Who am I? Where do I come from? These became defining questions in the late 20th century for a generation whose parents and grandparents had endured the cataclysm of the Holocaust.

Raven Mother: War, family and inheritance: a memoir – Jane Messer (NewSouth Books)

Since the turn of this century, the desire to discover and document the histories of families whose worlds were decimated by the Nazis has driven a publishing phenomenon. It’s not just a Jewish project. Millions around the world have taken up the hunt for their family origins, helped in part by the rise of genealogical sites such as Ancestry or My Heritage, and a revolution in DNA science.

This accelerated modern-day quest to solve what for many has become the greatest historical detective story of our era – the puzzle of our identities, presumed to be rooted in our very DNA – is now the fastest growing hobby in the western world.

For second and third generation Holocaust survivors, there is the added urgency that comes with the loss of parents and grandparents, many of whom remained silent about their experiences either because they couldn’t bring themselves to speak of the horrors they had endured and the people they had lost, or because it was felt such experiences were best suppressed as they forged new lives and new families.

Many have detailed the “ambiguity and secrecy” that permeated childhoods growing up with Holocaust survivors. Secrets surrounded lost spouses, old lovers, missing family members or the parentage of children.

As Jane Messer discovers in her own quest to unravel the mystery of her Jewish grandmother, Bella, there is no single truth to a life. Messer never knew Bella, who died before she was born. But when she was in her early twenties, her parents decided it was time to tell her the truth of Bella’s suicide, which until then had been their own dark secret.

Bella committed suicide in 1949, two years after arriving in Australia to join her husband and two grown children living in Melbourne. From the day Bella died, she was rarely spoken of.

Messer sets herself the task in this book of discovering this grandmother she never knew, a woman who defied many expectations of her era, yet ultimately was undone by the tragedies of war, displacement, exile and separation.

A different kind of woman

Born in Berlin, Bella grew up during the early years of the 20th century in a comfortably assimilated middle class family. She trained as an early childhood teacher, taking this training with her into World War I and later again, during World War II when she was in Palestine.

These scraps of information, bestowed by her father in his factual but brief typewritten account, “The History of My Family”, are the beginning for Messer’s considerable odyssey to uncover Bella’s life. She writes:

For years all physical traces of her were kept out of sight; these documents and photographs were stored in cupboards and sheds. They were never discussed, never brought out to look over.

It’s a lot of material work, Messer informs us, and footwork too, taking her across the world in the search for traces of her grandmother.

In the process, Messer attempts to find a different kind of woman to the one whose memory her father has been carrying, of a woman who abandoned him as a child in England in 1935, and 14 years later, abandoned him with her suicide; of a woman who he believed never loved him.

In 1935, Messer’s father Michael was eight years old when, together with his older sister, Ruth, he was enrolled in an “exile” school set up by a German-Jewish education reformer Dr Anna Essinger for German Jewish children in Kent, England.

It was made possible by Bella’s friendships with the network of educators forged among women such as Essinger, and was an extremely lucky escape for Michael and Ruth from Nazi Germany, at a time when it was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews and countries around the world were closing their borders.

But for Michael, the sudden absence of his parents, the feeling of being left by his mother, was a betrayal he never recovered from. “She abandoned me, and she lied to me,” he told Messer. “She said she’d be back, and she never came.”

After securing the safety of their children, Bella and her husband Willy, a wholesale cap manufacturer, returned to Berlin, where they set about organising their own emigration to Palestine in 1937.

Two years later, the family was separated once more. Although the plan had been to come to Australia together, there was a problem with the landing permits, and only Willy and daughter Ruth were able to arrive in 1939.

Landing permits for Jewish refugees were becoming increasingly rare; it was not uncommon for one family member to emigrate to Australia first, in the hope of bringing out the rest of the family at a later date. The outbreak of war, however, shut down possible travel routes. The family remained separated across three continents: Michael spent the war years in Kent, Bella remained behind in Palestine. Most of the rest of their family were murdered in the Holocaust.

In 1947, Michael, now a young man, joined his sister and father in Melbourne. His mother came ten months later. Yet, writes Messer, she “didn’t survive the surviving”. In December 1949, she overdosed on barbiturates while her husband was at work. From then on, her death shaped a wounded silence that settled over the family, “separating one from the other for the rest of their days”.

Messer also learns another “terrible secret even more unspeakable than suicide”: her grandmother was, allegedly, a “nymphomaniac”. This accusation, originating with his father Willy, had led Michael to believe that his mother had never come back for him as a child at school in Kent because she “had been too busy having affairs”. Her apparent promiscuity was another nail in the coffin of her failed maternity.

Yet Bella had simply fallen in love another man who was not Willy. She had met Walther Strauss in Berlin sometime in the 1930s, before he also immigrated to Palestine together with his wife and child.

Messer is also at pains to address some of the broader inheritances – as the subtitle of her book indicates – of the histories through which her grandmother lived, in particular that of Israel.

The fact that Bella spent a decade there is the occasion for Messer to investigate the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, when Bella had already left for Australia. She wonders often about the suffering this history has caused.

Many will applaud the history presented here. But others will be uncomfortable with some of its assertions and its moral activism. The historical labour of the book is immense, but at times distracting from the thread of the family story.

A puzzle

At the end of the book, Messer returns to the puzzle of Bella’s love affair with Walther Strauss. Under Messer’s forensic investigation, we learn Strauss was educated and handsome, becoming a leading professor in the field of public health. Bella and Walther had shared interests and purpose, not just sex.

Messer is strongest when contemplating the greater puzzle of how to understand, to unknot, the mystery of a person’s life.

I might guess at but finally know nothing absolute about what was in Bella’s heart or loins, or how she experienced her marriage to Willy, or who she loved the most as a mother, or if mothering was important to her.

There is a beautiful relationship between father and daughter at the heart of this book, and through this journey of writing it, a healing between her father and his long-dead mother that is, to my mind, an incredible gift.

Ruth Balint receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Divided along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court on April 29, 2026, issued a ruling that severely weakens a provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That provision, known as Section 2, prohibited any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for minority groups to exercise their political clout.

In her dissent on the ruling, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that it is the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

The decision in the case known as Louisiana v. Callais struck down a Louisiana voting district drawn to consolidate Black voters into a district where they would be the majority. The court’s conservative majority deemed the drawing of the district an unconstitutional gerrymander.

That, wrote Kagan, will “systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”

I’m a historian of racial formation and electoral and cultural politics in the U.S. I see this decision by the nation’s highest court as the latest in a long line of successful attempts, by both state and federal authorities, to limit the political power of Black Americans and, most recently, to reverse the gains they won in two periods of civil rights advancement.

Etching away at voting rights

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections.

In the Louisiana v. Callais case, the court seemed ready to abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

While the conservative majority in Louisiana v. Callais did not explicitly strike down Section 2, the ruling appears likely to nonetheless open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work is being undone by the current Supreme Court with its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb 3, 2026.

Robert D. Bland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When white smoke rose above the Sistine Chapel on May 8 2025, the surprise was immediate. The Catholic Church’s leadership had elected its first pope born in the United States, a former Augustinian missionary in Peru who few expected to win.

One year later, the story is not about celebration or verdicts. It is about difficulty. Leo XIV’s first year reveals how hard it is to govern a global church shaped by division, reform and competing expectations.

That difficulty has not remained internal.

Leo’s interventions on war, migration and the meaning of a consistent pro-life ethic have drawn him into global politics, most sharply when US President Donald Trump attacked him and, in doing so, turned a cautious pope into an even more visible moral figure.

Criticism from Trump brought Leo unexpected attention – and, among many, a measure of admiration.

Read more: Pope Leo’s resolute response to Trump attack reveals a man of God, not politics

In terms of his role as pontiff, the pattern now emerging is clear. Leo is trying to combine Francis’s reform agenda with tighter structures, a stronger emphasis on unity, and a renewed stress on Catholic social teaching. Whether that balance can hold remains the central question of his pontificate.

Peace as a starting point

Leo’s priorities were clear from his first appearance.

Standing on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, he greeted the crowd with the words, “Peace be with all of you”. He repeated that emphasis days later at his inauguration mass on May 18 2025, calling for a church marked by unity, dialogue and reconciliation.

Read more: ‘Peace be with all of you’: how Pope Leo XIV embodies a living dialogue between tradition and modernity

This language reflects both theology and experience. Before becoming pope, Robert Prevost spent decades working in Peru, including as Bishop of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023, where he dealt directly with poverty, migration and political tension. His instinct is pastoral and conciliatory.

But his first year as pope has shown that peace is not a theme that resolves conflict. It is a framework within which conflict must be managed.

