, I’m overwhelmed,” she said.
The first iteration of the People’s March came together after Trump defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Women called for a protest the day after Trump’s first inauguration and hundreds of thousands responded.
The movement spread beyond the nation’s capital with millions of women across the US carrying signs railing against the Republican president and sporting pink knit “pussy hats” – a reference to a leaked tape in which Trump had bragged about grabbing women’s genitals.
The Women’s March remained a key part of the so-called resistance to Trump’s agenda in the years that followed.
But none of the subsequent marches have been on the same scale.
Trump, meanwhile, arrived in Washington DC later on Saturday to begin his inaugural festivities with a private event featuring fireworks at his golf club in the Virginia suburbs.
Organisers of the march said they aimed to confront Trump by “drawing on past successes and effective strategies against autocrats”.
A small group of Trump supporters were at the Washington Monument on Saturday. Noticing the men in red Make America Great Again hats, one People’s March leader with a megaphone approached chanting: “No Trump, no KKK.”
One of the men, Timothy Wallis, told the Associated Press news agency his friends had just bought the Trump hats from a street vendor.
Mr Wallis, 58, of Pocatello, Idaho, said the People’s March protesters had “every right” to demonstrate, though he said he was confused by the rancour.
“It’s sad where we’re at as a country,” he said.
Another protester the BBC spoke to, came to Washington specifically for the march.
Susie came in from the San Francisco area to demonstrate with her sister, Anne, who lives nearby. They both attended the Women’s March after Trump’s first inauguration and came back in their “pussy hats”.
Susie recalled the crowds of people in 2017. She said she hoped people would still take to the streets against Trump’s policies.
“This time the stakes are higher,” she said. “Trump has been emboldened. He’s got the billionaire class and the tech class bowing down.”
Anne also said she recognised the protesters are “out of touch” with a lot of America. Trump won all seven swing states and the popular vote last November.
But she added: “We’re still here, and we will resist.”
(BBC)
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In 1628, Shah Jahan acceded to his father’s throne to become the fifth padishah of Hindustan. The event is described in the text of the Padshahnama, an official chronicle of the reign, and it is also depicted in a painting commissioned to accompany the words. It shows the emperor receiving his three eldest sons in a glittering court scene.
The centre of the image, the focus that draws the viewer’s eye, is a young Dara Shukoh bowing low before his father; Shah Jahan’s arms are extended too, to clasp his beloved eldest son’s shoulders. It is a tender moment, clearly recognisable to any Indian who has ever bent down before a parent or grandparent as a gesture of respect. But the elite audience this painting was made for would not have read it the way we can today, with our knowledge of history: Aurangzeb standing on the margins of his father’s affection, foreshadowing the destruction of his family. For us, the image transforms from one of celebration to one of foreboding.
It is this imaginative potential that contemporary illustrated histories, like The Book of Emperors (co-authored by Nikhil Gulati and myself) and The People of the Indus (by Nikhil Gulati, with Jonathan Mark Kenoyer) draw on. Illustrated histories aren’t a new format in English, especially outside of India: kids (and adults) have giggled through the irreverent art in the Horrible Histories series or enjoyed the photographs that fill publisher Dorling Kindersley’s handsome volumes, and there are newer attempts to use the medium of comics to make history engaging, like The Middle Ages: A Graphic History by Eleanor Janega and Neil Max Emmanuel.
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In India, though, most people first encounter history in school, where engaging with the people of the past takes a back seat to the memorisation of names, dates, and lists, all without sufficient context. We view coins, sculpture, buildings and artefacts outside of the worlds that produced them, which often elides what made them significant in the first place. This contextless-ness renders us unable to recognize that the past was populated by real people making decisions in varied circumstances that are far removed from our own. Illustrated histories present an opportunity to fill in these missing details, to make the story of the past more accessible, and more interesting. These works are written for audiences of all ages to whom they present history in a way that invites engagement instead of intimidating the reader. At a time when the discipline of history is under siege, with misinformation running rampant even as funding for research dries up, vividly illustrated narrative accounts help demystify the past and push back against misinterpretation and misrepresentation—two things that both the history of the Indus Valley Civilization and the Mughal Empire seem especially prone to today.
Also read: Deleting history from NCERT textbooks is lying to children. It’s also betraying parents
Beyond heroism and villainy
In The Book of Emperors: An Illustrated History of the Mughals, the emperors and those around them are given purpose and personality rather than being reduced to one-dimensional caricatures as they often are. Each emperor portrait epitomises a quality or a trait that most represents its subject: Jahangir peers over an artist’s shoulder as he draws a zebra; Shah Jahan stands with his back to the reader, watching, across the water, a white marble tomb be built; Shah Alam is laid low by despair as he hands the diwani over to a looming Robert Clive. The narrative chapters on each emperor are interspersed with double-page spreads that draw inspiration from Mughal art: we see the Mughal garden full of fruit and flowering trees, a functional space for both pleasure expeditions and court business; we see the marketplace bustling with traders hawking their wares to merchants both Indian and foreign; we see the emperor ride his elephant as he pursues his quarry in a qamargah-style hunt, surrounded by beaters, beasts and spectators. We see the individuals who made up the empire in context, as actors whose worldviews and ideals were shaped by a variety of influences.
