Tithes / Taxes and protection rackets... yeah, yer right. I didn't think of that. Don't forget the looting and plunder that came with subduing pagans. It you convert them. you get to take their lands.... in reality that's what happened.

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According to the cover, the book "takes the reader on a tour of twenty two destinations in Greece and Turkey, recounting the classic tales and the history associated with each".

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Very interesting question. I think it's possible for recent mythologies to become as legitimate as ancient ones. They all have to start sometime, right? I don't know how exactly that process will look in the modern world, though. I feel like so many stories are based on the archetypes of ancient myth, from books to films and movies. That is the key to embedding them in our collective unconscious. But which versions will last? Hard to say. I read once that the only thing every society on earth has always had in common is storytelling. It's importance to us as a species is huge. Personally, I hope Middle Earth lasts forever!

We are a country of immigrants who took land and lives under the banner of we need it more then you and now scream about letting immigrants in. We have proud moments but I bet you didn't know there is a good chance America would not be what it is today if not for surrounding a neutral town and demanding the women and children of king Phillips tribe causing him to rush in to an ambush. We were losing and knew it.

It depends largely on how much the contemporary culture defines itself from some element of the real or imagined past. Fascist Italy wanted to restore and/or strengthen the association of then-contemporary Italians to the ancient Romans, largely driven by the dissonance between Italy's historical pretentions and real geopolitical status. Repeated military defeat has severed one from the other, whereby a modern Italian is likely to feel pride in a general sense about individual or collective triumphs popularly ascribed, while simultaneously expressing cynicism about his fellow countrymen of the present day.

Nazi Germany had similar allusions to an imagined past for many of the same reasons. Germans felt a great dissonance between their reduced status in the aftermath of WWI and their collective identity as a first world nation. Because there existed no documented ancient Germanic state, they simply created one from an amalgam of foreign myths and outright lies. The Rig Veda is evidence that some group of ancient people, likely from current day Iran, wrote in an ancient "Aryan" language. Through many levels of alteration and distortion, this becomes "evidence" that a race of superhumans migrated from India to Germany, which was conveniently the location of those fabricating the narrative. Thus, one's ancestors are no longer from the loose confederation of Germanic tribes inhabiting central Europe, but from an imaginary super race that had an advanced culture and language but somehow neglected to use either of them after leaving Iran. I can't speak for how contemporary Germans identify with the past, if at all, but from my interactions, I sense a fair amount of pride in the present, and significantly less focus on the past, a sort of inverse of the Italian, who wishes to belong to any time except the present. Again, it has much to do with their current socioeconomic status.

The better off you (or the group you identify with) are doing in the present, the less you feel the need to link to a glorious past, real or imagined.

What style is your book in? Might help guide some suggestions!

Hi!

It seems like you are talking about the popular but ultimately flawed and false "winners write history" trope!

While the expression is sometimes true in one sense (we'll get to that in a bit), it is rarely if ever an absolute truth, and particularly not in the way that the concept has found itself commonly expressed in popular history discourse. When discussing history, and why some events have found their way into the history books when others have not, simply dismissing those events as the imposed narrative of 'victors' actually harms our ability to understand history.

You could say that is in fact a somewhat "lazy" way to introduce the concept of bias which this is ultimately about. Because whoever writes history is the one introducing their biases to history.

A somewhat better, but absolutely not perfect, approach that works better than 'winners writing history' is to say 'writers write history'.

This is more useful than it initially seems. Until fairly recently the literate were a minority, and those with enough literary training to actually write historical narratives formed an even smaller and more distinct class within that.

To give a few examples, Genghis Khan must surely go down as one of the great victors in all history, but he is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources, because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes.
Similarly the Norsemen historically have been portrayed as uncivilized barbarians as the people that wrote about them were the "losers" whose monasteries got burned down.

Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
This evaluation is something that is done by historians and part of what makes history and why insights about historical events can shift over time.

This is possibly best exemplified by those examples where victors did unambiguously write the historical sources.

The Spanish absolutely wrote the history of the conquest of Central America from 1532, and the reports and diaries of various conquistadores and priests are still important primary documents for researchers of the period.

But 'victors write the history' presupposes that we still use those histories as they intended, which is simply not the case. It both overlooks the fundamental nature of modern historical methodology, and ignores the fact that, while victors have often proven to be predominant voices, they have rarely proven to be the only voices.

Archaeology, numismatics, works in translation, and other records all allow us at least some insight into the 'losers' viewpoint, as does careful analysis of the 'winner's' records.
We know far more about Rome than we do about Phoenician Carthage. There is still vital research into Carthage, as its being a daily topic of conversation on this subreddit testifies to.

So while it's true that the balance between the voices can be disparate that doesn't mean that the winners are the only voice or even the most interesting.
Which is why stating that history is 'written by the victors' and leaving it at that is harmful to the understanding of history and the process of studying history.

