Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Our subject this week will be explorers, exploration and their impact. I finally read Charles C. Mann’s 1493 after much prodding from this site’s users, and it seems like a good springboard to discuss … Continue reading The History Thread Explores (and Plots a Coup)!
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! I’ll leave the thread without a discussion question this week, discuss whatever you like. Today’s picture: on February 19, 1807 Aaron Burr, the former Vice President of the United States, was arrested on charges … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Stands Accused of Plotting to Create an Empire or Something
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Not going to select a subject this week, but today is the 210th birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two of the 19th Century’s most consequential figures. Continue reading The Weekly History Thread of Discovery
On February 4, 1919 the Seattle Union Record, a union publication printed by Harry Ault, issued an explosive call to Seattle’s workers. After months of agitation and tensions, it summoned the city’s workers to perform something virtually unknown in the … Continue reading How We Got Here: Revolution Comes to Seattle
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today we’ll discuss controlling history, a topic both broad and specific. The presentation of history remains extremely contentious – witness the recent flap in Dearborn over Henry Ford – and there are numerous issues … Continue reading The [censored] Weekly History Thread
Like most politicians, William Warren Scranton disclaimed interest in politics. “I never intended to make public political life a career,” he said, shortly after stepping down as Governor of Pennsylvania in 1967. But Scranton was that rare politician whose reluctance … Continue reading How We Got Here: William Warren Scranton and the Principled Timidity of Moderate Republicans
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today’s topic: important historical events that aren’t well known. This topic is inspired by today’s anniversary, the Battle of Đông Bộ Đầu in 1258, where a Vietnamese army led by Trần Thái Tông defeated the … Continue reading An Anti-Mongol History Thread
Here is this week’s History Thread. Post what you will, I’m not sure how much I’ll be contributing to. Continue reading The Last Second History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Our discussion question: How do you draw lessons/inspirations from history? Perhaps you’re a creative type who mines history for stories or artistic ideas, maybe you view an historical figure as an inspiration. Maybe reading … Continue reading The Inspired Weekly History Thread
When Orlando Letelier awoke on September 11, 1973, he was Minister of Defense in a democratic Chile. By nightfall, he was a prisoner and his country a dictatorship. A red-haired, chain-smoking economist and diplomat who’d spent two years as Ambassador … Continue reading How We Got Here: The Wrath of Pinochet
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! This week, our discussion question: Favorite works of historical fiction. Favorite can mean a number of things, eg. just personal enjoyment, degree of accuracy, something that shapes your view of specific events or people, … Continue reading The Fictional History Thread
Welcome to the first History Thread of 2019! As usual we’ll do an open thread, though I’ll try and think of discussion questions for future ones. Please enjoy and post historical things. Today’s the sixtieth anniversary of Fidel Castro taking … Continue reading A New Year, a New History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! I’m going to take a break next week for Christmas (though I won’t object if someone else wants to throw something up). This week’s discussion question: History you’ve learned in 2018. It can be … Continue reading The Holiday History Thread!
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! As usual there won’t be a set discussion topic this week, though I might try and come up with new ones for future threads. Today’s picture: On December 11, 1917 British forces commanded by General Edmund H.H. Allenby entered Jerusalem. Allenby, who had replaced the hapless Archibald Murray as commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force a few months earlier, received orders to capture the Holy City by Christmas, more as a propaganda coup than from any strategic necessity. He defeated the Turks at Beersheba and Third Gaza in October, then slowly fought his way … Continue reading The Triumphant Weekly History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! The broader theme of this discussion is self-conscious archaism, the act of deliberately looking back to the past as a source of inspiration and emulating it in some way. This umbrella term also covers … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Appropriates the Past for Its Own Ends
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (both pictured above). Cleve Jones, Milk’s friend and ally, has a nice remembrance for … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Remembers
Thanksgiving is a strange holiday. It nominally commemorates a celebratory harvest dinner hosted by the Massachusetts Puritans in the fall of 1621, to which local Native Americans were invited in a spirit of friendship and gratitude for their help surviving … Continue reading John Redcorn’s Thankstaking History Thread
Watergate remains the defining political scandal in American history, endlessly milked for books, movies, cartoon caricatures and political analogies while Teapot Dome and Iran-Contra gather dust in the minds of history buffs. It’s easy to see why: the bizarre cast, … Continue reading Review: Watergate, Or How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President (2018, Charles Ferguson)
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Our picture commemorates the 36th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opening in Washington, DC. Designed by 21 year old architecture student Maya Lin, its simple design (a black wall listing the names of … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today is the 80th anniversary of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which allegedly caused panic across the country from hayseeds who thought it signaled a real alien invasion (though modern historians … Continue reading The Panicked Weekly History Thread
In 1929, the French National Academy of Sciences hosted a startling presentation. George Montandon, the Swiss-born enfant terrible of French anthropology, presented a paper positing the discovery of an anthropoid ape in South America. He cited as evidence the testimony … Continue reading Things That Are Not: George Montandon’s Malicious Monkey Business
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