History Videos & News

 Off into the weeds, sort of, with YouTube. It is fascinating what is there regarding serious historical videos, and strange how their algorithm works.

Two on Grant, the General:

 

Britain and the Republic of Texas; for me, this one poses all sorts of what-ifs, and a completely unknown American history.

 Unforgotten? How Did Elizabeth Of York Remember The Princes In The Tower?

 (Okay, but what does it have to say about the death of The Princes?)

Ghost Fleet of the Iron Age: Three Ancient Shipwrecks Rewrite the Story of Mediterranean Seafaring (Arkeonews)

The earliest cargo, known as Dor M, dates to the eleventh century BCE, when the Mediterranean world was just beginning to rebuild after the chaos of the Bronze Age collapse.

Archaeologists uncovered rare Iron I storage jars of a type found in Egypt, Cyprus, and Lebanon, alongside a stone anchor inscribed with Cypro-Minoan signs—the same writing system used on Cyprus at the time.

These clues point to a vibrant network of early seafarers linking the city-state of Dor with Egypt and Cyprus. The find echoes the ancient Egyptian tale The Report of Wenamun, which describes a harrowing voyage from Egypt to Dor and Phoenicia around the same period.

“Dor M represents the rebirth of long-distance trade,” says Yasur-Landau. “It shows that within a century of the collapse, people were back at sea, rebuilding their connections across the Mediterranean.” 

The Bronze Age collapse is a big thing — probably not as big as if we had lived through it — but raises questions of who destroyed the former civilization. 

Twelve Failed Constitutional Amendments That Could Have Reshaped American History (Smithsonian magazine) — I could go for 7 and 8.

The Walking Giants of Easter Island: How Physics Solved an 800-Year-Old Mystery 

 The process was elegant and efficient. Ropes were tied around the statue’s head or shoulders. Two groups stood on either side, pulling alternately to create a rhythmic rocking motion. Each swing shifted the center of gravity, causing the moai to tilt and pivot slightly ahead. A small forward lean in the design helped the statue self-correct and avoid falling backward.
Step by step, the giant “walked” toward its destination—balanced by nothing more than rope tension, gravity, and coordination.

De Soto Invades the Mound Builders (1540) 

 sch 10/12

 I do like listening to Sarah Paine — she makes complex issues understandable. So, I give you Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview).

 sch 10/13

Was World War One pointless? The video is right, you need to consider what were the war aims and not the war's outcome. I think what went wrong with Germany, Russia, and Italy led to their futures. Perhaps, the same is true of Turkey.

 Not quite as silly as it sounds, but actual historical questions. I know I have always wondered how Lee's plans were left to be found.

 The Feral Historian takes on the South's Lost Cause through the show Firefly. I am not a Southerner, I do not come from a Southern family, and I have no love for the Lost Cause. The freedom the South fought for was to make dark-skinned people slaves. Southerners fought because they thought others were coming to impose their will on them. I do not see the two ideas as opposites.

 

 

The best Union generals gave me one surprise, an Indiana entry. There are some I might quibble about, but there is a cogent argument for this list:

 

We are always learning something new — or should be:

Gore Vidal made a big deal of Henry Clay — in his essays, if I recall properly — as a person embodying a course not taken. YouTube turned up HENRY CLAY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE UNION. It seems a rational documentary on Clay's career; although I heard nothing of Clay's American Plan, that was so touted by Vidal.

 Sheila Kennedy's An Absolutely On-Target Essay where she highlights an essay on the University of Chicago's curriculum. 

Stephens attributes his own appreciation of proper argumentation to his time at the University of Chicago, an institution that requires its undergraduates to read the books that formed the Western tradition, to familiarize themselves with a philosophy and literature that was notable for argumentation meant to persuade, not put down. 

 This may seem utterly divorced from history, but I think you are being too narrow when you think of history. History is not just of Great Men and dates. History is also the passing along of ideas.

The virtue of Chicago’s curriculum is that it introduces students to a “coherent philosophical tradition based in reasoned argument and critical engagement that explained not only how we had arrived at our governing principles but also gave us the tools to debate, preserve or change them.” (In other words, students who were required to immerse themselves in these works received an actual education, rather than a job training credential; a distinction entirely lost on Indiana’s pathetic legislature. But I digress…) 

  sch 10/17

Forgotten Prelude To WW1 — Italo-Turkish War 1911-1912 (History Documentary):

sch 10/18

The Radical John Wilkes (History Today). I think I first knew of Wilkes from Garry Wills, but also that he provided the middle name for John Wilkes Booth.

The Publication of ‘1066 and All That’ (History Today) - short, funny.

sch 10/19

Five Essential Books For Understanding Haitian History (Literary Hub)

The Haitian anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot most forcefully signaled the damning implications of eliding the world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution in his well-known book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon, 1995). Trouillot insisted that the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is only “a chapter within a narrative of global domination.” “It is part of the history of the West,” he said, “and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” By erasing, downplaying, or otherwise denying how the Haitian revolutionaries opened the door to the Age of Abolition—when they proclaimed slavery an actual crime and declared that freedom from slavery should be constituted as a universal human right—it is not just Haitian history, but the Haitian people themselves who have been silenced.

The remarkable stories of some of Haiti’s most famous Black freedom-fighters, Dutty Boukman, Cécile Fatiman, Toussaint Louverture, Suzanne Bélair, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe, for example, have been replaced in the world’s memory by the more treacherous recent histories of dictatorships, earthquakes, presidential assassinations, and armed paramilitary violence. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, instead of garnering global applause, Haiti’s insistence on remaining free and independent consistently brought punishment, most aggressively, by France. In 1825, French king Charles X ensured longitudinal impoverishment of the newly independent country when he ordered the Haitian government, under threat of war, to pay 150 million francs as the price of France relinquishing its territorial claim over the island and to compensate former French enslavers for the loss of their “property.”

Bringing forward the perspective of Haitians represents one way to both lessen the silences of the past and rectify the ongoing and harmful distortions of the present. In my recently published biography, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, I therefore sought to highlight the stories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitians, whose numerous memoirs, pamphlets, letters, and myriad collections of essays and other forms of writing about the Haitian Revolution have often been ignored in favor of consulting western European and U.S. sources. At the same time, an incomplete and sometimes non-existent written archive encouraged me as a historian and literary critic to be imaginative in considering alternative sources about King Henry’s life, including oral histories, and to question the privileging of written forms over other kinds of storytelling.

 I think there is much to learn from Haiti; if nothing else, the obscuring of its history makes me suspicious of the reasons for its suppression.

sch 10/20