https://getpocket.com/collections/the-backstories-behind-your-favorite-christmas-songs

<figure> </figure/>

Archive</a> </hr>

<figure> <figcaption>history flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia. </figcaption> </figure>

Maxwell wrote the Treatise

reading the texts in parallel.

Just as Western historians erase indigenous ideas as misunderstandings or fabrications or outright appropriation of those ideas as pre-existing ideas in European culture, is it possible that we do the same thing with orality and memory? Are medievalists seeing mnemotechniques of the time and not properly interpreting them by not seeing them in their original contexts and practices?

The idea of talking rocks, as an example, is dismissed as lunacy, crazy, or some new-age hokum, but in reality it's at the far end of the spectrum. It's so unknowable for Western audiences that it's wholly dismissed rather than embraced, extended, and erased.

What does the spectrum of potentially appropriated ideas look like? What causes their adoption or not, particularly in cases of otherwise cultural heterodoxy?

The Great Man theory of history is the misconception that all the most important ideas can be traced back to a single great individual—usually a man—and ignoring the fact that they had likely been brewing in the social milieu of their time before being encapsulated, like a bug in ember, by a particular writer who then gets an outsized amount of credit for "inventing" the idea.

I wonder if the effect of social media and ubiquity of communication will dampen this effect?

Part of their point here seems to be that Pinker is suffering from a form of bias related to the most sensational cases which will tend to heighten the availability bias. (Is there a name for this sort of sensationalism effect?)

Is there also some survivorship bias at play here as well?

We don't have access to a wide statistical survey of dead bodies from a large swath of times and places which makes it difficult to determine actual numbers.

Continuing on the analogy between addresses for zettels/index cards and for people, the differing contexts for cards and ideas is similar to the multiple different publics in which people operate (home, work, school, church, etc.)

Having these multiple publics creates a variety of cross links within various networks for people which makes their internal knowledge and relationships more valuable.

As societies grow the number of potential interconnections grows as well. Compounding things the society doesn't grow as a homogeneous whole but smaller sub-groups appear creating new and different publics for each member of the society. This is sure to create a much larger and much more complex system. Perhaps it's part of the beneficial piece of the human limit of memory of inter-personal connections (the Dunbar number) means that instead of spending time linearly with those physically closest to us, we travel further out into other spheres and by doing so, we dramatically increase the complexity of our societies.

Does this level of complexity change for oral societies in pre-agrarian contexts?

What would this look like mathematically and combinatorially? How does this effect the size and complexity of the system?

How can we connect this to Stuart Kauffman's ideas on complexity? (Picking up a single thread creates a network by itself...)

http://editions.byzantini.st/ChronicleME/#/ Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa

A domain-specific language for encoding legal interpretations.

The 1747 book Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess, is remembered as the first book to suggest the idea of the welfare state.

—Dan Allosso

https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/14/the-dawn-of-everything-part-1/

A partial review and summary of The Dawn of Everything.

Worth coming back to review over the commentary later.

It is a pagan holiday celebrated on the night of June 23rd and on the day of June 24th. It celebrates the incoming summer season and the commemoration of St. Johns. The day is marked with singing, dancing and making bonfires. It is also associated with supernatural appearances.

It is a pagan holiday celebrated on the night of June 23rd and on the day of June 24th. It celebrates the incoming summer season and the commemoration of St. Johns. The day is marked with singing, dancing and making bonfires. It is also associated with supernatural appearances.

He was Greek warrior who was known for many feats including the killing of the minotaur, a mythical monster. There are many accounts of how his marriage to Hippolyta came to be. The following sources might have influenced Shakespeare narration of the popular story.

Link 1: Plutarch's biographical narrations (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14033/pg14033-images.html#LIFE_OF_PLUTARCH). During the Amazonian war, Hippolyta was influential in brokering, peace between the Athenians and her people. She was set to marry him but died on the battlefield.

1. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream: Texts and Contexts, edited by Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard, Bedford/St. Martins, 1999

Christine De Pizan (1405 - 1521), wrote a popular text about how women should conduct themselves. She also wrote on the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta. In her version, Theseus ambushed the Amazonians because they were afraid of their influence. On the battle field, Theseus saw Hippolyta and kidnapped her. In order to bring peace, the queen, Orythia, allowed Theseus to marry Hippolyta. Hisotry

The Mamertines were Roman mercenaries who settled in Messana before the Punic Wars. Messana is on the corner of Sicily closest to the "toe" of Italy.

The Claudii Marcelli, a branch of the Claudian patrician gens. M. Claudius Marcellus recaptured a lot of Sicily and Italy from Hannibal in the 3rd c. BCE, which is why there are statues of him all over Sicily. Cicero gave a defense speech of a Marcus Marcellus in 46 BCE (he had two brothers, all high achievers in politics). Another M. Marcellus was briefly Augustus' heir (he was Augustus' sister Octavia's son) before his untimely death in 23 BCE.

Reference that discusses calculating machines and information processors.

With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.

aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories

In order to become a free-standing tool, the card index needed to have self-referential closure.

This may have been one of the necessary steps for the early ideas behind computers. In addition to the idea of a clockwork universe, the index card may have been a step towards early efforts at creating the modern computer.

This is what I have been arguing all along as I've been doing my research as well.

https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.alumni.jhu.edu/article/837669

Institute of Intellectual History University of St Andrews, Scotland started under Richard Whatmore

https://publish.obsidian.md/danallosso/Bloggish/Actual+Books

I've often heard the phrase, usually in historical settings, "little book" as well and presupposed it to be a diminutive describing the ideas. I appreciate that Dan Allosso points out here that the phrase may describe the book itself and that the fact that it's small means that it can be more easily carried and concealed.

There's also something much more heartwarming about a book as a concealed weapon (from an intellectual perspective) than a gun or knife.

General Historical Context

During the Great Migration (1910–1920), African Americans by the thousands moved into industrial cities to find work and later to fill labor shortages produced by World War I. Though they continued to face exclusion and discrimination in employment, as well as segregation in schools and public accommodations, there were fewer barriers with voting for Northern African American men.

In the 1920s there was a migration of Black Americans from the rural South to urban North which generated an African American cultural renaissance that was named after the popular NYC neighborhood Harlem but spread north and west. This movement marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics paid attention to African American literature, music, art, and politics. This is where this revolutionary black poetry began. Unfortunately, emerging black writers relied heavily on white-owned publications and publishing houses. With the beginning of the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance died down as African American organizations became focused on the economic and political hardships this minority group now faced; however, the renaissance created opportunities and opened doors for a newfound Black culture around the world.

Maya Angelou, born in 1928, lived through some of the worst oppression and inequality for African Americans. World War Two was occurring during her teenage years. Throughout the time of the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the term “Four Freedoms” which included freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear; despite being eager to fight, African Americans lacked these freedoms while residing in the US. Although slavery had been long abolished, Angelou saw its effects on society and the African American people which led to her inspirational writing and attributes to the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement - which occurred mainly during the 1950s and 1960s - was a social justice movement advocating for equal rights for the African American community. The effects of slavery still pursued post Civil War as African Americans continued to face discrimination, prejudice, violence, and racism. Mass demonstrations, televised racial violence, and the desegregation of segregated institutions alongside works of literature, art, and other cultural expressions as a part of the movement led to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act involved the government much more in the civil rights sector as it eliminated tactics to limit voting, assured racial and religious minorities equal access to public accommodations, prohibited job discrimination, strengthened the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and initiated the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

To explore this movement in more detail, visit the Civil Rights Movement informational site.

"History's shame" could be interpreted as an understatement. Slavery generated extensive suffering through tearing apart families, destroying the spirits of African people, and many died. The effects still present today - seen with some still prevalent racist beliefs - demonstrate that slavery changed the course of American history.

