All of this became “dated,” as I grew older. My first shocking discovery about the “modern” liberal is, that while he might give lip-service still to some “antiquated” ideals, and gratuitously pose as virtuous, his first instinct when faced with serious responsibility was to cut and run.
My second was to find that he was now brainwashed by ideologies and slogans; that it was impossible to argue with him from reason or fact; that faced with any difficulty he would present himself as the helpless victim of forces he would not even try to define coherently.
My third was the discovery that he was now, instinctively, on the side of the criminal; that he identified with the lawless; that he admired “the transgressive,” trespass, violation. Without acknowledging it to himself, he now had a conception of “human rights” which consistently excused the wrongdoer, and consistently ignored the consequences to those who had done nothing wrong.
This “modern” liberalism, I came to understand, was the development — not over months and years but over centuries — of a mortal flaw in the “classical” liberal worldview. It was avoiding God. The liberal mind was persuaded that humans must “make their own beds.” Its great strength was that it took responsibility; its great weakness was that it had no reason to do so. Faith and reason are mutually dependent; when one goes the other eventually goes, too.
Or put this another way: the Devil gets in when we make room for him.
David Warren, “Crime without punishment”, Essays in idleness, 2018-08-03.
November 14, 2020
QotD: “Modern” liberalism
October 24, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on the potentials of therapeutic use of psilocybin
In the last free edition of his Weekly Dish newsletter — and probably the last time I’ll be able to link to it — Andrew Sullivan discusses the medical trials and legalization initiatives for psilocybin along with some of the history of its use in the Elusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece:

At the archaeological site of the Sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis. The information board on the left stands on what was once the courtyard of the sanctuary. Over the staircase behind it stood the Greater Propylaea. Next to the cavern in the background stood the Sanctuary of Pluto (who abducted Persephone, Demeter’s daughter). The cavern represents the entrance to the Underworld. The path to the left of the cavern leads to the Telesterion where the faithful were initiated to the Eleusinian mysteries. The brown building up on the hill (left) is a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary (Church of Panagitsa Mesosporitissa) and stands over the area of the Telesterion.
Photo by George E. Koronaios via Wikimedia Commons.
There are many ways in which this election might portend the future, but there’s a seemingly small issue — only on the ballot in Oregon and the District of Columbia — that’s a sleeper, it seems to me, and worth keeping an eye on. It’s the decriminalization of naturally-occurring psychedelics, in particular, psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in some mushrooms which have long been dubbed “magic.”
This doesn’t come out of the blue. Huge strides have been taken in the last few years in the decriminalization of cannabis, with 33 states allowing medical use, of which 11 allow recreational as well. The FDA recently greenlit clinical trials for psilocybin as a “breakthrough therapy” for depression — with some wildly impressive results. Books like Michael Pollan’s magisterial How To Change Your Mind have helped shift the reputation of psychedelics from groovy, counter-cultural weirdness to mature, spiritual, and regulated mental health treatment. Ketamine — previously a party drug and an animal tranquilizer — has shown more promise as an anti-depressant than any therapy since the mid-1990s.
The familiar worry, of course, is that we might be ushering in an era of wild drug experimentation, with unforeseen and unknowable results. Some people fear that relaxing some of the legal restrictions on things that grow in nature could lead to social disruption or higher levels of addiction or worse. The great popularizer of psychedelics, Aldous Huxley, gave us a somewhat sobering description of what might be our future in Brave New World, and many in the West have been terrified of these substances for quite a while.
But new research suggests that this shift toward integrating psychedelics into a healthy, responsible life for Westerners may not be new at all. It would, in fact, be a return to a civilization that used these substances as a bulwark of social and personal peace. New literary investigations of ancient texts, new — and re-examined — archeological finds, and cutting edge bio-chemical technology that can detect and identify substances in long-buried artifacts, suggest that deploying psychedelics would, in fact, be a return to a Brave Old World we are only now rediscovering.
We’ve long known that human knowledge of psychedelic aspects of nature goes back into pre-history; and use of them just as far. But perhaps the most surprising find in this new area of research is that sacred tripping was not simply a function of prehistoric religious rituals and shamanism, but an integral, even central part, of the world of the ancient Greeks. The society that remains the basis for so much of Western civilization seems to have held psychedelics as critical to its vision of human flourishing. And that vision may have a role to play in bringing Western civilization back into balance.
