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I read Morelos in Mexico by W. H. Timmons. It's an older book from the early 70s I just stumbled upon in a used shop but I was curious about him and the Mexican independence movement so I picked it up.

If you don't know a lot about the principal players or actions during the the Mexican rebellion of the 1810s then I would say this is worth checking out. Especially if you can find it cheap in a thrift store like I did. I'm sure there's more up to date stuff or more comprehensive stuff but this was good b/c it was fairly short, 170ish pages with decent sized type and margins so you felt like you were making good progress. And it didn't assume a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader. I thought it was a great introduction to the topic.

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Does anyone have recommendations for books on ancient and/or pre-1900's LGBTQ+ history? Can be specific to one place or generic world history on the subject!

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Does anyone have a suggestion for a good book on the Portuguese empire from say 1430 to 1800s?

Hi this article is written by me. I wanted to go through the complete history of camera development. I hope you people enjoy this. Please let me know your feedback.

My knowledge of the Age of Discovery is assembled from a loose collection of stuff I learned in school and the odd passages in other books. Thinking about it, there are still a few points I'm confused on where things don't seem to make sense. If anyone has an answer or can point me to a good source I would be grateful.

The story I got in school was that the Portuguese were looking for a route to India. However, they spent decades content with the west coast of Africa and Vasco da Gama's initial voyage to India didn't set sail until years after Columbus' return. What Africa did have at this time was a profitable network of trans-Saharan trade routes that ran between Timbuktu in the Malian Empire to coastal cities in Algeria and Libya, and even as far as Egypt. Gold and slaves went out, salt came in. First question: were the Portuguese exploring the African coast as a way to cut out the middleman?

Now for Columbus. He'd been trying to get funding for a westward voyage before any other sea route to Asia was active, and in fact before Dias even rounded the Cape of Good Hope. As far as I know at that time the only claim of a circumnavigation of Africa had been made over 2,000 years earlier by the Phoenicians. So Columbus was in effect saying that the westward route would be more promising than attempting to sail around Africa. I realize that Columbus did some funny math to try and prove that a westward expedition was even feasible, but what gave him the confidence that it was the best choice? Were there any stories of land masses between Europe and Japan that Columbus would have known about? Did he know of Viking expeditions? Were there perhaps rumors that the ancients reached the Antilles?

Finally, I'm curious about the geopolitics involved in Spain actually funding the trip. In 1492, Spain finally wrapped up the Reconquista. And after wrapping up this 200+ year project they throw money at an Italian adventurer with visions of grandeur? Were they so eager for a prestige project? Columbus used funny math, but surely someone at the Spanish court could have called him on it. Spain had 3 universities by this point. Were they just too afraid of missing out on a potential opportunity and worried a rival might get it first?

Wikimedia's got you. There are population pyramids for nearly all the countries, and for the major ones you got several from the early 20th century.

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I'm looking for population pyramids of countries involved in the first and second world war. I've done quite a bit of research online to find it but haven't had any luck. Even just the data would work as I can turn it into a graph myself.

There were attempted crusades around that time that involved children, but they were not crusades led by children, made up entirely or even mostly, of children. The latter idea is a fanciful creation added on to misunderstandings, or outright mythmaking.

> I disagree about how emphatic this is. I think there’s ample support for its occurrence, of course, and I do believe it, but the primary source for it in modern humans comes from a single author (I don’t recall his name, but it might be Liebenberg) writing about the San, who are very much a removed population operating outside their indigenous cultural norms.

Louis Liebenberg did the most detailed ethnography, but he’s certainly not the only source. As a grad student I personally interviewed people in East Tanzania who hunt local ungulates in a way we categorize as persistence hunting, but absent the endurance running aspect, which is something Liebenberg discusses as a limitation. Like, they jog of course, but it’s more of a 4-5 hour jog-track-jog-track etc.

You’re probably thinking of Pickering and Bunn’s critical response to him a couple years after that first paper, and while I don’t want to speak for other people, I would confidently say most people agree their retort stepped way over the bounds of what is reasonable. Louis was never making causal claims that endurance running and PH were the bundles of selection pressure that causally produced the capabilities related to endurance running, because this is a circular and nonsensical “just so”, and certainly not a mistake a staff associate at Harvard would make. His work is really more about tracking than endurance running, and it was before the wave of very clarifying research came out in the 2010’s which illuminated much of the transitionary period between Australopiths and early Homo, a lot of which was morphological, a lot out of Olduvai, etc.

Very important to delineate the version of persistence hunting in the capital-H hypothesis, with the actual anthropological definition, which in colloquial language would basically just be extended tracking at a pace the animal cannot maintain for a number of hours. Running a marathon chasing after a gazelle is a fantasy introduced by McDougall.

Is the children’s crusade a real thing that happened?

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It’s hard to know without some survey data. I feel like Einstein is, in my culture, Ia widely recognized face and a man who is known for being very smart. If you drill down beyond that, with the average person, they might have an idea that he was smart, and also wise, which is why are you end up with so many sappy quotes attributed to Einstein that he never said. He is everybody’s genius, pacifist, kind grandpa with the crazy hair. In many ways, he fulfilled that role of eminent, trustable figure that Carl Sagan or Neil Degraase Tyson did/does later.

Tons of strange conspiracy stories just don’t make sense with Einstein. So he ends up with inspirational quotes instead.

I don’t think Newton is anywhere near as well, known by the average American. And when he is, it’s seldom more than the guy who “discovered” gravity, when an apple fell on him. You don’t hear about alchemy or calculus or astronomy or politics.

Tesla was a bit like Newton in America. Some people knew a lot about him. A ton of people who knew only one thing, probably do that. He did crazy experiments with electricity, like Tesla coils that were dramatic and cool in someway without knowing any of the details. He was a guy that was the epitome of not just alone genius but the unsuccessful doomed genius.

Edison was a revered figure who turn a heel turn in popular view and folks begin to weigh his politics, his greed, is intellectual property, theft, and such more than his stable of patents and financial success. Tesla made a good foil for that.

Even so, I think there’s not much comparison. Einstein is a figure on par with Napoleon in terms of recognition. Tesla, as a person, even as a highly fictionalized person, is a lot more obscure culturally.

> There are different kinds of bipedalism.

Sure, but limb development is highly canalized even in quadrupeds. You have to look at this scenario from the paradigm of the selection pressure which started our lineage on the trajectory towards bipedalism, and it very clearly extends far back beyond the earliest signal of even the Australopiths. A change in a trait like major skeletal morphology takes an extremely long time to fix.

> Early homo were unable to run even if they were obligate bipeds.

I’m going to push back on this. It’s too confident a claim for the physical evidence base, which is scarce. Unless some major work was released and I haven’t heard about it, which I feel is unlikely because I attend most seminars from the major anthropogenic institutions like CARTA and Leakey.

> Nuchal ligaments, Long bone length, gait, narrowing of the hip, extension of the achilles tendon and arched foot, broader heel and short toes. I’m unsure of any others off the top of my head. These traits would have appeared around 1.8mya

All of these have a pretty clear developmental trajectories extending far back beyond erectus. Australopith tibias are notably elongated.

> It very well might be that we just evolved a kit that could be repurposed for a hunting style - and we’re misunderstanding the cause and effect.

This is basically “just so” stories in a nutshell.