Top 10 life lessons from books of the past. Bedbugs. Awkward conversations. Embarrassment on the dance floor. No matter what problem you’re facing, the Past has already faced it. More importantly, the Past has already written about it. As a book historian, I’ve spent many hours examining the advice that past centuries found worthy of committing to paper, from dancing handbooks to etiquette manuals to recipe collections. In fact, I thought it was time for the lip balm of 1579 and the budget fashion advice of 1280 to return to circulation, so I’ve compiled my favorite advice from yesteryear in a new book, Ask the Past. 1. A good starting point for most interactions: “Moreover, if there is any doubt as to whether a person is or is not dead, apply lightly roasted onion to his nostrils, and if he be alive, he will immediately scratch his nose.” • Johannes de Mirfield, Breviarium Bartholomei 2.
Inspirational advice from the Past: it’s not whether you fall on your face, but how you finish the dance that matters. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 6 myths about the Ides of March and killing Caesar. This is what most of us know about the death of Julius Caesar, half-remembered from movies and plays: Some soothsayer said, "Beware the Ides of March. " A few idealistic Romans decided to win back Rome for the people.Caesar got stabbed by Brutus with a big sword, said "Et tu, Brute? " and died nobly. All of that is wrong. In major and minor ways, a lot of us misunderstand the death of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 BC. A lot of those myths come from Shakespeare, who relied exclusively on Plutarch to paint his picture of Rome. Myth 1: A soothsayer told Caesar, "Beware the Ides of March" An illustration of the soothsayer from an edition of Shakespeare's play.
The Ides of March comes from the ides, a term the Romans used to note the middle of a month. The truth is actually more interesting. For one, we know who the soothsayer was and what he really said: he was named Spurinna, and he was from Etruria. "They have a lot of contacts," Strauss says, "and they're people who know what's going on. " How history forgot its role in public debate – David Armitage. It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship and the railway, thinkers from the late 19th century onwards often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies. In our current age of jet travel and the internet, we often hear that the world is flat, and that we live in a global village. Time has also been compressed. Timespans ranging from a few months to a few years determine most formal planning and decision-making – by corporations, governments, non-governmental organisations and international bodies.
Quarterly reporting by companies; electoral cycles of 18 months to seven years; planning horizons of one to five years: these are the usual temporal boundaries of our hot, crowded, and flattened little world. Short-termism has no defenders. Popular now How often do ethics professors call their mothers? How bad experiences in childhood lead to adult illness Does Earth have a shadow biosphere?
Daily Weekly History. 'Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation' by Ruby Blondell, Reviewed | The New Republic. Émile Zola’s gripping novel Nana (1880) evokes the rise, fall, and early death of a sexy blonde teenager, a celebrity actress and prostitute, who takes all of Paris by storm. She destroys every man who crosses her path before herself dying a dismal death of smallpox, portending the fall of the Second Empire.
The novel is part of Zola’s series on urban industrialization and its threat to traditional family life. Nana, although theoretically human, is a destructive and powerful machine, the engine of the new civilization as well as the motor of Zola’s novelistic plot. Her sexual allure, figured as an irresistible scent, is in the end transformed into, or revealed as, the seeping putrefaction of the charnel house. This is one of the most powerful modern versions of a far more widespread misogynistic trope. Heterosexual male desire for an exceptionally attractive woman tends to be projected onto the woman herself, who is then presented as particularly lustful. Diagnosing Mental Illness in Ancient Greece and Rome.
Health Gods-given hallucinations and suppressing anger for the greater good: How what's considered "abnormal" has changed. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > We can put a man on the moon a rover on Mars but we’re still figuring out our own brains. Mental illness is stigmatized, potentially overdiagnosed, and often misunderstood. Scientists are still learning new things about where conditions come from, while sufferers figure out how to cope. William V. Harris is the author of several books, and most recently edited Mental Disorders in the Classical World, published last summer. Could you start by explaining how attitudes toward mental illness were different in the classical world than they are today? Many people in antiquity thought that mental disorders came from the gods.
Physicians and others fought against this idea from an early date (the 5th century B.C.), giving physiological explanations instead. Germans see the best of their soul in Weimar. Everyone else, on the other hand... Thuringia, a region of former East Germany, occupies a special place in the thoughts of Germans, who like to regard it as the origin of all their best virtues. It’s an alluring place, full of wonderfully untouched stretches of densely forested hills; the occasional small historic town seems hardly to have changed for decades, and the tourist can spend a happy week pottering from Schmalkalden to Ilmenau to Eisenach in the illusion that none of those unpleasant realities of the last century ever touched this place.