A breakthrough in understanding this comes in the form of a rigorously scholarly new book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, by Brian Muraresku. What he shows is the centrality of psychedelic use for the ancient Greeks, in an elaborate and mysterious once-in-a-lifetime ceremony at the Temple of Eleusis, a short distance from Athens. We’ve long known about this temple of the Mysteries, as they were known, and the rite of passage they offered — because it’s everywhere in the record. Many leading Greeks and Romans went there, including Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Here is Cicero, no less, in De Legibus:
For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those Mysteries. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope.
October 23, 2020
“The Lion From The North” – Gustavus Adolphus – Sabaton History 090 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 22 Oct 2020It was a time of religion and war. Legends tell the tale of a mighty Swedish King, a Lion from the North, who arrived in the German Empire with a mighty host to save Protestantism. Beyond the legends, Gustavus Adolphus was a warrior king who sought to create a Swedish empire through hegemony on the Baltic Sea. Once, Sweden’s involvement in the 30 Years War had begun out of sheer necessity, but soon send her armies on a path of glory and fame. But would this path lead the Swedish King to victory or his inevitable demise?
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Editor: Karolina Dołęga
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Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.comVisual Sources:
– Nationalmuseum
– Arms of Vasa courtesy of Sodacan from Wikimedia
– Nils Forsberg Gustav II Adolf courtesy of Nils Forsberg, Swedish painter from Wikimedia
– Death of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden by Carl Wahlbom courtesy of Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg) from Wikimedia
– Icons from The Noun Project: Cannon by Graphic Nehar, Man by Milinda CoureyAll music by: Sabaton
An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
October 18, 2020
Russian Civil War in Central Asia I THE GREAT WAR 1920
The Great War
Published 17 Oct 2020Sign up for Curiosity Stream and get Nebula bundled in: https://curiositystream.com/thegreatwar
By the fall of 1920, the Russian Civil War had unleashed three years of ethnic and internal conflict in Central Asia, and there was no end in sight. In this episode we’ll catch up on the dramatic events of the former Russian imperial lands in Central Asia from the revolution right up to the end of 1920, 100 years ago.
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*Buying via this link supports The Great War (Affiliate-Link)» SOURCES
Baumann, Robert F. Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, Combat Studies Institute, 2010.Becker, Seymour. Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Brower, Daniel R. Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire, Routledge, 2010.
Buttino, M. “Study of the Economic Crisis and Depopulation in Turkestan, 1917–1920”, Central Asian Survey, no. 4, 1990, pp. 59-74, doi:10.1080/02634939008400725.
Campbell, Ian W. Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917, Cornell University Press, 2017.
Everett-Heath, Tom. Central Asia: Aspects of Transition, Routledge, 2003.
Hiro, D. Inside Central Asia, Abrams, 2011.
Keller, Shoshana. Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence, University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Khalid, A. “Central Asia Between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 2, 2011, pp. 451-76, doi:10.1353/kri.2011.0028.
Khalid, Adeeb. “The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in the Light of Muslim Sources”, Die Welt Des Islams, no. 3, 2010, pp. 335-61, doi:10.1163/157006010×544287.
Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, Cornell University Press, 2019.
Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Loring, B. “‘Colonizers With Party Cards’: Soviet Internal Colonialism in Central Asia, 1917–39”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 1, 2014, pp. 77-102, doi:10.1353/kri.2014.0012.
Olcott, M. B. “The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan 1918–24”, Soviet Studies, no. 3, 1981, pp. 352-69, doi:10.1080/09668138108411365.
Poujol, Catherine. “Jews and Muslims in Central Asia”, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb, Benjamin Stora, Jane Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith, Princeton University Press, Princeton; Oxford, 2013, pp. 258–268.
Sahadeo, Jeff. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent: 1865-1923, Indiana University Press, 2010.
Sokol, Edward D. The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
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QotD: Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence”
In making Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence the theme of this book, Gillespie has set himself a huge task. Not only is it one of the philosopher’s weakest and most unconvincing theses, it is the one that sits in opposition to nearly everything else he wrote. For Nietzsche, despite his writing appearing wistful and gothic Romantic, was essentially an empiricist. He had no time for the dualism of Plato and only a fleeting but unconvinced interest in Kantian metaphysical idling about what lay beyond the tangible world. Nietzsche wrote that all there was for sure was the here and now.