To view more about the history during this time period and how Maya Angelou impacted this crucial era of American history, view the Historical Context page note.

When talking about her ancestors, Angelou is referring to her great grandmother who was a slave (and passed away in 1942). By saying she is the dream, Angelou is attempting to set an example for others of her race in regards to rising above hard situations. Her goal with her work is to inspire change. She is demanding that society leave behind the negative effects of slavery and history of oppression with intent to rise above.

Shown through her later works, Angelou's great success with not only poetry, but other aspects of American culture. being a poet of presidents, civil rights activist, filmmaker, actor, dancer, and above all educator. She was the first of many special experiences for the African American community; for instance, she served as the first black female street car driver in San Francisco, she wrote the first script by a black woman to be made into a Hollywood film, and her best-selling, award-winning autobiographical book (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) was one of the first ever written by an African American woman to generate widespread readership. Overall successful in her rise above the deep-rooted racist American beliefs as she played a major role in the civil rights movement.

Referencing her personal experiences, she hopes to distance from the bad memories inflicted upon her and her community - leaving behind her race and moving towards equality. Specifically talking about the abuse that she endured as a child, but generally talking about the pain that African Americans were subjected to as a community. She will not let these events bring her down even if the whole world believes she should.

Another set of rhetorical questions, Angelou is painting a picture of defeat. Being direct and pertinent, she is accusing the oppressor for their actions. She is aware that her success is received with bitterness by the racist society. A few interpretations can be drawn from this stanza. This may literally be a picture of a slave who was abused and she is referring to a broken person. But it can also be taken as a person with a broken spirit as this poem is an autobiography. When Angelou was a young child, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and informed of his death after he was murdered soon after; the traumatic series of events led her to be almost completely mute for several years. This interpretation can be of her broken heart and broken spirit from those traumatic childhood experiences. Finally, a general interpretation applies this brokenness and defeat from challenge as an experience that everyone can undergo throughout their life - making it relatable and applicable to the general public, or someone who is experiencing similar despair.

With this poem, Angelou's goal is to try and highlight the past wrongs and present realities of oppressed minority groups, specifically African Americans. Here, she is directly referencing the long history that this group of people has with slavery. To explore more behind the extensive history of oppression, check out this timeline for Slavery in America.

Angelou is referring to biased literature, opinions, beliefs, etc. that were one-sided and dated. Born in 1928, Angelou was subjected to live through some of the worst oppression and inequality for people of color over the course of her lifetime. Although slavery had been abolished in 1865 following the ratification of the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, she continued to experience its harmful and strong-willed effects on society and the African American people almost a century later. Using writing as an outlet for activism, Angelou and many other colored poets contributed to the great social and political gains for this group with the civil rights movement.

Edgerton (2008) - The shock of the old

• https://is.gd/cfQ0Yt
• urn:x-pdf:ba1c8b150da6a972816a7ef5b0945482

This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?

Which direction gives rise to more complexity?

sources for Anecdotal writing to history fiction

Αυτα ειναι από τα ουσιώδη κατορθώματα της Αντιστασης στην Γεμρανική Κατοχή.

Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, in 1653, completes the basic idea of an excerpt collection as an ordering of paper slips in a physical box in alphabetic order.

1. Placcius 1689, p. 72.

Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge as well as a history of the subject.

In the book, he warns specifically against the loose form of indexing exhibited by Joachim Jungius. (p72)

The first card catalogue dates to Vienna around 1780.

Insightful infos why industrial revolution was ver far away from the ancient world.

Please be warned: a friend noticed some very insensitive language I had forgotten about entirely. I've chosen to leave it since this website should not be surfaced in any discovery engines beyond NeoCities... Hoping that isn't a stupid idea.

