I don't believe what follows, but I will quote it without further comment now just for the heck of it. This is from Grant Allen, in GENTLEMEN'S MAGAZINE, 1878. The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other unknown or unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it be a fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences between the are wholly due to the geographical position of the various races...the great permanent geographical features of land and sea.... We cannot regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effect in...
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I wrote last week about the history of journalism, and its technologies, prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web. In this connection I have come across a fascinating quote from Ben Bagdikian, who was following precisely this subject in real time. In a 1973 article for the Columbia Journalism Review, Bagdikian wrote about the new doohickies on which reporters were writing their stories in the most advanced city rooms. His breathless prose is amusing from this distance. I call them "dookickies" because the names were in flux. The phrase "word processor" would eventually stick for machines dedicated to textual purposes such as reporters and editors would employ. Further on, of course, it became the name of a class of computer software, but that was distant yet. Again, the following passage comes from 1973. As he types, the letters appear on the screen. If he wishes to delete or add to a line he has typed, he uses a set of command keys to move a curs...
Someone at Quora asked me to suggest resolutions concerning open historical questions on which one could based a formal debate I came up with five and I will simply quote myself here. I used the customary format- stating a proposition around which one could build either a "pro" ro a "con" case. That the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten was the first important monotheist in human history, and the fount of the monotheisms of the “peoples of the Book” ever since. That the Roman Empire in the west didn’t end when we usually think it did — that essential social structures remained in place until the rise of Islam changed trade routes. That the invention of the stirrup led to the social/political system known as feudalism. That the medieval Catholic Church’s restrictions on usury were an important factor in the outbreak of Reformation. That Henry VIII was entitled to an annulment of his marriage to Katherine under the law and ecclesiology of the day, and the Pope’s refusal to...
I am at most a casual movie viewer, and extremely casual about following celebrity news. So I didn't know, until my social media news feeds started telling me, that there was a new being in the world calling himself Elliot Page, or why that was extraordinary. Apparently, Elliot Page is the new chosen identity of a Hollywood actor who won the Austin Film Critics' Award for "Best Actress of the Year" in 2006 and 2007 for Hard Candy and Juno . I had to do an absurd amount of work to find that out, because there seems to be a rule in the mainstream media against saying things like "Elliot Page, pre-transition, was known as Ellen Page." I don't think that rules against stating history (quite recent history too) accurately are sensible ideas. Even Howard Cosell must have said a time or two, "Mohammed Ali, the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay, won his appeal today," or similar sentences. Yes, I've watched more boxing than I have movies.
A great "life is so unfair" story. Also, a fine peek into an incident in the history of journalism. Robert H. Jackson was a photographer working for UPI in 1963, out of its Dallas office. Sometimes History with a capital H comes to one's hometown, as it came to Jackson's in late November of that year. Jackson's press pass got him into the Dallas police station's basement around noon on November 24, when Oswald was about to be handed over to the sheriff. Those of you of a certain age surely know where I am going with this. It was Jackson who got THE PHOTO. One that would win him a Pulitzer Prize. You know the image. Oswald had just been shot, the bullet was entering his body. Oswald's face is registering pain and shock. His body is still upright but already crumbling. This photo: Jackson was not the only photographer who was there that day. The Dallas police had opened up their basement to the press. Another shutterbug there, an employee of...
What can or should philosophers say about history as a field of study? History in the first instance is as I understand the term simply the human past, especially in the millennia subsequent to the invention of writing. But history in the second instance is the name we give to the systematic study of that vast subject. And the "philosophy of history" encompasses both of those, it is analogous both to the philosophy of nature AND to the philosophy of science. There are three major questions that the philosophy of history asks. The first two concern each half of the distinction I just made: the third cuts across that distinction. Here they are: what are the key units we should invoke in studying or discussing this past: individual lives and actions? social classes? ethnic/racial identities? civilizations? sovereigns? faiths and churches? something else? [If “all of the above,” or some combination of the above, we still may have to rank them in cen...
What was the single most important event of the 20th century, from the standpoint of creating the 21st? It is, you might say, an arrogant question. How do we measure the importance of, say, the development of antibiotics, beginning with penicillin , against the importance of Hiroshima? How do we measure either of those against the creation of the United Nations, the end of the gold standard for money within and among most nation states, or a thousand other things? How even decide what counts as a "single event"? But if you were to want an answer despite all objections, I could do worse that to say ... Probably the rise of the internet. One key moment in this development came on January 1, 1983, when ARPA initiated the TCP/IP protocol suite. To decode that a bit: ARPA was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, of the US Defense Department. When ARPA started linking computers together, the people working on this naturally called it the ARPANET. TCP/IP stands for...
Back in May of this year, the Science History Institute did a story entitled "The Myth of the Cuyahoga River Fire." It is a fascinating look at a piece of our collective understanding of environmentalism: how we remember it versus what really happened. Here's a link: https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/the-myth-of-the-cuyahoga-river-fire I'll say no more.
I am certainly open to correction about any and all of the "40 snapshots" I presented as yesterday's post. I don't plan to revisit it and rework the post. This is a blog, and spontaneity even at the cost of error, is part of the charm of the medium. You have to look elsewhere for authoritative pronouncements, especially about the more ancient stretches of history covered there. All that said, here is one quick correction: I provided a photo, representing a famous piece of statuary, and said that it represented the Sargon I mentioned in snapshot 2 of my list. It didn't. That snapshot represents Sargon of Akkadian, a precursor empire to the Assyrians. Our Assyrian Sargon I may have adopted his own title from the already-famous Akkadian figure represented in that bust. There is no available image of our Sargon I. Leaving out the Akkadians (and the Sumerians who came before THEM in the same region) was a pretty radical foreshortening.
Somebody on Quora asked how brief I can make the history of the world. I interpreted "world" for this purpose not as going back to the Big Bang back as starting when civilization does. And I foreshortened that too, a little, though not much. How brief can I be in recounting the history of the last 4000 years? Well: I can leave you forty still shots from an infinitely complicated motion picture. 1. By 2025, the Assyrian Empire had been founded in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent, our story begins with a quick rise-and-fall arc for Assyria, because ... 2. 1990 BCE, approx., wthe reign of the great Sargon I in this empire. He is the charming fellow portrayed above. But all institutions are mortal, so … 3. 1730 BCE Assyria fragments, as someone described in the surviving records as a “son of a nobody” seizes the throne. 4. 1680 BCE, Hammurabi founds an empire to the south of Assyria, which becomes known as Babylonia 5. 1353 BCE The Egyptian Pharaoh Akh...
Grandfather paradox The “grandfather paradox” is an argument used to prove the impossibility of time travel. The idea is that an individual (usually called "Tim" because the name looks a lot like "time") who could travel backwards in time, could kill his grandfather, prior to the conception of his father. But this would imply that Tim’s father would never have been born, and that in turn would imply that Tim would never be born. And if Tim was not born, Tim could not go back in time. This situation leads to a contradiction. Tim both could and could not kill his grandfather. He could (because he would by hypothesis be in the right time and place with a weapon) yet he could not (because he would have to have been born!) And since our “Tim” could be anyone this means that nobody could - that time travel is impossible. Syllogistically, the macro argument is this: Premise 1. If time travel is possible, then contradictions are possible. Premise 2...