This is exactly why he was not a militant atheist in the way we understand the expression today. He felt no need to concern himself with the veracity of Christianity’s claims about the afterlife, something we cannot be sure about. He seldom railed against the theological pretensions of Christianity or the absurdity of religion because to him the only thing that mattered was how religion affected us. He objected to Christianity because he saw it as nihilist and life-negating. It taught people to be meek, humble and to accept their lot. Nietzsche was an empiricist in that he wanted people to fulfil their life in the here and now, something that Christianity was hostile to.
Yet Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence belongs strangely to the realm of metaphysics and dualism. Its fatalism and determinism contradicts Nietzsche’s exhortation for each of us to become our own masters and to become who we truly are. While he did not believe in free will, he did believe that the Übermensch could harness and master the forces of his inner “will to power”. Contrarily, the eternal recurrence condemns us to history and supernatural fate. The notion of “eternal recurrence” reeks too much of his youthful dalliance with Schopenhauerian metaphysics.
This is perhaps why Nietzsche rarely mentioned it, and made even less effort to explain it in the books published in his lifetime. It seems too much of a flight of fancy, and the only time he spoke of it in all seriousness is when he recounted one day in August 1881, when walking in the Swiss mountains, when he had a kind of strange, rapturous religious experience – the day when the notion of “eternal recurrence” came to him in the first place.
Patrick West, “Nietzsche and the struggle against nihilism”, Spiked, 2018-08-03.
October 16, 2020
QotD: The Law of Abrogation
Rather than say this myself, let me quote Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, the “traditionalist” Anglican who directs the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity in London. He found himself recently trying to explain the crazy truth to a journalist who asked him about violent passages in the Koran, which Islamists quote constantly. “Is there no part of the Koran which modifies these violent texts in the way that we would say our New Testament modifies the Old Testament?”
Dr. Sookhdeo: “In fact the reverse is true. … All the peaceful passages that are enjoined on Muslims occur in the chapters written at Mecca. They are tolerant toward Jews and Christians. But when Muhammad gets to Medina and sets up his city/religious state, the tone towards other groups changes rapidly. The statements about slaying the pagans and killing the Jews and others occur there. Now in Islamic interpretation, all passages that are revealed later take precedence over those revealed earlier. This is known as the ‘law of abrogation’.”
David Warren, “Jihad Politics”, DavidWarrenOnline, 2005-08-03.
October 6, 2020
Rowan Atkinson Live – The devil Toby welcomes you to hell
Rowan Atkinson Live
Published 29 Jul 2010In this sketch, Rowan plays the devil, also known as “Toby”, he welcomes new people to hell.
Selected Highlights from Rowan’s stand up tours during the years 1981 to 1986.
Whether mesmerising us with the sheer visual mastery of Mr. Bean, beguiling us with the acerbic wit of Edmund Blackadder, or simply entertaining us as the suave, but rather hapless British Secret Agent Johnny English, you surely won’t have escaped the comic genius that is Rowan Atkinson.
In Rowan Atkinson Live, co-written with Richard Curtis (4 Weddings & a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) and Ben Elton, Atkinson runs the whole gamut of his remarkably versatile 30 year career, with sketches, mimes and monologue’s that are guaranteed to have you shedding tears of laughter. Performing live on stage alongside “straight man” Angus Deayton, the show features a number of original and familiar routines, including sketches that appeared in the original Mr. Bean series.
“The Caucasus is a bad neighborhood”
Fighting broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia last week over the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a quasi-independent Armenian-majority territory still technically part of Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh’s declaration was not followed by formal recognition by other states). Mark Movsesian provides some historical background to the conflict in First Things:
Thirty years ago, in response to discriminatory treatment and outright pogroms against Armenians, the region declared independence. Armenia (population 3 million) supported Karabakh — though it has never formally recognized its independence — and a bloody war followed, in which 30,000 people died and hundreds of thousands on both sides became refugees. Against all odds, Armenia and Karabakh prevailed and established a buffer zone comprising perhaps 20 percent of Azeri territory.
