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86f1a2b
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The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: "Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' a..
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friendliness
promised-land
middle-east
israel
jews
palestine
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Tony Horwitz |
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c49e634
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There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.
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pretence
shelby-foote
intimacy
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Tony Horwitz |
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89aadb9
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I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.
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faith
belief
maps
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Tony Horwitz |
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077bde7
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Egyptians undergo an odd personality change behind the wheel of a car. In every other setting, aggression and impatience are frowned upon. The unofficial Egyptian anthem "Bokra, Insha'allah, Malesh" (Tomorrow, God Willing, Never Mind) isn't just an excuse for laziness. In a society requiring millennial patience, it is also a social code dictating that no one make too much of a fuss about things. But put an Egyptian in the driver's seat and ..
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insha-allah
taxis
middle-east
egypt
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Tony Horwitz |
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3d2ac29
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Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving: a day to solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union....Shopping was part of the American Dream, too. So in 1939, at the urging of merchants, FDR moved Thanksgiving ahead a week, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. And there it has remained, a day of national gluttony, retail pageantry, TV football, and re..
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Tony Horwitz |
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24b33c8
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You asked how I'd define prejudice. That's it. Making assumptions about people you've never met.
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Tony Horwitz |
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3aacb25
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The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it.
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Tony Horwitz |
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da0fb50
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Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.
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Tony Horwitz |
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35bf1ce
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When Union litter-bearers climbed out of their trenches, four days after the assault, they found only two men still alive amongst the piles of stinking corpses. One burial party discovered a dead Yankee with a diary in his pocket, the last entry of which read: "June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed."
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Tony Horwitz |
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033833e
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If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature--even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods.
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Tony Horwitz |
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1e756c4
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Seven severely depressed prisoners were listed as having died of "nostalgia."
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Tony Horwitz |
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10551c4
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I asked him if he thought "there" was better than "here." "Not better," he said. "I mean, my great-great-grandpap got his leg shot off. But I feel like it was bigger somehow." Hawkins flipped through pages of Civil War pictures. "At work, I mix dyes and put them in a machine. I'm thirty-six and I've spent almost half my life in Dye House No. 1. I make eight dollars sixty-one cents an hour, which is okay, 'cept everyone says the plant will c..
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Tony Horwitz |
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5756b5c
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Cook," the historian Bernard Smith speculates, "increasingly realised that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilization."
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Tony Horwitz |
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86bf562
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The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren't national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite; leaders of a rebellion against the nation - separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn't call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn't think o..
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Tony Horwitz |
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16ac872
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Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I'd met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.
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Tony Horwitz |
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ebef217
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Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet
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Tony Horwitz |
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7103ea1
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My life has been of but little worth mostly fild [sic] up with vanity.
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Tony Horwitz |
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66c3a8a
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The best you can do is catch an echo of the man. You can never reach out and touch him.
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Tony Horwitz |
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9e778bb
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For Robert Lee Hodge, it was also a way of life. As the Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating, he was often hired for Civil War movies.
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humor
re-enactment
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Tony Horwitz |
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df2135a
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Van Laar wasn't a climate change denier, nor did he talk defensively of the United States' appetite for oil. Rather, he confessed, "I don't give much of a fuck, and nobody I know does, either, because this industry is giving me a future, even if it's a short one and we're all about to toast together."
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Tony Horwitz |
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ef4c8a2
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They're pushing the envelope in terms of authenticity," the Camp Chase Gazette editor, Bill Holschuh, told me when I phoned for his opinion. "About the only thing left is live ammunition and Civil War diseases. I hope it doesn't come to that."
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Tony Horwitz |
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87d3236
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crumpet. Fifty years later, Michener and the Yanks show up. Then come the travel hacks, who have to justify their fancy rooms and plane fare by telling us this shithole is paradise." He stubbed out his cigarette. "Come to think of it, paradise probably is a shithole. The missionaries sold a pup with that one, too. At least I hope they did, because I'm certainly not headed there." We motored back to our yacht mooring. In twenty-four hours we..
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Tony Horwitz |
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3a3bcb9
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John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.
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heritage
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Tony Horwitz |
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839b51f
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Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something's wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.
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tony horwitz |
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8ba728a
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The way I see it," King said, "your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I'm supposed to feel all warm inside about that?"
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Tony Horwitz |
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5c38bdb
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Seventeen evangelicals, plus five of their wives and three children, disembarked at Tahiti in 1797. Eight missionaries fled on the next boat out, to Sydney. One of the remaining missionaries married a native woman and left the church.
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Tony Horwitz |
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249adf1
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Cook, judging from his journals, was not a pious man. A product of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, he valued reason above all else, and showed little patience for what he called "Priest craft" and "superstition."
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Tony Horwitz |
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600dd9c
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While Americans tried to justify and glorify their Indian-killers, George Armstrong Custer in particular,
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Tony Horwitz |
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26871c9
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lingering
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Tony Horwitz |
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7ab85a9
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Look at these buttons," one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. "I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine." Chemicals in the urine oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s. "My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, 'Tim, you've been peeing on your buttons again."
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Tony Horwitz |
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1c33a38
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At one stop in New Zealand, an Englishman bartered for sex. He was presented with a boy; when he complained, he was presented with another. The English related this incident with amusement, as a cruel joke. But the Maori may have supposed that homosexuality was the English norm. How else to account for the absence among them of women and children?
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Tony Horwitz |
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82ff4a1
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eight storage tanks were
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Tony Horwitz |
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4b302d6
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looked about as romantic and welcoming as a tar pit. I later learned that producers of the 1962 Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty had imported white sand from America so Matavai Bay would match the Hollywood image of a tropical island.
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Tony Horwitz |
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2adef33
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I came here from Kansas," he announced to his captive. "This is a slave state. I want to free all the Negroes in this state. I have possession now of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood."
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Tony Horwitz |
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3c04e4b
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In principle, rememberance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860's. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in s grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.
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Tony Horwitz |
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4708008
|
I found myself unexpectedly moved, less by the memory of Cook than by the people gathered to honor him. The British were brilliant at this sort of ceremony: sincere, stoic, and understated - nothing like cynical Australians or syrupy Americans. Watching these few dozen faces lashed by freezing rain, their breath clouding as they uttered "God Save the Queen," I caught a glimpse of the grit and pride that had sustained Cook and his men, and t..
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Tony Horwitz |
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019c34e
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Elijah gives
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Tony Horwitz |
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299371a
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A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.
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Tony Horwitz |
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0363e1b
|
The world of the rural poor remained what it had been for generations: a day's walk in radius, a tight, well-trod loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot.
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Tony Horwitz |
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bc2292d
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with a
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Tony Horwitz |
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6fa875a
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Olmsted's initial faith in reasoned discourse had also waned. In the course of his travels, the South's "leading men" had struck him as implacable: convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound society, intent on expanding it, and utterly contemptuous of the North. "They are a mischievous class--"
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Tony Horwitz |