Extra Credits
Published on 27 Jul 2019Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
City after city surrendered to Joan of Arc without a fight. Her mission was complete… or was it?
July 28, 2019
Joan of Arc – Thy Kingdom Come – Extra History – #4
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July 22, 2019
Joan of Arc – The Maid of Orleans – Extra History – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 20 Jul 2019Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
When Joan met the army of Orleans, they weren’t exactly keen on her idea to just GET ‘EM and go completely offensive — thinking she would have more use as a mascot. But both they, and she, would be in for many surprises…
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July 19, 2019
QotD: “Re-imagining” Notre-Dame de Paris
The monstrous regiment of modernists was so quick off the mark with their hideous, egomaniacal plans to rebuild the roof of Notre-Dame — one could not call any of their proposals a restoration — that I began to suspect that the fire that destroyed the roof was the result of a conspiracy by them. Gone were my suspicions that it was either Muslim terrorists or degenerate smokers who had set the fire, and my new hypothesis was perfectly reasonable. Modernists, after all, have done far more damage in the long run to the urban fabric of Europe than even the Second World War did; and it stands to reason that they, the modernists, would not want anything to escape their attentions for long, lest anything remain intact to shame by painful comparison their own wretched efforts.
So far their proposals have included apiaries and swimming pools, and all of them look like greenhouses for the cultivation of marijuana. And why not? After all, Baudelaire wrote a book about les paradis artificiels, that is to say those induced by psychoactive substances, and is not a spire an arrow pointing up to heaven? All conceptions of paradise are artificial in the sense than none of us has any direct knowledge of such a location; perhaps, in the spirit of ecumenical multiculturalism, a kind of Muslim-style paradise could be created under the glass roof (I shall refrain from describing it because young people might read this).
Of course, there is no end to the uses to which this prime space might be put. There could, for example, be a three-Michelin-star restaurant there. Think of the rent it would pay, the prices it could charge! The French state (which is responsible for the upkeep of the building) would — or at least could — be relieved of financial anxiety about it.
This proposal might be objected to because it would not be socially inclusive enough; the Pope would not countenance it because it would exclude illegal immigrants (except, perhaps, as plongeurs). The customers would be mainly wealthy foreigners, Russian oligarchs, Gulf oil sheikhs, and the like, and while this might assist with France’s yawning commercial deficit, it would do little for social justice, the ultimate aim of human existence, by which is meant the reduction of everything to the lowest common denominator.
Theodore Dalrymple, “What to Do With Notre-Dame?”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-05-25.
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July 14, 2019
Joan of Arc – Angels and Demons – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Jul 2019Joan of Arc was on a mission from God — a mission to guide the Armagnacs into a holy war.
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June 24, 2019
The idea of “infinity”
David Warren, staunch man of the 13th century, might be termed an opponent of the notion of infinity:
The term “infinity” was an invention of the Devil. This, gentle reader will understand, is my humble opinion. Or if the Devil didn’t invent it, he “evolved” it, from the more innocent usages that conveyed “unlimited,” or “countless,” or “unknowably” large or small. What is finite has an ending, can be finished, finis. What is infinite cannot be; it is open-ended. There is, where we look for an end, nothing there.
Portrait of Georg Cantor
Photographer unknown, via Wikimedia Commons.Nothing is quite the opposite of something. Perhaps this is a fact no longer taught in our schools: that “nothing” can do nothing for you. Whereas, “something” might. For in its modern usage, “infinity” has become a thing. It has become “virtually” an agent, a kind of god, demanding to be worshipped. The very Christian idea of Alpha and Omega — from the first to the last letter of the (Greek) alphabet, from beginning to end — is subtly replaced in our minds with the progressive idea, “from one to infinity.”
Which is where the human mind checks out. “So what is infinity plus one?” one asks. There can be no answer. Today we are hanging on a cross of “infinity.”
The mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918), in his lucid moments (when out of insane asylums), invented set theory. It may be found, lodged in the heart of post-modern reasoning. My hero Wittgenstein, among others, explained how pernicious it was. Scholastic theologians had already spotted the fly in the “infinite” ointment. It is pantheist, and in Cantor’s “final” posit of an infinity of infinities, it is a direct challenge to the unity or uniqueness of the revealed God. Cantor himself was under the impression that God existed, in the sense that God had communicated set theory to Cantor of all people. I, at least, am sceptical of those who claim direct communication with God, especially those who spend a lot of time in bat houses, and wonder with whom they were really chatting. (I don’t doubt that the mad can be brilliant, however.)
