60 Things I learned This Year:
The oldest rock and roll song is most likely/arguably Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every day” from 1945.
Adolf Hitler degenerative art theory stems from Degeneration by Max Nordau
After the Civil War, former slaves and black Americas were killed daily and beyond count in the US south with impunity and without historic recollection, then or now, for decades.
John Wilkes Booth greatly accomplished his goal by assassinating Abraham Lincoln.
Andrew Johnson probably raped his young slaves before becoming the US president responsible for rebuilding the post-Civil War America.
The Kingdom of Judah paid the Assyrians to destroy their ‘annoying’ northern rivals the Kingdom of Israel.
To “VIk” is to travel.
Many Jews were responsible for many/all elements of hip hop’s rise.
Carvel’s ‘original’ soft serve ice cream cake the “Cooky Puss” led to a famous prank-phone-call-song by the Beastie Boys that started their transition and rise in hip hop. It might have been inspired by the famous prank phone call in the movie Porky’s. That movie scene may have ‘created’ the Beastie Boys as a hip hop group and led Melvin Simon to buy the Pacers.
Gavrilo Princip (WWI) was an excellent shot and got what he wanted.
Quebec makes a ton of money off hydro power that it sends to New York City.
Black pianists in western Texas playing boogie woogie — with heavy left-hand rhythms — music for ‘immigrant’ workers may be the deepest roots of rock and roll.
Hip hop and Christian rock and roll seem to have roots in Jamaican Rastafarian reggae music for Jah.
Germany really wanted Danzig back and went crazy for it.
The Mongols and Turkic/Mongol descendants ruled Western Europe much longer than classical history gives them credit.
Egypt is the world’s first civilization of great consequence, not Mesopotamia, but it is a photo finish — and neither of them makes sense without the other.
There are no eras in history of human stagnation that caused limited human travel. Literature rose and fell, but people were forever on the move. In good and bad times, they ‘moved. When they were curious or in crisis, they moved about the Earth.
The Native Americas in the US and Canada and Mexico AND Latin America were always on the ebb and flow and moving, even before the arrival of the Europeans. The horse only accelerated this.
Adolf Hitler learned to control people from Gustave Le Bon’s book The Crowd.
The ‘Nakba’ is the irreconcilable 1948 crime from which Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians both claim that no peace can ever result.
Jewish Zionism followed and was greatly influenced/caused by Christian Zionism.
Early Islam really waffled greatly on slavery, concubines, and umma al-walad status.
Muslim/Barbary slavery had a much bigger impact on Europe, Christian slavery, and the eventual trans-Atlantic slave trade than history credits it.
My own idea(s): throughout most of history slavery was the great alternative to killing everyone in ancient (and beyond) warfare. Not killing all of your ‘future subject and workers’ gave your army needed replacements (often offered service as slaves OR instead of slavery), farmers for grow food for your army, and workers to build your future infrastructure. Killing so many people was too much work and burying them was more work than any army would want to do. The people ‘kept’ could complete the burials and then work as laborers. Armies took the women as concubines and the men as menial laborers to assist the engineers with the projects needed to cross rivers and siege cities. Slaves were also a way to pay officers and get them young assistants. Slavery became a lucrative system of its own and drove the war efforts of the Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Mongols, Barbary pirates… Slavery was often the better alternative to death and that realization is why so many slaves accepted it ‘willingly.’ Outside the language, culture, and social hierarchy of already very ‘black-and-white’ thinking and harsh societies (which left over 90% of humans in the lowest/bottom class), slavery was often more of just the ‘right to live’ at the base foundation of a drudgery society. Once society was no longer 90% peasants and mostly drudgery for all, slavery made little sense. Though the Enlightenment gave us the ideas to see a world without slavery, the Industrial Revolution’s invention of the middle class really made slavery look less inevitable and/or necessary. Its creation of rising lifestyles and hourly incomes made ‘free’ labor absurd. Ultimately, slavery was mostly started as an alternative to death for the losers of wars between different peoples. If given a choice between death or slavery, many/most people chose slavery.
