Reprising these reflections from reading Eric Axelson’s Congo to Cape: Early Portuguese Explorers. Always an interesting question to ask how great ventures begin: Why did they start when and where they did? Why were they initiated by those individuals or groups and not others? The circumnavigation of Africa was a great achievement over many decades. […]
Why did Portugal become a great exploring nation? Read More »
Reprising this about Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio [Die Entführung aus dem Serail], which has a charming scene indicating England’s eighteenth-century reputation in Europe as a land of liberty. A woman named Konstanze and her English servant Blonde have been abducted by pirates and sold to Pasha Selim. In Act II, the Pasha’s crude overseer,
English liberty and Mozart’s opera Read More »
Reprising this from when I read E. G. West’s fascinating Education and the Industrial Revolution, which is a powerful argument for the conclusion that … well, let’s first look at some data. Here’s a table comparing school enrollments in various parts of the world with enrollments in England and Wales a century earlier. The table
All from the twenty-first century: * Sorcerers stealing or shrinking men’s penises in Congo. * Black magic murders in Brazil. * Witches beaten and humiliated in in southern India. * God punishes Haiti for its witchcraft and other immoralities. * Though progress in Ghana: a call “for the immediate abolition of witches camps and witchcraft
What’s new in witchcraft Read More »
Reprising this rant-post about those who fail to learn from history, who are condemned to … well … uhhh … something or other. But I digress. Last weekend we went to a school-sponsored Santa Shop. The idea of the Santa Shop is that while the parents eat cookies and sip punch and listen to carols,
Don’t know much about history — anecdote Read More »
Current infant mortality rates are about half of one percent, and it is awful for parents who lose a child. But in the 1700s, before the achievements of the Enlightenment were widespread, infant mortality rates were over 50%. I came across this in Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great: Peter the Great (1682-1725) and his
More appalling infant mortality numbers, then and now Read More »
Reality demandsthat we also mention this:Life goes on.It continues at Cannae and Borodino,at Kosovo Polje and Guernica. There’s a gas stationon a little square in Jericho,and wet painton park benches in Bila Hora.Letters fly back and forthbetween Pearl Harbor and Hastings,a moving van passesbeneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea,and the blooming orchards near
On the heavy weight of history: *Reality Demands* by Wisława Szymborska Read More »
The next session of our online course “Education’s Villains and Heroes”: October 12, when we will discuss John Dewey & Pragmatic Democracy. * Reading to prepare for this session: Excerpt from Democracy in Education (1916). * Link to register: ZOOM. To see more of our courses and related topics, visit Atlas Intellectuals. Related: Professor Hicks’s online course
Dewey & Pragmatic Democracy [Education’s Villains and Heroes course] Read More »