Inheriting Francis, but not repeating Francis

Leo’s pontificate begins with a complex inheritance.

Pope Francis, who made Prevost a cardinal in 2023 and appointed him prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, left a church divided over reform.

Leo has not positioned himself as a simple continuation. His choice of name signals a shift. By invoking Leo XIII, author of Rerum Novarum (1891), he places Catholic social teaching at the centre of his agenda, particularly in response to artificial intelligence and technological change, which he has repeatedly described as a new kind of industrial revolution.

This reflects his formation. Trained as a canon lawyer in Rome and shaped by Augustinian spirituality, he combines legal precision with a theology of authority as service. The result is a pontificate that seeks continuity, but with clearer boundaries.

Reform

Leo’s early decisions show a preference for consolidation rather than expansion of reform.

In November 2025, he updated the Regulations of the Roman Curia, aligning them with Francis’s constitution Praedicate Evangelium. He also confirmed that leadership roles in Vatican City governance can be held by lay people, including women, removing earlier restrictions.

These moves build on Francis, but also regularise his reforms.

The same pattern appeared in January 2026, when Leo convened a consistory – a formal meeting of cardinals – and asked them to submit written reflections on key themes. He also proposed regular annual meetings of the College of Cardinals, signalling a more structured advisory model.

This reflects his background. As prior general of the Augustinian order from 2001 to 2013, he governed a global religious network, travelling widely and managing diversity through institutional processes rather than personal style alone.

A focus on social teaching

If governance reveals Leo’s method, social teaching reveals his focus.

In his first apostolic exhortation, he placed the poor, migrants and the vulnerable at the centre of Christian life. This is consistent with his earlier work in Peru, where he supported refugee communities and criticised political violence.

As pope, he has continued this line. He has opposed armed conflict, criticised nationalism and warned against the dehumanising effects of artificial intelligence. He has also reaffirmed Francis’s environmental teaching.

The Jubilee Year of 2025 gave him a global platform. With around 33 million pilgrims in Rome, he used the occasion to criticise consumerism and anti-foreigner sentiment, asking whether Christians truly recognise the stranger as a neighbour. This is not simply rhetoric. It is the core of his claim about the church’s role in the modern world.

Priorities

Leo’s travel choices reinforce that message.

His first apostolic journey, to Turkey and Lebanon in November and December 2025, combined ecumenical symbolism with diplomacy. The visit to Iznik in Turkey, site of the Council of Nicaea, marked the 1,700th anniversary of a foundational moment in Christian unity.

His April 2026 journey to Africa, covering Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea, was even more revealing. It placed the church’s mission in the global south at the centre of his pontificate.

This reflects his own biography. As a dual citizen of the US and Peru, and a missionary shaped by Latin America, Leo embodies a church that is no longer centred on Europe alone.

Where tensions are sharpest

The real test of Leo’s approach lies in the controversies.

His comments linking abortion, capital punishment and the treatment of migrants into a single “pro-life” ethic provoked strong reactions, particularly in the United States. Critics argued these issues belong in different moral categories.

Debates around LGBTQ+ Catholics have exposed another fault line. Leo has signalled a more welcoming tone, while maintaining doctrinal continuity, including the church’s teaching on marriage. His caution reflects a broader concern: avoiding change through practice that appears to bypass formal teaching.

The abuse crisis remains the most serious challenge. Allegations relating to his earlier career, including his time in Peru and the US, have drawn scrutiny. While he has insisted on accountability and encouraged victims to come forward, the credibility of his leadership will depend on outcomes rather than statements.

Politics, power and pressure

Leo’s first year has also shown how quickly papal authority intersects with global politics.

As the first pontiff born in the US, his position carries geopolitical weight. His criticism of migration policies and armed conflict has brought him into tension with political leaders, including Trump, who publicly attacked him in 2026.

At the same time, Leo has maintained a consistent diplomatic line. He has called for ceasefires in Ukraine and Gaza, criticised military escalation in the Middle East, and warned against what he described as a “delusion of omnipotence” in global politics.

This places him in a familiar papal role, but in a more polarised international environment.

An emerging pattern, not a final verdict

After one year, Leo XIV’s pontificate is still taking shape.

He is a first in many ways: the first US-born pope, the first Augustinian pope, and a leader formed across two continents. But those facts matter less than the governing pattern now visible.