An unstable ceasefire has held since 1994. But last week, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive against Karabakh and Armenia itself. This is more serious than past Azeri efforts to break the stalemate. Flush with petrodollars, Azerbaijan has purchased a large stockpile of heavy weapons, which it now employs against Armenia. Moreover, Turkey (population 80 million), which borders Armenia on the other side, is supporting Azerbaijan. Azeris are a Turkic people, though they are Shia, not Sunni, Muslims, and the Erdogan government sees the conflict as a way to pursue its goal of pan-Turanism. Turkey has supplied Azerbaijan with military advisers and equipment, including drones and fighter jets and thousands of Islamist soldiers from Syria, who fight for Azerbaijan on the front lines.
[…]
One needs to go back at least a century, to the collapse of the Ottoman and Czarist Empires. The two empires had long contested the border between them, which ran to the southwest of the Caucasus. Armenians, an ancient Christian people who lived on both sides of the border, found themselves in the crosshairs. During World War I, fearful that Armenians on the border would rise up and side with Russia — some Armenians did fight with the Russians, but many others fought with the Ottomans, and the Armenian threat was always exaggerated — the Ottoman government undertook an ethnic cleansing campaign, killing millions of Armenians and other Christians in the Armenian Genocide.
The Genocide eliminated Turkey’s once sizable Christian population. It likely would have eliminated the Armenian population on the other side of the border, too, except that a hastily-organized Armenian militia stopped a Turkish army in 1918 at the Battle of Sardarabad, which took place just outside the city of Yerevan, today Armenia’s capital. Sardarabad is unknown in the West, but the image of a small group of Christian Armenians fighting, alone, to stop a Muslim Turkish army bent on their annihilation is a powerful part of Armenian consciousness today.
When the war ended, the Soviet Union quickly settled the border dispute with Turkey, giving up some historic Armenian lands around the city of Kars, and took over the Caucasus and divided it among the region’s ethnic groups. The Soviets initially promised to place Karabakh, whose Armenian identity dated back many centuries and whose population was more than 90 percent Armenian, in the new Soviet Republic of Armenia. But Stalin, as commissar for nationalities, decided to place the region in Azerbaijan instead, as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy. Armenians never accepted the decision and, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the nations of the Caucasus gained independence, the conflict over the region resumed.
October 3, 2020
History Summarized: Hawai’i
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 2 Oct 2020To learn more about the Native Hawaiian community and their culture, visit: https://www.hawaiiancouncil.org/about
This year, to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, we’re taking a look at the history of Hawai’i, from its early history in the Polynesian maritime culture to its forming a Kingdom to its annexation by the United States. Beyond simply a special case in the story of American expansion, Hawai’i has a deep history that deserves to be better known.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Great Courses Lecture “Lifeways of Australia and the Pacific” by Craig Benjamin, Britannica Hawai’i, “The Navigators: Pathfinders of the Pacific” By Low & Estus, Lonely Planet Hawai’i History, and lots of discussion with a native Islander (see discord section below).
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/kguuvvq — Come to the #New-Video-Discussion channel to chat about this video, and ask questions about Hawai’i to my friend Lady Eris#9175, a native Islander!
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October 1, 2020
English lead and the European markets of the 1600s
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the meteoric rise in lead production in England and Wales from the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe:

The well-preserved ruins of Fountains Abbey, a Cistercian monastery near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Founded in 1132 and dissolved by order of King Henry VIII in 1539. It is now owned by the Royal Trust as part of Studley Royal Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Photo by Admiralgary via Wikimedia Commons.
In the early sixteenth century, England was a minor producer of the stuff. It was widespread and cheap enough to be used for roofing buildings (unlike much of the rest of Europe, where copper was preferred), but the country never produced more than a few hundred tons per year. It didn’t really need to. Like stone in [the game] Dawn of Man, you could amass a stockpile and not worry too much about any leaky bucket problems [where stockpiles need to be replenished due to wastage or other “drains”]. The lead in roofs could always be recycled, and hardly any more was needed for pipes or cisterns. The vast majority of the demand came from Germany, and then the New World, where it was used to extract silver from copper ore. Even this dissipated in the mid-sixteenth century, when the New World silver mines began to switch to using mercury instead.
