Concentration camps. For World War II camps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, do not use phrases like Polish death camps that confuse the location and the perpetrators. Use instead, for example, death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

So when I think about the future of research in a thoroughly connected age, what I see, primarily, is opportunity. If scholars are encouraged to write more clearly, to find better stories to tell, to stop showing off, to dig deeper into unpublished material, then readers and writers alike have some good times ahead.

Retell the history of the world from the perspective of water. Rivers, lakes, oceans. Both as life-giving force, allowing the earliest civilizations to survive, and as the quickest transportation route for generations, water has continued to be an essential, driving force behind the advancement of history. Tell the history of the planet from the perspective of water.

The word "Anthropocene" was coined by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen about a decade ago. One day Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds, was sitting at a scientific conference. The conference chairman kept referring to the Holocene, the epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, 11,500 years ago, and that—officially, at least—continues to this day.

Our schools, including the elementary schools, are indoctrinating our children into the Holocaust cult. The Marshfield Senior High School library has 107 books with the library number 940.53, the number listing books dealing with the Holocaust. But the school libraries refuse to add the following books: "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," "The Auschwitz Myth" and "The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland." The conclusion of that report: These rooms were not and could not have been used as gas chambers.

Menze trained software to detect the characteristic wavelengths of known anthrosols in images spanning 50 years of seasonal differences. This automation was key. “You could do this with the naked eye using Google Earth to look for sites, but this method takes the subjectivity out of it by defining spectral characteristics that bounce off of archaeological sites,” says Ur.  

Island Projects
A few people have asked me about the island projects that you’re working on. Here’s what I’ve shared:

We’ve been talking about civilization(s) all year. For the eighth graders’ final academic project of the school year (not including individual capstone projects), the kids discussed fully combining their humanities and science (earth and environmental science) studies. Lately they’ve discussed the collapse of civilizations, biomes, and human impact on the environment. They’re also in the process of reading The Giver, so they decided to try to design self-sustaining civilizations (something akin to their concept of utopia) in groups of two or three students, keeping in mind susceptibility to collapse. There are plenty of systems for them to keep in mind: environment, energy, water, soil, government, culture, belief, sources of materials, food, etc. They’ve chosen to make these island civilizations to keep them as self-contained as possible.

They’ve agreed to provide a minimum set of materials and information so that comparisons between projects and islands can be made. A few items on that lists are: the name of the civilization, symbols used to represent the civilization (flags, seals, etc.), a maps of the island, specific coordinates on the globe where the island is located, climate information, language, population, etc. (They have a shared document with the full list.) Once they’ve finished designing their island civilizations, they will present them to the class. As part of that process, Carwai, their peers, and I will look for signs of susceptibility and have them defend their designs.

Eighth graders: Does that sound accurate? Is there anything that I should add, remove, or change?

humanity

Wieland believed that egg-eating must have been rampant during the age of the dinosaurs. In fact, he thought that a diet of eggs may have even led to the evolution of some of the largest of all predatory dinosaurs. Considering the giant Tyrannosaurus, Wieland wrote, “What more likely than the immediate ancestors of this dinosaur got their first impulse toward gigantism on a diet of sauropod eggs, and that, aside from the varanids, the theropod dinosaurs were the great egg-eaters of all time?” The cruel irony of this idea was that the immense predatory dinosaurs also reproduced by laying eggs, and Wieland considered it “quite inferable” that their nests, in turn, would have been raided by smaller monitor lizards and snakes.

great history videos that are sadly just slightly not appropriate enough to show in class

"human wormholes"

He was old, but not ancient, the man next to us at the delicatessen. It was 1973. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I had ordered dinner and this old guy, sitting by himself, seemed lonely, so we got talking and he told us how he had grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and that when he was a boy, his next-door neighbor was a famous man, a really famous man.

We asked, "Who was it?" And he said, "Have you ever heard of the mad monk, Rasputin?"