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Finished A Fiery & Furious People: A History of Violence in England by James Sharpe. Fairly long copy and pasted review

>5/5. Excellent, highly recommend if interested in English history or social history.

>Very well written, enjoyable to read with the stories being well told. Good selection of cases used as well as the right amount of statistics to get the point across without being bogged down in them. There is a lot of analysis in each chapter as to the change in the kind of particular kind of violence (murder moving from mostly between male strangers/ acquaintances to being more domestic based over the centuries for example) over time as well as the change in attitudes towards the specific violence (such as views on wife beating or infanticide).

>Part 1 is short and covers the medieval era - general violence but also the big events like the 1381 peasants revolt and the War of the Roses. It also has a bit on the ways that were meant to restrict violence like the Church or the ideal of chivalry and where these did and didn't work.

>Part 2 covers up to the end of Victorians and each chapter covers a specific kind of violence like duelling, crime, domestic etc and how these changed over time. The author argues that violence declined fairly rapidly after the English Civil War. The main reason for this is the emergence of capitalism which led to the growth of a middle class who valued 'respectability' and had more stake in preserving the status quo. Additionally they had different views from other economic groups, for example they believed that domestic violence was something the lower classes did but they also thought the duelling culture of the aristocracy was a bit ridiculous.

>Part 3 covers the 20th and 21st centuries with a similar style of each chapter focusing on a specific kind of crime. Personally my favourite chapter from this part of the book was focused on the depiction of violence in TV and movies (like the movie A Clockwork Orange) and the debates in society about if these contributed to violence in real life (the author argues they didn't/don't). In part 3 the author argues that for a variety of reasons (with an interesting theory that it is down to the deindustrialisation loosening the cohesion of society) violence rose in the 60s to 80s then declined rapidly, but this mainly reflects a decline in violence between strangers and acquaintances rather than a big decline in domestic violence.

>There is a nice further reading list for each chapter but since I read this to clear my British history unread pile I doubt I will read anything on it.

>Only complaint is that I personally found a couple of chapters to be boring (the slander/libel chapter and the historical sport related violence chapters), but that reflects my own interests rather than anything wrong with the book.

Hadn't planned it when I started reading a bit about British historical law and order but I remembered I had Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War by Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson which meant I could combine the law and order and get back to WWI at the same time. Most of the way through it but not enough to give it my longer thoughts, probably going to say a straight 4/5 by the time I'm done.

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I don’t think it makes much difference for the vast majority of people because most people simply don’t give a shit about history. I’m from Scandinavia which supposedly has a lot of this stuff, but people here tend to know very little about the pre-Christian culture of 1000+ years ago and care even less. People have a vague idea of who Thor and Odin are but that’s pretty much it.

I read the Logevall bio of JFK recently and the first couple hundred pages are a slog b/c his childhood just isn't that interesting. Especially compared to his Father's life. I am excited for the next volume of that though, which will cover the presidency. This volume ended with the election.

In the US I would say that you could look at our most famous monuments to see what we mythologize. The Jefferson and Lincoln memorials and the Washington Monument in DC and Mt Rushmore in SD are devoted to the founding fathers, the national mall has multiple monuments dedicated to veterans of various wars, and what is probably our most famous monument, the statue of liberty, is devoted to the ideals of freedom and opportunity.

There is no singular national epic of literature here but writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner and many others I'm not remembering occupy that place in the culture, in my opinion. I would even go so far as to say there are some classic films that fit here as well.

I don't think that most Americans lament not having an age of antiquity to look back on.

But I guess to answer your question, you use what you have.

I'd recommend reading this NYRB review of Graeber's work along with the book. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/

I like Graeber and he has a lot of important ideas that are worth considering and testing, but his history isn't always the best.

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It seems so obvious now they’ve explained how they did it

No its bullshit. Romans used both IIII and IV and clocks did too centuries before Louis.

I've recently finished David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. It's about the people Kennedy brought into the White House when he won the election in 1960 and they way they handled the Vietnam War. On one hand, it's interesting how so many intelligent and well educated men can be so wrong, but at times it felt like court gossip. I'm don't think any great insights can be gleaned from the childhood of e.g. Robert McNamara. Kind of hard to get through too I felt towards the end.

Just saying, not every wood boat in the caribbean is laden with gold.

And who says global warming is all bad?!

If you wanted to know how to say “China” in Manchu language then it could either be Nikan(it means the China as a country or it could also mean a single Chinese person) or Nikasi(It means the Chinese people or it could be used as a plural form of Nikan)

How does this make no sense and perfect sense at the same time

As for your other question I believe you could read these letters again then you’ll figure it out yourself.

These letters were recorded in literary sources written in Manchu language (not necessarily meant they were originally written in this language though ). The Manchus were using Manchu alphabet (a variant of Mongolian alphabet) by that time.