Leo speaks the language of peace, unity and social responsibility, while trying to stabilise reform and maintain doctrinal continuity. His approach is cautious, structured and shaped by experience rather than dramatic gestures.

The tensions of this first year are not distractions. They are the reality of the church he now leads, and the measure of whether his attempt to hold it together can succeed.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

Is the science that we do today truth, likely to be a lie, or is it undetermined? – Nathaniel K., age 15, Hamilton, Ohio

For most students, science is something you study and something you have to learn. I remember when I was in school, adults were always asking me things like “Do you like math?” and “Do you like science?” It’s almost like asking someone if they like spinach or broccoli.

In reality, science is not really a specific thing to like or hate, or something to believe in or not. Science is an activity. As one famous scientist put it, “Science is what scientists do.” It’s a way of working, a way to get things done.

So, then, what is it that scientists do? As a historian of science and medicine, I’ve studied how scientists try to understand the rules that govern things in the universe. For example, what makes the Moon orbit the Earth? How do clouds produce rain? How do people catch a cold? To answer questions like these, they do three things: They observe, they experiment and they analyze.

The process of science

All scientists carefully observe the subjects they are studying. Take the case of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin traveled the world collecting specimens of plants, animals and fossils to figure out how they came by their different features.

He soon came up with an idea: Maybe certain species in an area look the way they do because they have characteristics that are best adapted to the environment they live in, and they are passing these on to their offspring. Darwin kept testing out this idea everywhere he went, and in the end his theory seemed to work. Ever since, scientists have conducted countless studies that affirm his theory.

Many scientists take observation a step further by performing experiments. In an experiment, the scientist might use a laboratory and special instruments to modify something they’re studying and look at the effects of the change. Their aim is either to test a theory or to see whether certain changes occur regularly.

A good example of this process can be seen in the experiments conducted by Ivan Pavlov in the 1890s with dogs. By introducing a sound right before a dog would be fed, Pavlov found the dog would start reacting to the sound the very same way it reacted to a bowl of food. For Pavlov, this demonstrated that animals learned through a process of association, or “conditioning.”

Finally, scientists are constantly analyzing the results of their observations and experiments. Scientists use measurements, logic and math to consider what their findings mean. But it’s often not clear what the findings mean, and so the investigators end up having to make more observations, conduct more experiments and rethink their methods and guesses.

Reporting the findings

The analysis process doesn’t stop there. Scientists show the results of their work to others, who, in turn, are invited to weigh in on whether they did a good job answering their research question. The criticism can be pretty intense at times. In most cases, this practice includes telling other scientists who work in the same field about what they did and what they found by giving presentations at conferences.

Scientists also have to submit their work for more evaluation if they hope to get money to support their research. After that, they go through even more evaluation when they try to publish the findings of their research in professional magazines called journals.

In both cases, scientists undergo a process called peer review, during which other scientists who study similar topics are asked to basically grade the quality of the researcher’s work and provide both negative and positive feedback.

If reviewers decide the study is not good enough, the researcher won’t get funding or their study published.

Is science truth?

The work of a scientist isn’t just observing something out in the world. Scientists must invite other experts to weigh in on what is right and wrong about their methods and ideas. As a result, every scientist has to be ready to rethink what they have been doing and believing.

Through this process, scientists work at getting closer and closer to the truth. New observations and new experiments may support or disprove earlier ones, or they might open up a whole new set of questions to answer.

The scientific results of today aren’t the whole truth, but they are the closest we can come to it right now. And as scientists today and in the future keep working, they seek to bring the whole truth more and more into focus.

When you see science as something people do to reach the truth, you realize it’s a way of working, whose strength comes from scientists being open to changing their approaches and conclusions.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Greg Eghigian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

In Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the second Trump administration has adopted an increasingly aggressive policy.

From drone strikes on purported drug traffickers to increased tariffs on imports, and from the blockade on fuel shipments and threats of invasion in Cuba to the Jan. 3 military incursion into Venezuela, the U.S.’s more coercive approach to its hemispheric neighbors evokes an earlier period of U.S. foreign policy.

Many commentators have found echoes of the 1989 capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Others highlighted the longer history of U.S. interventions in Latin America stretching back through the Cold War. That includes the Nixon administration’s support for the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the CIA-sponsored removal of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954.

Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one Latin American country after another. This practice was often justified by the Roosevelt Corollary, President Theodore Roosevelt’s addition to the Monroe Doctrine. In cases of “chronic wrongdoing,” Roosevelt said in 1904, the U.S would find itself compelled to exercise an “international police power” in defense of U.S. interests.