Wikimedia Commons
Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin (1871 - 1916).
I knew of Rasputin. He'd lived, I'd thought, in a Russian palace with the Romanov czar, Nicholas II, and had magically healed the czar's son from a supposedly incurable disease, then gained great sway over the Romanov family, and then, in a ghastly scene, was shot, clubbed and poisoned to death by a group of noblemen just before the start of the Russian Revolution. In my mind, all this happened in a different age. The pictures I'd seen showed him with a 19th century beard, dressed in robes.

Our civilization has passed through all these stages; what are some future transitions we can expect -- no matter the fashions and fads of the day? What are the emergent thresholds of information and energy organization that our civilization can look forward to? Most of these thresholds are gradual, so we can't assign dates, but each of these structures seem to be a natural transition that any civilization must reach sooner or later.

2. Civilization V

Appropriate Grade Level: 6-12+ (complexity)

Universal: Problem-solving, Resource Management, Collaboration, Various Thinking Strategies

Government, History, Social Studies, Geography: Diplomacy, Impact of Geography on Policy, Hoarding and Trade, Political Tactics, Communication

french imaginations of the future... make 10 drawings of what you think the future will look like...

a socialist wrote the pledge of allegiance?

When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

Firaxis, the company that created the "Civilizations" series of video games, donated twenty discs of "Civilization III, its sophisticated simulation of empire building, to Kimball Union Academy. Civilization III is a complex game for building and maintaining empires. Students must start from scratch, deciding what geographic regions would be most advantageous (near an ocean or perhaps a river delta), and what type of empire they believe would be most successful and long-lasting (commercial, religious, militaristic). After the parameters of their empire are established, the real task begins. Now comes the hard work: constructing cities, keeping people happy, avoiding overcrowding and disease, providing jobs and food, defending military redoubts and recuperating after natural disasters. These are all part of a day's work, or at least a semester's. Decisions made early in the simulation may have consequences several hundred years later. Some of the most difficult decisions students face are made with leaders of other empires across a bargaining table, as students learn the complexities involved in decisions to fight or compromise, an important skill in global politics in any era, including our own!

The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored. Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, "because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines." France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself.

The potato changed all that. Every year, many farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to rest the soil and fight weeds (which were plowed under in summer). Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe's food supply.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors-in all likelihood, a couple of dozen-and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh.

What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?

The machine on the drawing boards at the Science Museum in London is the Babbage Analytical Engine, a room-size mechanical behemoth that its inventor envisioned but never built.

The project follows the successful effort by a group at the museum to replicate a far less complicated Babbage invention: the Difference Engine No. 2, a calculating machine composed of roughly 8,000 mechanical components assembled with a watchmaker’s precision. That project was completed in 1991.

Kids would have a better understanding of history if they read one biography per semester K-12 for social studies. #edchat

how to create a historical villain

Sometimes I feel like everything since humankind’s adoption of farming some 10,000 years ago has been a massive mistake.

No one ever asks who was the richest man during Italian Renaissance. Everyone, however, knows of da Vinci.

this will be fun to play in class.

In the clip below Harris-Perry is able to eloquently break down why The Help is damaging in that it completely distorts American history and at worst rewrites it to whitewash just how horrible it really was for black women in the south at that time. Harris-Perry argues the movie makes it seem like “Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi” when in reality for black women, “it was rape, it was lynching, it was the burning of communities” that were the unspeakable realities they survived.

IP NANCY WAKE (30 August 1912 – 7 August 2011)

Ms Wake, who has died in London just before her 99th birthday, was a New Zealander brought up in Australia. She became a nurse, a journalist who interviewed Adolf Hitler, a wealthy French socialite, a British agent and a French resistance leader. She led 7,000 guerrilla fighters in battles against the Nazis in the northern Auvergne, just before the D-Day landings in 1944. On one occasion, she strangled an SS sentry with her bare hands. On another, she cycled 500 miles to replace lost codes. In June 1944, she led her fighters in an attack on the Gestapo headquarters at Montlucon in central France.

Work began earlier this month on a feature film about Nancy Wake’s life. Ms Wake, one of the models for Sebastian Faulks’ fictional heroine, Charlotte Gray, had mixed feelings about previous cinematic efforts to portray her wartime exploits, including a TV mini-series made in 1987.

