Lost Tongues and the Politics of Language Endangerment
By some estimates, thousands of the world's 6,700 languages will be lost before the turn of the next century. What are the factors that drive a language to the brink of extinction, and what allows others to prosper--or simply to survive? Salikoko Mufw...
Lost Egypt: Photography and the Early Documentation of Egyptian Monument
In 1992, the Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago published a series of limited edition photographs entitled Lost Egypt. The images reproduced in these portfolios are from the Survey's unique archive of over 800 lar...
The Lessons of Enron
Was energy giant Enron guilty of criminal activity or was it simply a business that failed? What changes will the Enron debacle, and the subsequent indictment of accounting firm Arthur Andersen, have on the rules that govern corporate auditing? And wh...
The Legitimacy of Military Tribunals
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US government announced its intention to establish military tribunals to try non-US citizens suspected of terrorist activity. In a panel discussion at The University of Chicago Law School, leading schol...
'I Have Given You my Advice': Educational Principles in the Hittite Empire
Whatever the topic was--raising children, training soldiers, pouring wine for the king's guests--the Hittites had an anecdote for it. The stories that survive from this ancient empire are often entertaining, but their broader purpose was instructive: t...
Hypocrisy about Hypocrisy: The Creation of Selves
Hypocrisy has been given a bad rap. What is hypocrisy, after all, but the acting out of a role, the attempt to be someone other than who we really are? Wayne Booth, the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language and...
Hatshepsut: Wicked Stepmother or Joan of Arc?
Hatshepsut was an Eighteenth-Dynasty pharaoh, one of a handful of female rulers in ancient Egypt. Because Hatshepsut's monuments were defaced by her stepson, Tuthmose III, following her death in about 1458 BCE, historians have characterized her not onl...
Fragmentation and Cybercascades
The ability to personalize your own news page--to create, in the words of MIT's Nicholas Negroponte, the 'Daily Me'--is often hailed as one of the great benefits of the World Wide Web. In cyberspace, consumers can filter out the news that doesn't inter...
Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency
Before it was ousted from power in Afghanistan, the Taliban was seen in the West as a retrograde regime whose intense misogyny and hatred of all things modern was typical of Islamic fundamentalism. Hollywood celebrities and the Feminist Majority campai...
Family Values in Ancient Rome
The phrase 'family values' often conjures an image of a close-knit, loving nuclear family. How real is this vision of the model family, and has it ever existed in history? Ancient Romans, just as we are today, were anxious about the moral decline of th...