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Comment by Dallas the Phallus on March 31, 2013 at 1:10pm

Five Common Historical Misconceptions Explained

Comment by doone on February 10, 2013 at 6:57pm

Face Of The Day

FEB 10 2013 @ 6:49PM

Julia Sklar marvels at a very old visage:

Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman – the oldest ever found. By looking at artefacts like this as works of art, rather than archaeological finds, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London hopes to help us see them and their creators with new eyes. Human ancestors date back millions of years, but the earliest evidence of the human mind producing symbolic imagery as a form of creative expressioncannot be much older than 100,000 years. That evidence comes from Africa: this exhibition explores the later dawning of representative art in Europe and shows that even before the remarkable paintings of the Lascaux cave, France, humans were able to make work as subtle as the expressive face above.

(Image: The oldest known portrait of a woman sculpted from mammoth ivory found at Dolní Věstonice, Moravia, Czech Republic. c.26,000 years old. Height 4.8 cm. Courtesy of the Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute)

Comment by doone on February 1, 2013 at 7:53am

FOCUS ON THE SLAVE TRADE

From BBC:

The exact numbers of Africans shipped overseas during the slave trade are hotly debated—estimates range between 10 and 28 million. What is undisputed is the degree of savage cruelty endured by men, women and children. Up to 20% of those chained in the holds of the slave ships died before they even reached their destination. Between 1450 and 1850 at least 12 million Africans were taken across the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic—mainly to colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies. The Middle Passage was integral to a larger pattern of commerce developed by European countries. European traders would export manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa where they would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then sold for huge profits in the Americas.

More here. (Note: One daily post throughout the month of February will be devoted to commemorate African American History Month)

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:25 AM | Permalink

Comment by Michel on January 29, 2013 at 9:34am

Time warp: Very rare color photos of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. An amazing collection.

Comment by doone on November 27, 2012 at 8:43am

The Perils Of Ancient Motherhood

Emily Wilson reviews a spate of books on motherhood, among them Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome:

Even male authors of antiquity were aware that motherhood was a very dangerous business, for women as well as for men and babies. Those who survived to adulthood must have been conscious that their mothers could have died giving birth to them; men must have been aware that fathering children on their wives could, and quite likely would, kill them. Orestes, who kills his mother in adulthood, is supposedly justified in his action, because he is avenging his father – and the Oresteia itself can be read as, among other things, an attempt to justify matricide and fatherhood (which are, revealingly, linked together). But the cultural background of the play includes the awareness that children very often "kill" their mothers, simply by being born; and husbands often "kill" their wives by making them pregnant.

Comment by doone on November 23, 2012 at 7:42pm

The Dark History Of Cranberries

Madeleine Johnson investigates the mysterious epidemic that wiped out 90% of the Indian population around Plymouth:

The symptoms were a yellowing of the skin, pain and cramping, and profuse bleeding, especially from the nose. A recent analysis concludes the culprit was a disease called leptospirosis, caused by leptospira bacteria. Spread by rat urine.... According to the hypothesis, infected ship rats landed in the New World and excreted leptospira, infecting raccoons, mink, and muskrats whose urine further contaminated any standing fresh water.

Johnson explains why the European colonists remained largely untouched by the plague:

Wampanoag have long had seasonal feasts of thanksgiving, one of which celebrates the cranberry harvest. There is some evidence that cranberries were also used medicinally - raw, ground into a poultice, and applied to open wounds. Although modern research suggests that cranberries can be a potent antimicrobial, that might not have been enough to slay the spirochete. The more leptospira that initially invade the bloodstream (possibly via direct contact with berries), the more likely the disease is to be fatal.

Comment by doone on November 22, 2012 at 3:43pm

THANKSGIVING GUILT TRIP: HOW WARLIKE WERE NATIVE AMERICANS BEFORE EUROPEANS ARRIVED?

John Horgan in Scientific American:

The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding over recent scientific portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes. When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash and corn. This episode seemed to support the view—often (apparently erroneously) attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful “noble savages.”

Many prominent scientists now deride depictions of pre-state people as peaceful. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature (which I reviewed last fall), Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker mocked the idea that “war is a recent invention, and that fighting among native peoples was ritualistic and harmless until they encountered European colonialists.” According to Pinker, pre-state societies were on average far more violent than even the most brutal modern states. Native Americans definitely waged war long before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence; war seems to have surged during periods of drought. But scientists such as Pinker, Keeley and LeBlanc have replaced the myth of the noble savage with the myth of the savage savage.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:58 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on November 17, 2012 at 9:10am

FROM HERODOTUS TO GLOBALISATION

The basic intellectual problem is this: once you have defined the central issue of politics as the preservation of liberty within a political community, absolutism, fascism and religious fundamentalism can easily present themselves as phenomena of essentially negative interest. Yet fascism, for example, produced, in the writings of Carl Schmitt, a theorist of considerable power who provided a searing critique of parliamentary democracy. His definition of politics saw liberty as a distraction and revolved instead around the friend/foe distinction. One may disagree with this, but one has to take it seriously. Yet Ryan’s treatment of fascism and Nazism remains trapped within an older historiography that sees the most important thing about these movements as their irrationalism. Today most historians would regard their challenge to interwar liberalism as much more serious than this “irrationalism thesis” acknowledges. And as a result it seems downright odd to have a history of political thought that does not engage more fully with some of Schmitt’s ideas.

more from Mark Mazower at Prospect Magazine here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on November 17, 2012 at 9:09am

THE SCIENCE OF SIZZLE

From The New York Times:

“Which comes first, the stir-fry or the wok?” It may sound like a bad joke, but the answer holds the key to one of the world’s great cuisines. Bee Wilson’s supple, sometimes playful style in “Consider the Fork,” a history of the tools and techniques humans have invented to feed themselves, cleverly disguises her erudition in fields from archaeology and anthropology to food science. Only when you find yourself rattling off statistics at the dinner table will you realize how much information you’ve effortlessly absorbed. Wilson, an award-winning British food journalist and historian who contributes the “Kitchen Thinker” column to The Sunday Telegraph, is also, incidentally, the daughter of the biographer and novelist A. N. Wilson. Her fourth book (following histories of beekeeping, food scandals and the sandwich) proves she belongs in the company of Jane Grigson, one of the grandes dames of English food writing. Like Grigson’s, Wilson’s insouciant scholarship and companionable voice convince you she would be great fun to spend time with in the kitchen.

So, which does come first, the stir-fry or the wok? Wilson’s answer is, “Neither.” To solve the riddle, we have to take a step back and contemplate cooking fuel: firewood was scarce, and with a wok you could cook more quickly after chopping food into bite-size morsels with a tou, or Chinese cleaver. Chopsticks were also part of this “symbiosis.”

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:34 AM | Permalink

Comment by Davy on November 12, 2012 at 3:55pm

Here is a link that Gives an account of some of the laws from the Code of Hummurabi.

 Hummurabi Codex

Here is a link to a PDF for the Hummurabi Codex 

PDF of the Codex

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