“It was well-acted but in parts it was extremely stupid,” she said. “At one stage they had me cooking eggs and bacon to feed the men. For goodness’ sake, did the Allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men? There wasn’t an egg to be had for love nor money. Even if there had been why would I be frying it? I had men to do that sort of thing.”

Ms Wake was also furious the TV series suggested she had had a love affair with one of her fellow fighters. She was too busy killing Nazis for amorous entanglements, she said.

In the situation under discussion in the thread posted, the standard model of what is likely to result from the reactor problems is only part of the question. But whereas some derisive commentors jumped instantly to comments like “I guess space aliens could invade and we could nuke them and destroy ourselves,” I would be more inclined to note that people watch other people running away, and then they run, and then economic disruptions shut down manufacturing of all sorts across the world–and so on, to the point that much suffering occurs regardless of questions about specific core meltdown consequences.

Inquiry starts with a question that can be answered based on factual evidence.  We don’t ask “should the US have dropped the Atomic Bomb?” as our entry point, instead we ask “Why did the US drop the Atomic Bomb?” Then, we do not answer this for the students; we ask them why they think the US did it. We then give them documents that confirm their viewpoint and ask them to develop their point of view based on the evidence.  But then, we give them evidence that forces them to question their viewpoint, and ask them to reevaluate.  Lather, rinse, repeat, as often as you can.  In the end, force students to answer the question using all the evidence, not only what confirms their view.  Then, once students are informed, discuss the moral question.

Survivor: Build Your Own Civilization
On your way to colonize Mars, you got
transported through a worm hole and ended up on
a planet remarkably like Earth, but seemingly
unpopulated. Unfortunately, everyone over the
age of 20, except for me, has mysteriously died.
Another side effect of the worm hole was the
wiping of all memory other than spoken and
written language. Your group has been randomly
chosen to be the leaders of the new civilization.
Through a series of challenges, you will design a
civilization that will survive and flourish in the
environment in which you have found yourself.
You will then present this civilization to the clas

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

...

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

The site was long known as a haven for escapees and members of Indian tribes avoiding European encroachment. Advertisements seeking the return of escaped slaves from the 1700s mention the swamp, and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about it as a place of refuge in the novel "Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp." The North Carolina legislature was even petitioned to do something about the settlements in the swamp, said Wanda Hunt-McLean, a local historian who studies the underground railroad.

"I'm slowly working my way through Charles Mann's 1493 and there are interesting tidbits on almost every page. One of my favorite bits of the book so far is a possible explanation of the Little Ice Age that I hadn't heard before put forth by William Ruddiman. "As human communities grow, Ruddiman pointed out, they open more land for farms and cut down more trees for fuel and shelter. In Europe and Asia, forests were cut down with the ax. In the Americas before [Columbus], the primary tool was fire. For weeks on end, smoke from Indian bonfires shrouded Florida, California, and the Great Plains." Burning like this happened all over the pre-Columbian Americas, from present-day New England to Mexico to the Amazon basin to Argentina. Then the Europeans came…"

The History of English in Ten Minutes

“What they didn’t seem to realize was we’ve never been first in the world in math and science,” says education historian Diane Ravitch. Since the ’70s, the U.S. has typically placed in the bottom quartile in worldwide math and science rankings.

“We have the biggest economy in the world, the most productive workers, the most inventors, the most patents, the greatest universities. How could all of this success have come from kids who were in the bottom quartile in the international assessments?” Ravitch asks. “It suggests to me that there’s no connection.”

Of course there is no connection. The things we require students to do and learn in school have very little correlation with what happens after they leave school. That’s not new information, nor is it a big secret. When I taught in a big traditional school, I would hear countless parents over the years tell their kids, “Look, school is game. You have to play the game.”

* * *

Here’s a test question to ponder:

I)         What is the most important thing for students to know about history upon graduation?

the name of the president during the War of 1812
the significance of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930
the name of the battle that turned the tide of the Civil War
that learning about history can be both interesting and useful
We spend a disproportionate amount time, effort, and money focusing on answers 1, 2, and 3, which undermines our ability to help students see the value of answer 4. That’s why focusing on improving students’ test scores in history is the wrong goal.

The results of these tests are not a “wake-up call.” We don’t need to improve our schools. We don’t need to get better at doing the wrong thing. We need to re-invent schools with a focus on a different set of priorities.

We get a much clearer picture of the real standing of countries if we consider economic growth and GDP per capita. Western Europe GDP per capita was higher than that of both China and India by 1500; by 1600 it was 50% higher than China's. From there, the gap kept growing. Between 1350 and 1950 -- six hundred years -- GDP per capita remained roughly constant in India and China (hovering around $600 for China and $550 for India). In the same period, Western European GDP per capita went from $662 to $4,594, a 594 percent increase.

Ideally speaking, I don’t think history is the most important subject when it comes to making better voters. You’d do better off to drill students on economics 101 and the basics of the budget. Maybe then we’d wouldn’t have a citizenry convinced that foreign aid is a large portion of our spending, and that understands the downsides of price controls. More importantly schools could stop reinforcing the notion that voting is some moral obligation, and let people know that voting on the basis of uninformed biases is far worse than not voting whatsoever.

There’s also a large cognitive dissonance whereby we view art as being something soft, idealistic, unpractical, and unserious compared to other school subjects. Art is a fun distraction, whereas history is serious business. But of the two art is clearly the more practical real world subject. Many serious, button downed, grown-up careers require artistic skills: architects, marketing, graphic design, engineers, web designers, city planners… the list goes on. Which careers require knowledge of history? Journalists, history teachers, politicians? It seems as though the caricatures of these fields should be exactly the opposite, and that history should be viewed as soft, idealistic, and unpractical, whereas art should be viewed as the hard-nosed practical subject of serious people.

Historical analysis and interpretation include the following:
Explaining issues •
Identifying historical patterns •
Establishing cause-and-effect relationships •
Finding value statements •
Establishing significance •
Applying historical knowledge •
Weighing evidence to draw sound conclusions •
Making defensible generalizations •
Rendering insightful accounts of the past

417 Culture Give two reasons why people immigrate to the U.S.
317 Culture Explain the historical context of a slave letter
314 Culture Use a picture to describe Sioux life (shown on page 18)
308 Technology Explain how machines and factories changed work
293 Democracy Identify a photo of President Lincoln and give two reasons he was important
292 Democracy Enter events on a timeline (shown on page 17)
283 Culture Identify a role of women during the American Revolution
276
Proficient
273 Technology Understand why cities grew in certain locations
270 World Role Identify the role of an international organization
268 World Role Identify the Cold War communist superpower
263 Technology Understand why Europeans sought new trade in the 1400s
259 Democracy Use a map to explain the purpose of the Lewis and Clark expedition
256 Technology Understand that canals increased trade among states (shown on page 19)
249 Culture Interpret a text about the African American experience
243
Basic
237 World Role Understand a purpose of the Bill of Rights (shown on page 20)
225 Democracy Identify the change for African Americans after the Civil War
217 Technology Interpret a map about the colonial economy
204 World Role Understand the purpose of a government poster
195
191 Technology Understand the importance of certain colonial jobs
178
//
0
Culture Identify a civil rights goal


411 Culture Interpret a graph and explain immigration patterns
350 Democracy Identify and explain the purpose of President Nixon’s resignation
343 Culture Explain two differences between plantations and small farms in antebellum South (shown on pages 32 and 33)
342 Democracy Identify and explain civil rights issues
336 Technology Interpret data and explain an impact of farm technology
332 Technology Identify a goal of the labor movement circa 1900
327
Proficient
322 Technology Explain changes in colonial slave practices
310 Culture Identify a domestic impact of war
307 World Role Identify an advantage held by American forces during the American Revolution (shown on page 35)
302 Technology Identify products shipped along the triangular trade route
301 Democracy Understand what right is protected by the First Amendment
299 World Role Explain a post-war foreign policy goal
294
Basic
292 Technology Understand why the apprenticeship system declined in 1800s
285 Democracy Identify the purpose of Three-Fifths Compromise (shown on page 31)
281 Culture Identify a result of Native American-European interaction
274 World Role Use a map and identify a cause of war
265 Technology Understand an impact of the invention of barbed wire (shown on page 34)
252
251 Technology Interpret a simple political cartoon
250 World Role Understand the purpose of a wartime poster
219
//
0
Culture Understand the purpose of Progressive Era photo


402 World Role Evaluate arguments about the use of atomic bombs
394 Democracy Evaluate Civil War arguments
389 World Role Define and explain the purpose of the Proclamation Line of 1763
379 Technology Explain how political campaigns have changed since 1948
366 Democracy Identify Maryland as an early grantor of religious freedom
357 World Role Identify North Korea’s ally in the Korean War (shown on page 45)
355
Proficient
352 Culture Explain a trend in the U.S. population
344 Democracy Interpret a Henry David Thoreau quotation
342 Technology Compare the purposes of labor unions
337 Democracy Understand Missouri statehood in the context of sectionalism (shown on page 45)
335 Technology Understand a key aspect of the colonial economy
329 World Role Understand the U.S. entry into World War I
325 Culture Understand the context of a Frederick Jackson Turner quotation
325
Basic
321 Culture Explain an impact of World War II on African Americans’ struggle for rights (shown on pages 46 and 47)
318 Democracy Understand the context of a women’s movement document
316 World Role Interpret a Cold War cartoon
308 Technology Identify products shipped along the triangular trade route (shown on page 48)
294
290 Democracy Understand the historical role of third parties
273 Democracy Identify the states’ rights issue in 1832 quotation
256
//
0
World Role Identify the message of a World War II poste

Diane Ravitch, an education historian who was invited by the national assessment’s governing board to review the results, said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that only 2 percent of 12th graders correctly answered a question concerning Brown v. Board of Education, which she called “very likely the most important decision” of the United States Supreme Court in the past seven decades.

Students were given an excerpt including the passage “We conclude that in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and were asked what social problem the 1954 ruling was supposed to correct.

“The answer was right in front of them,” Ms. Ravitch said. “This is alarming.” The tests were given last spring to a representative sample of 7,000 fourth graders, 11,800 eighth graders and 12,400 12th graders nationwide. History is one of eight subjects — the others are math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography and economics — covered by the assessment program, which is also known as the Nation’s Report Card. The board that oversees the program defines three achievement levels for each test: “basic” denotes partial mastery of a subject; “proficient” represents solid academic performance and a demonstration of competency over challenging subject matter; and “advanced” means superior performance.

As digital tools move on, standards change, and interoperability fails, we lose access to older information. As our history becomes harder to access, only the newest information rises to the top, leaving us with a collective digital memory that is foggy on anything but the most recent past.

To correct this problem, the Library of Congress is debuting Recollection, a free platform developed by the LoC’s digital preservation program, with help from information architecture company Zepheira, to preserve and present digital history.

We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters. (Junot Díaz on Haiti http://bit.ly/khZ2nk)

great source for history anecdotes and potential writing prompts?

The Inquisition never executed anyone because of their scientific ideas or discoveries (actually, the Church was the chief sponsor of scientific research and several popes were celebrated for their knowledge of the subject);

It was medieval scientific discoveries, methods, and principles that made possible western civilization's "Scientific Revolution".

If you were taught that the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual stagnation, superstition, and ignorance, you were taught a myth that has been utterly refuted by modern scholarship.

As a physicist and historian of science James Hannam shows in his brilliant new book, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, without the scholarship of the "barbaric" Middle Ages, modern science simply would not exist.

The Middle Ages were a time of one intellectual triumph after another. As Dr. Hannam writes, "The people of medieval Europe invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves. Lenses and cameras, almost all kinds of machinery, and the industrial revolution itself all owe their origins to the forgotten inventors of the Middle Ages."

Contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of modern science were planted in the ancient and medieval worlds long before the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that revolution would have been inconceivable without the cumulative antecedent efforts of three great civilizations: Greek, Islamic, and Latin. With the scientific riches it derived by translation from Greco-Islamic sources in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian Latin civilization of Western Europe began the last leg of the intellectual journey that culminated in a scientific revolution that transformed the world. The factors that produced this unique achievement are found in the way Christianity developed in the West, and in the invention of the university in 1200. A reference for historians of science or those interested in medieval history, this volume illustrates the developments and discoveries that culminated in the Scientific Revolution.

