History, Argued Honestly

Posts

• Augustine's test for a government is still the hardest one

  Augustine on kingdoms without justice, and why the line cuts harder at believers than at pagans.

• Portugal answered the 1755 earthquake with a questionnaire, and scientists still use it

  After the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Pombal sent every parish a list of factual questions. Scientists still use the answers.

• Before spelling was fixed, how did people actually read each other's letters?

  Before spelling was standardized, how did anyone read a letter where every word could be spelled three ways?

• Before clocks were everywhere, how did two people agree to meet "later"?

  Before clocks were everywhere, how did ordinary people agree to meet at a time? I want the small, practical answer.

• Before packet yeast, who in a household kept the sourdough starter alive?

  Sourdough is older than most countries. So who kept the starter alive through winters, moves and wars, and did people pass it on like an heirloom?

• Ancient Chinese mirrors
• Lope de Vega (1562-1635)

  Lope de Vega was a legendary Spanish play-wright, also known as the Shakespeare of Spain

• Was the old case against street lamps a real argument or just a punchline?

  The 1819 Cologne case against gas street lamps gets used as a dunk on every new technology. What was the real worry?

• 𝐍𝐄𝐋𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐋𝐀– 𝙰 𝙻𝙸𝙵𝙴 𝚃𝙷𝙰𝚃 𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙽𝙶𝙴𝙳 𝙰 𝙽𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽

  𝙸𝚖𝚊𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚎 𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 27 𝚢𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚍 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚘𝚗 𝚠𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚜… 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚠𝚊𝚕𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚑𝚘𝚙𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝.

• 🇮🇳 𝗜𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗔𝗡 𝗛𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗬— 𝙰 𝙹𝙾𝚄𝚁𝙽𝙴𝚈 𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚁𝙾𝚄𝙶𝙷 𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚄𝚂𝙰𝙽𝙳𝚂 𝙾𝚏 𝚈𝙴𝙰𝚁𝚂 🇮🇳

  🇮🇳 INDIAN HISTORY — A JOURNEY THROUGH THOUSANDS OF YEARS 🇮🇳

• Shah Abbas II insulting Aurangzeb
• The Rise of Geography During the Age of Exploration

  The Rise of Geography During the Age of Exploration

• The Secrets of the Egyptian Pyramids

  The Mystery of the Egyptian Pyramids

• RUPRAM BARUAH

  The 1942 Behali movement was a prominent local chapter of the Quit India Movement in Assam, driven by "Mrityu Bahini" (Death Squads) and "Shanti Sena" (Peace Corps). On September 20, 1942, locals marched on the Behali Police Station in the Biswanath district, where freedom fighter Tileswari Mahanta was instrumental in hoisting the national flag.The 1942 Context & The Behali IncidentThe Call: Following Mahatma Gandhi’s "Do or Die" call in Bombay, the Darrang District Congress Committee organized

• Was Britain's real achievement breaking the ceiling that capped every life before it?

  For nearly the whole of human history, the standard of living did not move. A peasant in Roman Gaul, a peasant in medieval England, and a peasant under the early Stuarts lived at roughly the same material level, because any surplus a society produced was eaten by the mouths it then fed. Good harvests bought more babies, not better lives, and population climbed back to the edge of hunger. Economists call this the Malthusian trap, and it held without exception. Then, in a damp corner of England…

• Was Italy's greatest cultural hour also a political catastrophe?

  We carry an unexamined assumption that culture follows power, that the great age of an art is the great age of its army. Renaissance Italy refutes it cleanly. Between roughly the fourteenth century and the sixteenth, the peninsula produced linear perspective, humanism, the recovered ancients, the secular gaze, and a recognizably modern idea of the individual person. It also failed, completely and humiliatingly, at the one task we usually call the test of a civilization. It could not unite,…

• Is Canada better off for having skipped its revolution?

  Most nations remember a morning they would die to defend: a Bastille, a Boston, a shot that started everything. Canada has no such morning, and that is the point most easily missed about it. On 1 July 1867 the British North America Act took effect and the Dominion of Canada existed. No declaration was read to a crowd, no army had to be beaten, no king was overthrown. A handful of colonial politicians, John A. Macdonald among them, had argued their way through a series of conferences and…

• Is the United States the rare country built on an argument?

  Most nations are facts before they are ideas. France was French, with its language and its soil and its dead, long before anyone wrote down what France was for. The American Founding ran the other way. In 1776 there was no American people in the old sense, no shared ancestry, no national church, no thousand-year memory, only a set of colonies that had been quarreling with London and, increasingly, among themselves. What held them was a written argument: that governments exist to secure rights,…

• Is there any conservative ideology left to recognize in the Republican party?

  I used to think I understood what I was part of. Not in a blind, devotional way, but in the sense that there was a rough consistency to it. Free markets, free trade, small government. Respect for institutions, personal responsibility, suspicion of concentrated power, especially when it showed up in Washington. Remember that? You didn’t have to agree with every position, but you could at least recognize the shape of the ideology.

• Were the Romans far more progressive than we give them credit for?

  There is a common trend of young men being interested in the Roman empire out of movies and populat history, and imagining it as a militaristic, right wing hyper-masculine empire that was great for men. Spartacus, Rome, Gladiator... to different degree all give a perception of Rome being a sort of warrior-culture, sometimes bogged down by decadence. Gladiator II takes this to a ridiculous extreme. For that particular movie, I recommend reading Brett's, from acoup.blog , critique: