Είτε ξεπλένει τη χούντα (18/6/2017) είτε το προδικτατορικό «λεγόμενο παρακράτος» (7/3/2021)

προβληματική καταμέτρηση των εκατέρωθεν θυμάτων σε 57 όλα κι όλα χωριά της άκρως συντηρητικής Αργολίδας, σε ενάμισι μόνο από τα τέσσερα χρόνια της Κατοχής.

The internet is not the first promising technology to have quickly turned dystopian. In the early 20th century, radio was greeted with as much enthusiasm as the internet was in the early 21st. Radio will “fuse together all mankind” wrote Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian futurist poet, in the 1920s. Radio would connect people, end war, promote peace!Almost immediately, a generation of authoritarians learned how to use radio for hate propaganda and social control. In the Soviet Union, radio speakers in apartments and on street corners blared Communist agitprop. The Nazis introduced the Volksempfänger, a cheap wireless radio, to broadcast Hitler’s speeches; in the 1930s, Germany had more radios per capita than anywhere else in the world.** In America, the new information sphere was taken over not by the state but by private media companies chasing ratings—and one of the best ways to get ratings was to promote hatred. Every week, more than 30 million would tune in to the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit priest who eventually turned against American democracy itself.

από το να μνημονεύουμε απλά τους ήρωες, να εξαίρουμε τα κατορθώματά τους και να εκφωνούμε πανηγυρικούς.

Για ν’ απελευθερωθούν οι άνθρωποι απ’ τα πολιτικά δεσμά, πρέπει ν’ απελευθερωθούν πρώτα απ’ τα πνευματικά τους δεσμά.

Πως κανένας σημαντικός εθνικός στόχος και καμιά εθνική υπόθεση δεν μπορούν να κερδηθούν δίχως να κερδηθεί και η διεθνής κοινή γνώμη, δίχως να πειστεί για τον δίκαιο χαρακτήρα τους, δίχως τελικά να οικοδομηθούν κάποιες διεθνείς συμμαχίες.

Το αποδεικνύουν οι πολιτικές εξεγέρσεις όπως αυτή του 1843 για την καθιέρωση του Συντάγματος ή εκείνη του 1862 που οδήγησε στην έξωση του Οθωνα. Το μαρτυρά με τον πλέον εκκωφαντικό τρόπο η εξαιρετικά πρωτοπόρα για την εποχή, σε σχέση με το διεθνές πλαίσιο, de facto καθιέρωση του καθολικού εκλογικού δικαιώματος (για τους άνδρες) στη χώρα μας ήδη από το 1844, κάτι που θα κατοχυρωθεί και συνταγματικά δύο δεκαετίες αργότερα. Το υπενθυμίζουν και ορισμένες άλλες θεσμικές αποτυπώσεις, όπως η καθιέρωση της Αρχής της Δεδηλωμένης το 1875, καθώς και κοινωνικές μεταρρυθμίσεις όπως η διανομή των εθνικών γαιών σε ακτήμονες το 1871.

«Οι Μοραΐτες ελύσαξαν από τα πολλά πλούτη, τα οποία ήρπασαν από τους Τούρκους της Τριπολιτσάς, του Ναυπλίου, του Λάλα, της Κορίνθου, της Μονεμβασιάς, του Νεοκάστρου και των λοιπών μερών και έγιναν ντερμπέηδες και προσπαθούν να αντικαταστήσουν τον Κιαμήλ Μπέη και τους λοιπούς μπέηδες και αγάδες. Και εσείς τρέχετε αυτού, χωρίς ψωμί, χωρίς τσαρούχι, χωρίς φορέματα, με μια παλιοκάπα, καταβασίνεζσθε. Τι λοιπόν περιμένετε; Άλλην αρμοδιωτέραν και ευτυχεστέραν δια σας περίστασιν δεν θέλει εύρητε ποτέ δια να πλουτίσετε μικροί και μεγάλοι. Τώρα άνοιξαν δια εσάς δυο πηγαί πλούτου, οι λίρες του δανείου και τα πλούσια λάφυρα του Μωρέως. Τι άλλο πλέον επιθυμείτε;»  Την επιστολή τη μάθαμε, εμείς οι νεοέλ

δρα μετά με τρόπο βλαπτικό για αυτήν

As the Victoria and Albert Museum present in A History of Computer Art,

Milton Eisenhower Justifies the Internment of Japanese Americans

But after Lenin's death in 1923, says Wolff, Stalin short-circuited those plans by simply declaring the Soviet Union a communist-socialist state.