Yet by 1600, England was producing about 3,000 tons of lead a year, up from just 300 in the 1560s. By 1700, it was producing two thirds of Europe’s lead — a whopping 20,000 tons a year. How?
Unlike copper or iron, there is no evidence that lead mining or processing techniques were imported. If anything, they seem to have emerged from the Mendips, in Somerset, where production costs fell with the introduction of furnace smelting in the 1540s. As well as raising the extraction rates from the ore coming up from the mines, the new furnaces allowed previously unusable ores — found in the easily-accessible waste tips of old mining camps — to be smelted after some simple sifting. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear idea of who was responsible for the innovation.
Yet the source of England’s supremacy was really, at first, religious. Following the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the melting down of their roofs dumped some 12,000 tons of lead onto England’s markets — at least a year’s worth of Europe’s entire output. Although the immediate effect was to annihilate England’s own lead industry, the medium-term effect was to send the other European producers into disarray. By the 1580s, once the stockpile had depleted, England’s lead producers were among the only ones left standing. The sale of monastic lead ensured that the English retained a foothold in foreign markets, while the cost-saving innovations then gave them the competitive edge. These factors explain, at least, England’s eventual hold over the European lead market.
But there was yet another phenomenon responsible for the industry’s massively increased scale: the development of hand-held firearms. Gunpowder technology was of course centuries old, but cannon had largely fired balls made of stone or cast iron. Muskets and pistols, however, used bullets made of lead. With the proliferation of the weapons over the course of the seventeenth century, lead thus acquired a major leaky bucket problem. Bullets were too costly to recycle, leading to an estimated fifth of Europe’s annual production of lead disappearing every year — a wastage that only increased as armies grew, weapons’ rate of fire improved, and the continent experienced extraordinary violence. Europe lost an estimated fifth of its population to the Thirty Years’ War, and England itself succumbed to civil strife.
England’s lead industry thus had to drastically increase its production just to maintain Europe’s stock of lead, let alone increase it. It was from soldiers entering the fray, to trade bullets across sodden fields, that it owed its extraordinary success.
September 21, 2020
QotD: Prohibition and the Temperance movement
Prohibition was the culmination of nearly a century’s worth of propaganda, and repeated failed attempts to get such laws to work at the local and state level. Read J.C. Furnas’ The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum for an overview of the pre-1919 Temperance/Prohibition movement.
… [T]he original Temperance movement started out with the very best of intentions, and was trying to deal with a real problem. In colonial and early-19th-century America, people (men, women and OH HORRORS even children!) drank enough that by modern standards we’d call them alcoholics. Modern Russians drink more, but if they were transported back to that time and place, they’d fit right on in. Part of it was because water was often not safe to drink (tea and coffee were often expensive and hard to get, while beer and other alcoholic drinks were made just about everywhere), part of it was snobbery (only really poor people drank water!) and part of it was because people back then believed that alcohol strengthened and warmed the body.
Two of the good side effects of the Temperance/Prohibition movement were the provision of safe, clean drinking water in American cities and towns, and the modern fruit-juice industry (as a lot of churches went hot-Prohibition, they got uneasy about serving wine at Communion, so they went to work and came up with non-alcoholic substitutes.) Welch’s Grape Juice was started by a pastor who wanted non-alcoholic “wine” for Communion, and caught on, real big.
Eric Oppen, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2020-06-18.
September 13, 2020
Irish War of Independence – WW1 Veterans In A New Battle I THE GREAT WAR 1920
The Great War
Published 12 Sep 2020Sign up for Curiosity Stream and get Nebula bundled in: https://curiositystream.com/thegreatwar
The conflict between the Irish independence movement and the UK government had been heating up since 1919. The summer of 1920 brought a new level of escalation with the arrival of the the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Former veterans of the First World War were brought in to quell the rebellion and get hold of the strongholds controlled by the IRA.
