Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Monday, February 5. 2024

Crazy Europe


Well, the whole world has always been crazy about wealth and power. That's what "History" is about anyway. It's a soap opera. I think most of my European ancestors were serfs, but Protestant merchants by the time they sailed to the US. History doesn't care much about regular people. Of course, I have my share of Viking blood which has not done me any good.


Europe did not have much to offer the world until the Renaissance in Italy. Given the big world, Europe was sort of a backwater.


I should have seen this thing before I took Medieval History in high school because  I had no context:



Posted by Bird Dog at 15:35 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Well I got my share of viking blood along with a couple of percent of Neanderthal too. That's what I'm blaming for my Dupuytren's contracture.

https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/mysterious-viking-disease-linked-to-neanderthal-dna
#1 bilejones on 2024-02-05 17:43 (Reply)
History doesn't care much about regular people.

Cultural history really kicked off about 60 years ago, though of course people did it before then. It is all about regular people. If you're interested in how normal people lived in the past, try some of that. It's less rigorous because those folks usually left fewer documents to study, but you do get more history books and articles with recipes in them, which I find to be a good exchange. Also, some of what they can't get through historical documents they get through archeology.

Try Secrets of the Castle on Amazon Prime, if you have that. It's a short series about how castles were built and focuses on the lives and skills of the masons, smiths, carpenters, workers' wives, etc., and how they lived and worked.

Ambrose's Band of Brothers was a kind of cultural history as well, focusing on WWII at the company level.

Cultural history can be called "history from below" and it's exactly that kind of stuff.
#2 Thomas Doubting (Link) on 2024-02-05 23:26 (Reply)

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