Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-closing-doors-to-the-future-1302538.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Closing doors to the future
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Sunday, March 6, 2011
When my friends and I were growing up, public education was held sacred by our parents. As the children of immigrants, education had been their way into American society and their way up the economic ladder.
Times Higher Education
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=415562&c=1
Pax Romana’s inherent violence
Tom Palaima appreciates a depiction of the nature of exploitation under Roman imperial rule
Published: 24 March 2011
Title: Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire
Author:David J. Mattingly
Reviewer: Tom Palaima
Publisher:Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691146058
Pages: 366
Price: £27.95
Reviewer : Tom Palaima is professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin in the US.
Of all the images of empire offered here, one persists in the memory and haunts the conscience. In a Sebastiao Salgado photograph of the modern Brazilian gold mine at Serra Pelada, countless human beings stretch in ant-like files up, down, around and across the vast sides of the huge pit opened by the collective unmechanised labour of their individual bodies.
What makes the image monstrous is Mattingly’s use of it as a modern relic of the pre-industrial labour conditions that prevailed during the Roman Empire. In his chapter on metals and mines, Continue reading
There have been criticisms and political attacks on the two flagship universities in Texas (Texas A&M and UT Austin) since at least 2008. Here I present a recent commentary piece I wrote with pertinent information and with links to other commentaries by Gov. Rick Perry and Gail Collins of the NY Times.
These are followed by selected reader response.
I have received permission to circulate these comments from the people who sent them to me.
They are worth reading.
TGP
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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-universities-spending-on-sports-undermines-their-mission-1409458.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Universities’ spending on sports undermines their mission: education
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, April 18, 2011
Since 2008, I have represented the University of Texas on the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), the only faculty organization in the country monitoring National Collegiate Athletic Association programs within institutions of higher learning.
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Find this article at:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-NCAAthe-Athletes-It/127181/
COMMENTARY
The NCAA and the Athletes It Fails
Thomas G. Palaima
Chronicle of Higher Education April 17, 2011
How we treat the young people on our campuses whom we often euphemistically call “student athletes” is essentially a moral issue. Some of those students, after all, generate millions of dollars for their coaches, athletic directors, and institutions, yet we have failed, in turn, to make sure they have legitimate experiences as students.
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http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416350&c=1
The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games
By Garrett G. Fagan | Cambridge University Press | 374pp, £60.00 and £22.99
ISBN 9780521196161 and 185967 Published 17 February 2011
Reviewer : Tom Palaima is professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin in the US.
Times Higher Education 2 June 2011
Blood flowing, hordes roaring
Tom Palaima agrees that people’s fascination with watching violence against others doesn’t change
Readers who are lured to Garrett Fagan’s The Lure of the Arena for graphic descriptions of violent acts will not be disappointed. Given the universal questions about human nature and human societies that Fagan poses in trying to explain the phenomenon of the Roman amphitheatre, they will be rewarded with catalogues, drawn from many societies and periods of human history, designed to prove that “the Romans were by no means alone in finding the sight of people and animals tormented and killed both intriguing and appealing”.
Cultures closer to our own in time have been more creative in devising forms of violence for their men, women and children, poor and simple-minded or wealthy and well educated, to witness and enjoy together.
Fagan devotes a long chapter, judiciously illustrated with woodcuts of 16th- and 18th-century public executions, to sampling the “vast corpus of comparative evidence for violence staged before spectators”. Crucifixion, castration, stoning, clubbing, flaying, burning, boiling alive in oil, decapitation, burial alive, drawing and quartering, branding, flogging and other kinds of mutilation cannot match being “braided” on a wheel for gruesome cruelty.
Practised in France until 1787 and in Germany into the 1840s, this manner of execution pulverised the prisoner’s limbs, threaded his body through the spokes of a wheel, and then set it on a pole for public viewing. An eyewitness describes the victim eventually as “a sort of huge screaming puppet, writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh, mixed with splinters of smashed bones”. This makes Martial’s description of the Sicilian bandit Laureolus, who was ripped apart by a bear in the arena so that “in his body there was no body”, Continue reading
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-pair-hope-31-000-images-will-help-1565908.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Pair hope 31,000 images will help spur social change
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, June 27, 2011
It is easy to feel powerless about changing the world we live in.
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-we-the-people-are-losing-civility-understanding-1667192.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: We, the people, are losing civility, understanding
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, July 28, 2011
This Fourth of July, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, spoke on “Civility and the American Spirit” in Chautauqua, N.Y. (Read the text of his speech at http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/07042011.html.)
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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/home-where-they-take-you-in-no-matter-1775334.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: “Home, where they take you in, no matter your challenges”
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, August 23, 2011
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”
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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-history-gives-us-guidance-in-dealing-with-1862859.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: History gives us guidance in dealing with national tragedy
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Saturday, September 17, 2011
The cover of the Sept. 12 Newsweek shows a solitary plane in the kind of spacious blue sky we praise in “America, the Beautiful.” On this background in white letters we read: “9/11 Ten Years of RESILIENCE.” Three words in black, “FEAR GRIEF REVENGE,” are placed vertically above the much larger word “RESILIENCE.”
This image conveys one take on a national moment of suffering and how we have lived through 10 years of history in reaction to it: the color-coded dark emotions of fear and grief fueling the equally dark human instinct to take vengeance. The Newsweek editors believe what we ourselves want to believe about what we have been through and where we are now. We are resilient. We have bounced back to where we were before.
I think all Americans have their own ideas about where we stand a decade after 9/11. Our opinions probably differ about whether we took the right paths as individuals or as a nation. Rather than discuss such potentially polarizing matters, I want to make some observations on how we use history and historical memory to deal with tragedy and the grief that stems from it.
It is a tricky subject. A senior honors thesis student, Abraham Callahan, recently asked me why Thucydides, the father of scientific history, had bothered analyzing the motives and causes of mass killings of human beings in civil wars and political revolts. Thucydides asserts that human nature is constant and will lead to such things happening again, presumably no matter how much history people have read.
Fortunately, intelligent human beings, from the Greek soldier-playwright Aeschylus to leaders of our nation after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., have thought about the nature of collective grief after violent public acts, where our emotions want to take us, and what happens if we let them take us there.
One way we might confront an atrocity like the Holocaust is by placing it beyond human understanding. Claude Lanzmann, whose long documentary about the Holocaust, “Shoah,” focuses on personal testimonies Continue reading