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Hart, Peter: The IRA and Its Enemies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Harvey, A.D: “Who Were the Auxiliaries?” The Historical Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Sep. 1992)
Hopkinson, Michael: The Irish War of Independence (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002)
Leeson, David: The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
McMahon, Sean: The War of Independence (Cork: Mercier Press, 2019)
O’Brien, Paul: Havoc: The Auxiliaries in Ireland’s War of Independence (Cork: Collins Press, 2017)
Riddell, George: Lord Riddell’s Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After: 1918-1923 (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1933)
Roxbourgh, Ian: “The Military: The Mutual Determination of Strategy in Ireland, 1912-1921” in Duyvendak, Jan Willem & Jasper, James M. (eds) Breaking Down the State: Protesters Engaged (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015)
Townshend, Charles: The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918-1923 (London: Penguin Books, 2014)
“Tubbercurry”, Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1920.
Hugh Martin: “‘Black and Tan’ Force a Failure”, Daily News, 4 October 1920.
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
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Editing: Toni Steller
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All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020
September 7, 2020
Who Was Leif Erikson?
Atun-Shei Films
Published 9 Oct 2019Happy Leif Erikson Day! Allow me to regale you with the saga of the daring Viking who sailed to North America five hundred years before Columbus (that hack) and called it Vinland. We all know his name and his famous deeds – but what sort of man was Leif Erikson?
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September 5, 2020
History Summarized: The Viking Age
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 4 Sep 2020The Vikings are enjoying a new wave of enthusiasm in popular culture, but these seafaring Norsemen are still quite clearly a misunderstood force in medieval European history. So let’s take a wide look at the European world during The Viking Age!
Check out Yellow’s livestreams over at https://Twitch.tv/LudoHistory
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Vikings by Walaker Nordeide and Edwards, Vikings: A Very Short Introduction by Richards, Age of the Vikings and The Conversion of Scandinavia by Winroth, The Vikings By Harl via The Great Courses, The Viking World by Graham-Campbell, The Viking Way by Price.
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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From the comments:
Ludohistory
23 hours ago (edited)
Thanks so much for having me on and letting me help out! It was a lot of fun (even if I talked a little too fast sometimes)! To clarify a piece that I know I did cover too briefly — missionary trips to Scandinavia occurred in Denmark around 823, on the orders of Louis the Pious, and in Sweden in 829, when Ansgar, a Frankish monk, traveled to the town of Birka, where he found a very small Christian community, probably mostly enslaved or formerly enslaved people, and converted a couple of Norse people, including the town prefect. (The graveyard for that town, incidentally, is where the 10th century “female warrior” that made waves a few years ago was buried).There’s a lot we didn’t get a chance to talk about about the diaspora and its ending, so if there’s anything you all are curious on or find unclear, let me know here or on twitter 🙂
Finally, if you liked this, all the VODs for my personal streams (where I try to ramble about history in games) can be found by clicking on my name, and tomorrow I’ll be streaming CKIII on twitch (link in the description)!
September 4, 2020
QotD: Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Born into a Shia mercantile family, Jinnah left for England after high school, where he studied law and acquired a love for parliamentary procedure. Thoroughly and poshly anglicized (200 Savile Row suits were found in his closet after his death), he returned to India before the First World War, armed with a fearsome reputation as a barrister so brilliant judges tried to avoid him, and committed to Hindu-Muslim unity. His English was exquisite, but he spoke no Urdu. Completely secular, Jinnah was so indifferent to his religion — he drank and ate pork — that he planned Pakistan’s inauguration-day banquet as a luncheon, unaware it was Ramadan (they changed it to dinner).
Jinnah’s political intentions are hotly contested. According to New York Times Pakistan expert, Jane Perlez, many Pakistan researchers contend Jinnah had no interest in an Islam-dominated state, but “used the idea of Pakistan as a mere bargaining chip for Muslim majority rights within a loosely united post-colonial India.” With no autobiography or recollections from close friendships for our guidance, Jinnah remains a shadowy historical player, a political loner with an indeterminate goal beside Nehru, Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Mountbatten.
It is quite possible, for example, that Jinnah created the Muslim League and employed the rhetoric of Islam (slogan: “Islam in Danger”) and started wearing native clothes to harness religious fervour to political ambitions never fully articulated. But we can’t ever know, as a lifetime of chain smoking caught up with Jinnah, and he died before the first (bloody) year of Pakistan’s existence was out.
In Jinnah’s first speech to his newly minted country, though, we have this strong intentional clue: “You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
Barbara Kay, “A celebrated figure today could well be the condemned sinner of tomorrow”, National Post, 2018-06-05.











