System of the World - Astronomy and Cosmology in Early Modern Europe

A Treatise of the System of the World, by Sir Isaac Newton. / Public DomainFor decades, historians have grappled with the origins of modern science in early modern Europe.By Dr. Oded Rabinovitch, Senior Lecturer in History, Tel Aviv UniversityAbstractHistorians have long debated the origins of modern science in early modern Europe. Recently, however, scholars pointed to our need to understand how the ‘new philosophy’ became a sustained movement, which did not dissipate over the course of a fe...

Trains of Europe

Review By Eoghan Smith  John Holten, The Trains of Europe (Broken Dimanche Press, 2024)Since the Covid pandemic, there has been no shortage of fiction speculating on planetary catastrophes yet-to-come. As with typical iterations of this species of anxiety-driven literature, the cause of the apocalypse is never an abstract entity but a manifestation of an existing mega-threat already facing the world. Recent examples include the technocapitalist hellscape of Niall Bourke’s Line, the spectre of...

Zombie Hero of our time

On July 11, 1980, there was a traffic accident, a collision,  on the road in the hills above a Club Med in Haiti. One of the involved persons, Emerson Douyon, was a criminologist and anthropologist from Canada. He wrote an article that begins with the details of the accident, and its cause, which was as follows: in the backseat with Douyon was a man who, as the taxi driver in front understood from the conversation they were having, was dead. The name of the man was Clerveus Narcisse. The taxi...

Spring of Easter - Unveiling its Pagan Past and Christian Present

Welcome to a insightful documentary, "The Spring of Easter: Unveiling its Pagan Past and Christian Present." In this captivating exploration, we journey through time to uncover the rich history and varied traditions that have shaped Easter, a significant holiday celebrated around the world. Easter's origins are a fascinating tapestry woven from both pagan and Christian beliefs, and this film aims to unravel that tapestry thread by thread. We delve into the history of Easter, tracing its roots...

Spring of Easter - Unveiling its Pagan Past and Christian Present

Welcome to a insightful documentary, "The Spring of Easter: Unveiling its Pagan Past and Christian Present." In this captivating exploration, we journey through time to uncover the rich history and varied traditions that have shaped Easter, a significant holiday celebrated around the world. Easter's origins are a fascinating tapestry woven from both pagan and Christian beliefs, and this film aims to unravel that tapestry thread by thread. We delve into the history of Easter, tracing its roots...

War Trilogy – Three Films by Andrzej Wajda

Watching these harrowing films in rapid succession allows us to watch a great director’s confidence develop at close hand; though 1955’s A Generation (Pokolenie) is an impressive debut for a 27-year old director, both Kanał (1957) and 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) really show Wajda’s technique taking flight. The three films are thematically linked but don’t share any characters, tracing life in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1942 until the end of the Eur...

The Russian Empire Pre-Revolution: Recreating the Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record

His ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of history.Curated/Reviewed by Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminateIntroductionThe photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industr...

The Russian Empire Pre-Revolution: Recreating the Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record

His ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of history.Curated/Reviewed by Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminateIntroductionThe photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industr...

How House of the Dragon Mirrors The Anarchy in England

Now that the hugely successful first season of HBO’s House of the Dragon has aired, it is safe for us to do an analysis of how much and how closely the events and characters mirrored those of actual history. It is no secret that George R.R. Martin drew inspiration for some of his storylines for the smash hit Game of Thrones from historic events, but what about the spin off, House of the Dragon ? Well, at a Comic-Con panel in 2022, Martin explained how G.O.T. had been loosely based around t...

How Traveling Booksellers Spread Literature Throughout Ancient Greece

How many books were there in the golden age of ancient Greece? What percentage of the population could read them? We have only shreds of information preserved by chance, blades of grass that float along on the breeze but don’t allow us to calculate the size of the meadow from which they came. And most of them refer to an exceptional place, the city of Athens. The rest remains in shadow.Seeking traces of this invisible literacy, we turn to images of readers represented in ceramic paintings. Fr...

Armageddon Time - film review

There are any number of memorable images from James Gray’s "Ad Astra," a singularly introspective space adventure in which Brad Pitt journeys to the outer limits of our solar system just to hear Daddy Lee Jones tell him that he doesn’t care, but none have stayed with me quite like the shot of Pitt’s astronaut landing on the Moon — the very first stop on his interstellar voyage into the heart of darkness. Once the ultimate symbol of humanity’s possibility and the nearest proof of our species’ ...

Ukrainian Names U to Z

U is for unrulySourceURL: https://drkottaway.com/2022/04/25/u-is-for-unruly/ I am blogging from A to Z about Helen Burling Ottaway, my artist mother, and other women artists. Artists are unruly. They are not obedient. They are usurpers. They are unreasonable. This is another etching of my mother, a self portrait, titled "Giantess". She looks giant, rising from an ocean. Will she have arms and hands and legs, or is she an octopus? We do not know. It may depend on her mood. ...

Slavs and Tatars

For nearly fifteen years, the collective Slavs and Tatars have been producing installations, sculptures, performative talks, and publications that address the relationship between language and the ever-shifting landscape of identity politics. Having started in 2006 as an informal reading group, Slavs and Tatars’ remit of research is, as their name suggests, the not-so-small region "east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China." The artists’ practice unearths the ways in ...

The Romans, the Visigoths, the Huns

From the second century AD, the Goths were regarded as Europe’s most ferocious warriors. In the fourth century AD, a nomadic tribe appeared that was ferocious on a new level: the Huns. The Huns arrived on the Volga in 370 AD, and they started raiding the territory dominated by the Goths and other Germanic tribes that were living outside the borders of the Roman Empire. In 376 AD, they defeated the Goths. Ermanaric, King of the Goths, was devastated by the defeat and committed suicide. The Rom...

Apollo magazine reflects on 1941

Edward's Syndrome - Everything2.com

Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Edward's Syndrome (thing) by BioTech Fri Nov 02 2001 at 16:00:15 Edward's Syndrome (also known as trisomy 18 or trisomy E) is a congenital disorder caused by a baby having an extra copy of chromosome 18 (in other words, the baby has three copies instead of the normal two). Characteristics of the disorder include widespread defects in internal organs throughout the body and malformed physical features of the face and skeletal s...

Waldensian Heretics

Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Waldensian Heretics (thing) See all of Waldensian Heretics, no other writeups in this node. (thing) by sui Thu Feb 28 2002 at 11:15:50 WALDENSIAN HERETICS Origins and Beginnings This group of heretics was formed in approximately 1170 AD, and was named after its founder, a man called Waldes. A citizen of Lyons in France, Waldes was a wealthy man who forfeited his riches to live in poverty and evangelical perfection. Hi...

The essential colporteur - a pioneering unheroic history of the printed book

How Europeans viewed the Turks

Alchemy in Death of Procris painting

In Death of Procris - The Considering the alchemist background of Cosimo Rosselli (the painter's teacher and father-in-law), it has been suggested that the painting "can be explained in terms of the pictorial language of alchemy".[3] According to this conceit, the dog (whose form is visually echoed by three other dogs in the background) represents none other than Hermes Trismegistos and a tree shown growing over Procris's breast symbolises the arbor philosophica.[3] The red-and-gold veil...

TLS clips - WWII focus - Aug 2019

Sally Rooney captures our beleaguered idealism