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June 22, 2019
History Summarized: The Fall of Rome
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 21 Jun 2019Go to http://www.audible.com/overlysarcastic or text
OVERLYSARCASTICto 500500 to get a free audiobook, 2 free Audible Originals, and 30-day free trial.Rome, in one form or another, has been around for a *while*. Kinda seemed like it was going to last forever, like it was basically immortal. Well bad news for everyone involved: Rome goes bye-bye just like all the other empires in world history. So let’s talk about when, how, and why Rome fell!
SEASONS OF ROME T-Shirt: https://www.threadless.com/discover/s…
SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall: https://amzn.to/2FwBRvO
Mary Beard’s SPQR: https://amzn.to/2Wwu2x3
The History of Rome Podcast: https://apple.co/2U7Q4tq
Lectures from TheGreatCourses: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” (Gregory Aldrete), “Late Antiquity — Crisis and Response” & “Barbarians & Emperors” (Thomas Noble)
If I see anyone complaining that I didn’t sufficiently cite this video I’m going to sack your ancient capital and pillage your temples.PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
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June 18, 2019
QotD: The birth of Jesus and the open concept house
Peasant homes in first century Bethlehem were designed with what we would today call an “open concept.” They typically had one large room with the nicer living space in an open loft or on the roof, while the main floor area was where the family’s animals would be brought for safekeeping at night. The guestroom that was unavailable to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph was that loft or roof space, and the big room where they stayed instead served as the kitchen, living room, dining room, and farmyard all at once. The defining feature of Jesus’ birthplace was not isolation, as we often tend to think, but an utter lack of privacy: Mary delivered in a crowded farmhouse with few, if any, interior walls.
And that was perfectly normal, if not exactly desirable, for our modern fixation on the open floor plan is a historical anomaly. It flies in the face of literally millennia of consensus that more rooms is better, and it is a dreadful mistake. The last 70 years of open concept construction and remodeling has left us with dysfunctional houses, homes that are less conducive to hospitality, less energy efficient, and more given to mess.
Bonnie Kristian, “Open concept homes are for peasants”, The Week, 2019-05-12.
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June 17, 2019
100 Years War
Ryan Reeves
Published on 2 Jul 2014The 100 Years War between France and England lasted more than 100 years and was not one war but many. We explore Henry V and other important kings, and finish by exploring Joan of Arc as the savior of France.
Ryan M. Reeves (PhD Cambridge) is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RyanMReevesWebsite: http://www.gordonconwell.edu/academic…
For the entire course on ‘Church History: Reformation to Modern’, see the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
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May 20, 2019
A Guide to Dark Age British Politics
History With Hilbert
Published on 26 Sep 2017A beginner’s guide to the politics of Dark Age Britain, from the southern Celts to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Pictish north.
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May 19, 2019
Siege of Vienna & Queen Nzinga – Lies – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 18 May 2019Writer Rob Rath talks about all the cool stories and facts we didn’t get to cover in our two special short series on the Siege of Vienna, and the life of Queen Nzinga.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
From the comments:
Extra Credits
Timestamps:
2:00 – Demonetization sucks. THANK YOU PATRONS!
7:15 – Istanbul was Constantinople now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople been a long time gone oh Constantinople
11:07 – the arrival of the Winged Hussars wasn’t exactly the same as Rohan answering Gondor’s call for aid
16:20 – Nzinga’s controversial role in slavery
19:25 – what’s next on Extra History?
21:02 – SIX DEGREES OF WALPOLERecommended reading:
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe by Andrew Wheatcroft
The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent by John Stoye
Hispanics and the Civil War: From Battlefield to Homefront by the National Park ServiceMusic videos:
Queen Nzinga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94H6F0WObcSiege of Vienna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ_HV57cgbg
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May 16, 2019
Remembering Monte Cassino … and Wojtek the Bear, a Polish war hero
At the Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff remembers the Polish soldiers who finally took Monte Cassino from the Germans in 1944, after earlier allied attempts by soldiers of many other nations (including Canada) had failed:
The ruins of the abbey at Monte Cassino after the 1944 battle.
Photograph credited to “Wittke” in the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) via Wikimedia Commons.