στην πορεία υπέστησαν πολλά βασανιστήρια  απειλές, ξυλοδαρμούς

he Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway talks about the possibility of networks. While the Facebook of 2021 strings us out along a spectrum and pushes us to either end, Haraway’s conception of a network in 1985 is “the profusion of space and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic.” I

Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software (currently a set of Debian packages)[2] that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand

It’s grand larceny and, as usual, what is being stolen is power.

David Wiley

In history, for example, he told me, “history was taught from the perspective that America was wrong – and always wrong and … uniquely evil, uniquely pernicious, never ever morally right, never ever justified in any decision that we ever made.”

He was so deeply offended and concerned by the notion that somehow it was America’s fault that a group of radical, violent Islamist terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans that it opened his eyes to the indoctrination that was happening in his classes.

He is seriously concerned – as many of us are – about the destructive repercussions of identity politics, the censorship of dissenting opinion, and the rewriting of American history.

With the introduction of CPUs which ran faster than the original 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 used in the IBM Personal Computer, programs which relied on the CPU's frequency for timing were executing faster than intended. Games in particular were often rendered unplayable. To provide some compatibility, the "turbo" button was added. Engaging turbo mode slows the system down to a state compatible with original 8086/8088 chips.

Extropians and other early transhumanists also had a longstandinginterest in self-historicisation. Theyseemed to have a feeling that what they were doing at the time was important and that one day people would want to know about it.

In retrospect, such a meme, then all in fun,now seems to pose a significant PR problem for transhumanists. Despite their youthfully optimistic parties and wordplay, extropianism always had a serious and strongly academic side and, over time, in keeping with its principle of self-transformation, the handshakes and the outfits fell away. This is perhaps part of the reason that some former extropians and early transhumanists, who remain active transhumanists today, rarely mention Machado and her antics when reflecting on the early days of transhumanism.

Marvin Minskysaid of the extropians, with whom he often associated,“they’re extremists... but that’s the way you get good ideas.”

These ideals were first promoted by The Church of Venturism, which was founded in 1986. However, the ‘Church,’ which promoted rational thinking and decried mysticism, soon changed itsname tothe Society for Venturism.

To all this, the extropians said no. There is more to come, and better things lie on the horizon. Evolution mandates change, and “in the long run the positive potentials for intelligent beings are virtually limitless.” Believing that they were theagents of their own destiny, extropians aimed to be catalysts for progressive change, adopting “a positive, dynamic, empowering attitude,” while rejecting, “gloom, defeatism, and the typical focus on the negatives.”

Extropymag was one of the two main mediums in which extropian ideas were circulated—the other was, of course, the Internet. The first issue of Extropyin 1988 had a print run of 50 and interest was scant. Speaking about the first editions, More recalls, “we basically forced them on people.”444By 1992,the editors were churning out 750 copies,445and in the subsequent Winter/Spring edition of 1993, the output more than trebled to 2,500.446In 1992 a separate newsletter, Exponent, was launched and circulated bi-monthly, and in 1993 Extropywas printed in colour for the first time. By 1995, the print run per issue was 4,500.447Althoughthese are ultimately small print numbers, every increase was seen by Extropy’s founding editors as an important milestone in the pursuit of what More referred to as the “inexorable advance”448of extropianism.

While still a student at MIT, a young Eric Drexler met O’Neill, for whom he worked as a research assistantat Princeton in the summer of 1974, funded by the wealthy patron and influential space colonisation spokeswoman, Barbara Marx Hubbard(another devotee of Teilhard’s ideas).408Drexler“went on to develop plans for lunar factories, solar sails, and methods to mine asteroids for mineral resources” and “was one of the L5 Society’s most articulate and vocal advocates for an expanded human presence in space.”409Butby the late 70s,Drexler began to turn his attentionto a new concept, nanotechnology, which fed into the space colonisation dream, but also broadened the emphasis of the L5 space-age, human potential movement, into something that underpinned cryonics and life-extensionist ambitions,and other facets of what later became a distinctly transhumanist vision of the future.

Although Haldaneobserved thatthe progress of science had been staggeringly rapid in the last hundred and forty years, he considered it, “quite as likely as not that scientific research may ultimately bestrangled in some such way as this before mankind has learned to control its own evolution.”

