I just love the passionate way historians talk. Especially when they're not talking about their specialist subject - like when Dr. Finkel is promoting the youtube channel.

No one in their right mind goes into careers like history, the sciences, or academia for the money (not that I'm accusing historians of being in their right mind), so the ones that get comfortable but keep working are inspiring.

The trap is assuming a particular individual belonging to a group shares all characteristics of the average member of the group. Or that a particular individual acts how they do because they are a member... that's fuckin' bigoted and ugly.

That said, I don't see why we can't generalize about a GROUP. In general, black people have a much tougher experience of this country than white people. In general, people born twenty years after me have a much different cultural, social and material experience than I did. In general, people of 100 years ago were way more outwardly racist than people of today. Are these generalizations unfair? They don't match every single member of the group, so should we stop trying to recognize broad cultural forces at work over time on large populations of people? You certainly are free to argue that any of the particular generalizations he made are inaccurate or even too dangerous to be spread, I saw a few... but to say that the act of generalization IN GENERAL is taboo...?

Historians 100 years from now won't hesitate to lump our primitive asses all together...

http://queeranarchism.tumblr.com/post/162899252338/60-year-old-historian-martin-b%C3%BChler-who

Thanks

There's actually a bit more to the chemistry of smelting than he mentions. It's not only the higher temperatures that are important, carbon monoxide is used to extract the base metal from the ore (which is usually an oxide).

If he's been relying on ancient sources, they may well have not mentioned the chemistry since oxidation and reduction were only really properly described in the 18th century (oxygen was discovered in 1772) and not all historians have a good grounding in chemistry.

Legal historians will use Scalia's legacy as a communal toilet.

I think it's just easier to simplify an argument when it's part of another society. Even George Saliba criticizes western civ by simplifying Copernicus, Galileo, and others into monopolizing crooks; something he warns his own, "morally just" Islamic society against.

Both Neil and George are railing against each other's society whIle acknowledging a truth.

Always good to hear both sides, and one from an actual historian, but honestly, none of this is news. Any time someone says "this" is why this happened, it's safe to call bullshit until you've seen a multitude of angles (deduction). It's like debating the multitude of reasons for the fall of Rome or the start of WWI. Nothing in history truly repeats itself because it's so convoluted there's rarely a single cause for rises and declines. It's just easy to find a historical pattern and then hold onto it as THE pattern of history and exclude things that are contrary.

Mongols have good bbq... Koreans have good bbq... Americans have good bbq... What does it all mean?!?!?!

Correlation is not necessarily causation. A different explanation of what happened.
http://videosift.com/video/An-historians-take-on-what-went-wrong-with-Islam

An historian's take on what went wrong with Islam has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

What the fuck is going on here? Is this real politics? This is an obviously stupid, ignorant man. It's as though he has verbal diarrhea - he just can't stop exaggerating and making things up as though he's a kid in a playground, with no thought for evidence or substance, i'm expecting any minute for him to say that his dad can lift a house, he's been to the moon three times and he's been made Earth President by the alien high council. How the hell can he make so much progress in his bid for the American PRESIDENCY?

"I don't know where i saw the video, but i know i saw it because i have the world's greatest memory"
Those words were spoken in absolute seriousness by a leading presidential candidate for the US in 2015 when justifying a racist comment about muslims. I write this for posterity so future historians are left in no doubt, when the video is long gone, when all we have are fossils of internet text, because our civilisation violently died when President Trump took the west to nuclear war because he thought his dad is better than Putin's dad.

You can trust my memory. Where did i see it? I don't remember.....

@bobknight33 - whereas those right wing comedians have been absolutely killing the ratings as of late. They don't exist because as Chris Rock said comedy should always be punching upwards - so where is the comparison to say whether or not a right wing comedy show would do so much better? Personally i very rarely find Colbert funny, but that's because i don't find him funny, not because i think he's left wing - hence i wouldn't watch his show regardless of politics. It's your burden to prove that his political leanings have anything to do with his ratings.

Of course. People always try to manipulate facts so that they fit their agenda.
History doesnt lie. Historians however... and history is written by the victors.
That doesnt make history meaningless, because sooner or later the truth gets out. It took a long while on WW2 and even WW1 (read The Sleepwalkers), but it happens. Also people, thanks to the Internet, get more and more informed from different sides. Common sense has been reformed. People actually understand cause and effect now, and dont just believe in what the news or some history books say that were written by PC or victor authors.

The problem with history is that it is taught fundamentally wrong. When it happened and who were involved are more or less unimportant. The real importance is that we learn from it, so we dont repeat historical mistakes and know what happens when we do this or that decision. People need to think for themselves when learning history, how that is projected on todays happenings, how we can avoid the things that happened so many times in history and always caused the same bad thing and how it all worked together to cause that. That should be taught. Instead names and dates are the most important thing to our society. No wonder history is so easily manipulated and repeated then!

