Climate-change disaster and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver

I am going to confess to a common fault. If things are bad enough, I just don't want to think about them, certainly not in any detail. And, as someone remarked at my dinner table two nights ago, things are pretty yucky right now.The worst thing happening right now, if not the closest,...

Student in HIST 5216?

If you are going to be in Nipissing University's Masters in History program this fall, note that I have started a blog for my graduate seminar he...

Egypt's Coptic church

Al-Biruni sends a link to a CNN video report on Egypt's native Christian church.An earlier post is worth a look, t...

Insufficiently pessimistic

Karl Steel shares a quick ("flash") review of Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages:By trying to write as though the Holocaust were not the inevitable future of European Jews, Elukin aims to shift our attention away from lachrymose history to quotidian survival. In the early middle ages, at least, we shouldn't...

"An honest to God Elizabethan psycho" and a fascinating reading list about literacy

So far this weekend two especially noteworthy posts have come to me via Google Reader.Thanks to Dr. Beachcombing, I got to read about said Elizabethan psycho, Sir Richard Grenville, who ... was of so hard a complexion that, as he continued among the Spanish Captains, while they were at dinner or supper with him, he would carouse three or four glasses of wine; and, in a bravery,...

Now, that's frustrating!

In a recent commentary in the Guardian, Ioan Lewis is guilty of tantalizing his readers. In an article entitled "Somalia has a role model for success on its doorstep," first outlines of troubles of the failed state of Somalia, then points to a neighbor, Somaliland, as a good example...

"History’s ultimate insult"

"He doesn’t even ...have a Wikipedia page."Thus saith Dr. Beachcombing in his Bizarre History Blog. Have a look at the most recent entry, on Madog, Prince and Poem for another meditation on the obscu...

The Kornbluth Photo Archive

This announcement speaks for itself:Dear Colleagues,After two decades teaching medieval art history and doing photography for my own use, I have started a photography business. As part of that project I am posting my archive of images online for all to use without charge. So far I have posted about 750 images, and I am adding more all the time. The archive includes material...

Nipissing University history student? (2010-11)

Now is the time to start reading the NU History Ne...

Nipissing history students find the fun in academia

Some readers may disapprove, but seeing as this grew out of a seminar situation, this tickled me:Yesterday, Matt and I went to Sudbury (Laurentian University) for a conference called "Social Science on the Final Frontier." Essentially, the conference was about the intersection of...

Brian Ulrich quotes al-Masudi

...in his World History syllabus:For any branch of knowledge to exist, it must be derived from history. From it all wisdom is deduced, all jurisprudence is elicited, all eloquence is learnt. Those who reason by analogy build upon it. Those who have opinions to expound use it for argument. Popular knowledge is derived from it and the precepts of the wise are found in it....

Juan Cole on prospects in Iraq

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Kn...

Jonathan Jarrett does Carnivalesque

Carnivalesque is a monthly "carnival" which collects interesting links from blogs that discuss pre-modern history. Every other month it focuses on ancient and medieval blogs. It's one of those months, and the turn of Jonathan Jarrett of A Corner of 10th Century Europe to do the...

The "end" of the "Iraq war"

Is the USA's Iraq war over?I remember it being declared over back in 2003. Yet American troops remained and continued to fight and be killed. Now 50,000 non-combat trainers remain in Iraq, not to mention the US Air Force, and low levels of disruptive violence continue. In part this is because no Iraqi government has emerged from the spring elections; the various interim...

The woods battle at Pennsic 39

Here is a brief video of one of the battles at last week's Pennsic war. It was produced by students of the Entertainment Technology of Carnegie Mellon University. They used a "shield cam," a camera embedded in a shield, which meant the mechanism had a good POV and a certain amount of protection. Li...

An Open Letter to New Graduate Students

Not mine. But this might be valuable to one of my reade...

Ploys

Roger Pearse on the ploys scholars use to keep interesting texts to themselves:Another ploy has been to have only German scholars work on it, and get them to do it a century ago in obscure publications, usually without translation. After all, if you provide a translation, who...

Plato's Code podcast

George Kenney of Electric Politics has been kind enough to alert me to the existence of his interview with Dr. Jay Kennedy of the University of Manchester, about Kennedy's discovery of secret musical/mathematical codes in Plato's writings. For the interview go here; my earlier post on this is he...

North Bay drivers pass a litter test

When you renew your vehicle license in Ontario, you get a little sticker, about a centimeter by 2 centimeters, that you put on the right upper corner of the metal plate to show when your license expires. The sticker is mounted on a piece of paper, and there is a smaller piece of...

Bird of Paradise by Holly Anne Garnett

Li...

The "Ground Zero Mosque"

Matthew Gabriele found this somewhere and posted it to Facebook:I just try to imagine how the characters on Law and Order: SVU would react to a bunch of people from Alaska etc., anywhere but the neighborhood or the city itself, making this fuss.It's as if New Yorkers didn't really...

The rich and strange world of medieval manuscript illustration

Thanks to Carl Pyrdum and Dr. Beachcombing for these odd and interesting posts.Image: via Ca...

Phil Paine revamps his blog

One of the most original blogs on the web is philpaine.com, which has been around for some years and which I have often quoted and linked to. (Phil and I are long-time friends and sometime collaborators, and have taught each other a lot.) But the blog has up to now been difficult to reference. So I cheer the reorganization of Phil's on-the-net home. The old material is being...

Happy people dancing on Planet Earth

Thanks to Matt and Astronomy Picture of the D...

Agora preview

John Emerson alerted me to this. Could it be any good? Could it stir up a huge controversy?...