For ancient or early medieval India, such context and individuality are harder to find, and must be mined from a variety of sources, from the archaeological to epigraphs and literature. And when we go back thousands of years to the Indus Valley Civilization, all we have are the remnants of the lived-in spaces and objects found in them—seals, toys, jewellery, utensils, and weapons. Seeing them in a sterile museum display case, it is easy to forget that they once belonged to someone. To bridge this distance, The People of the Indus foregrounds the people of the Indus, imagining them into being in its first few pages in a wordless sequence that shows a family packing up their belongings and leaving for the big city. Veering between the present-day and the past, it places the physical remnants from the display-case back into the world they come from. Five thousand years may separate us from the people who made these objects, but through the medium of comics, the years fall away. Suddenly, we see traders using weights, children playing with toys, coppersmiths plying their trade, and hunters with their bows out to find food to feed their families. Instead of faceless entities we can project our own ideas onto, the people of the Indus become real, and we build a sense of kinship and understanding that transcends time. Illustrated histories, with their potent combination of narrative and art, is an effective way of getting us to imagine the past in minute detail, giving us a visual reference for what life would have looked like hundreds or thousands of years ago. Crucially, they also put people front and centre, nudging us into understanding that the people of ancient India and medieval India were animated by the same impulses as us: love, greed, ambition, and the desire to make a mark on the world. This kind of work feels especially important to produce in our polarised times, when historical people are turned into black–and-white figures of either heroism or villainy, and the past is weaponised to justify present-day violence. By placing history and historical figures in context, illustrated histories can highlight our continuity with the past, even as they immerse us in worlds that are very different from our own. In this way, they can help make the argument for why the past is relevant, and worth remembering with empathy rather than judgement. Ashwitha Jayakumar is a writer of narrative history for readers of all ages. She has an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds and is the author of The Book of Emperors: An Illustrated History of the Mughals and Incredible Indians: 75 People Who Shaped Modern India. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
Washington Wizards (6-34, 15th in the Eastern Conference) vs. Sacramento Kings (21-20, ninth in the Western Conference)
Glenn Carstens-Peters // Unsplash
Last November of 2024, Washington suffered from a deadly bomb cyclone that caused region-wide power outages that lasted for days. With utilities, data connection, electricity and overall technology down, many individuals, businesses, educational systems and communities had little to no information on what was happening outside of their doors.
Extreme weather with strong winds can cause damage not only to the environment but to power lines as well. An example of this would be Bellevue Way, which had a strip of traffic lights that were inoperable during the height of the cyclone. Not only that, but many phone carriers shut down until days or even weeks later, which caused a delay in educational schedules, especially for local colleges and universities like Bellevue College, Seattle University, University of Washington and so forth.
This has led to the questionable dependency on technology, especially in the youth. Why are we so dependent on gadgets? Should this trend continue to emerge and develop over time? What are its negative effects if we become overly dependent?
Smartphones were first developed as exclusive devices that were not as accessible compared to the regular touchscreen phone now. With the incorporation of the online digital world, it raised the number of internet users to 90% of the world having access to the internet from only 7% of the world.
“More and more, life is resembling the chat room. We’re paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle.”
– Dr. Elias Aboujaoude in The 2010 New York Times Interview, An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness
Since the introduction to this era of the technological revolution, the industry has been rampantly releasing an array of gadgets and mechanisms that all have the common goal of making the average American life more convenient. With brands like Samsung and Apple leading the smartphone industry by a large margin, it has become a well-incorporated item in our day-to-day lives, i.e. mode of communication, entertainment, and learning.
This blend of both online and in-person lives has blurred the lines of how dependent we have become due to the unknowing nature of being too reliant on these gadgets. Now that the American education system has shifted to a lenient hybrid type of class sessions, the majority of both primary and secondary education classes require applications, like Canvas, to be used to submit assignments, contact instructors, manage class schedules and so forth.
Technological dependency is as simple as its definition: A dependence on technology, specifically our smart gadgets. It is not entirely unhealthy to rely on certain materials to make life flow more efficiently, but the over-reliance can cause a decay in mental health. With the recent power outage, many users became disconnected for a moment in time which has led to a difficult effort to get back on track once the power returned. There were schedules that were being delayed and projects that were missed, which caused a cascade of stress and anxiety about how students would be able to move forward. Despite the power returning eventually, there was still instability and unreliability with the system since not all had sudden access back to their gadgets. It is not entirely on the students themselves to develop a dependence on technology for learning, but it is rather the system itself feeding into the overuse of gadgets.
“This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.”
– Don DeLillo in his book White Noise: Text and Criticism