These are the big stops of capitalism during 20th century and beyond:

• 1933: Roosvelt nationalized the gold from the private banks
• 19171: Nixon dismantled [[Bretton Woods]]
• 2007-2020: Lehman Brothers & #Covid19 crisis consolidated international capital

Did I ever really find this man intelligent??? Things sincerely do make a lot more sense now. Such a specific lack of aspiration.

This may prove an interesting perspective given my own desire to explore some of the same sorts of dynamics in Celtic texts at the border of orality and literacy in the early centuries of the common era.

This looks interesting with respect to the flows of the history of commonplace books.

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England by Megan Heffernan

https://site.pennpress.org/material-texts-2021/9780812236422/textual-situations/

This looks interesting for a later time...

Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers by Andrew Taylor

Generations of scholars have meditated upon the literary devices and cultural meanings of The Song of Roland. But according to Andrew Taylor not enough attention has been given to the physical context of the manuscript itself. The original copy of The Song of Roland is actually bound with a Latin translation of the Timaeus.

Textual Situations looks at this bound volume along with two other similarly bound medieval volumes to explore the manuscripts and marginalia that have been cast into shadow by the fame of adjacent texts, some of the most read medieval works. In addition to the bound volume that contains The Song of Roland, Taylor examines the volume that binds the well-known poem "Sumer is icumen in" with the Lais of Marie de France, and a volume containing the legal Decretals of Gregory IX with marginal illustrations of wayfaring life decorating its borders.

Approaching the manuscript as artifact, Textual Situations suggests that medieval texts must be examined in terms of their material support—that is, literal interpretation must take into consideration the physical manuscript itself in addition to the social conventions that surround its compilation. Taylor reconstructs the circumstances of the creation of these medieval bound volumes, the settings in which they were read, inscribed, and shared, and the social and intellectual conventions surrounding them.

THIS IS LITERALLY THE ANSWER TO SEARCH.

Just… FYI.

All you need to do is give users more control.

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

This would be nice to turn into a science lesson or to represent this in an experiential, participatory Deep Humanity BEing Journey. To do this, it would be important to elucidate the series of steps leading from one stated result to the next, showing how scientific methodology works to link the series of interconnected ideas together. Especially important is the science that glues everything together over deep time.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/historians-reaction-to-history-of

Interesting to watch Dan Allosso watch this video and see which parts he responded to.

There are definitely some nice stopping off points in this overview which may make for some useful research for viewers. It also highlights in its negative spaces and non sequiturs areas which need more research and study to be better understood by historians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs

That sure went by fast.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dan Allosso </span> in Historian's Reaction to "History of the Entire World I Guess" - by Dan Allosso - MakingHistory (<time class='dt-published'>11/10/2021 10:49:46</time>)</cite></small>

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/help-me-find-world-history-textbooks

Dan Allosso is curious to look at the history of how history is taught.

The history of teaching history is a fascinating topic and is an interesting way for cultural anthropologists to look at how we look at ourselves as well as to reveal subtle ideas about who we want to become.

This is particularly interesting with respect to teaching cultural identity and its relationship to nationalism.

One could look at the history of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War to see how the South continued its cultural split from the North (or in more subtle subsections from Colin Woodard's American Nations thesis) to see how this has played out. This could also be compared to the current culture wars taking place with the rise of nationalism within the American political right and the Southern evangelicals which has come to a fervor with the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Other examples are the major shifts in nationalism after the "long 19th century" which resulted in World War I and World War II and Germany's national identity post WWII.

I've seen/heard several articles about Narendra Modi and the BJP rewriting history in India over the past several years.

