A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.
Went to the African-American history and culture museum yesterday - everyone should. Despite what I imagine some people believe, it’s not just violence and trauma porn, it’s a lot of day to day normal stuff on the upper floors. My wife wondered where the slavery and Jim Crow stuff was, but it occurred to me that it would probably be concentrated somewhere else in the building - excessive focus on slavery and trauma is a complaint I’ve heard about cultural stuff usual made for white audiences.
If I get a chance to go back I’ll have to see if they’ve got a Wilmington 1898 exhibit and what they have about COINTELPRO-related fuckery. Probably the single most horrifying thing in there is the child-sized shackles, but there’s also plenty of stuff in there that isn’t evil or soaked in blood.
#history / "King Abdullah I and Glubb Pasha (Lieutenant-General John Bagot Glubb) adopted a policy meant to erase the word 'Palestine' from the Arabic dictionary..."
A comment from Abdullah Tal's memoirs "كارثة فلسطين" (The catastrophe of #Palestine) published in 1958[9] (translated to Hebrew 1964), referring to the King fury with the initiative to establish an independent Palestinian government (September-October 1948). Tal was the Military Governor of the Old City of Jerusalem.
The Codex Mendoza, composed in 1541, was an attempt to memorialize Aztec culture, capturing knowledge of a world that was swiftly disappearing. Let’s flip through its pages together.
An interesting old booklet we came across in the National Library in #Belgrade
Fairly simple and straightfoward rules from 1914 on how POWs were to be treated.
Issued after the start of #WWI and #Serbian victories in that year, which resulted in several tens of thousands of Austro-Hungarian soldiers being taken prisoner. Some 30 000 of them would be escorted with the Serbian army through #Albania in 1915. and handed over to Italians on the coast.
April 1744. 19-y-o Casanova returns to Vrsar in Croatia after a year and the town medic is super enthusiastic: he has made a fortune from treating the gonorrhoea epidemic that Casanova caused last time, and now he hopes the young man will start a new one.
The All-Palestine Government of September/October 1948 was a messy affair: a last ditch effort by the Arab League and then de facto Palestinian national leader, Hajj Amin al-Husseini (AHE), to form a government, that will give some semblance of sovereignty and insert the Palestinian voice into the discussions about the future of Palestine at the UN General Assembly, which was about to discuss Bernadotte's recommendations (annex the Palestinian territories to Trans-Jordan).
United States Department of State
501.BB Palestine/10–248: Circular telegram
A controversial and important work of revisionist history that rebuts the accepted version of the role of the Versailles Peace Treaty in the rise of Nazism and the unleashing of World War II.
Exactly one year ago today, I unboxed the first copies of Naming Gotham. I got to spend a year sharing on podcasts, giving public lectures, & doing news interviews with PBS, Daily News, Hellgate (+ so many more). What an adventure! Thank you all for the support.
"Against the backdrop of the threat of war with Persia and an imminent Spartan invasion which resulted in the overthrow of Hippias (510 BCE), it is considered that a political transition occurred because Greece was both geologically and politically disposed to adopt this labour-intensive silver technology which helped to initiate, fund and protect the radical social experiment that became known as Classical Greece."
"In particular, I make a response to Wood’s suggestion in Archaeometry (2022, first view, ‘Other ways to examine the finances behind the birth of Classical Greece’) that the end of the production of lead votive figurines in Sparta might have been caused by Athenian restrictions to Laurion lead exports, drawing on new LIA of the Spartan lead votives and wider considerations concerning the trade, cost and volume of lead in the 7th to 5th century bce Mediterranean."