On May 18, the day Australia goes to the polls, on the other side of the world we will be commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the bloodiest and hardest fought battle of the Italian campaign if not the whole of the Western front of WW2. On that day, a patrol from the 12th Podolian Cavalry Regiment raised the Polish flag above the ruins of the Benedictine monastery on top of Monte Cassino, bringing to an end four months and four Allied offensives against the heavily fortified Gustav (or Winter) Line, manned by crack German divisions across the entire width of the Italian boot about 100 miles south of Rome. Some of the German troops, veterans of the Eastern front, thought the fighting was worse than at Stalingrad. Others, on the Allied side, compared the conditions to Verdun. Unlike Russian cities or French fields, most of the fighting around Monte Cassino took place over an unimaginably difficult terrain of steep mountain slopes, deep valleys, wild rivers and landscape stripped bare by the artillery. It was a truly world battle in a world war: pitted against the Wehrmacht were the units from Great Britain, including British India and Rhodesia, the United States, France and its north African colonies like Morocco, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, including Maori troops, South Africa, Italy and Poland. Since the start of the Allied offensive in January 1944, waves after waves of troops of the 5th US and the 8th British armies smashed themselves against the rocks, unable to dislodge the well dug-in Germans. Finally, the fourth battle code-named Operation Diadem, which commenced with a massive bombardment on May 16, threw the British 13th Army Corp and the 2nd Polish Corp against the very linchpin of the Gustav Line at Monte Cassino and its monastery. Two days later it was over.
[…]
Churchill, right from the time of the Gallipoli disaster, remained obsessed about the vulnerability of the continental powers – primarily Germany – through what he called “the soft underbelly of Europe”. The war records are full of his harebrained schemes to attack the Axis through Italy, the Balkans or Greece and knock them out of the fight by a sharp thrust into the Central Europe. This was to be a masterstroke in place of the Normandy invasion, which Churchill strenuously opposed, and later in addition to it, to draw some of the German troops away from the northern France and indeed to get to Austria and southern Germany before the Red Army.
The problem with the soft underbelly of Europe is that it’s anything but. In fact it’s the hardest part of Europe; all rock, no roll. It’s mountains and deep valleys, fast rivers and vast forests, rudimentary roads and virtually no useful infrastructure. Unlike the northern European plains, this is the defender’s country where the Allies lost all the advantage of their numbers, their maneuverability and their armour. The two years of arduous slogfest from the southern Sicily to the Emilia-Romagna in the north might have indeed drawn valuable German troops from the other theaters of war but it was a bloody dead end. Poles were still stuck taking Bologna in April 1945, while only days later the patrols from Patton’s 3rd US Army were reaching the outskirts of Prague.
And Wojtek?
Monte Cassino is on my mind today, because entirely coincidentally I’m reading a delightful war book (that’s an oxymoron if there is one) titled Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero. It tells the surreal but entirely true story of a bear cub adopted by the Polish troops in northern Iran in 1942, towards the start of their anabasis from Stalin’s Siberia all the way to Italy and eventually Scotland. Accompanying the Poles through all their service in the Middle East and then southern Europe, Wojtek grew up to be a 6-foot, 500-pound ursine, who always thought he was a human. Quintessentially Polish (if only by adoption), he loved beer and cigarettes (he also ate them, but only if lit), taking showers with the troops and riding shotgun in army trucks. Some of his war-time exploits included capturing an Arab spy in Iraq and stealing underwear from a female support unit. But Wojtek truly became a legend during the battle of Monte Cassino, when to his comrades’ amazement he volunteered to carry ammunition in his paws. He was eventually made a Private in the Polish Army, and lived until 1963, continuing to win hearts in Scotland, where the Polish troops were repatriated after the war.
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May 6, 2019
Queen Nzinga – The Double Queen – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 4 May 2019Nzinga was briefly, temporarily supplanted by Ngola Hari who had been installed by the Portuguese, but she was determined to let nothing get in the way of keeping West Africa safe from colonial powers. To achieve this end, she would go on to form — and break, as she pleased — alliances with the Dutch, the Imbangala, and even the Catholic Church!
Thanks again to Cassandra Khaw for guest-writing this mini-series!
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
From the comments:
Extra Credits
Queen Nzinga is a woman who, despite being one of the best-documented rulers in early modern Africa, still presents a puzzle. Her record, from ambitious noble, to guerrilla fighter, to consummate diplomat and religious reformer is still haunted by myths conjured up by her enemies — and a few constructed by Nzinga herself.Catch our Lies episode next week for behind-the-scenes on our research for the Siege of Vienna and Queen Nzinga series!
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April 28, 2019
The Battle of Lützen – 1632 – The 30 Years War (in Swedish, with English sub-titles)
Gripen
Published on 3 Dec 2015One of the bloodiest battles of the Thirty Years War. Sweden vs. the Holy Roman Empire. A mass grave has been found, with the victims from the battle. Are they Swedish/Finnish soldiers or German mercenaries?
(This Swedish documentary has English subtitles).
