history – Page 3 – Treehouse Writers

The cruelty is the point. People keep saying that about the criminal occupying our White House, the Republicans in general, the Kochs and their fellow oligarchs, and the others who hold a lot of power in the United States right now.

It’s hard for me to fathom that attitude, but I’m beginning to think it’s true.

I just read historian Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain, a very thought-provoking book that takes history far beyond the Western Civ I learned in school.

He mentions the castellans, 11th and 12th century men who built or took over a castle, hired a bunch of thugs to defend it, and terrorized the people around into working for them. Random cruelty works.

Right now in the United States we have a lot of people in power who think like castellans.

Smail also quotes Robert Sapolsky: “When humans invented poverty, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.” Continue reading “On Cruelty, Poverty, and Hierarchy”…

Scraps of History

by Gillian Polack

September 7, 2020September 7, 2020

I’m supposed to be working on a novel, but a conference has intervened so I’ve been visiting Medievalists for two days. I can’t tell you everything I’ve learned in the last few days (for it’s a technical update for me in what’s happening in the world of manuscript studies, since my first PhD included matters of that kind) , but I can give you ten moments of interest.

1. Some illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages have curtains. A picture might have a special religious meaning, or it might be of someone losing their head, or it might be two people in bed. The scholar in question was introducing us to the little scraps of cloth and the fine silk thread and the holes in the parchment that make these curtains. I want to call them veils. One of the terms for finding them in a manuscript catalogue is ‘serpente’.

2. Ireland is creating a virtual reproduction of the National Archive that burned down in 1922, and it is a thing of beauty already. Plus, there’s some really neat programming behind it.

3. Holes in manuscripts can be turned into a part of the story. The hole in the parchment we were shown represented the Wound of Christ and dripped red paint. Continue reading “Scraps of History”…

History is Human

by Madeleine Robins

July 8, 2020July 8, 2020

Along with half the known universe, we watched the streaming version of Hamilton last weekend. I think either you love it or have no interest in seeing it at all, but I am very firmly in the former camp. We had seen it last fall with the San Francisco cast, and it was wonderful. Seeing the streaming film with the original cast was, in some ways, even better, because we kept the subtitles on, and lyrics that sped past on my first viewing landed this time, and it was, if anything, more emotionally resonant.

We followed up the next evening with 1776, our annual 4th of July tradition. (The first time I saw it–I must have been in college–I developed a serious crush on Thomas Jefferson: tall, red-haired, wordsmith, plays the violin, looks suspiciously like Ken Howard –no, actually, he didn’t, but never mind that. Subsequent learning took a lot of the gloss off Mr. Jefferson.) I love this show because it captures something important about the origins of my country–it glances off the flaws of the men, but doesn’t skip over the compromises: Here’s John Adams protesting against the removal of a clause condemning slavery:

John Adams: Mark me, Franklin… if we give in on this issue, posterity will never forgive us.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin: That’s probably true, but we won’t hear a thing, we’ll be long gone. Besides, what would posterity think we were? Demi-gods? We’re men, no more no less, trying to get a nation started against greater odds than a more generous God would have allowed.

They’re both right. Posterity–rightly–has not forgiven them. And maybe, likely, without the compromise over the mention of slavery, the south would have walked and the war would have gone the other way. Continue reading “History is Human”…