John Cameron and the History of English Football « More Than Mind Games
Fascinating essay over at MTMG about a footballer called John Cameron and the early history of English football.
(del.icio.us tags: football history sport )
BBC - Ouch! - Features - What’s your Sign Name?
Interesting article about 'sign names' - i.e. the nicknames deaf people give [...]
Jefferson Bible reveals Founding Father’s view of God, faith - Los Angeles Times
'to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the four Gospels… and reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative'
(del.icio.us tags: America Christianity ThomasJefferson [...]
The Royal Society - Article
Interesting. 'It is widely believed that Charles Darwin avoided publishing his theory of evolution for many years… This essay demonstrates that Darwin's delay is… overwhelmingly contradicted by the historical evidence.' via Carl Zimmer
(del.icio.us tags: C19th CharlesDarwin evolution history )
The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, is a selection of essays by different historians. To quote the blurb:
Many of the traditions which we think of as ancient in their origins were, in fact, invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention [...]
There’s a great quote in [...]
Kottke pointed out this thread, a discussion starting from this question:
I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I [...]
Full, slightly overblown title: Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory. This is a book about the relationship between England and Holland in the C17th. It’s an interesting period, of course: the C17th was Holland’s ‘Golden Age’, when the country was not only a wealthy global power but at the intellectual and especially artistic forefront of Europe. For [...]
Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary: 9th May 1833
After a period of being a bit dull, Darwin's Beagle diary livens up as he goes ashore and meets some gauchos. "I here found out I possessed two or three things which created unbounded astonishment. — Principally a small pocket compass."
(del.icio.us tags: C19th CharlesDarwin Uruguay history )
I’ve actually linked to these before, but a post over at i heart photograph reminded me about them and I was browsing through them again. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer taking colour pictures in the years before the Great War. He took three black and white negatives of each subject using different coloured filters, then reassembled them [...]
Or to give it its fuller, more informative title: Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. It is what it sounds like: a brief (under 200 pages, including the index) overview of dating technologies for a general audience: radio isotope dating, dendrochronology, Antarctic ice cores and so on. And I enjoyed it; [...]
The full title is The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; i.e. the century in question is the longish C17th from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Queen Anne. I guess most centuries are centuries of revolution somewhere, and in one way or another, but the C17th was the only time the English have had an actual [...]
There is, I gather, an ongoing philosophical debate running behind the scenes of Wikipedia; one which will probably run forever. On the one side are the deletionists; on the other are the inclusionists. The question is how to deal with articles about less important subjects: one side generally favours deleting them, the other would prefer [...]
And a peculiarly London sun - against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot - glorified all this by its stare. It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance. The very pavement under Mr Verloc’s feet had an old-gold tinge in that [...]
I talked about the juxtaposition of the C19th Gothic of Tower Bridge and the genuine medievalness of the Tower of London: not, in my opinion, one of the great planning decisions in the history of London. Well, at Westminster, you meet with a similar case. The Palace of Westminster (i.e. the Houses of Parliament), started [...]
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a biography of Stalin, focussed on his domestic life and the tightly-knit group of people around him: his own family, and politicians, bodyguards, and their families.
As a piece of history, it’s very impressive. It’s clearly the result of a huge amount of research by Montefiore: he [...]
A fairly short chunk of the path; I was intending to go a bit further, but the sun went in and I wasn’t really enjoying it much so I hopped on the tube at Westminster. Still, if you use one of the traditional definitions of a city—a town with a cathedral—this section includes the three [...]
I highly recommend this fascinating book; it seems to be out of print, but there are lots of second-hand copies on Amazon. As the title suggests, it’s about poor mad George III. And even Americans, brought up to think of George III as a tyrant, might have a little sympathy for him after reading this.
It [...]
This is a biography of Charles Darwin’s grandfather. He was a doctor by trade, and one of the most highly rated in the country, but was one of those classic Enlightenment figures whose interests included botany, meteorology, physics, chemistry, engineering, philosophy and just about anything else that came his way. And for a few years [...]
Charles Darwin was in an unusually poetical mood 175 years ago today:
The night was pitch dark, with a fresh breeze. — The sea from its extreme luminousness presented a wonderful & most beautiful appearance; every part of the water, which by day is seen as foam, glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before [...]
I watched Who Do You Think You Are earlier, the BBC’s celebrity genealogy show. It’s a bit of a lottery. Carol Vorderman gets an ancestor who was the first person to identify a dietary cause for beri-beri and who probably would have won the Nobel prize if he lived a little longer, as well as [...]
William Adam was an English sailor working as a pilot on a Dutch expedition of five ships that set out in 1598 to make money in the Orient. In 1600, after a disastrous voyage during which just about everything went wrong, Adam was one of just 24 men surviving on one of the ships – [...]