The Harry Potter book series as allegory for 1930s Europe
The Harry Potter book series as allegory for 1930s Europe. Voldemort as Hitler, Dumbledore as Churchill, and Potter as FDR’s America?
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kottke.org posts about history
Animated geographic history of the United States
Animated geographic history of the United States. This is pretty cool.
Humans’ worst mistake
Jared Diamond calls agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. “With the advent of agriculture [the] elite became better off, but most people became worse off”.
David McCullough’s 1776 and the tension between academic historians and popularizers
David McCullough’s 1776 and the tension between academic historians and popularizers. Also apropos to the scientists vs. pop science writers argument I’ve been hearing lately re: Blink and Everything Bad is Good for You.
A condensed history of the world, from
A condensed history of the world, from the Big Bang to the present (and a little of the future).
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond has written a fantastic book that lays out in simple terms how Europeans came to dominate the rest of the world without resorting to racist notions of Europeans being intrinsically smarter or more gifted than the inhabitants of the rest of the world. Diamond’s thesis is so simple and powerful, it seems, as Erdos would say, to come from “God’s book of proofs”. An illustration of this powerful simplicity is how the orientation of the continents affected the spread of domestication of crops, animals, germs, and ideas (which in turn influenced how fast difference cultures matured):
Why was the spread of crops from the Fertile Crescent so rapid? The answer partly depends on that east-west axis of Eurasia with which I opened this chapter. Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation). That’s part of the reason why Fertile Crescent [crops and animals] spread west and east so rapidly: they were already well adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
I’ve read so much about science that I was reluctant to pick up Bryson’s book, but I’m a sucker for good but accessible science writing, so I forged ahead anyway. The beginning of the book was interesting but nothing I hadn’t heard before, but once Bryson got to the more recent developments in everything from physics to evolutionary biology, I was hooked. I try to keep up with where science stands today by reading magazine and newspaper articles, but the big picture is hard to visualize that way. Bryson painted that big picture…the last few chapters of the book should be required reading for high school science students who may have learned that protons, neutrons, and electrons are indivisible or that Darwin had the first and final say on how evolution works.
A People’s History of the United States
Zinn’s a Marxist freak (well, according to some), but this book is still worth reading as an antidote to what most American kids learn about in school.
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