Examples include:

• https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture/ 2018-03-06
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/01/indias-new-textbooks-are-promoting-the-prime-ministers-favorite-policies-critics-allege/ 2018-06-01
• https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/11/16/bjp-has-been-effective-in-transmitting-its-version-of-indian-history-to-next-generation-of-learners-pub-80373 2019-11-16

Methods for attacking a research problem about history used here:

• Web research
• Journal database research
• Zotero reference manager stub
• Research Rabbit (AI search)
• Reach out on various social media channels

Not mentioned, but perhaps useful:

• Standard library search (WorldCat)
• Internet Archive search (scanned historical textbooks)
• Off-label and dark web services (Library Genesis, Pirate Bay, etc.)
• Open access and OER sources (this will probably find newer perspectives and newer texts which sometimes have philosophical outlines of what they're trying to change for the future versus the pedagogies of the past)
• Current curricula and recommended textbooks at major universities on particular books and potential comparisons to those of the past (perhaps via Internet Archive).

What evidence was given for this identification of Homer and Aristotle?

The author's hierarchical tags are delimited by dashes(-). I do it by dots(.). That's a convention we have to decide.

Ted Nelson's history & image of his vision.,

Contains the visions fro the pioneers on the field.

Shortcomings of today's WWWeb in comparison to what Xanadu has visioned.

Internet history x10 slides, from 1945, 1963, 1989, ..

Πολυ ωραια περιγραφη πως και γιατι επιτιθονται στη Μεταπολιτευση.

Εμπορικό έλλειμα: x3

Μεγα-σκανδαλα της Χούντας (περα των σαπιων κρεάτων).

Εξωφρενικές Φοροαπαλαγες σε Εφοπλιστες.

Χρέος: ~x3

Η Δεξιά ειναι ριζωμένη στα μυαλά των ανθρώπων, οπως φαινεται από ΌΛΕΣ τις εκλογικές αναμετρήσεις μέχρι σήμερα.

Απλή συμβουλή από καποιον που δομικαστηκε στη δυσκλία της Δικτατορίας: don't stop!

Σημαντική διαπίστωση, πως ο φοβος ενυπαρχει ακόμα στους Αριστερούς εν Ελλαδι, από καποια που εζησε τη Χούντα.

Η Χούντα γεννησε τη Μεσαία Ταξη στη Ελλάδα!!??!

Ιστορική ακροβασία ξεπλύματος των χουντικών από τις λίγες!

3η εξωφρενική προταση-ξεπλυμα της Χούντας.

Εντυπωσιακό ξεπλυμα της Χούντας νο 2.

Ειναι εκτός τόπο και χρόνου με τη Ελληνική πραγματικότητα ο ξενοτραφής καθηγητής.

406εκ σκανδαλο με δωρεές πιστών και πολιτών φαγανε τα λαμόγια της Χούντας.

This documentary speaks a lot, not only about the Greeks, but also about its creators!

• 12:40: "the communists had destroyed Papandreou's 1st government ..."

  Talks about the Dekemvriana, where on 3rdof December 1944, 3 months after the country had been liberated from Germans, the police gendarmes under Papandreou's government and backed by British troops and Nazi collaborationists killed 100's of unarmed demonstrators in front of the parliament, signalling the start of the White Terror against the anti-Nazi warriors - most of them from the Left.

• 19:20: "The MPs are the surgeons, that must cure the victims of a broken down bureaucracy, and a society that has outgrown most of its institutions"

  Again, no mention of the fact that this system was established by foreign powers (UK and then US) against the will of the people after WWII.<br> While DURING THE WARR, people of Greec had elected and run their own government (ΠΕΕΑ), running liberated parts of the country. The members of that government had been motivated and worked with unselfishness for the benefit of the people, had even constituted the legality of female voting, and had built roads and communication networks, all while the Nazi still occupied Greece. That was the "Pillars of Greece" that the British had to bring down in order to establish the loyalist government of Papandreou and subsequent conservative governments.

• 12:40: one of the rare moments where the newspaper mogul Ελενη Βλαχου talks to the camera. Her opinion apears twice in this documentary, signifying her unconstitutional power ove Greece at that time.

