Happy 152 birthday to Sir Ernest Shackleton youtu.be/hqD2CRx9-8Y

On 13 February 1741, a motion in the House of Lords suggested that Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first Prime Minister, be removed from office. Although this was ultimately defeated, Thomas O'Donoghue explored how this motion marked the beginning of the end for Walpole. @georgianlords.bsky.social

Plokhy indicates that this moment is not Cold War II, it’s something very different. How the Russo-Ukraine war (also: special military operation) will end may predict alternative futures either with or without renewed nuclear proliferation.

Delighted that my current project on Thomas Merton and Cold War America is scheduled to appear in 2027 as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s series on Utopianism link.springer.com/series/15242

10 February 1906. HMS Dreadnought is launched by the British Royal Navy. Edwardian Britain redefined naval power in the early twentieth century with its christening of HMS Dreadnought, the fastest and most heavily-armed warship at that time.

February 10, 1946 In the first election in the Soviet Union since 1937, there was a reported turnout of 101,450,936 voters, 99.7% of those eligible.682 deputies of the Soviet of the Union, and the 657 members of the Soviet of Nationalities, the candidates were unopposed and the choice was yes-or-no.

10 Facts about the Profumo Affair from History Hit www.historyhit.com/the-scandal-... Photo: Boston Globe

FACT OF THE DAY. 4 February 1945. Allied leaders Roosevelt (USA), Churchill (GB) and Stalin (USSR) met at Yalta. The “Big Three” discussed the post-war fate of Germany and the rest of Europe and reiterated their non-negotiable demand for “Unconditional Surrender” from Germany.

Stalingrad was liberated on this day in 1943. @versobooks.bsky.social www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/t...

Shawn Sharpe, The link to cotton – a mural in Blanche Street, Preston, Lancashire, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 2024

@thebulletin.org “Nuclear deterrence is dying. And hardly anyone notices” By Alex Kolbin, 30 January 2026 in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists thebulletin.org/2026/01/nucl...

The opening line and central mandate of's Jameson’s seminal 1981 book, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. It establishes history as the "ultimate horizon" of all literary and cultural analysis.

The 2026 calendar is identical to the 1914 calendar.

Remember, the American 🇺🇸 experiment has always been a rhetorical, physical, and existential battleground between autocracy and democracy … at least for 230 years of its 250 years of historical existence.

Thomas Merton, a comment on America 🇺🇸 in 1961 Left: Merton from Conjectures, published in 1966. Right: advertising photo from Vanished Chicagoland.

Happy birthday Thomas Merton 31 January 1915

Delivered to a Joint Session of Congress in the early afternoon of 30 January 1961, President John F. Kennedy's first State of the Union address painted a dark picture of the country's domestic and international standing. youtu.be/CWu0Ir6OYNI?...

A scene that nearly everyone who saw Churchill’s funeral, 30 January 1965, remembers – the lowering of the cranes beside the Thames as his coffin was conveyed from Tower Pier to Festival Pier at Waterloo.

30 January 1948. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Commemorative plaque at 20 Baron's Court Road, Barons Court, London

It’s hard to conceive of the French Revolution without the American Revolution www.heritage.org/american-his... French Revolution, the end of the Convention, fight at the Church of St. Roch on October 5, 1795 Paris, France Bildagentur / Universal Images Group / Getty Images

“To believe in America 🇺🇸 is to believe in possibility” youtu.be/lruEtNTN9oY?...

Ken Burns, the American Revolution, 250 yrs this year. youtube.com/shorts/hu9aI... The American Constitution was drafted during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia from 25 May to 17 September 1787. This is where Burns begins …

On modern propoganda From Thomas Merton, Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander. New York: Doubleday, 1989 (originally published in 1966), p. 236.

@versobooks.bsky.social selection to provide histories of immigration enforcement and philosophies of division and pacification: www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/a...

How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics www.smithsonianmag.com/history/immi... Flag of the Know-Nothings, officially American Party, 1844-60.

Karl Stojka (1931–2003) was an Austrian Roma artist and author who documented his survival of the Porajmos (the Romani genocide).

Respects to be paid to the victims of genocides in the Second World War and the years since: www.lbc.co.uk/article/what...

The eight surviving conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 were tried in Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606. All were condemned to death for treason. Four men - Sir Everard Digby, Robert Winter, John Grant and Thomas Bates - were executed on 30 January 1606 in St Paul's Churchyard.

Current events are showing me that my little study of a year in the writing life of Thomas Merton #ReluctantPacifist may be more relatable than I had previously considered.

An Arctic bomb test in 1961 spooked America into building backyard fallout shelters, with US governmental approval.

Military assets in the Arctic at a glance

Surgeon-Captain Richard Tadeusz Jolly OBE died on 13 January 2018. He cared for both British and Argentine troops during the Falklands War in 1982 and was uniquely honoured by both nations, an inspirational and humane man www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018...

The Shackleton memorial honours polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton in Emily Square, Athy, County Kildare, Ireland, in the county of his birth. It was sculpted in bronze by Mark Richards, and faces south.

David Bowie, a decade departed on 10 January 2026 …

Stephen Moylan, from Blarney Street, Cork, a Patriot of the American Revolution who was the first to coin the phrase, "The United States of America", in a letter he wrote on 2 January 1776.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) was set in 2026.