Emergence is the biggest idea in the social studies.
As the physical sciences have diligently been advancing rapidly, the social sciences are almost as regressive as they are progressive. Even as the social sciences learn more about humans, they seem to forget much of what they learned in the past.
Europe’s economy is recovering from 2008 much slower than America.
China’s crises seem to be arching it into stagnation.
Communism doesn’t work because it doesn’t allow democracy. A fully democratic/voluntary communism could be very successful. More important than capitalism or communism is choice.
No religion will ever allow its state to flourish when it can gain power over the state. The etymology of religion is to bind (threads) together. Religion will strangle any state it is allowed to bind.
Conservatism fails when it takes away choice.
Liberalism wins when liberals allow people to chose bad/’counter-choices’, even if some regress will occur in those failures. Failure has to be allowed in society. Utopianism becomes tyranny when it seeks to guarantee everyone’s perfection. The biggest faith that people must have is that free and open democracy will eventually lead to progress.
A religious school education can never be in the service of a civic state because religion will always (or at least seems to) try to control children by taking away many of their choices. Yes, children need rules, but religion imposes many that are not for mere survival or secular success. This entanglement of civic and religious ‘rules’ confuses children in their true choices.
Opium originated in Europe. Everywhere it goes, it becomes a very useful pain sedative.
Our total lack of understanding of the unconscious ‘thinking’ and the apparent randomness (and statistical probabilities) of elements of reality are the two biggest sources of human superstition and mysticism in history.
In the crises of 1960, modern Japan was born.
The Delaware Indians were named after a major British investor.
James Monroe almost died during the American Revolution and was saved by a fluke.
Marquis de Lafayette almost drowned in Indiana. He came back to the US for a grand tour.
Whetzel Trace goes through the CGHS property.
No Indian tribes are ‘native’ to east central Indiana.
The Mississippi River is the number one reason for America’s success.
Douglas Adams may have picked 42 because of the AC/DC song “Let there be rock.”
Abraham had a third wife and her kids play a big role in Jewish history.
Hitler’s second book “My Victory” is rarely referenced.
The 1964 Pontiac GTO was the first “muscle car.” An Australian car stood in as its 40th anniversary car in 2004.
Roman bird augurs teach us that birds find land (Noah and the show Vikings) and water (Alexander the Great and Siwa) and see developments across land and weather before us.
The Greek Eleusinian Mysteries were huge even for the later Romans. They were super weird and history’s greatest secret.
The red heifer sacrifice of Jews was the best you could do. The ‘holocaust’ sacrifice was for huge sins and it left nothing to eat on the burnt altar — a full burning. Jews call the holocaust ‘shoah’ because holocaust is the wrong phrase and not chosen by them.
The Cuyahoga River fire song Burn On of Randy Newman is pretty much the same as the the theme song of Toy Story. Randy Newman has taken over kids movie soundtracks.
Greek pederasty is probably the most neglected topic in history.
Mixing water and wine into the correct portions in a Greek krater was one of the most important things in their culture.
The Hussites, the first protestants, came into the US and centered themselves in North Carolina.
Martin Luther copied Jan Hus and then became famous when early printers turned his works into best sellers.
In 1395 the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards (followers of John Wycliffe) were the first people to conclude that Church and state entanglement corrupted each other.
Sigmund Freud stole many of his ideas from Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd.
Genoese sailors started the modern era of exploration.
The Japanese took one Portuguese matchlock gun in 1543 and spread it Japan almost instantly.
Many of the areas that Europeans conquered, imperialized and colonized were actually controlled by ‘outsiders’ already - Mughals (Central Asian Mongolian-Turkish Muslims) and Manchurians from north of China.
Post-modern ironic cynicism only critiques/destroys and doesn’t create anything of connective sentimental value.