My topic for the turn of the year is the history of naming ceremonies. Such traditions have been important parts of human culture at least as long as recorded history, and this makes sense: naming children marks them as part of their communities, and much about a society can be understood from how folks went […]
Aztec Goddess Cihuacoatl and Naming Ceremonies Read More »
So much about human nature can seem depressing: we unthinkingly follow orders, allow confirmation bias to skew our views, and commit horrible acts of violence against people we don’t even know. However, the opposite is also true, and history has many examples of people who have disobeyed authority and risked their lives for total strangers.
Hugh Thompson’s Fight Against the My Lai Massacre Read More »
We are inseparable from our environment, and we change with our surroundings whether we are aware of it or not. You are looking at a photo of some of the skulls of the approximately 800,000 Tutsis killed by their Hutu neighbors in the 1994 genocide. It is easy to pretend that the inner workings of
The Propaganda of the Rwandan Genocide Read More »
Killing in the name of God has been an unfortunate part of the legacy of Abrahamic religions, and we might wonder how people across the millennia have rationalized this. No need for much Biblical exegesis here, because I am hopeful that readers would all fall into the “no sh*t, Sherlock” camp at the mere suggestion
The Fourth Western European Crusade Read More »
“Are you not entertained?” chides the gladiator Maximus to the crowds watching him in the 2000 film by Ridley Scott. The question teases all of us humans, because of our penchant for being attracted to drama — sports, scandal, and story.In Byzantine history this penchant for the dishy reached an acme with the author Procopius,
Author Procopius and the Chariot Sports Team Blues Read More »
In the late 1980’s, the country of South Africa was perched on the edge of civil war. The white Afrikaner minority population had enforced a brutal range of policies under its apartheid system. Whites were to live in the wealthy areas, blacks were legally sequestered to the poor lands. Only the pro-apartheid National Party was
de Klerk and Mandela Avoid a Civil War Read More »
I try to keep the “Byzantine” (overly complex relationships of very wealthy people) out of my Byzantine history class, but in the early 11th century there’s no getting around the way events parallel _The Game of Thrones_. Take the reign of Basil II, a.k.a. “the Bulgar Slayer,” for instance. It wasn’t just the way the
Byzantine’s Basil II – “The Bulgar Slayer” Read More »
Medieval Tournaments really didn’t look like the way they often appear in pop culture, certainly not as they started out. Rather than being in an enclosed space and having two knights joust towards each other, they were more like practice battles.They could have contingents of 200 mounted soldiers in fields that span acres of land.
Real Medieval Tournaments Read More »
There is a stereotype about how vikings loved their beer and mead, and it wasn’t invented by Marvel Comics. Here, you see a stone carved with a scene of Scandinavians from the Early Middle Ages and they are enjoying their alcohol. In the Old Norse poem _Grímnismál_, some of the deceased warriors await the final
Traditional Norse Beer Drinking Read More »
The first foreign-born Japanese samurai was the warrior Yasuke, represented here in a 2019 sculpture by South African artist Nicola Roos. We don’t have any images from the years around 1579, when he arrived in Japan alongside a Portuguese Jesuit missionary. However, Japanese sources from Yasuke’s contemporaries speak of the power that Yasuke held from
The First Foreign-Born Japanese Samurai Read More »
“The Great City of Benin,” at one time called Edo, is a place I wish I could time-travel back to. It was completely destroyed by Bristish armies in the late 19th century, but in pre-colonial times it was one of the largest Medieval cities in the world, the capital of the Benin Empire.The walls of
The Great City of Benin Read More »
Here is the banner from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, one of the two major powers that engaged in China’s civil war between 1851 to 1864. While accurate records of casualties are impossible to tally, the Taiping Rebellion resulted in the worst civil war in terms of deaths: upwards of 20 million people — as many
Banner of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Read More »
Lots of animals love to play — many of us mammals will forgo food and sleep just to take part in exploratory fun. Humans have excelled at a specific type of play that comes in the form of games.Games are more formal than most types of play. They involve rules and have uncertain outcomes .
Ancient Chinese Board Game “Go” Read More »
War is a complex phenomenon riddled with tragic deaths and players with a kaleidescope of myopic perspectives. The Spanish Civil War exemplifies this, as does one of its central figures – the left-wing feminist, supporter of the poor, and propagandist Dolores Ibárruri (1895-1989).Ibárruri, known as “La Pasionaria”, had a mindset shaped by her impoverished background
Dolores Ibarruri, “La Pasionaria” Read More »
The gentle and intelligent expression you see on this man’s face runs completely counter to his actual deeds. This is Sidney Gottleib, one of the most powerful CIA officials in history, and he created a vast operation to develop mind-control experiments that involved torture and death — the casualty rates of which remain unknown.In the
Sidney Gottleib and the CIA Read More »
The product you see here turns out to have been ubiquitous and super important in recent world history: Pervitin was a methamphetamine synthesized by Germans in 1937, and the Nazis were addicted to it.In _Blitzed_, Norman Ohler reveals the macabre dependency of both Hitler and the Nazi military on drugs. The trajectory is fascinating: while
Nazis and Pervitin Read More »
This is a post about two Irish songs that deal with memory. 1994 was the release date of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” and Sinead O’Connor’s “Famine,” and both emerged out of The Troubles, a period of about thirty years (late 1960s to 1998), when tension in Northern Ireland between forces that favored independence and those who
Irish Songs of Memory and Activism Read More »
“The Long Walk” is a Navajo experience of great devastation committed by the U.S. government, especially officials Kit Carson and General Carleton. This mural, “Return from the Long Walk,” by Navajo artist Richard Kee Yazzie, portrays the resilience and renewed shared values of the Navajo survivors of the Fort Sumner internment camp. During the period
The Navajo Long Walk Read More »
This is the sixteenth-century painter Federico Barocci’s _Aeneas’ _Flight from Troy_. If the composition looks unsettling and chaotic, it should: it attempts to capture the turmoil of a man having to flee his homeland because of war. The violence propelling the family of Aeneas to escape Troy is mostly offstage, but the billowing fabric, darkened
Federico Barocci’s Aneneas’ “Flight from Troy” Read More »
This Romano-British mosaic of combating gladiators speaks to the tradition of these bloody contests. It turns out, they were sanguineous in multiple ways — not only with the frequent slayings of the losers, but also in the way gladiator blood was revered for medicinal purposes.First appearing in the records about 260 BCE, gladiator fights originally
Gladiator Blood and Epilepsy Read More »