But crucially, how Latin Americans responded to the U.S. exerting its dominance in the early 20th century may hold some lessons for the present day. One of the major side effects of the U.S.’s so-called gunboat diplomacy was an upsurge of resistance and anti-imperialist thinking in the region’s political life.

The roots of anti-imperialism

In the 30 years after Roosevelt asserted the U.S.’s right to intervene across the hemisphere, U.S. forces occupied Cuba three times – in 1906-09, 1912 and 1917-21. They also occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. In Nicaragua, the U.S. deployed the Marines from 1912 to 1925 and then again from 1926 to 1933, waging a counterinsurgency in which it used aerial bombardment for the first time.

Across much of the region, then, this was a time when the U.S. was quick to resort to force, unburdened by any concerns for Latin American countries’ sovereignty.

Yet this era of external intervention also coincided with a period of remarkable political ferment, which I describe in my recently published book, “Radical Sovereignty.”

In one place after another, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and from Havana to Lima, movements sprang up that put forward sharp critiques of U.S power. Many of them grew out of student organizations in the late 1910s, while others drew on the rising strength of labor unions and newly formed leftist political parties.

In 1923, rural workers in the Mexican state of Veracruz formed a Peasant League. From the outset, they saw local issues as closely interwoven with international ones, and they argued that there was a compelling reason for this. As the league put it, “Our internationalism is not the child of a crazed enthusiasm for empty phrases … but of the need to take preventive measures, to bolster ourselves against the enemy,” which they identified as “the imperialism of North America.”

Many of Latin America’s radical movements at this time were inspired by the recent example of the Mexican Revolution. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917 had nationalized the country’s land and natural resources, putting it on a collision course with U.S. companies and landowners.

Others still were energized by the global repercussions of the Russian Revolution. This, of course, included several brand-new communist parties across the region. But at the time, many others in Latin America saw the Bolsheviks as part of a global anti-colonial wave.

Mexico City as activist hub

My book explores the key role Mexico City played as a gathering point for these different political tendencies.

They included groups ranging from Mexican peasant leagues to the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, an anti-imperialist movement formed by Peruvian exiles. Many of these organizations converged under the umbrella of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas. Founded in Mexico City in 1925, it soon had chapters in a dozen more countries across the region.

Between them, these movements brought into focus the novel features of U.S. power. As the Cuban student leader and communist Julio Antonio Mella saw it in 1925 – at a time when his native country was highly dependent on the U.S. but formally sovereign – the U.S. was distinct. Unlike European empires, it largely refrained from direct control of territories, though it had pressed the Cubans to include in their 1901 constitution a provision allowing it to intervene in the island at will.

In Mella’s view, the U.S. was clearly an empire, one that mainly exercised its dominance through commercial or financial pressures. For him, the dollar and Wall Street were as central to U.S. power as the halls of government in Washington, D.C.

For Ricardo Paredes, an Ecuadorean doctor who founded the country’s Socialist Party in 1926, a new term was required to capture Latin American countries’ contradictory position. Formally sovereign, they were not colonies as such. Yet they were economically and politically subordinated to Washington and Wall Street – “dependent countries,” as he phrased it in 1928.

For the Peruvian poet Magda Portal, a leading member of the anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, U.S. dominance played out differently in different parts of Latin America.

In a series of lectures she gave in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1929, Portal divided the region into zones. While countries such as Argentina or Brazil were mainly sites for U.S. investment, Mexico and the Caribbean were regularly subjected to U.S. military force. Or, as Portal put it, “Here imperialism wears no disguise.”

Portal concluded her lectures with a phrase that combined her analysis of U.S. dominance with a resonant appeal for unity: “We have a single and great enemy; let us form a single and great union.”

United states of resistance?

Yet while there was much Latin American anti-imperialist thinkers could agree on, there were also profound divergences between them. This included questions of strategy as well as issues of principle. What role should different classes play in their movement? How radical a transformation of society were they pushing for? And what kind of state should emerge from it?

Over time, these differences turned into deep rifts that pitted revolutionaries against democratic reformists, internationalists against nationalists, and pro-Soviets against anti-communists. These disagreements played an important role in Latin American politics over the rest of the century.

While many of these rifts became especially prominent during the Cold War, they developed out of earlier divisions over how best to counter U.S. dominance.

The anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s was formative for a generation of Latin American radicals. Several of those who entered political life during these years went on to play key roles in major events of the 20th century. Raúl Roa, for example, who served as foreign secretary for Cuba’s revolutionary government from 1959 to 1976, was first politicized in the island’s anti-imperialist movement of the 1920s.

The men and women whose political visions were formed in the interwar period carried those ideals forward into the Cold War era. In important ways, the 1920s and 1930s laid vital groundwork for later and better-known radical movements.

Past is, of course, not always prologue. It is impossible to predict what the long-term consequences of current U.S. policy in Latin America will be, especially given the rightward tilt that is currently unfolding across the region.

But looking at the region’s anti-imperialist traditions does point to one possible outcome: The U.S.’s newly aggressive stance will, sooner rather than later, fuel a resurgence of anti-imperialist sentiment as the organizing principle for a new generation of activists.

Tony Wood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When the United States and Israel began striking Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, images of smoke billowing over Iranian cities began to dominate the news. But another feature of those skylines has remained constant: the thousands of satellite dishes that dot Tehran’s rooftops, picking up signals that originate far beyond Iran’s borders – despite attempts to confiscate them.

For two decades, Christian television channels produced in the United States and Europe have made their way into Iranian homes. Some of this programming echoes apocalyptic ideas from American figures promoting the war, drawing on scriptural interpretations long present in evangelical teachings. Writer Hal Lindsey popularized such ideas in the 1970s with “The Late Great Planet Earth,” a best-selling book that cast Persia as the foretold antagonist in an imminent end-times conflict that would usher in Jesus’ second coming.

In my 2025 book, “Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East,” I show how these broadcasts became tools for spreading such messages to Christians and potential converts – positioning the region at the center of a long-running “faith war.”

Satellite missions

Of course, Christianity itself was born in the Middle East, and the region’s deep, diverse traditions long predate any Western missionary activity. Ancient communities such as the Assyrians, Copts, Maronites and Armenians have preserved their liturgical and theological heritage across generations, and form some of the oldest continuous Christian traditions in the world.

But evangelical churches have proselytized in the region for two centuries. Over the past 50 years, evangelical media outlets have flourished during moments of conflict and where weak government control has created openings for proselytism.

During the Lebanese Civil War, which took place from 1975-1991, U.S. evangelicals such as former business executive George Otis and Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson established the channel now known as Middle East Television. The Christian network transmitted its signal from Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon from 1981 to 2000, operating in a legal gray area that bypassed Israeli and Lebanese media regulations.

The station’s primary goal was to convert Israeli Jews to Christianity and, in doing so, to help trigger a series of end‑times events. This ambition was consistent with prophetic frameworks popular in American evangelical churches at the time.

A similar pattern emerged after 9/11 and during the Iraq War that began in 2003. Like many other evangelicals, Paul Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, believed the U.S. invasion was an opportunity to launch “spiritual warfare” – a battle between good and evil in the Middle East. He visited Iraq and distributed satellite television equipment so locals could receive evangelical programming in Arabic.

Many evangelicals interpreted the Iraq conflict through an apocalyptic lens, viewing the turmoil as evidence of biblical prophecy. Some, like Oklahoma pastor Mark Hitchcock, even claimed that the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of Saddam Hussein echoed scriptural descriptions of destroying “Babylon” before Christ’s return.

This proved to be a powerful fundraising tool among North American donors eager to accelerate what they saw as a divine timetable.

Persian broadcasts

In Iran, Western evangelicalism’s history dates to the 19th century. But arguably its most striking form emerged about two decades ago, when Christian networks began using new technologies to get around decades of restrictions in media and religion.

After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic allowed Armenian and Assyrian Christians to practice their ancient faiths in their own languages. The government officially recognizes them as religious minorities. However, it effectively criminalized Protestant activities in Persian, which it associated with Western missions.

Because evangelicals – a small fraction of Iran’s Christian believers – relied on Persian for worship, the prohibition led to church closures, the persecution of their leaders and a strict ban on missionary activities. Converting from Islam to another religion is illegal in Iran, and converts risk punishment.

By 2006, Christian organizations abroad turned to satellite broadcasts as an easier way of reaching Iranian audiences. Satellite dishes, though officially prohibited, were widespread and difficult for authorities to control. Tracking who actually watches these channels is extremely difficult, but producers claim that Christian broadcasts helped foster secretive house churches across Iran.

