Quotulatiousness

August 25, 2020

The Russian Revolution 1917

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Epic History TV
Published 4 Aug 2016

Everything you need to know about the Russian Revolution in a 13 min video. Produced in partnership with Bridgeman Images http://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-GB/

We explain all the major events of Russia’s TWO revolutions of 1917 – the February Revolution that ended Tsarist rule in Russia, and the October Revolution, that brought the Bolsheviks to power. We explain the causes of Tsar Nicholas II’s growing unpopularity – the role of the mysterious Siberian mystic Rasputin, Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War One, and the events on the streets of Petrograd that led to the Tsar’s abdication. That summer Russia lurched from crisis to crisis, with a Provisional Government that faced riots (the July Days), military revolt (the Kornilov Affair), economic chaos, and constantly dwindling support. Socialist Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky, once hailed as Russia’s great hope, was unable to restore order, or, in October, prevent the Bolsheviks from launching a coup, organised by Leon Trotsky and led by Vladimir Lenin, that overthrow the Provisional Government and brought the Bolsheviks to power. A brutal civil war followed, leading to the death of more than 10 million Russians – amongst them Tsar Nicholas II and his family, executed by Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg in July 1918. From the wreckage emerged the Soviet Union, formed in 1922, and destined to be one of the 20th century’s two superpowers.

Please help me make more history videos by supporting me at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/epichistorytv

#EpicHistoryTV #HistoryofRussia #RussianRevolution

Recommended books on the Russian Revolution (as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases):
S. A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction http://geni.us/RzOAk2U
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution http://geni.us/UIxyirj
Robert Service, The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution http://geni.us/A89T
Neil Faulkner, A People’s History of the Russian Revolution http://geni.us/bME0unl

Berlin’s experiment with rent control has already made huge changes in the housing market

Filed under: Business, Economics, Germany — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sadly, for advocates of rent control in other cities, the changes are not positive for renters or landlords:

In the beginning of this year, the city government of Berlin brought in a rent freeze, a particularly crude form of rent control. Predictably, this led to calls from certain quarters for introducing similar measures here in London. I had several discussions about this, making the standard economic case against rent controls, but to no avail. I was told that I was blinded by neoliberal dogma, that the world is not as simple as my Econ 101 textbook, and that this was a brilliant and necessary measure to rein in the power of greedy landlords and speculators.

The first results are already in now, and they can be interpreted as the revenge of Econ 101. In Berlin, the supply of new rental properties coming on the market has fallen by a quarter compared to last year. No, this is not because of the virus: in other big cities such as Hamburg, Munich and Cologne, supply has increased by a third over the same period.

In fact, the one subsector of Berlin’s rental market which is exempt from the rent cap, namely new-built properties, is not that different from the rental markets of other big cities. In this subsector, the number of new rental properties coming on the market has increased by a quarter. Yet in the main market, where the cap does apply, supply has fallen by almost half – a drastic reduction, which more than cancels out any gains made elsewhere.

There has also been an increase in the number of properties that are up for sale, rather than rent, because while rents have been capped, sales prices have not.

So whether you compare the rent-capped part of Berlin’s rental property market to its counterpart in other cities, to its cap-exempt counterpart in Berlin itself, or to the owner-occupier sector – the result is always the same. The rent cap clearly is having a negative impact on supply, and this is happening astonishingly quickly: even I was not expecting to see any impact in this year, or the next.

None of the arguments against rent controls are new. You can already find them all in Verdict on Rent Control, a book which the IEA published in 1972. The book is actually a collection of papers on the subject, some of which are much older than that. It contains one paper by Milton Friedman and George Stigler on wartime rent controls in the US, which were still lingering after the war had ended. It was first published in 1946, but they were already having the same arguments then that we are still having today.

The Bronze Age Changes with Archeological Evidence

Filed under: Architecture, History, Middle East, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 22 Feb 2019

Check out the full collaboration playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

Up until the 19th century, the Bronze Age was merely a time of legends, where the Bible and Iliad told fantastic tales of brutality and triumph. But archeology changed that, and that’s what I want to talk about today, how the Bronze Age was rescued from legend.
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references:
Stephen L. Dyson, “Archaeology and Ancient History,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 59-66. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X

Marie-Henriette Gates, “Archeology and the Ancient Near East: Methods and Limits,” in A Companion to the Ancient Near East, edited by Daniel C. Snell (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 65-79. https://amzn.to/2BrsBqO

Alan B. Lloyd, “Chronology,” in A Companion to Ancient Egypt, vol. 1, edited by Alan B. Lloyd (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2010), xxxii-xliii. https://amzn.to/2LqGZnM

John Marincola, “Historiography,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 13-22. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X

John Van Seters, “Historiography in Ancient Israel,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 15-34. https://amzn.to/2PAC5Vz

Tim Whitmarsh, “Ancient History through Ancient Literature,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 77-86. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X
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Wiki: The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, and in some areas proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies.

