Couching cataracts appears to be as old as civilization, and is recorded in cultures in both the Greco-Roman and Indian ancient civilizations. Experts in this technique could apply orbital pressure and dislodge a clouded lens into the posterior chamber, thus restoring a modicum of vision. Jesus pulled off this maneuver in Mark 8: 22-26.

Agree with all. The guy was a sniper trained by the US military; no surprise that he knew how to use a rifle with a sight.

IIRC the later Persian kingdoms like the safarids had majority Sunni populations.

There is a sadly not much mentioned/elaboration that Greek mythology directly refers to Ancient Greek fossil finds, e.g. mammoth thigh bones => cyclops/giants, dinosaur bones => hydra/gryphon. Aka that they had such things in temples as tourist attractions and used it as validation that their mythological age was real.

I found that quite fascinating proposition by a historian in a documentary years ago.

Its hard to say if they happened at all, let alone what they might have been potentionally influenced by.

Like /u/MeatballDom points out, history moves more through Kuhnian shifts than Popperian revolutions. With that said, I think we're getting some exciting evidence that is pushing back the timeline of settlement in the Americas and if the evidence pans out and we find more, it could be a big shift.

Also, with new technologies like Lidar we're finding out more about settlement patterns and urbanization. It sees that we had underestimated the size of population centers throughout the Americas. Combined with the earlier settlement info, we might very well increase estimates of the populations of the Americas at the time of settlement from about 40ish million, which is kind of the standard right now, to one of the higher end estimate ranges.

But it's not a sudden shift. People have been arguing this for decades and slowly building and examining an evidentiary record for these theories.

> Other constructs are purely theoretical and can be philosophized but have no meaning in reality.

Indeed - time is physical, anatomising them into abstracts kills them.

>Time and Space are real beings, a male and a female: Time is a man, space is a woman, and her masculine portion is Death.

> William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment

Could Gilles de Rais’s killings have been influenced by the death of joan of arc?

It's the only acceptable explanation. Even his wife was sure of it too until she realised she could make money off of conspiracy nuts.

I think just the fundamental argument of the book is important b/c Diamond made the same mistake in GG&S about how societies actually exist. They don't just suddenly disappear. They are constantly adapting and changing. The Conquest of Mexico didn't happen in the short time span Diamond portrayed it as happening, it took hundreds of years, fighting was ongoing in the Yucatan until the 20th century and the state still has issues with control there and in Chiapas and the hills of Oaxaca. He takes the same kind of assumptions throughout Collapse and they just don't pan out when you look at the peoples who these experts still are working with, even though they are supposed to have "disappeared."

Unless you were extremely blind, before the industrial age it wasn't all that important. You don't need to see all that great to plow a furrow or swing a scythe or to watch for stray animals, etc. Most people didn't read very much, if at all. If you couldn't see well you wouldn't be apprenticed into a trade where it mattered if you weren't a farmer, and most people were farmers.

I don't normally recommend David Graeber's book, Debt. But this is one topic that it was actually really good on. It talks about the way people traded when money was scarce, which is most of human history in most places.

There's a lot of valid criticism of the book so I would maybe check out the wikipedia entry on it to get the outlines of the debate and to help read it critically b/c Graeber is a great writer and he's can be very convincing if you're only getting his side of the story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

I would check out Richard Evan's Pursuit of Power. It covers the period from the end of the Napoleonic wars until the beginning of the WWI. It covers the major trends, politics, intellectual, and scientific history of the period.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529358/the-pursuit-of-power-by-richard-j-evans/

There's a good paper on the NIH's site about this. Abscessed teeth was an incredibly deadly condition. The paper cites evidence from the 1500s that put it as the 5th or 6th leading cause of death. Basically if you didn't get the tooth removed and cleaned early, it was a serious life threatening condition.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10686905/

So, this is a fringe theory from the late 1800s that Mormons basically made up out of whole cloth to show that the Book of Mormon had some historical basis. It was never taken seriously outside those circles. When people started actually studying the genetics of Native American peoples and their languages it proved there's no evidence at all. All the genetic and linguistic evidence points back to the Altai mountain area.

You might find this paper and interview interesting: https://www.econtalk.org/omer-moav-on-the-emergence-of-the-state/

Paper: https://bse.eu/research/working-papers/cereals-appropriability-and-hierarchy

It talks about how the development of cereal grains can have an impact on state formation. I don't fully buy into it b/c it seems a little too deterministic, but it's definitely an interesting idea.

Japan was infinitely more scared of a communist Soviet invasion than a US invasion. They were fanatically anti-communist. The end of the war in Europe meant Stalin was able to send troops eastwards and their invasion was very immanent. Their declaration of war on the day of the atomic bomb was perfectly timed.

Röhm was also irritated that Hitler got the backing of some major bankers and industrialists. He wanted there to be another revolution in which the state would play a more central role in an anti-capitalist sense, to end monopolies and nationalise industry and land. He was the "left wing" of the nazi party. He also was one if the very few people who called Hitler by his first name and was not scared of him. He led the SA, which by 1934 numbered some 3 million men whilst the Reichswehr was limited to 100,000 under the terms of the treaty of Versailles, so was in fact a potential future threat to Hitler.

🤣Do try living your life backwards - or explaining to your employer that deadlines don’t matter - just an arbitrary construct. What a load of cobblers. Our world and all our experience operates on time flowing in one direction- that is not open to suggestion, options or directions. Other constructs are purely theoretical and can be philosophized but have no meaning in reality.

There are many constructs of time. We choose that which suits us.

It's actually one of the more plausible theories. Oswald was a disturbed ne'er-do-well who seems to have been hungry for attention any way he could get it. He initially wanted to kill the ultra right wing general Edwin Walker, but failed and later just happened to be living in Dallas when JFK visited.

Narratively, though, this isn't satisfying, which is a big reason, I think, why the conspiracies continue to flourish.

Given that the USA has a long history of mentally unstable, gun wielding murderers, is it possible that LH Oswald was in fact a gun nut who managed to kill JFK alone?

Neat! Thank you! It's fantastic to have a contrary look at his assertions. What are a few that stood to you?

We have visited Harlech and there is a post already about our visit to Harlech castle but it is written before my partner started writing as a historian so it won't be the same as the Conwy or beaumaris castle that I posted a link to last month.

There is probably a plan to revisit and rewrite Harlech castle but I'm not aware of it yet

Edit. Beeston Castle, not beaumaris. Although I think there is a beaumaris castle post on the blog

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