Huddled in living rooms, often guided by television programs and companion WhatsApp groups, believers held Bible studies and group prayers. Many converts kept their beliefs hidden to avoid persecution.

While precise numbers are difficult to confirm, Western governments and human rights groups have reported a rise in arrests of converts over the years. Some of those organizations say the Islamic Republic has accused converts of collaborating with foreign agents.

3 channels

As I discuss in my book, three major Persian Christian channels illustrate different approaches to this digital mission work.

SAT-7 PARS, founded by British missionary Terence Ascott and a coalition of Western evangelical organizations, adopted a cautious strategy that, according to the channel’s slogan, aimed to “make God’s love visible.” It emphasized children’s programming and shows highlighting Western ideas about women’s rights and family life. Even this softer approach faced resistance: In its early years, SAT-7’s translation offices in Tehran were repeatedly raided, staff members were detained, and translation operations were relocated to England and Cyprus.

Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Nejat, which means “salvation,” and the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Mohabat TV, which means “love,” embraced a more confrontational stance. Reza Safa, an Iranian convert who became a Pentecostal preacher in Sweden and the United States, partnered with Crouch to launch Nejat. Safa portrayed Christianity as locked in a struggle with what he called the “demonic” forces of extremist Islam.

Mohabat TV also emphasized elements of this spiritual warfare, as well as miraculous “signs and wonders.” The channel documented secret baptisms of Iranian converts.

Perhaps the most provocative development has been the introduction of Christian Zionist teachings into Iranian satellite feeds. Christian Zionism teaches that the modern state of Israel plays a central role in biblical prophecy. In recent years, Mohabat TV has aired high-production documentaries such as “In the Footsteps of Jesus,” a Persian-language film about the “Holy Land” that portrays Israel not as a political adversary, but as a nation all Christians must cherish.

Language of war

At the start of the 2026 war, the Yahsat satellite service – an Emirati carrier that hosts Persian-language Christian channels, among other feeds – experienced disruptions. The Iranian government has often been accused of jamming satellite signals.

Meanwhile, religious language about the conflict continues to escalate in American politics, with some evangelical commentators referencing apocalyptic prophecies.

Since the early 1980s, evangelical TV ministries in the region have advanced a similar message about politics, religion and the end times – under the banner of conversion.

Febe Armanios does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The CBS television show “It’s What’s Happening Baby” aired a music video featuring Martha and the Vandellas performing their hit song “Nowhere to Run” to kick off its national broadcast dedicated to Detroit on June 28, 1965.

In the video, the Detroit-based trio sang about how they could not escape missing an ex-lover after a breakup while sitting in a white Mustang moving slowly down the assembly line in the Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge plant.

As a cultural and labor historian, I see the “Nowhere to Run” video as an iconic testament to Detroit’s reputation as the “Motor City” and the role of the autoworker in the American imagination.

Motown founder and CEO Berry Gordy, Jr. worked on the Ford assembly line and used it as inspiration for Hitsville U.S.A., the famed headquarters and music recording studio that served as a space to train performers and perfect the “Motown sound” for the masses.

Martha and the Vandellas were part of Motown’s illustrious roster of artists in the 1960s. Initially comprised of Martha Reeves, Rosalind Ashford and Annette Beard, and with members changing over the next three decades, they helped establish the Black “girl group.” They presented themselves as working class in videos like “Nowhere to Run.”

Their classic anthem “Dancing in the Street” reflected the revolutionary mood of civil rights protesters, especially Black Americans in the 1960s. As lead singer, Reeves also emerged as a pioneering R&B “diva,” helping pave the way for Black female solo vocalists like Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Mary J. Blige and Beyoncé.

A patient path to stardom

Martha Reeves was born in Eufaula, Alabama, on July 18, 1941. Soon after, her family moved to Detroit’s east side. Music occupied a central place in her life from childhood.

Reeves writes in her 1994 memoir, “Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva,” about her father serenading her mother with his guitar while she was pregnant with Martha. Her mother, Ruby, also sang. Reeves’ parents passed their love for music to her, and she sang in her church choir and aspired to a life of performance.

“At that young age I was already hooked on pleasing the crowd with my singing,” Reeves wrote.

Reeves graduated from Northeastern High School. As a teenager, she used fake IDs to get into night clubs to watch singers perform, and she sang in open mics and talent shows. She scored her first break after earning a three-night performance at the 20 Grand, a popular Detroit night club located on 14th Street and Warren Avenue.

