which period of history are you obsessed by today?

[Cheesypoof]

nah - self mythologising bunch of boring stoners making dull music and telling each other how great they were.

Haha, i heartily disagree! Talk to people who are still alive and lived there (not all were stoners, and some had quite tasty lives outside music, or communal living). A very odd mix of musicians, writers, strange gaffs and 'lost people.' Some awful music, some excellent - same with the literature. And some of the big music makers werent even stoners!

 

[Idris2002]

nah - self mythologising bunch of boring stoners making dull music and telling each other how great they were.

With the exception of Joni Mitchell. Though her art would have been better if she had stayed in Canada.

Today, my history reading concerns the battle of the Atlantic.

 

[Tankus]

Tudor..... trimming my white beard today ....wistfully missing its former redness

 

[coley]

The history of the whaling industry is pretty interesting. Some good old whaling ship films on YouTube

I'd love it to be actually history, but the Japanese have to protect their 'culture'

 

[twentythreedom]

Indeed

 

[PDJ]

The day before yesterday

 

[bi0boy]

Wondering how things would have turned out had Henry, Prince of Wales not died of typhoid aged 18 in 1612. His younger brother Charles become king instead and we all know what happened next.

Henry was hugely popular, widely regarded as being intelligent and competent, and was very much a Protestant.

 

[mojo pixy]

As always when I pass through the docks at Bristol, today I wished I could go back to about 1750 and see* them then.

* hear, smell etc

 

[Gramsci]

Spanish civil war. So recent, but so little talked about here that I seem to know more than many of my students. I can understand that with the teens and younger, but the adults, and especially the teachers, seem to know so little.

My partner is Spanish and been reading up on this.

I read this recent novel on the civil war. An academic starts to look into an event at the end of the war and starts to discover the history of his country. My partner started reading it and likes it. Imo good introduction to the issues of the war and very moving. It's also a about how in Spain the civil war is a subject that has been repressed.


Soldiers of Salamis: Javier Cercas: Bloomsbury Paperbacks

In Spain the civil war is still a difficult subject. Still affects politics now.

 

[Riklet]

Hundreds of thousands of murdered people in mass graves and not enough political ganas or social pressure to dig them up or do much about it.

Second highest number of disappeared people in the world too (apparently).

Def still a sore subject in my experience! Facinating history tho...

 

[mx wcfc]

I'm in Zaragoza at the moment. Compared to Barcelona the Civil War may as well not have happened, except for a tower with 3000 Italian dead in it. Unsurprisingly the civil war is much more prominent in Barca.

 

[butchersapron]

An incidents worthy of note there though - a revolt against the fascists from within their own military forces when anarchists who been forced to fight for the foreign legion mutinied tried to storm the prison and free the thousands of other anarchists who'd been rounded up at the start of the 'war'.

 

[Idris2002]

For a long while there it was the October crisis of 1970 that kept me interested - the most interesting thing to happen in Canada since, well, anytime.

And that crisis was one of the outcomes of Quebec's Quiet Revolution.

An Egyptian gives her experience of that one here:

I moved to Montreal in 1967. Little did I know it was the Quiet Revolution | CBC Canada 2017

 

[yield]

This 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Clay Tablet Just Changed The History of Maths
24 AUG 2017

But if the new study is right, then the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived about 120 BC, is not the father of trigonometry that he's long been regarded as. Scholars date the tablet to around 1822-1762 BC.

Puts trigonometry back by 1000 years. Still can't work out how base 60 works mind.

New theory suggests heavy elements created when primordial black holes eat neutron stars from within
August 24, 2017

PBHs are still just theory, of course. They are believed to have developed shortly after the Big Bang. They are also believed to roam through the galaxies and might be tied to dark matter. In this new theory, if a PBH happened to bump into a neutron star, it would take up residence in its center and commence pulling in neutrons and other material. That would cause the star to spin rapidly, which in turn would fling material from its outermost layer into space. The hurled material, the researchers suggest, would be subjected to an environment that would meet the requirements for an r-process, leading to the creation of heavy metals.

Not that I have any idea what primordial black holes are but interesting nevertheless

 

[hipipol]

today for me it has been the birth of capitalism in britain, the birth of capitalism in venice, babylon around the time of hammurabi, particularly around debt law.
by obsessed you can take it how you like but for me it means idly wiki'ing something, and then spending the day daydreaming about what it might be like spending your day idly getting drunk all day with your pig in a life of rural idiocy hundreds of years ago or whatever.
tomorrow will be different but certain things keep recurring.
anyways, anybody else do this sort of shit?

Drunk with your pig?
Are you channelling the Express here?

 

[discokermit]

Drunk with your pig?
Are you channelling the Express here?

peasants had nearly half the year off under feudalism. things got worse under capitalism when people were driven from their land, traditions and customs and into the factories.

 

[malatesta32]

for once, im in the now! trump, economics, brexit... somehow the past seems much brighter.