It may be urged that they are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was the son of the leading Scottish physiologist, John Scott Haldane, from whom J.B.S. learned “the fundamentals of science,”an education that began very early in his life.Throughout the younger Haldane’s youth, the pair undertook many “legendary and daring physiological experiments,”

Teilhard consistentlyargued that,“the main movement in the universe has been, and is, a groping towards consciousness.”262Evolution, in hisview, exhibits a tendency towards increasing complexity and “cerebralisation.”263To date, this process has resulted in the emergence of humans, highly complex creatures thathave in turn given rise to a new “‘thinking layer,’” or noosphere—the complex web of collective thought and technologies that have dramatically extended humanity’s reach within the biosphere.264

The most impressive, I might say startling, of these changes have been brought about in the course of the last two centuries; while a right comprehension of the process of life and of the means of influencing its manifestations is only just dawning upon us.

TheIndustrial Revolution isthe first strong historical analog for the modern phenomenonof a quantum leap in human progress, resulting in radically altered ways of life in a short span of time.

Αυτή η ανισορροπία δεν θα κατορθώσει να συνεχιστεί, εκτός αν η Ευρώπη γίνει ένα αστυνομοκρατούμενο φρούριο.

η Eλλάδα θα γίνει ένα τουριστικό ξενοδοχείο ας πούμε. Tα σημαντικά πράγματα θα πέσουν στα χέρια ξένων εταιριών, οι Έλληνες θα είναι διευθυντές ξενοδοχείων και γκαρσόνια, χορευτές στα καμπαρέ κ.λπ.

Ενόψει μιας παγκόσμιας οικολογικής καταστροφής, παραδείγματος χάριν, κάποιος/κάποια μπορεί πολύ εύκολα να δει αυταρχικά καθεστώτα να επιβάλλουν  δρακόντειους περιορισμούς σε έναν πανικόβλητο και απαθή πληθυσμό.

Το να πούμε, όπως λέχθηκε απ’ όσους υπέγραψαν την «Έκκληση της Χαϊλδεβέργης» (την οποία, από την πλευρά μου, μάλλον θα ονόμαζα Έκκληση της Νυρεμβέργης), ότι η επιστήμη και μόνο η επιστήμη μπορεί να λύσει όλα τα προβλήματα, είναι αποκαρδιωτικό.

lynched just by looking

Skinner’s reinforcement theory was used to create carefully constructed self­-instructional materials

Was it not too much, to combine the vaccines for three different illnesses at once? Was there a chance Tobie could get these diseases from the vaccines themselves? Given that he was premature, given that he was so tiny, wouldn’t the vaccines be even harder for him to take than they’d be for a full-term baby? Why immunize him against diseases that we no longer see? If vaccines were as good as doctors seemed to think they were, why were there so many websites warning against them?

“Often the first question that I address with parents is: What’s your opinion about vaccines for your baby?” he said. “What do you think?”