From the comments:
Blah b
2 years ago
This documentary is often painful to watch, the way inexperienced modern people with no sense of empathy project their values onto those times. They weren’t “defenseless men standing still”. Armies had learned the hard way that massed musket fire won battles. If everybody is looking for cover and looking out for themselves, you can never operate such rigid units.So the individual soldier was harshly drilled to indeed stand still even with cannonballs tearing through his unit, or another unit standing 30-80 meters away. Because if individuals acted as individuals, the battle would be lost and the army would be destroyed.
But when that machine operated, it would win battles. The system invented by Maurice of the Netherlands ensured that if you were attacking a group of musketeers, every 20-25 seconds, they could deliver a crushing volley that can kill or injure 10-25% of a another unit, that means they only needed 2-3 salvos to achieve a local victory. Untrained units would literally never touch a musketeer, as his unit would’ve routed the attackers before they got within touching range.
Also there were no standing armies, there was no national identity as such. Mercenaries were totally acceptable. Mercenaries could become very loyal and reliable if paid on time [and] consistently, and would easily crush national armies that usually lacked the routine of professional soldiers. Loyalty and your identity was constructed differently. It would’ve been perfectly normal for me to utterly hate and maybe kill my neighbours if they were of a different religion. Otherwise, a Swedish protestant from far away was an ally with the right ideas. I wouldn’t have been able to understand him and everything would be alien about him, but I’d consider him a friend, and Catholics from the next village where I’d lived all my life would be enemies.
Unless the king comes around and says the Catholics are friends. Because the king is appointed by God who runs the world on a day to day [basis], and you obey without question. If the king says it’s so, that means God himself agrees and says it’s so, and you don’t question God. Loyalty until death is about the least you owed your king in those days.
People who can’t understand how such things worked historically, really should not be making documentaries…
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April 23, 2019
David Warren’s musings on the Notre-Dame de Paris fire
There have been other incidents since the fire, most pressingly the horrific bombing attacks on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, but David Warren would still like us to remember what happened a week ago in Paris:
A week has passed since the fire in, or on, Notre Dame de Paris; let me be the last to comment on a story that is stale-dated by any meejah standard. It dominated international mindwaves for only two days, but left images that viewers may be able to recall many decades from now.
“The church is on fire,” is a commonplace thought, when a church is visibly on fire, and I who am commonplace was thinking that while turning to the news. As an old meejah hack, who happens to know a little about Gothic architecture, I was prepared to discount the “fake news” that would be disseminated in “live time.” For instance, when told that the roof had collapsed, with strong hints that the building was now a write-off, I reflected that the roof is a hat, only. Stone vaulting lies underneath it, except the circle much of the spire fell through (as burnt offering onto the altar). Stone doesn’t burn easily; and even fallen vaulting can be repaired, having been erected with technology we would consider primitive today.
A spectacle: to see the ancient oak timbers, of great girth, burning up like matchsticks. But the craft masons of Notre Dame — far, far in advance of our modern Lego builders — expected fire and lived in a time so simple that they knew oak doesn’t burn without help. It isn’t big matchsticks. The idea that you need some serious accelerants to make it burn, and that only the accelerants would flame like that, was among my initial thoughts. We’ll see what comes of investigations. I also recalled two recent attempts to torch the cathedral, associated with terrorism.
Instead, the explanation of a clumsy accident by restoration workers was immediately accepted by the talking heads, and even Fox News hung up on a guest who had another theory. In favour of the politically correct, plausible account, I learnt that a fire alarm had sounded 23 minutes before the blaze itself was spotted. Paradoxically, this showed the ruinous consequences of depending exclusively on modern technology: the computers directed the first responders to the wrong place, away from the actual heat source.
I can easily believe in electrical short circuits as a fire hazard, especially since having had myself to flee a building where a cost-cutting landlord was having an elevator repaired by what I characterized as “a Romanian comedy team.” (They buzz-sawed through a live electrical cable, then themselves fled the scene of their handiwork as smoke shot up the shaft through the building. Luckily this smoke warned all tenants to evacuate; the building’s siren alone would have been taken by everyone as yet another false alarm.)
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April 20, 2019
The damage to (and the PR spin about) Notre-Dame de Paris
At Never Yet Melted, some quick analysis from Matthew Keogh (posted originally to Facebook) are quoted on the carefully curated public information made available about Notre-Dame de Paris, even while firefighters were still busy trying to contain the blaze:
Notre Dame Cathedral Fire, a few facts you should know courtesy of the mainstream media:
1. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown.
2. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but it has been ruled an accident (despite the fact that the exact cause of the blaze is still unknown).
3. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but Islam is the real victim here.
4. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but it’s not arson.
5. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but Macron is setting up an international appeal for funding to rebuild despite not knowing how much is needed because the damage has not been thoroughly assessed.
This is the sort of information you get when journalists are in bed with the politicians.
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