“In the face of hard realities, Thucydides embodied the dual concern of classical realism, consciousness of external threats while being wary of our capacity for self-destruction, to fall prey to irrational emotions and false hope. An age of blood and iron is well and truly now underway, and the bitter winds of economic warfare are only just beginning to blow back on us all. It is not a bad time, then, to think through what it means to be prudent, while avoiding excess brutality and the corruption of our polities. Thucydides’ realism, austere yet humane, should both shake and fortify us in the hard days ahead.”
—Patrick Porter, “Thucydides was a Realist.” Engelsbergideas.com. April 1, 2022.
Tag: history
Timeline of the Human Condition
“Ages: following the big bang 13.8 billion years ago, time passed two-thirds of the way to the present before the formation of the Sun 4.57 billion years ago. Rescaled to a calendar year, starting with the big bang at 00:00:00 on 1 January, the Sun forms on 1 September, the Earth on 2 September, earliest signs of life appear on 13 September, earliest true mammals on 26 December, and humans just 2 hours before year’s end. For a year that starts with the earliest true mammals, the dinosaurs go extinct on 17 August, earliest primates appear on 9 September, and humans at dawn of 25 December. For a year that starts with the earliest humans, our own species appears on 19 November, the first built constructions on 8 December, and agricultural farming begins at midday on 29 December.
–C. Patrick Doncaster, “Timeline of the human condition.” https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~cpd/history.html Accessed: January 5, 2022.
Rick Steves’ The Story of Fascism
h/t Open Culture.
The Sifter
“The Sifter is a publicly available searchable database and is designed to be a tool to aid in finding, identifying and comparing historical and contemporary writing on food and related topics. It is overseen by an advisory board of rotating members of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery as well as other friends of food history. As with Wikipedia, it will be populated by its users. Entries will be made both in standard English and the language of the original document. It will be possible to enter data in over 150 writing systems. As many countries as possible will be included. Corrections may be made by registered users. Data visualization will be a component. With the aid of this tool it is our hope that what has been invisible will come into focus.”
—https://thesifter.org/
The Online Archive of The Letterform Archive
“We designed the site and structured the data specifically with design artifacts and graphic designers in mind. After you’ve browsed the highlights from the homepage, we encourage you to use the search filters: click on each category to explore disciplines like lettering, and formats like type specimens, or combine filters like decades and countries to narrow your view to a specific time and place.”
–http://oa.letterformarchive.org/
100 (or more) Gays
“Annotate your books, but please, make it good. Make it like the anonymous owner of 100 Gays, who signed their notes only ‘R.’, but gave us everything else they had. On the spare pages at the front and rear of the book, R. has added their own notes, remarks, poems and theories…
…This is a whole worldview; each person appearing on TV, each voice on the radio, assessed for sexual similarity, for tells, for giveaways, for something shared. This is being raised in a hateful and homophobic society, where every rumour of queerness in a filmstar, a writer, a politician, is clung to as a sign of a secret underground of desire. Who keeps lists of names of queer people in their head, their sexuality, their secret loves, their supposed desires ranked? Other queer people, that’s who.”
-Huw Lemmey, “100 (or more) Gays.” Utopian Drivel on substack.com. November 18, 2019.
Right to Bear Arms
You could bear them, but you needed to pick them up from the state house first.
The 1619 Project – The New York Times
“The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.“
—https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
Best Year in Music
“A Journey through every Billboard top 5 hit to find music’s greatest era.”
The Billboard Top 5 for every week between October 18th, 1958 and April 13th, 2019.
Mike Duncan’s Revolutions Podcast
Mike Duncan’s Revolutions Podcast gives a broad overview of revolutions, the most recent is on The Mexican Revolution.
cafebedouin.org 