I have had a dislike for history my whole life. I just now realized that I don't dislike history, but the way it is taught, as a list of important people doing important things on important dates. This post on the other hand was probably the most interesting thing I've read in a long time.
You'll probably enjoy the rest of the author's blog then. He really does his best to focus on systems, modes of production, and modes of organization. This is has been the standard for modern historians for quite a long time, but most pop history is still stuck in a "Great people, great ideas, great battles" framing. The author of this blog complains about this too at some point (I think somewhere in his Sparta series).
He often does blog posts where he looks at a fictional work and explains what it got right and what it got wrong. So fiction is useful to learn history, and then fiction+diff is even more useful.
This is true for most topics. The way that math is taught, the way that history is taught- all separate the vast and deeply interconnected miracles of human ingenuity and achievement and discretize them into asynchronous packets of information to be tested on. How could you learn about Arabic numerals and Roman numerals without learning about how they slowly spread across Europe and revolutionized business? One without the other is boring. Every human invention is connected.
Some suggested things to look up, caveat that you may already know about a few of these-
- John Taylor Gatto and his myriad essays about the state and education (especially "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher" as a Gatto primer)
- Buckminster Fuller's "Everything I Know" lecture series (transcripts are up somewhere)
University-level history is much more like this, at least these days, than "important people doing important things," perhaps partly thanks to the influential Annales school [1], although that probably varies by country. Lots of economic and social structures, plus lots of documents, mostly court documents, that tell the lives of ordinary people. I took a class just on the everyday "things" of people in early-modern Europe -- what they ate and how, what they wore etc.
What ultimately killed it for me was that after a few short years, when you get to the research level, the work becomes so hyper-focused, like shipbuilding in 17th century Spain or weddings in late-medieval Germany, that you don't have the chance to look at the bigger picture until you're an established professor and I didn't have the patience for it.
But I was happy to put the skills I had learned into a personal project a few years ago, and composed an anthology of primary sources on the history of logic, algebra and computation, that I published -- in a rather crudely edited form -- as a series of blog posts: https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra (although intellectual history is often about "important people").
This sentence was quite the meta-contradiction:
"Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866-1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988)." - in other words, the Annales school was made up of important people doing important things :)
I think there's a difference: the sentence is basically a reading list so you can get familiar with the school. You can't really read Napoleon or Caesar, because the first didn't write much, and the second only wrote PR fluff pieces.
Thinkers are influential to schools of thought in a way more concrete way than individuals are to the course of history. It's easy to imagine a modern world without Napoleon (the French army was already kicking ass before he turned up, even if he turned it up to 11). It's not easy to imagine modern philosophy turning out how it has without Kant.
I've long felt that the greatest exploration of history every created in entertainment form was the 20-year long show called Modern Marvels[0] on the History Channel. It was the History Channels very first show and since it's beginnings in 1995, Modern Marvels has treated us to 44 minute long explorations of the history of things (infrastructure, buildings, devices, earthworks, vehicles) with a format that avoids the boring and useless. All "5 Ws" are addressed each episode, but instead of focusing on "when" and "who" and "where", it focuses on:
- "What?" What is this thing? What is it's purpose? How does it do what it does? What can we learn from it?
- "Why?" Why was it built? Why did we drive to build something so important? Why should I care?
Only after we understand what it is and why it is, do we start to look at who built it, when they built it, etc (though they sneak in some who and when to contextualize the why quite often (which is great!)). Take for example this exploration of the United States Library of Congress:
Connections[0], The Day the Universe Changed [1], and Industrial Revelations [2] are other very good choices in this area. These series are very old (1978, 1985, and 2002 respectively) but their age gives them a level of quality that modern, dumbed-down, documentaries do not have.
They're probably more readily available through forms of through non-monetary cultural exchange rather than by paying streaming service danegeld, however.
As a huge history fan that is beyond sad to me. History has more crazy story then Game of Thrones, is insanely complex and multifaceted dominated by changing climate, invisible hand of markets, spontaneous mass movements, total accidents, insane coincidences, raging passions and people doing great or evil things.
Shared feeling. I once ran into a early 20th researcher that rebuild history through causal analysis rather than event listing. I failed to note his name or the name of his field.. but it felt exciting.
I've recently started reading through the archives on the blog. His writing style took me a little getting used to (he's oddly fond of italics), but I think it's really an attempt at transcribing what might otherwise be a lecture into text, and once you get used to it, it's fine.
But the actual writing is amazing, and he's written on an oddly large number of topics that I find fascinating. I also appreciate how he's careful to give citations to source materials, and how he tries to mention, when relevant, that there's a controversy or dispute over some idea, or that the historical record simply doesn't let us know some detail.