It was after one of those performances when she met William Stevenson, Motown Records’ executive for discovering new talent. Stevenson invited Reeves to the label’s headquarters.

Reeves came to the studio, but she didn’t audition for reasons that aren’t entirely clear today. Instead, Stevenson told her she could answer the phones. That’s how she got a job in the A&R Department and began working with other Motown artists.

In 1957, Reeves joined her first group, the Del-Phis. Formed by Edward “Pops” Larkins, the Del-Phis also included leader Gloria Jean Williamson, Rosalind Ashford and Annette Beard.

Reeves soon caught another break. In September 1962, Stevenson called for her to fill in for Mary Wells in a Marvin Gaye studio session. Reeves enlisted the other Del-Phis, and they performed so well that they became the supporting vocal group for Gaye.

After the Del-Phis toured with Gaye and recorded “I’ll Have to Let Him Go,” Gordy offered Reeves, Beard and Ashford a recording contract. The group also took on a new name, Martha and the Vandellas.

Martha and the Vandellas enjoyed commercial success soon after, with songs like “Come and Get These Memories,” “Quicksand” and “Heatwave.”

An anthem for revolution set to a groove

“Dancing in the Street,” written by Gaye, Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter, was released in the summer of 1964 and became a signature hit for Martha and the Vandellas.

Reeves wrote in her autobiography that she did not like “Dancing in the Street.”

However, she made it her own, and Reeves later acknowledged that the song embodied the spirit of civil rights protests.

“It became the anthem of the decade,” Reeves wrote.

She was right.

At the time of the song’s release, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. Black Americans in Harlem took to the streets to protest the killing of 15-year-old James Powell by an off-duty New York Police Department officer.

The 1960s set off a string of “long, hot summers” as racial tensions intensified. Black folks in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1965 protested in the streets in response to police violence.

More than 100 protests were organized in response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, from Chicago to Washington and Baltimore.

Detroit erupted a year earlier, in July 1967, after Detroit police officers raided a “blind pig,” or an unlicensed bar, on 12th Street.

The iconic opening lines of “Dancing in the Street” announced a new attitude among Black folks: “Calling out around the world/ Are you ready for a brand new beat?”

The high-octane, optimistic song is laced with slogans interpreted as invitations to take action. Martha and the Vandellas’ declaration that “Summer is here and the time is right for dancing in the street” reflected Black Americans’ willingness to not only march, but to take measures in their own hands and fight for equality and justice.

Battle for fair pay and recognition

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of transition for Reeves and the Vandellas. The Supremes were on the rise and threatened to displace them as the most prominent girl group on the Motown label. Reeves also experienced creative differences with Motown executives and struggled with drug addiction. Then, in 1972, Gordy moved Motown to Los Angeles so he could try his hand at filmmaking.

Martha and the Vandellas broke up later that year after the release of their album, “Black Magic.” However, Reeves continued as a solo artist, releasing five albums, including her self-titled debut “Martha Reeves” in 1974, “The Rest of My Life” in 1976 and “We Meet Again” in 1978, among others.

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, along with many Motown artists, experienced a resurgence in popularity during the 1980s. Motown Records’ 25th anniversary show in Pasadena, California, in 1983 launched them back into the mainstream. The group reunited and started performing again in 1989.

Also, Reeves and the group sought to resolve their old conflicts with Motown Records. Reeves and various members of the Vandellas sued Gordy and Motown in 1989 for unpaid royalties. Motown Records settled the suit in 1991 for an undisclosed amount.

Four years later, the B-52s inducted Reeves and the Vandellas into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The diva archetype

Martha and the Vandellas played a vital role in laying the foundation for future all-Black female groups like En Vogue, TLC, SWV and Destiny’s Child.

They helped set the standard for turning songs about the trappings of love and heartbreak into anthems. Reeves embraced being an “R&B Diva” long before music critics applied the persona to singers like Mary J. Blige and Beyoncé. Reeves was not just a larger-than-life vocal presence; she showed future generations of Black female vocalists that, to be a diva, one must have control of one’s own career.

“We became the Vandellas and with me being the only lead singer, my name was put out there because I did all the work,” Reeves said in a 2020 interview. “I did all the singing … I managed to just come up with my own destiny, with my own future in show business.”

Austin McCoy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.