Ah, the old advertising games... It's kind of hard to explain for new generation of players, but back in the days we had games fully dedicated to certain brands. And they wanted us to pay for them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about games like Zool and Biker Mice from Mars that used to include excessive product placement. Even some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games had it. I'm talking about games that were created solely to promote a certain brand. Like Pepsiman, where we played as that weird Pepsi mascot, or Avoid the Noid with the scary bunny-like... creature from Domino's (there was actually another game about him, but it was just a “hack” of somewhat popular Famicom game Kamen no Ninja: Hanamaru). Like I've said, it's kind of hard to explain, but back in the days, kids were less sarcastic, while Ads were... well, a bit more than just Ads.With no Internet, with TV being way more than it's today and with way, WAY less rules applied (because SEGA does what Nintendon't), Ads were more than just that annoying thing that interrupts Rhett and Link on YouTube. Those were almost art on their own. And the perfect scenario for a brand was to create the mascots so cool that everybody would want to buy merchandise with it. I mean, aside from the main product. Like, everybody loves Cap'n Crunch (huge fan here). But would you also pay for a PEZ dispenser with the man? Would you like a T-shirt? That's how it worked back in the days. And with video games starting to recover from large-scale recession of early 80s, when crappy products like Pepsi Invaders almost killed the entire market, we've got ourselves advertising games... that were actually quite good.Believe it, or not, but the games about 7-Up's Spot, Cheetos' Chester Cheetah and even McDonald's Ronald McDonald were actually pretty solid. And sometimes there were even games that tried to achieve more than that. From a fourth generation platformer with kickass soundtrack called Global Gladiators that used to include McDonald's kids Mick and Mack (previously included in the game called MC Kids, which wasn't as good) to a weird 3D action game called Darkened Skye, which featured magic system based on Skittles. Let's just say that advertising games were not as simple as you may think. And this one? Not only it's my most favorite game of the kind, it's, like, one of my most favorite puzzle games... ever. Together with The Incredible Machines, Supaplex and so on. It's that good.First of all, Pushover is a game that was made to promote a popular British snack Quavers (they're so curly!). Quavers are the curly potato puffs and their mascot, Colin Curly... just lost all of them. So, as Colin's ant friend, we need to go down through the ant hill to some caves (because reasons) and get them back. That's pretty much all the background we've got here. Nothing big, nothing really interesting, but... it doesn't matter. Like... at all. The thing is – Pushover is an action puzzle game, the story doesn't really matter in that genre, while gameplay-wise... well, like I've said, this game is totally awesome.Long story short, Pushover is all about the domino effect. You push (hence the title) one block and watch the others falling. Naturally, your goal is to drop all the blocks on level during the limited amount of time. After that, you'll be able to exit the current level and get the password for the next one. Which will be very useful, since the game comes with the whooping 100 levels, some of which will be pretty tricky. Sounds pretty dull, though, can't argue with that. I mean, who cares about domino, right? Pushing blocks on 100 levels... sounds boring, right? But it's not that simple.See, there are ten different types of blocks in this game. All with their own unique properties. And trying to figure out how to drop all blocks on the levels with just a couple of pushes? It's just fun. Very, very fun. So fun that I actually love this game more than Lemmings. And everybody knows just how fun Lemmings game is. Pushover is just... well, it's hard to explain, but it's one of those games, which just “click”. It's one of those games, in which “stars” aligned perfectly. Controls are simple enough, the puzzles are very interesting and tricky (but not too tricky to make you feel bad), the graphics is very cute, the sound has that awesome “Sound Blaster” feeling... Pushover is just one of those games that you can't stop playing. 28 years later? I still can't get enough of it. And it's not just me. Even though the game was ported to quite a lot of systems (there was even SNES version with all Quavers Ads completely removed), there was a fan-made remake released in 2006. Guess, it says something.What we have here is a 100% original (not remade) DOS version (runs through DOSBox), but guess what? No complains here. Even though very often Amiga versions had better music, Pushover was not one of such games (I totally prefer the DOS sound), while all “big three” versions (Amiga, Atari ST and DOS) look almost identical and I'm not a big fan of those “filters” from fan-made remake. I mean... it's pretty cool version and stuff, but... there's nothing like the original.So, yeah. I can't recommend this game enough. Pushover is charming, cute, smart and extremely addicting puzzle game from early nineties. You like games like Lemmings, Bomberman, Wrecking Crew and so on? You should totally check this one out. Like the original Goonies (which also got fan-made remake, by the way), this game is a forgotten gem from the past. It's in my Steam favorites and it'll stay there forever. I love it that much. Dixi.

Twitter threads gave illness a name and a face, grounding the dread in particular bodies and disparate — if often overlapping — experiences. They placed these experiences in history, creating an archive of disease, fear, rage, and hope that will persist even as these feelings — and some of these people — have passed.

He attended naval college as a teenager and served in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force during the First World War.

Godwin wasn’t convinced. Hiscounterargument, neatly summarised by Porter, was that “such a threat would be averted by the simultaneous withering away of sexual desires—a proposal which notoriously reduced Malthus to guffaws.”

Another thinkerof the period, whose life also extended into the nineteenth century,was the British philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin was the father of Mary Shelley, the author ofthe classic gothic novel,Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus(1823). Hewasalsoan ardent believer in the power of reason and mind to improve the human condition. According to the Stanford Encyclopediaof Philosophy, Godwinwas a prolongevist who:... looked forward to a period in which the dominance of mind over matter would be so complete that mental perfectibility would take a physical form, allowingus to control illness and ageing and become immortal.

O that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and the human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity!

Today, Mr. Machine, as La Mettrie mechanically dubbed himself, finally has his audience.

14Like all other ideas and movements, transhumanism is a product of its time. Transhumanist ambitions of radical life extension, brain uploading, intelligence augmentation, and space colonisation, could not be taken seriously as realisticprojectsbefore the invention of modern computers and rockets, the discovery of DNA, or the rapid increases in computing power and the declining cost of computation—all of which took place in the twentieth century

its people have shared a history of common struggle and achievement, from carving communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness, to winning independence and forming a new government, through wars, industrialization

History repeatedly documents the death knells that never came. Writing destroys the mind! Books destroy the mind! Radio destroys the mind! TV destroys the mind! The world wide web destroys the mind! Social media destroys the mind! Except they didn’t and probably don’t. What new mediums do destroy is the primacy of older ones.

