Category: History & Culture
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Know Your History: The Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Part III
PART I: HERE! PART II: HERE! In 1978, Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli President Begin signed the Camp David Accords which brokered an official peace between the two nations. Israel gave back the territory of the Sinai Peninsula it had gained during the 1967 Six Day War and Israel received Egypt’s diplomatic recognition of their right to…
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Know Your History: The Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Part II
Read Part I: HERE! The tragedy of the Holocaust during WWII provided an ample amount of sympathy toward the Jewish race, and with the establishment of the newly formed United Nations, the world body (minus some key states) looked to solve the dilemma in Palestine once Britain signified that it no longer wanted anything to do…
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Know Your History: The Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Part I
With all the chaos happening between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, I thought I would take a few blog posts to break apart what is going on in short and hopefully digestible snippets which will help us all understand the roots of this conflict. Before I get into the first section, let’s just clarify…
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Know Your History: Indochina 1945 from a Page in my Novel
I’m going to change up the “know your history” post this time around and use a direct quote from my new novel, The Reach of the Banyan Tree, to emphasize the strange WWII ties which existed in Indochina in 1945. Here’s a short paragraph from the chapter entitled “The Strange Ways of the Universe”: On a cosmic…
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If your opinion is right, you are being disingenuous: A Brief Look at Political Discourse
The US Supreme Court had two significant rulings this week that bolstered the spirits of the country’s traditional establishment. The first was the Hobby Lobby case in which the court ruled 5-4 that small companies, where the owner and the company are nearly indistinguishable, do not have to offer contraceptive coverage (especially the so-called morning…
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Visiting the 911 Memorial Museum in New York City
New York, unfortunately, has another must-see destination. But its not one to relish with wide-eyed wonder. It’s one to ponder in its solemnity and remember the event that no one could ever forget. I had the privilege of recently visiting the memorial site and the new museum. The memorial site with its beautiful symmetrical black…
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Know Your History: The Colonial Make-up of the Middle East
With the tragic events taking place in Iraq, and the term Levant becoming once again a house-hold name, I thought I would go back in time a little bit and outline how the region was influenced by the colonial powers. Levant is a French word which was used to describe the regions of modern day…
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The Strange Ways of the Universe – an Excerpt
One of the things I really enjoyed doing with my soon to be released third novel, The Reach of the Banyan Tree, was to pepper small doses of history into the writing to better frame the time period. Here’s the opening paragraph to a chapter entitled “The Strange Ways of the Universe” which help set the…
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Ho Chi Minh & Truman: Part II
Part II of my post from yesterday: http://wp.me/p25YFc-C8 – The second part of this post even talks about Tan Trao, the mountainous headquarters of the Viet Minh which is home to the glorious banyan tree which inspired my third novel, soon to be released. Ho took up the mantle of fighting for Indochinese independence by supporting…
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Ho Chi Minh & Truman: Part I
My new novel coming out in a couple weeks, “The Reach of the Banyan Tree”, is in no small part a by-product of my love for 20th century Vietnamese history. Unlike most Americans who study Vietnam, I became much more fascinated at the 1945 connections between the Americans and the Vietnamese rather than the Vietnam War…
Author Mark W Sasse 