Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter

From the return of Ethiopia’s first plane to an Asian American argument for solidarity, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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Ethiopia hails return of its first plane, stolen by Mussolini in 1930s

Lorenzo Tondo
Guardian

Almost nine decades after it was stolen by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, the Italian government has officially returned Ethiopia’s first plane. The official handover of the aircraft, named Tsehay in honour of the princess daughter of Emperor Haile Selassie, was celebrated on Tuesday by the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.

“Today is a day of great pride for Ethiopians as we celebrate the official handover of ‘Tsehay’ by the Italian Government,” Abiy wrote on his social media account on X, alongside photographs of the red two-seater plane. [continue reading]

The Clinton-Yeltsin Moscow Summit, January 1994

Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
National Security Archive

Declassified highest-level records from the Moscow summit 30 years ago this month detail U.S. President Bill Clinton’s strong personal support for Russian President Boris Yeltsin, their close cooperation on security issues, and deep concern about Yeltsin backtracking on economic reforms newly understood by the Clinton team as too “harsh” on the Russian people.

The documents include verbatim transcripts of Clinton’s two “one-on-one” discussions with Yeltsin, their trilateral discussion with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk about removal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, the detailed report from the U.S. Embassy Moscow on the dinner thrown by Yeltsin at his official dacha for Clinton, and the transcript of the expanded bilateral discussion between Clinton and Yeltsin on security issues. [continue reading]

How the social structures of Nazi Germany created a bystander society

Ellen Pilsworth
Conversation

In the initial post-war judicial proceedings to establish what had happened under Nazism, and to punish the perpetrators of crimes, victims’ accounts were often discredited. Only in 1961, with the high-profile trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, did the focus shift.

For many survivors, the concept of “Holocaust testimony” – accounts of what they had lived through – took on almost sacred dimensions. In 1989, author and Auschwitz-survivor Elie Wiesel argued that it was unethical for anyone besides surviving victims of the Holocaust to try to represent or explain it. [continue reading]

Shocking images show why many Aussies are no longer celebrating Australia Day

Candace Sutton
Daily Mail

The house where 40 pairs of human ears were nailed up around the walls still stands up in the Gulf country, in a remote part of the outback most Australians have never seen. The old homestead called Lawn Hill station is on a riverbend just south of Burketown on the Gulf of Carpentaria, in tribal territory occupied by the Waanyi people.

The house belonged to Frank Hann, a pastoralist and explorer later infamous for collecting the heads of Aboriginal people, who was described as having different young Aboriginal companions he referred to as his ‘splendid black boy’. Both men linked to the trophy ears nailed up inside Lawn Hill, sometimes known as Lorne Hill – Hann and his station manager Jack Watson – are recorded in newspapers in the late 1800s as having cut off the heads of Aboriginal Australians for souvenirs or as bounty. [continue reading]

Palestine Is in Asia: An Asian American Argument for Solidarity

Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nation

For Asian Americans, among whom I count myself, the question of Palestine holds great relevance. And for writers, among whom I also count myself, the question of when to speak our conscience has always mattered. I want to address Israel’s war on Gaza and how it raises issues of self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity that have great meaning for anyone who has been classified as an “other” and for anyone who has sought to write through that otherness. This includes Asian American, Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish writers—all of whom have grappled with what it means to be the monstrous other.

Asian Americans were once called “Orientals,” a term we rejected partly because we heeded Edward Said’s argument in his classic book Orientalism that the Oriental is an object and an opportunity manufactured by the Occident, a fantasy with very real consequences. For Asian Americans, the Oriental became a shadow to dispel, a double to destroy, a name to reject. But if Orientalism provided much of the intellectual energy that drove the growth of Asian American literature and culture, many of us forgot or overlooked that Said was Palestinian and claimed the Palestinian cause as his own. We Asian Americans appropriated his argument about Orientals, since his book did not for the most part deal with America’s Orient, found in Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam, which is to say, East and Southeast Asia. Said addressed Europe’s Orient, located in what Europeans called the Near East and the Middle East, and that some writers and scholars with ancestries in those areas now call, in an act of renaming and reclaiming, West and Southwest Asia. [continue reading]