Quebec college teacher saves civility with non-confrontational protest model

What's the key here?  Unhappy energy being redirected into hitting your own noisemaker instead of a human opponent?From the Globe and Mail:Twelve days have passed since Montreal’s last riot and fire, eight days since the city’s last mass arrest, and about that long since the last person bled from a serious clash between police and protesters.In little more time than it takes...

The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance, by Christopher MacEvitt. Another good one

Christopher MacEvitt's book has a certain resemblance to Giancarlo Casale's book on Ottoman exploration. It's about an important, difficult subject; it goes against the prevailing wisdom; and it is based on difficult research in fragmentary sources.MacEvitt presents  the prevailing...

Everybody has their favourite pirates: Giancarlo Casale’s The Ottoman Age of Exploration

Near the beginning of Giancarlo Casale's  book, he remarks that the famous explorer-hero Prince Henry the Navigator was basically a pirate.  What follows is an entire book about Ottoman pirates of the 16thcentury, whose role in expanding the trade in the Indian Ocean basin...

Laying down my arms

Some of you know that I have long been a member of the SCA -- for about as long as I have been studying the real Middle Ages, 40 years and more. One of the main activities I took part it was fighting in the lists and on the  mock battlefield. I loved fighting, and once upon...

Sharia and Egypt: what it means, or may mean

The Carnegie Endowment has a meaty Q&A.Among other things it explains why sharia is not going away any time soon:What is the Islamic sharia?The term “Islamic sharia” has subtly different denotations and sharply different connotations in Egypt than it often does in the United States or Europe. There is a reason many scholars insist that defining it as “Islamic law” (as it is...

A review of Constance Heiatt's most recent book on medieval cookery: Cocatrice and Lampray Hay

Reproduced from the excellent review source, The Medieval Review Hieatt, Constance B. ed. and trans. Cocatrice and Lampray Hay: LateFifteenth-Century Recipes from Corpus Christi College Oxford.Totnes: Prospect Books, 2012. Pp. 176. GBP30.00/$60.00. ISBN: 978-1-903018-84-2. Reviewed...

Pseudo-epigraphy in the Ancient Near East

David Meadows forwards this note from Yale:The letters she [Mary Frazer] studies offer three related challenges, she says. “They present multiple parallels with other genres, such as chronicles, so are generally difficult to classify. Second, the historicity of the events referred...

I see blowback coming

Arabist.net forwards this from Danger Room:The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting...

Fun times crossing the border

There haven't been a lot of fun times crossing the border in ten years, but on my way to Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, I shared a light-hearted moment with a border guard.He asked me where I was going and I replied that I was attending a conference...

Two wind-driven photos from the Big Picture

Wildfire in Yuma, Colorado:Spectators chase a competitor in the Volvo Ocean Race.Click pics to see them big, and if you've time, see the whole collecti...

Desktop fusion -- almost routine

Over at Science News, there is a story about a 17-year-old who has achieved nuclear fusion on a desktop and -- maybe -- used it to create a beam of neutrons. Astonishing? Get this: [Ben] Bartlett is not the first person to achieve fusion. He’s the 34th outside government and industry, he says. Neither is he the youngest. That record belongs to [Taylor] Wilson, who built his reactor...

From Kalamazoo -- Miniature Manifestos

A new feature of the Kalamazoo conference this year -- the International Congress on Medieval Studies -- were some very short presentations by people talking about issues that really mattered to them.Here's a piece from Historian on the Edge that spoke to me:Item: History is not ‘relevant’History does not tell us ‘how we got here’History’s value lies in:i. not believing...

Victory Day in Kiev

From the Big Pictu...

Does American democracy still work? Brad DeLong and a bunch of non-abusive commenters

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/05/berekeley-faculty-club-does-american-democracy-still-work.h...

The full moon of May 6, Amman, Jordan

From the Big Pictu...

This!

The bo...

Muhlberger speaks at Kalamazoo -- twice

The 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies is taking place at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo starting Wednesday May 9.  (The schedule is here.)  I will be speaking twice.On Friday at 10 AM in Fetzer, Room 1045, I will be taking part in a session with the wonderful title High in Protean Content:  Chivalry and Its Transformations.  My own paper...

Outrageous book prices: one post in a long series

If you were publishing a book on the philosophy and history of history-writing, and actually wanted people to read it, wouldn't you price your ebook edition to encourage sales?And not price it at 70 POUNDS...

1812 -- controversial after all these years

In September, the Department of History at Nipissing University will be sponsoring a symposium on the War of 1812 in context.  I brought this up originally because I thought that professional historians based in Canada should create an opportunity to discuss a historical event...

The Feynman technique to learn things faster

Thanks to Jim Downey and the people he got this from.  I wonder if this would help some students? Step 1. Choose the concept you want to understand.Take a blank piece of paper and write that concept at the top of the page.Step 2. Pretend you’re teaching the idea to someone else. Write out an explanation of the topic, as if you were trying to teach it to a new student....