The world’s biggest problem is that not enough people are working on the world’s biggest problems.
–- Max Marmer, Student of Life, January, 2011

Are we being good ancestors?
–- Jonas Salk, in interview on Open Mind, 1985.

The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. -– Vladimir Lenin

Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.
-- Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town, p. 17

Survivor The entire village of Yalding gets the black plague and perishes, including one farmer’s daughter whom many thought was too beautiful to die.

The Bachelor Ladies from far away lands compete to bear the illegitimate child of the ill-tempered Lord Baldor of Igythrop, each week two contenders are sent home with syphillis.

The Bachelorette The winning lady of The Bachelor and mother of Lord Baldor of Igythrop’s illegitimate child gets beheaded in the town square.
Top Lep Eight apothecarists contend to see who can model their leprosy-ravaged face into a presentable visage using only black hollyhock and locally sourced goat tails.

The Mule Whisperer Ulric, the town drunk, has sex with many neighbors’ mules and is castrated with a pitchfork.

Extreme Home Makeover Fief Edition An extremely wealthy Lord gives his quadripeligic serf a lice-infested pillow that makes his life better for a brief time before it becomes even worse.

→ A few television videos for your enjoyment and education.


James Burke’s Connections

Burke's series Connections is an anthropological wild-goose chase through the lens of technology. More Info →

Episode 1: The Trigger Effect
Episode 2: Death in the Morning
Episode 3: Distant Voices
Episode 4: Faith in Numbers
Episode 5: Wheel of Fortune
Episode 6: Thunder in the Skies
Episode 7: The Long Chain
Episode 8: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
Episode 9: Countdown
Episode 10: Yesterday, Tomorrow, and You


Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

Sagan paints science and the universe not as a delineation of fact, but rather an unfolding of mystery. More Info →

Watch all 13 episodes on Youtube →

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing

A visual primer in how to see and perceive the world around us, particularly in our relationship to images. "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. … But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." More Info →

Watch all 4 episodes on Youtube →

Alain de Botton’s Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness

An investigation into happiness through the work and minds of several prominent philosophers. Each great thinker is matched with a particular hardship that their work illuminates. More Info →

Episode 1: Socrates on Self-Confidence
Episode 2: Epicurus on Happiness
Episode 3: Seneca on Anger
Episode 4: Montaigne on Self-Esteem
Episode 5: Schopenhauer on Love
Episode 6: Nietzche on Hardship


Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn

Brand studies the evolution of buildings and how they adapt to changing requirements over long periods. More Info →

Episode 1: Flow
Episode 2: The Low Road
Episode 3: Built for Change
Episode 4: Unreal Estate
Episode 5: The Romance of Maintenance
Episode 6: Shearing Layers

Barton’s basic point is two-fold, as I read it. First, that the Founders in their political vision largely anticipated the issues of our own time, and in their views endorsed or authenticated most or all of the major positions preferred by conservative activists today. Second, that the Founders were expressly Christian in both their worldview and in their vision of governance and intended the United States to be a specifically Christian nation.

The best thing I've read about pirates: "... only economics, can disentangle this mess of piratical paradoxes."

Anthropologists have tended to imagine warfare as something that existed in some form through all the millions of years of human evolution. But “imagine” is the key word. Wounded Australopithecine bones thought to show war injuries actually show the tooth marks of leopards. The Walls of Jericho were apparently built to protect against flooding, not warfare. There is, in fact, no evidence of warfare older than 10,000 years, and there would be, because war leaves its mark in wounds and weapons. This suggests that of the 50,000 years modern Homo sapiens have existed, 40,000 saw no warfare, and that millions of years of prior ancestry were also war-free. Or, as an anthropologist put it, “People have lived in hunter-gatherer bands for 99.87 percent of human existence.” War arises in some, but not all, complex, sedentary societies, and tends to grow along with their complexity. This fact makes it unlikely war could be found more than 12,500 years ago.