The Middle Ages,” wrote Carl Jung in a 1958 book about ufos, “have not died out… Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst.” I doubt if Monica Black, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of A Demon-Haunted Land,a n intriguing, subtle, and occasionally startling examination of a wave of superstitious… Read More Book review: The sound of silence
Jacques Pauwels: Mythmaking and the Atomic Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Truman and his advisors thus fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence”. They convinced themselves that the new weapon would enable them to force their will on the Soviet Union. The… Read More August 6 & 9, Hiroshima & Nagasaki: Mythmaking and Atomic Destruction / Blinded by the Light: Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
As his fame grew, Dalí’s reputation was undermined by his outrageous pronouncements. He confessed that he dreamed of Adolph Hitler “as a woman” whose flesh “ravished me.” Although he insisted he rejected Hitlerism despite such fantasies, the Surrealists, who were allied to the French Communist Party, expelled him in 1939. He also later extolled Spain’s… Read More Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) – The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí
Old Babylonian tablet likely used for surveying uses Pythagorean triples at least 1,000 years before Pythagoras An Australian mathematician has discovered what may be the oldest known example of applied geometry, on a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet. Known as Si.427, the tablet bears a field plan measuring the boundaries of some land. The tablet… Read More Australian mathematician discovers applied geometry engraved on 3,700-year-old tablet
Archaeological “treasures,” including Greek ceramics and 2,400-year-old wicker baskets filled with fruit, have been discovered at the site of the ancient sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion, off Egypt’s coast. Thonis-Heracleion was Egypt’s largest Mediterranean port before Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 331 BCE. A team from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM), led by… Read More Archaeological 'treasures,' including 2,400-year-old fruit, discovered at ancient Egyptian city
The Imperialism of Nation-states or Soft Power I seek to grasp the genealogy of China’s Belt and Road (BRI) in relation both to the imperial Chinese world order and the historical sequence of forms of global domination, i.e., modern imperialism, the ‘imperialism of nation-states’ during the inter-war and Cold War period as well as… Read More Prasenjit Duara – The Chinese World Order in Historical Perspective (2019)
Lauded as one of the world’s greatest writers when he died aged 57 in a car crash 20 years ago, Sebald always had a troubled relationship with his father, a German soldier who fought in the second world war, the biography will show His books are saturated with despair. Over and over again, his… Read More Book review: The secret trauma that inspired W.G. Sebald
Although every proprietor knows his own, … all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them: Thomas Morton regarding the Five Nations in North America Once referring to natural resources and collectively managed land, the notion of the ‘commons’ has expanded across cultural, scientific and digital realms. Can commonality… Read More Thijs Lijster: The commons versus capitalism
Two millennia ago, in his Records of the Grand Historian, the Chinese scholar Sima Qian concluded that no empire could be ruled from horseback, and later histories seemed to confirm the view that imperial authority must be vested in cities. The great fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun developed a now familiar theory that “the rulers of a… Read More Book review: Pleasure Domes and Postal Routes – How the Mongols Changed the World
It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an “axis of evil,” three countries then incapable of endangering this one?… Read More Tom Engelhardt: Biden's indirect admission highlights the steady decline of American empire