I'm not a historian so i might be getting this wrong, but i'd been led to believe:

a) Germany itself was in debt after WW1, and the economic hardship forced on them in the form of reparations has been postulated as a reason why the Nazi party rose to power in the first place. When people are desperate, they look for someone to blame. Over in the UK, the government have ensured that we're blaming immigrants and anyone on welfare for these economic hardships that were caused by the rich elite and ruling classes, corrupt to the very core and no longer working in the interests of the country and its people.

b) European countries agreed to forget large portions of Germany's debts, because back then we seemed to know that is was pointless to wreck a country and cause untold misery, pain and death to the residents all in the name of profiting off them.

I am so disgusted and overwhelmed by how badly everything is being run, and how obviously it is being run for the benefit of a minority. I hope Greece sticks two fingers up to the lot of them and does an Iceland, followed by every other European country doing something similar. We can't hope to carry on like this, we can't let power hungry psychopaths control the world... we won't survive like this.

They came up with plenty of ideas and concepts, if you were to believe them. But none of it can be turned into legislation as that would be a unilateral act, and unilateral acts are a red line for the Troika. Meanwhile, the Troika insists on a comprehensive plan and opposes any form of piecemeal reform, so they can't even get an agreement on things they agree upon.

Again, that's what Varoufakis says. Maybe he's full of shit, maybe they all are.

Like you said, a fresh round of muddling through might be what's ahead of us. Should things go sour instead, it truly would be an epic fuck-up. Some twenty years down the road, historians will probably do their best Rocco impressions when looking at this mess.

That was absolutely fascinating -- great sift!

A few random thoughts:
-If any video has ever better demonstrated the idiom "necessity is the mother of invention", I don't know what it is.
-Castro was very very clever to anticipate the technological needs of his people and have the army print that "field guide" book that spurred on greater independent development.
-Some of the things they came up with remind me of working on my family farm. Every day is an exercise in problem solving -- how to solve problem A given a set of tools/resources B. And often the things in B don't really lend themselves towards A... So you end up hammering in a nail with a brick, or patching a friction hole in a metal pipe with a few layers of plastic from a 2 liter bottle and duct tape.
-That artist Oroza is a great combination of artist, historian, archeologist, and storyteller.
-We (the US) still have sanctions against Cuba, but I can't really say why that is warranted...

wait..what?
thats simply just untrue bob.
unless you are saying there was ZERO voting in the beginning of this country.
is THAT what you are trying to say?
are you also implying that representative democracy is losing our way and therefore bad?
/holds head in hands...
im trying to unravel your comment but its not making much sense.

what the fuck is this "true" history you are talking about? hell..just plain "what the fuck are you talking about"?

are you confusing the articles of confederacy with the constitution?
or the fact that senators used to be picked by elected officials and now they are voted for by the citizenry?

good god man,you are giving newt shit for not knowing his history yet you are butchering the very thing you proclaim to know the "truth" of.there is no definitive "truth" when it comes to history.there is just data and books and transcripts and journals,all left to be interpreted by the reader.the more information that you have the clearer the picture becomes but it aint math bubba.
people will still debate the finer details,and historians often do.though revisionists are particularly venal in my opinion,because they have an agenda.

i think you may have read a revisionists history book.

Rex Curry is the nation's leading authority on the Pledge of Allegiance. You're right to post the video. The video is completely accurate. The salute used by the Nazis was NOT derived from the socialist Mussolini. And the gesture was not based on the so-called "ancient Roman salute" because the "ancient Roman salute" is a complete fictional, as stated above.

Jacques-Louis David's painting "The Oath of the Horatii" did not associate the salute with classical Rome, and David never said such a thing, and the painting does not show the gesture, it shows three people reaching for weapons, including the use of the left hand. The Horatii lie is a very modern lie, fabricated circa 2006(?) on wakipedia in order to cover-up the Pledge of Allegiance's putrid past.

The socialist Mussolini did NOT adopt what he thought was the Roman salute.

No one should stand for nor chant the Pledge of Allegiance because it was the origin of the Nazi salute and Nazi behavior (see the discoveries of the historian Dr. Rex Curry). The early pledge began with a military salute that was then extended outward to point at the flag (thus the stiff-arm gesture came from the pledge and from the military salute). The pledge was written in 1892 for kindergartners to be forced to recite under the flag at government schools (socialist schools). The pledge was written by an American socialist who influenced other socialists worldwide, including German socialists, who used the gesture under their flag's notorious symbol (their symbol was used to represent crossed "S" letters for their "socialist" dogma -another of Dr. Curry's discoveries). The pledge continues to be the origin of similar behavior even though the gesture was changed to hide the pledge's putrid past. The pledge is central to the US's police state and its continued growth.