history

Random House canceled publication of a novel purporting to depict the early life of the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride, Aisha.

Excerpts from Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina do not make it sound like fiction worthy of the novel's latest defender, Salman Rushdie. Denise Spellberg, an Islamic historian who reviewed the manuscript, called it "soft-core pornography," and "ugly" porn at that. Consider a first-person passage from Aisha, who, according to some traditions, married Muhammad at age 6 and had sex with him at 9:

This was the beginning of something new, something terrible. Soon I would be lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me. He would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it? It's always painful the first time.

New research into the ancient climate of the Sahara shows that the region went from lush and wet to dry and desolate within a few thousand years.

The classic evidence for a wet Sahara comes from the Tassili frescoes, a series of fifty Algerian cave paintings that depict humans living with crocodiles, buffalo, giraffes, and other animals that do not thrive in arid climates. Ten thousand years ago, it appears, our ancestors could have grown rice in the Sahara, or spent their weekends Jet-Skiing at their North African lake-houses. For millennia, they had no reason to fear their water running out, or their settlements' being reclaimed by desert sands, or of water running out. What the new reports about this bizarre climatological period don't much emphasize, though, is that the Sahara was wet during a period of comparative global heat, and that it became parched only as the planet chilled.

Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker returned to Congress for hearings on the state of Iraq.

Time was when members of Congress didn’t have to rely on just the media, fact-finding tours, or high-profile hearings to find out what was going on in a theater of war. Instead, our representatives could turn to trusted ex-comrades or relatives for an on-the-ground view. But that was in another, better United States. Fewer and fewer senators or representatives have any military experience and the connections that come with it. MORE

Nikolai Baibakov, Russia's last commissar, died last week at 98, and Yakup Satar, the last WWI veteran of the Ottoman Empire, died at 110.

If the phrase "Soviet commissar" has a vaguely old-fashioned ring -- like "icebox," "suffragette," or "antimacassar" -- then "Ottoman foot-soldier" has a near-ancient one. The two deaths this week consign both categories to history, and give an occasion for reflection on the passing of two eras.

Newly released letters reveal that Abraham Lincoln considered trying to halt the war by buying slaves from the South for $400 apiece.

It would have been a pricey time for Lincoln to go bullish. At the time of the Civil War, one slave cost as much as five oxen. Nowadays in India, it's down to about five slaves per one ox, the result of a long decline in the price of human chattel.

An anniversary for nostalgic Cold Warriors

This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Great Terror, poet and historian Robert Conquest's chronicle of Stalin's purges.  In addition to being a great read as history, it contains one of the author's few limericks clean enough to publish in a family magazine:

There was a great Marxist named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
The great Marxist Stalin did ten in.