An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage.

Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition. Although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas (such as Sub-Saharan Africa), the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic.

Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing. According to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia (cuneiform script) and Egypt (hieroglyphs) developed the earliest viable writing systems
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Hashtags: #history #TheBronzeAge #archeology #BronzeBonanza

How we used to “dine out” (and someday might be able to again)

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business, Europe, Food, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Alexander Larman reviews The Restaurant: A history of eating out by William Sitwell:

The recent enforced lockdown closure was a potential death blow to the entire [restaurant] industry. Which makes William Sitwell’s luxurious book both a celebration and an unintentional requiem for what may be a bygone time.

His central thesis is clear: the history of dining out is also a social history of evolving cultures and tastes. This means that the subjects he writes about range from ancient Pompeii to the growth of the sushi conveyor belt restaurant, encompassing everything from medieval taverns and the French Revolution to the rise of Anglo-Indian cuisine.

It is a broad and impressive spectrum, but perhaps Sitwell has, like some of the less fortunate people he describes, bitten off more than he can chew. His opening chapter about Pompeii is rich in surprising detail (graffiti uncovered outside one tavern when it was excavated ranged from the poetic — “Lovers are like bees in that they lead a honeyed life” — to the crude — “I screwed the barmaid”) and an insightful evocation of the dining culture in Ancient Rome.

He is then, unfortunately, faced with the insurmountable difficulty that the restaurant, as we know it today, did not exist until the late eighteenth century, meaning that his definition of “eating out” has to do some extremely heavy lifting.

There is as much padding in the early chapters as there is around some of his subjects’ waistlines. Much of what he writes is very interesting and often amusing, such as the way in which coffee, first drunk in London around the time of the Restoration, became associated both with health-giving properties and reportedly making men impotent, withered “cock-sparrows”. Yet there are also lengthy sections that have little or nothing to do with restaurants, such as a potted history of the Industrial Revolution.

Nevertheless, when Sitwell finally gets into his stride and begins to write about eateries proper, his authority and enthusiasm are palpable. He describes the dawn of fine dining in Paris in the nineteenth century evocatively. London lagged behind, although gentlemen’s clubs such as the Athenaeum and Reform offered some delights for the wealthy thanks to chefs (French, naturally) such as Alexis Soyer who implemented what one biographer called “the most famous and influential working kitchen in Europe” in 1841, complete with gas-fired stoves, butcher’s rooms and a fireplace devoted to the roasting of game and poultry.

Forging a Sword – part two: fuller, bevels, straightening

Filed under: Technology, Tools, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published 28 May 2018

Sword-smithing again at the Cut And Thrust Collective, working on Arnander, my type 18 bastard sword. Lots of hammering.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

Part one of forging a sword: https://youtu.be/KYydVZRbl6M

My tutor: Thom Leworthy.

Music used in this video: “Siegfried’s Funeral March” by Wagner.

Buy the music – the music played at the end of my videos is now available here: https://lindybeige.bandcamp.com/track…

Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.

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QotD: Collective punishment

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We used to take calls for collective punishment much more seriously. In the 1949 Geneva Convention it was determined that: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” Collective punishment was seen as a tactic designed to intimidate and subdue an entire population. The drafters of the Geneva Convention clearly had in mind the atrocities committed in WWI and WWII where entire villages and communities suffered mass retribution for the resistance activities of a few. In their commentary on the outlawing of collective punishment the International Red Cross stated: “A great step forward has been taken. Responsibility is personal and it will no longer be possible to inflict penalties on persons who have themselves not committed the acts complained of.”

In times of peace, collective punishment may come in the form of social media dust-ups over sombrero hats or Chinese dresses. Gradual softening on the taboo of collective punishment does not bode well for the health of liberal democracies. Which is also why it is important for us all to remember that social-justice activists who complain about cultural appropriation only represent themselves, and not the minority groups to which they belong.

Claire Lehmann, “The Evils of Cultural Appropriation”, Tablet, 2018-06-11.

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