Prior to the adoption of the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) standard, JSONP was the only option to get a JSON response from a server of a different origin.

prima guerra mondiale

Johnson: Earlier I interviewed you about patrilocal residence patterns and how that alters women’s sexual choices. In contrast, matrilocal societies are more likely to be egalitarian. What are the factors that lead to the differences between these two systems?Hrdy: I think in societies where women have more say, and that does tend to be in societies that are matrilocal and with matrilineal descent or where, as it is among many small scale hunter-gatherers, you have porous social boundaries and flexible residence patterns. If I had to say what kind of residence patterns our ancestors had it would have been very flexible, what Frank Marlowe calls multilocal.

The length of the Ark gives him occasion to discussthe membership of the Church (who are the occupants of the different chambers of thetriple-decked Ark) through three divisions of time: the age of nature, the age of law, andthe age of grace, in a concise chronological summary of spiritual history (paras. 11–13).

Nevertheless, the limits of freedom are apparent in the response toNizardo’s own petition. The town council rejected it because the lot wasnot located“near where the other free blacks are.”As early as the mid-sixteenth century, the local authorities of Havana were crafting a socialand residential urban layout that identified blackness with certain areasof the emerging city.

“So I mean there are enormous chunks of our own history that are just missing. It’s no wonder that the people in our state have an identity crisis; we don’t know our own story. If you don’t know your own story, how can you determine what you are?” said Chuck Keeney.

They are often cited as the first website to feature banner ads.

The first Wired website, therefore, has a unique distinction of being an unofficial, amateur project led by two people from a different country uploading copyrighted content they didn’t own to a site that lacked any of the panache, glitz, or unconventional charm that had made Wired famous.

In July 2010, Microsoft let go Jimmy Schementi, one of two remaining members of the IronRuby core team, and stopped funding the project.[19][20] In October 2010 Microsoft announced the Iron projects (IronRuby and IronPython) were being changed to "external" projects and enabling "community members to make contributions without Microsoft's involvement or sponsorship by a Microsoft employee".

React didn't support rendering arrays without a wrapper for most of its existence 16.0.0 (September 26, 2017): Components can now return arrays and strings from render.

John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker and critic who was one of the first people to coin the term “documentary film” in the 1930s, advanced the idea, drawing from the work of radicals like Dziga Vertov, that documentaries can awaken people to liberal ideas and show them the necessity of social change.

A backronym, or bacronym, is an acronym that is assigned to a word that existed prior to the invention of the backronym.

If the react cargo cult didn't have the JSX cowpath paved for them and acclimated to describing their app interface with vanilla javascript, they'd cargo cult around that. It's really about the path of least resistance and familiarity.

Prior to version 6.0, BitTorrent was written in Python, and was free software.

As a result, it is no longer open source.

In React 0.12 time frame we did a bunch of small changes to how key, ref and defaultProps works. Particularly, they get resolved early on in the React.createElement(...) call. This made sense when everything was classes, but since then, we've introduced function components. Hooks have also make function components more prevalent. It might be time to reevaluate some of those designs to simplify things (at least for function components).

Facebook’s React has an optional language extension that enables you to embed HTML inside JavaScript. This extension can make your code more concise, but it also breaks compatibility with the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. ECMAScript 6 will have template strings [1], which enable you to implement JSX (or something close to it) inside the language.

The page was set up to show any post that contained a link to it - in other words, if you linked to that page, then your post appeared on that page.

How Textbooks are Produced 1 Authors, often academics, write a national version of each text. 2 Publishers customize the books for states and large districts to meet local standards, often without input from the original authors. 3 State or district textbook reviewers go over each book and ask publishers for further changes. 4 Publishers revise their books and sell them to districts and schools.

“The textbook companies are not gearing their textbooks toward teachers; they’re gearing their textbooks toward states,” she said.

Conservatives have fought for schools to promote patriotism, highlight the influence of Christianity and celebrate the founding fathers. In a September speech, President Trump warned against a “radical left” that wants to “erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology.”

