Let's Talk History

 Ted Gioia has been writing about the change and loss of our culture. I have noted some of his writings here.

 Fletcher Erskine's Flickering Light in Rome’s 'Little Dark Age': Towards a Literature of the 3rd Century (Antigone) is why I start this post with a reference to Ted Gioia.

If we attempt to confine ancient literature to artificial boundaries and typical epochs, the 3rd century will prove a meagre harvest indeed for the scholar. But if we, as LaValle Norman suggests, view the literature of that century as fundamentally transitional, shaped by experimentation, reinvention, and cross-pollination in tandem with societal changes and political turmoil, we find ourselves gazing into the very furnace in which Late Antiquity was smelted.

Perhaps, the same will ensue in our era?

I knew about the Canadians sacrificed during the Dieppe raid, but since Trump's bluster about invading Canada, there has been more information about Canadian military skills. This video is an enjoyable explanation of that history:

Some more Scottish history:

Religious history is really our Western History, right, but we forget our Christian history is not restricted to Western Europe:

And some stuff is off in the weeds, just because I do like this presenter:

I have read T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom twice. It is both a great war memoir and the story of a man whose conscience confronts duty. This has also given me an interest in the Palestinian campaign of World War Two. I have an idea for an alt-history story that involved this front. Therefore, this video was of interest for several reasons:

I have not yet finished Gore Vidal's The Golden Age, part of which resurrects the theory that FDR provoked the war with Japan. Sarah Paine keeps popping up on YouTube, she is a lecturer at the Naval War College (if my memory is right), and well worth listening to - she seems like she is a great teacher, knows how to break down her lecture into understandable terms without being as dull as last week's good news. This is her take on the start of the war with Japan.

Since reading Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, I have been interested in Richard III. Count me as one of those who think Richard is not guilty of killing the princes. When the following video came along, I had to give a look:

Business histories are also another long-time interest. Once it was to learn what made a business, but now it is more about the businesses that went under. The following is about A & P. I knew of one A & P store in Indianapolis when I was a kid, and it was not one we shopped at very often. Eastgate's Standard grocery was much closer (and is another chain long gone, as is the Eastgate Mall.) It seems to me that business logos, as much as the businesses themselves, infest our memories. Maybe an American version of Marcel Proust's Madeleine? I can remember the smell of the Danner's store in Alexandria - a polished wood smell from its floors. Downtown Indianapolis had a Sears store that when you walked into, there was the smell of roasting peanuts. I cannot think of any place that now sells roasted nuts. Howard Johnson brought clam strips and saltwater taffy to Indianapolis; both of which my mother loved. I recall having saved money from selling the returnable bottles (another long-gone product) found along the highway - pennies, dimes, nickels, and maybe some quarters - and pouring all those coins onto the counter to buy my mother a box of saltwater taffy. No longer do I know where one can buy taffy around here. Videos like the following should also teach a certain humility about business longevity and the stability of our world.

Terrifying is an overstatement, but there are several items of interesting historical finds, if obscure:

I insert this one  with trepidation, thinking its images are asinine AI creations and the narrator has to be artificial. On the other hand, the material is pretty much what I have read of the war against the Miami and the Shawnees. Custer gets the attention but the greatest victory of the Native Americans over American intruders happened over in Ohio.

This covers some of the same ground, less obviously AI generated, and shorter:

Definitely not AI generated - Bruce Foomey, again - asking how Scots and Americans view history differently. I think he has a point. We see ourselves as winners in the lottery of history while also caught in not having an ethnic unity. We look for identification overseas in our genealogies.

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This is a 48-minute documentary on the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. No AI, but a rather intense narrator. Some of the details I was completely unaware of:

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