history
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World History Plot Holes?
A meteor killing off the dinosaurs was obviously a cop out because the author didn’t know where to take the story. This was just one of several responses on Reddit’s thread “Assume all of world history is a movie. What…
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Blow Your Mind with These Timelines
Using a series of timelines that represent increasingly large amounts of time, this blog post puts everything in perspective. Everything. It starts out simple—timelines of the last 24 hours, the last week, and so on—and works its way up through recorded…
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Shakespeare’s Plays: Fact or Fiction?
Has Shakespeare become so intertwined with our culture that we find it hard to separate myth from reality? Dan Jones at the Telegraph writes about how many of Shakespeare’s historical portraits are tinged with his own biases and those of…
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Famous Rapes #1: Old Master Paintings
This is the first in a series of retrospective collage art focusing on myth, stories, historic events, and cultural attitudes about rape as seen through different time periods.
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The Island of Stopped Clocks: Inside Cuba 50 Years after the Revolution
In a museum in Havana there are two skulls
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Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown: An Etiology
“Guns are not simply tools or commodities; they are instruments of social power.”
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Books Through Time
Writers might be interested in yesterday’s installment of Dinosaur Comics, about the development of books through history. If talking clip-art dinosaurs can’t figure it out, what hope do the rest of us have?
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Round Trip
Thinking my grandfather was from here deepened my experience of Plovdiv. I felt closer to the city, to the people, and to my own family.
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Revising the Revisionists
I suffer from the primary carpet-bagging compulsion of the northern writer living in the South:
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Thinking Outside the Boomer Box
I am turning 60 this month, and I have to say that 60 has been occupying my thoughts quite a bit more than 50 did, or 40, or 30, or even 20
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“To My Old Master”
Here’s a letter written in 1865 by an ex-enslaved man, Jourdan Anderson, in response to his former master’s request that Jourdan return to work on his farm. “I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five…