• 28:00: the greek elites were already accusing the people they were suspicious that their government worked against them...which was, of course, pretty true. Very few cases of pro-people decisions had been made till the documentary was filmed, and most conservative politicians had been starving for more and more power, in the hope that this will transform into wealth.

• 36:00: shameless propaganda for private education (Doxiadis's university) - nowdays nobody remebers this institute ever existed.

• 45:30: again, resignation of A.Papandreou's is given out-of-the-blue: it was the palace that accused him and a bunch of high-ranking generals of plotting to establish a communist dictatorship in Greece. A false accusation that led to the Junta, after 3 years of king's puppet-governments. But it was not not the King this time, but the CIA-led Colonels who did the Coup d'état.

Αδικαίωτοι (καθηγητές αυτή τη φορά) παντου, η κληρονομιά της κυριαρχίας της Δεξιάς στην Ελλάδα ειναι μια συνεχής καταφρόνηση οσων πολεμησαν τη Γερμανία.

Apparently Yuval Harari didn't footnote very well as this idea is directly from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel which predated Harari's book.

Where exactly do we situate note taking? Certainly within the space of rhetoric, but also as Ann M. Blair suggests within the history of reading.

What else? manuscript studies, psychology, others?

[[Antonin Sertillanges]]' book ''The Intellectual Life'' is published in 1918 in which he outlines in chapter 7 the broad strokes a version of the zettelkasten method, though writing in French he doesn't use the German name or give the method a specific name.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Antonin |first1=Sertillanges |author-link1= Antonin_Sertillanges |title=The Intellectual Life: Its Sprit, Conditions, Methods |date=1960 |publisher=The Newman Press |location=Westminster, Maryland |translator-last1= Ryan |translator-first1= Mary |translator-link1= |pages=186-198 |edition=fifth printing |language=English}}</ref> The book was published in French, Italian, and English in more than 50 editions over the span of 40 years. In it, Sertillanges recommends taking notes on slips of "strong paper of a uniform size" either self made with a paper cutter or by "special firms that will spare you the trouble, providing slips of every size and color as well as the necessary boxes and accessories." He also recommends a "certain number of tagged slips, guide-cards, so as to number each category visibly after having numbered each slip, in the corner or in the middle." He goes on to suggest creating a catalog or index of subjects with division and subdivisions and recommends the "very ingenious system", the decimal system, for organizing one's research. For the details of this refers the reader to ''Organization of intellectual work: practical recipes for use by students of all faculties and workers'' by {{interlanguage link|Paul Chavigny|fr}}<ref>{{cite book |last1=Chavigny |first1=Paul |title=Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l'usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs |date=1918 |publisher=Delagrave |language=French}}</ref>. Sertillanges recommends against the previous patterns seen with commonplace books where one does note taking in books or on slips of paper which might be pasted into books as they don't "easily allow classification" or "readily lend themselves to use at the moment of writing."

A Theory of Change

How did we get here?

Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.

It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.

Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59

Reimagining our social architecture might begin with rethinking our past and origins as a species.

The Doctrine of Discovery

Since the Doctrine of Discovery was issued by a Papal Bull in 1493, Western Europeans have used this document as legal justification for the genocide, colonization, extraction, and profit from the theft of land and its resources in what they called the New World.

Design for the Real World

by Victor Papanek

Papanek on the Bauhaus

Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

(Pages 30-31)

This is a powerful example that class consciousness and class fears have driven the building of America since its inception.

It's been built into our DNA and thus will be difficult to ever stamp out fully so that people will enjoy greater equality, equity, and freedom.

elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.

The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not "natural."

Referenced by: https://www.reddit.com/r/texashistory/comments/pxtfpn/this_photo_shows_four_men_who_were_reportedly_a/

Dolgin, Elie. ‘The Tangled History of MRNA Vaccines’. Nature 597, no. 7876 (14 September 2021): 318–24. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02483-w.