I once asked the guide at the Wartburg, the magnificent medieval and mock-medieval castle on a snowy crop outside Eisenach, what this place meant to modern-day Germans. It was the castle where Luther holed up to translate the Bible, where the first idealistic students swore oaths to create a united Germany, and where Wagner set Tannhäuser.
She had no doubt. ‘Tausend Jahre positive Deutsche Geschichte’: 1,000 years of positive German history. This sometimes took some ingenuity. Sex and the Industrial Revolution | History Today. 'The Reapers', a hand-coloured mezzotint of 1809. British MuseumSexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) –Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles’ first LP. Something of the sexual revolution of the 1960s is captured in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ from his collection High Windows (1974). His pithy lament resonates because it captures an elemental truth. The advent of the contraceptive pill did transform sexual behaviour.
Since the 1960s ever more children have been born out of wedlock and the soaring divorce rate has begun to slow only because so few now tie the knot at all. But the 1960s was not in fact the only sexual watershed in modern British history. In order to understand how the Industrial Revolution could influence sexual relations we need to begin by thinking about the place of sex in pre-industrial England. Across the globe there are many different forms these customs have taken. Stories From the Berlin Wall: 25 Years Later. Wikimedia In December 1963, The Atlantic Monthly published a 43-page supplement on Berlin, "the Broken City.
" The report was published just two years after construction began on the Berlin Wall, and many of the stories revolve around the rise of this new, tangible division between the city's East and West. In honor of the 25th anniversary this week of the Wall's fall, we've included three of the most remarkable reflections from Berliners whose lives were very much defined by one of history's most consequential barriers. The Runaway Guard On Christmas Eve, 1961, an East German guard named Michael Mara defected to the West. Mara's own story of crossing over, however, is marked by a sense of circularity. A few weeks ago, I was standing one evening somewhere near Checkpoint Charlie. The Tunnel Diggers Around the same time, the Potsdam-born author Erika von Hornstein, interviewed another trio of tunnelers in Berlin: Werner, Otto, and Franz (Hornstein didn't provide their last names). The 10 greatest changes of the past 1,000 years.
11th century: Castles Most people think of castles as representative of conflict. However, they should be seen as bastions of peace as much as war. In 1000 there were very few castles in Europe – and none in England. This absence of local defences meant that lands were relatively easy to conquer – William the Conqueror’s invasion of England was greatly assisted by the lack of castles here. Over the 11th century, all across Europe, lords built defensive structures to defend them and their land. It thus became much harder for kings to simply conquer their neighbours. 12th century: Law and order If you consider visiting a foreign country, one of the most important aspects you bear in mind is how safe you will be while you are there. 13th century: Markets As is well known, money has existed for thousands of years. 14th century: Plague The greatest disaster to befall mankind and the most important event in the history of the western world had absolutely nothing to do with technology.
The Walls of Berlin: A Reading List. The Berlin Wall still exerts incredible power over our imaginations, 25 years after Germans on both sides of the city began the process of demolishing it. Its existence had always invited wildly divergent reactions, making it not only a physical structure, but also a canvas on which political and cultural dreams could be projected. This is as true today, for a generation that has never lived in its shadow, as it was during the Cold War. Here are four stories that attempt to trace its legacy. 1. From Rudow in the east to Gesundbrunnen in the west, author Will Self took two days earlier this year to traverse the length of the Wall by foot. 2. In the immediate period following the Wall’s construction, as the city was still coming to terms with this new scar carved into its surface, Bainbridge was among the first observers of its impact on Berliners on both sides. 3.
“Part of the experience was to explore the city, running through this empty city looking for a party.” 4. Like this: Related. Welcome to Weimar. Welcome to Weimar by Lisa Lieberman Hadn't there been something youthfully heartless in my enjoyment of the spectacle of Berlin in the early thirties, with its poverty, its political hatred and its despair?
Christopher Isherwood The Weimar Republic is everybody's favorite example of liberalism gone wrong. Today liberals, by their unwillingness to admit the consequences of a victory by Hitler and Stalin, are emotionally on the side of "peace" — when peace, so-called, at this moment means capitulation to the forces that will not merely wipe out liberalism but will overthrow certain precious principles with which one element of liberalism has been indelibly associated: freedom of thought, belief in an objective reason, belief in human dignity. Mumford attacked the complacency of American intellectuals who were blind to the "destruction, malice, violence" of the Nazi regime. Exhibit A find the city liberating and so he did. Distorting Mirrors.
WO2. Ancient Society Research Resources. Aztec.