I could go on. The series on Sparta was especially interesting, because I actually thought I knew a little bit about Sparta, but as it turns out, I really, really did not. Learning new things feels good, but unlearning mistaken beliefs is amazing. :)
If the above links don't seem interesting, try poking around the blog. He's written some fascinating analysis of Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, spaceship design, bow range, and more.
While the author talks about how iron production is commonly (but mistakenly) represented in popular conceptions of the past, I appreciate the focus on mining in this article. It's yet another activity, essential to the historical economy, that I had never really thought about. It's interesting to get some insight on how these systems worked.
As usual, if you like Bret's writing, please consider donating! He has emphasized that adjuncts (which he is) don't earn a lot (perhaps <30k/yr) and spend a huge amount of their time applying to jobs/grading papers. Donating would ideally offer him more time to work on his writing.
There was so much important stuff which in the past which is quite subtle. Recently I learned that the scythe was mainly used in Europe (and later America). Giving European farmer of the middle age and before a little productivity advantage. https://youtu.be/9Im_8sI0QFQ
Living in the close to the Swiss alps, its actually still quite common. We have mountain farmers here, and to cut the gras on the hills, there is still nothing better.
It WAY faster and works with way taller grass then my parents lawnmower, that is for sure.
If Elon is serious about building a self sustaining colony on Mars, this stuff will be critical. Mining, refining, and manufacturing will all be critical, as will growing food and producing air and water. Finding a minimal technology tree for that is IMHO an extremely interesting problem.
Quick, what is the only machine tool that can copy itself?
Although truly flat surfaces can be easily generated (relative to building a screw cutting lathe from scratch). It just takes a lot of time and labor, but lapping two granite plates together would produce a good-enough surface plate; considering the accuracy likely to be achieved with a one-off homemade lathe.
Realistically, the absolute hardest part would be the castings. Cast iron is no simple feat, as I'm sure the future posts in this series will show.
You can make a lathe from other materials. Most people building one in their garage these days use aluminum. Cast iron is better in a lot of ways, but the temperatures of aluminum are much easier to deal with, and today we can get good aluminum alloys to work with. You can also use bronze if you wanted. Granite is probably better than cast iron if you design for it. Concrete has been used commercially.
The Human / Operator; an advanced product of millions, or was it billions, of years of evolution which is self replicating (in the right pairs at least).
Technically, a lathe. However, it very much depends on how you define "can replicate itself". You probably need at least a foundry to melt metal as well to do it truly "from scratch" and I'm not sure you can make one completely with a lathe.
The Gingery machine bootstrap is one of the coolest things which has ever been written.
It's relaxing, to know that there's a technological floor below which humanity can't fall, given literacy and a collection of seven books. And it's a pretty high level of technology.
I kinda love that while you can't make books with a lathe, you can make the tools (to make the tools) for a printing press with a lathe so it still mostly works.
I "discovered" this blog a couple of month ago, and I absolutely love it. The recent posts about agriculture in pre-modern times[0] are particularly insightful and I enjoyed so much to read.
Recently caught a similar one from Alec (Mr. Connectify) of https://www.youtube.com/c/TechnologyConnections who described a mechanical component as "circular, like most arguments on the internet".
I enjoyed the economic tidbits that remain relevant today — rulers owning and controlling extraction of commodities, locating production based on cost of transporting inputs, and treatment of labor varying according to its scarcity.
>And I want to stress that broad framing: iron was made into more things than just swords (although swords are cool).
I honestly can't comprehend this line of thought. Why the hell would you care about stupid swords? If I was the first blacksmith on the planet I would try to replace bronze axes. Bronze is an extremely awful material choice for cutting down trees.
Bronze is not that bad. Several reproduction efforts have used bronze axes, at first like you they assume that you need to worry, but by the end they realize bronze isn't that delicate and works just fine. Don't get me wrong, iron is better in every way, but bronze isn't as bad as people think.
That's because unlike Jared Diamond, Bret Devereaux is a professional historian who understands what he is talking about, and is careful to note his sources and what areas we don't know much about.
I have pretty much the same reaction. Rolling my eyes every time I see another sword "forged" with a small trickle of red-hot something pouring into flat form.
>may also occur as ‘bog iron‘ where oxidation occurs in acidic environments (in swamps and bogs) leading to the formation of small clumps of iron-rich material
I've always been amazed at bog iron it seems like it shouldn't exist where it does and how it does. It must have been an amazingly valuable source rather than smashing rocks or spending time and effort searching for a rich vein of iron.
I wonder, was the Roman "ruina montium" technique used for iron mining? I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but it seems like something the author would be very familiar with.
And, as a generalization, slapping /feed/ onto the back of a blog’s URL seems to be effective in many places. I just try it by default now if I don’t see an RSS button.
I’m not sure if that’s a default setting for Wordpress sites, but it does seem to be modestly widespread.