Publishers are eager to please state policymakers of both parties, during a challenging time for the business. Schools are transitioning to digital materials. And with the ease of internet research, many teachers say they prefer to curate their own primary-source materials online.

And to Vivian Rolfe’s point made at OpenEd 16, are we are paying enough attention to voices of the past?

The current buzz about open pedagogy got kick-started in David Wiley’s 2013 blog post. Wiley defined open pedagogy as any approach or technique that would not be possible without the “5Rs” (at the time listed as the “4Rs plus free to access”: free to access, free to reuse, free to revise, free to remix, free to redistribute – the right to retain came later…) of OER.

Our experience is that many of today’s technology leaders genuinely venerate Engelbart, Kay, and their colleagues. Many even feel that computers have huge potential as tools for improving human thinking. But they don’t see how to build good businesses around developing new tools for thought. And without such business opportunities, work languishes.

What David told me was his energy, enthusiasm in the class was at a much higher level with the OER approach. Sure we choose the polished “professional” textbook because of its assumed high standards, quality etc, but then its a more passive relationship a teacher has with it. I make the comparison to growing and/or making your own food versus having it prepared or taking it out of a package. Having produced our own food means we know everything about it from top to bottom, and the pride in doing that has to make the whole experience much more energized.

son of Memory

their name gives no mnemonic boost whatsoever. Whatever faint associations it might once have held fade away, especially when the discover was neither famous nor narrow, and the reader is several generations removed.

I enjoyed Harari’s application of meme theory to the agrarian revolution of circa 10,000 BCE: it may have seemed like a giant leap for mankind, but imagine if you are wheat. As a species, you have conquered the world. Come on and harvest me! I will just spread further.

big histories

Big History

The last ETech was held in 2009.

I n South Carolina, t here emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans a sserting t heir o wn i nterests. An e stimated t wo-thirds o f enslaved Africans i n Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia l ost a s many as 30,000 enslaved Africans i n a sin-gle year.

Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery.

e Constitutional Convention. I t had begun i n Philadelphia on May 25, 1 787, months after Samuel S tan-hope Smith had addressed some of t he delegates on race.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the notoriety of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History persuaded serious historians not to go there or do that.

As I began to get a feel for the passions and frustrations of teens and to speak to broader audiences, I recognized that teens’ voices rarely shaped the public discourse surrounding their networked lives.

Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, historians like Gary Nash, Ira Berlin and Alfred Young built on the earlier work of Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin and others, writing histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras that included African Americans, slavery and race. A standout from this time is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, which addresses explicitly how the intertwined histories of Native American, African American and English residents of Virginia are foundational to understanding the ideas of freedom we still struggle with today.

Scholars like Annette Gordon-Reed and Woody Holton have given us a deeper understanding of the ways in which leaders like Thomas Jefferson committed to new ideas of freedom even as they continued to be deeply committed to slavery.

History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are.

If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past.

Affective forecasting is the process by which we attempt to pre-dict how we will feel in the future. One of the ways we fail at this task is called the end of history illusion,which suggests that we’re well aware of how much we’ve changed in the past ten years, but we imagine that that’s it—we’re done changing. When asked how much we think we’ll change in the next ten years, we assume we’re done.

History is somersaults all the way to the end. That’s why it’s so hard to write, and so hard to predict. Unless you’re lucky. ♦

Side note: After recently seeing Yale Art Gallery’s show “Seriously Funny: Caricature Through the Centuries,” I think there’s a good article to be written about the historical parallels between today’s visual memes and political cartoons from the past.

This painting was discovered in the Bulu Sipong cave on Sulawesi in 2016 and recent analysis has shown that it is the “oldest pictorial record of storytelling” and the “earliest figurative artwork in the world”, and is at least 43,900 years old. (The oldest known drawing in the world, a 73,000-year-old abstract scribble, was found in South Africa in 2018.)

I had come of age in Turkey after the 1980 military coup. I had witnessed how effective censorship could be when all mass communication was cen-tralized and subject to government control: radio, television, and newspa-pers.

Horwitz argued a fairly radical point, which I think never received wide enough recognition due to the subject matter and his extremely difficult (dense and dry) style.  He said, “I seek to show that one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal, not the tax, system, a choice which had major consequences for the distribution of wealth and power in American society”

Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett), the first enslaved African American to sue for her freedom in the courts based on the law of the 1780 constitution of the state of Massachusetts, which held that "all men are born free and equal." The Jury agreed and in 1781 she won her freedom. Her lawyer had been Theodore Sedgwick.

The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.