Sign in Subscribe

Topic

History

A collection of 249 issues

The Downfall of Cecil Rhodes (11/26/2020)

Stefan Kanfer, in his book on the De Beers diamond cartel, gives Chesterton the last word on Cecil Rhodes, who instead of promoting Western values "illustrated almost every quality essential to the Sultan, from the love of diamonds to the scorn of women." The irony was, as Kanfer

New Mother Cabrini Statue Next on the Hit List

Plus More HSP, Gardening Corner, and Louis Prima I'm impressed: New York City erected a statue of Mother Cabrini yesterday in Battery Park. I hope they put it behind a huge fence and appoint an armed guard to protect it. I mean, it's such a testament

The Symbolic Importance of the Battle of Marchfield Plain

Only coincidentally, but highly significantly on the symbolic level, the Minotaur started to grow quickly right after Thomas Aquinas died in 1274. In 1278, Rudolph von Hapsburg defeated Otakar, the King of Bohemia, at the Battle of the Marchfield Plain, thereby ushering in the greatest European dynasty of all time,

Tuesday

Flogging the Middle Ages Chesterton pointed out that every stick is good enough to beat the Catholic Church with. The same could be said about the Middle Ages (for related reasons, btw): every stick is good enough to beat it with. I have a business acquaintance who repeatedly harumps "

Thursday

Kontent from the Kindle As March Madness heats up, it's interesting to remember what group of people used to dominate the sport. From A Renegade History of the United States (perhaps the best book of American history written in the past 15 years): "The first professional basketball

Thursday

Ruminations on the Fall of Rome Belloc wrote, “The Catholic Church was the only subsidiary organism that had risen within the general body of the Roman Empire.” Belloc's idea that the Catholic Church was an organism that grew out of the organism of the Empire is important. Combine

Wednesday

I've pretty much accepted Belloc's premise that the Roman Empire was an act of Providence: By providing a coherent, unified, stable, and cultured environment, news of the Lord's birth, death, and resurrection could spread and His Church could get established. Of course, if there

Thursday

Some things never change. Writing about Bacon's Rebellion (1676) in his People's History, Howard Zinn discusses Nathaniel Bacon's “Declaration of the People,” saying it “shows a mixture of populist resentment against the rich and frontier hatred of the Indians. It indicted the [Governor] Berkeley

Tuesday

Kontent from the Kindle Perhaps the most interesting passage from my Memorial Day Weekend reading. The author is writing about the shocking dearth of archeological remains from approximately 630 to 930 AD and historians' struggles to account for it: > Another school of thought, most influential in Europe, denies

Thaddeus on Howard

I still haven't gotten through Zinn's A People's History of the United States, partly because my attention has been diverted to early medieval history and partly because I bought the iBook version that doesn't work on my Kindle, but I've