Davies, A., Seaton, A., Tonooka, C., & White, J. (2021). Covid-19, online workshops, and the future of intellectual exchange. Rethinking History, 25(2), 224–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2021.1934290

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunhjmtxtg6KlCOVpHGKbqUzW-Y/edit#gid=0

Hypothes.is Historical Survey of Annotation Efforts

Michael Hudson's thesis, apparently with nods to Babylonian history of the jubilee, is that without a way to escape the burden of debt, all productive labor becomes captured by servicing debt and causes economies to grind to a halt.

With this description, I want to read Michael Hudson's work.

Indeed, alt-right is a radical movement (hence the danger if we let it uncontested).

Το παρελθόν μας το επινούμε συνεχώς, όσο παραμενουμε ζωντανοί.

The great epidemic of the second century, which is sometimes referred to as the “Plague of Galen,” first struck the army of Verus, while campaigning in the East in 165 A.D.,

Semeia 56: Social Networks in Early Christian Environment: Issues and Methods for Social History

early book prototypes

Told from this perspective and with the knowledge of the importance of the theory of First Effective Settlement, is it any wonder that America has grown up to be so heavily influenced by moral and mental depravity, over-influenced by capitalism and religion, ready to enslave others, and push vice and drugs? The founding Virginians are truly America in miniature.

Cross reference: Theory of First Effective Settlement

“Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” “Thus, in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later.” — Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 13–14.

this time.

I do not wish to argue how far the change was due to the spread of clocks from the fourteenth century onwards, how far this was itself a symptom of a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude.

For some history of the importance of time with relation to naval navigation and trade, see: Sobel, Dava (1995). Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker and Company.

I've been wanting to read Zinn, so perhaps this is a good place to follow along? A sort of pseudo book club perhaps?

It's interesting to see Dan struggle with an obvious listicle article in Forbes as an authoritative source. This example is a great indicator that Forbes online has created far too much of a content farm to be taken seriously anymore. From what I've seen of it over the past several years it's followed the business model of The Huffington Post before Huffington sold it and cashed out. My supposition is that Forbes is providing a platform for people to get reach and isn't actually paying those writers to create their content.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States

• Covering a chapter a week
• companion edition, Voices of People's History of United States by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnov
• Erik Foner's article about Zinn
• Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism by E. P. Thompson *
• cultural theorist Raymond Williams' idea of resources of hope
  • Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism by Raymond Williams
• An Indigenous People's History of the United States

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlnYt9NOUAw

Nietzche's three types of historians:

• monumental
• antiquarian
• critical

Transactive memory is how a group encodes, stores, and shares knowledge. Members of a group may be aware of the portions of knowledge that others possess which can make them more efficient.

How can we link this to Cesar Hidalgo's ideas about the personbyte, etc.?

How would this idea have potentially helped oral cultures?

She uses the example of a trauma resuscitation team helping to shorten hospital stays, but certainly there are many examples in the corporate world where corporate knowledge is helpful in decreasing time scales for particular outcomes.

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/

what an aphorism for our time!

How might we compare/contrast the ideas behind this with Alex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories?

https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/who-were-the-black-irish

This idea of past flory is spread among present-day Greeks.

Scott Sampson has argued that we should subjectify nature rather than objectifying it. People are a part of nature and integral to it. We are not separate from it and we are assuredly not above it.

Can the injection of multi-disciplinary research and areas like big history help us to see the bigger picture? How have indigenous and oral cultures managed to do so much better than us at this? Is it the way we've done science in the past? Is it our political structures?

---Paul Lockhart

This is a great list of book types, genres, etc.

https://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/2020/05/28/teaching-the-slave-ship/

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/medieval-notepads

In a version similar to a footnote, a line and a dot were first used much as we use the carot symbol (^) today for editing to indicate the insertion of a missing line.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/finding-books

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/smart-bookmarks

Register bookmark

Τα φασιστικά κόμματα στηρίχθηκαν από τους βιομηχάνους.