Nobody Cares about History

[Argent Stonecutter]

You can always update Wikipedia.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Holy fuck get to the fucking point. I thought TED Talks were the worst for self-indulgent rambling. I'm two minutes in and he's talking about his fucking coffee.

tl;dw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raft

I'm afraid I must agree. Presenter seems to think he is an entertainer and that his history material needs "punched up." It is not an uncommon YouTube affliction. The topic and the history were quite interesting. The japes, jests and cat-centric shenanigans added nothing.

Interesting story, though!

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

My brain went this after viewing Milo Rossi for about 2 minutes:

 

[Khamon]

because...money...educational videos are well intentioned of course but still must keep you in the frame long enough to claim your eyeball on a spreadsheet.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Holy fuck get to the fucking point. I thought TED Talks were the worst for self-indulgent rambling. I'm two minutes in and he's talking about his fucking coffee.

tl;dw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raft

Yes. Lead with the main point. State your thesis and then support it. It's bad enough when a 500 word article buries the lead. On a 30 minute video you need to tell the audience why they are watching this. Surprise twists are not more interesting. You end up dumping a bunch of information and leaving it up to the audience to figure out how it is connected instead of giving them a roadmap at the start and saying where you are going. I turn this shit off if I don't know their thesis in 30 seconds because I assume they don't have one.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Milo Rossi is a little unusual for a youtuber. He started out making short-form content on Tik Tok, abrasively making fun of and debunking pseudoarchaeology. Tik Tok and other short-form platforms are completely drowned in videos pushing BS history, pseudoarchaeology, and conspiracy theories, and Rossi was one of the pitifully few voices that could be found pushing back against that content on that platform - and as far as I know the only one who managed to gain any meaningful traction.

He started posting some longer-form stuff to YouTube a few years ago that was originally along the same lines, debunking pseudohistory and related conspiracy theories. More recently he's been making occasional videos on these strictly-historical topics. His presentation style HAS been largely carried over from his origins; but I don't see it as some kind of money grab. Rossi needed this conversational, snarky unscripted style in order to compete against the kinds of channels he debunked in front of the demographic he was mainly trying to reach. It worked, and his common but brief digressions and in-jokes might best be thought of as personal communication with the audience he has built, that he has some rapport with. He also really loves his cat.

It might not be for everyone; but most people are fine with it because the educational content itself is solid, and he is a forceful Gen Z voice speaking out against pseudohistory which makes him so rare he may as well be...well, a cryptid.

He also consistently refers to the colonization of North America as an invasion, and to Manifest Destiny and the westward expansion as genocide, so there's that.

 

[Isabeau]

I hadn’t heard of the Nebra sky disc.

From WIKI:

“The Nebra sky disc features the oldest concrete depiction of astronomical phenomena known from anywhere in the world. In June 2013, it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and termed "one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century."

The disc, together with two bronze swords, two sets of remains of axes, a chisel, and fragments of spiral armbands were discovered in 1999 by Henry Westphal and Mario Renner while they were treasure-hunting with a metal detector.”

Secrets to crafting the Nebra Sky Disc revealed

Using a blend of forensic material analysis with experimental archaeology, researchers have successfully reconstructed the techniques and processes behind crafting the Nebra Sky Disc. - HeritageDaily - Archaeology News

www.heritagedaily.com

"We're conducting what we might call metallurgical forensics, peering into the disk's past as if it were a metallurgical diary"

"What is especially remarkable, Halle added, is that the Sky Disk was created without written knowledge, measuring instruments, or formal theory, only through trial and error.

 

[Free]

She's not wrong.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Politico article compares ICE enforcement actions with enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850:

As unprecedented as all this might seem, we’ve been here before — and there is a warning in it for the president. In the 1850s, the federal government enforced a brutal dragnet aimed at hunting down and returning “fugitive slaves” — formerly enslaved persons who had escaped captivity and fled north. Authorized by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a combination of federal officials and private slave catchers compelled Northern white citizens to cooperate with the arrest of formerly enslaved people, or else risk arrest themselves. The law introduced the brutality of slavery into free Northern communities. The use of armed soldiers in civilian settings, the arrest of free Black people — similar to today’s indiscriminate arrests, which have ensnared immigrants with legally protected status — and the erosion of political liberties long enjoyed by free citizens all presaged the current environment.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/26/ice-deportations-civil-war-history-00473752

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Devil in History

A new collection of essays confronts one of the world's wiliest adversaries

buttondown.com

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

The Devil in History

A new collection of essays confronts one of the world's wiliest adversaries

buttondown.com

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Happy Jimmy Hoffa Day!

 

[Free]

Happy Jimmy Hoffa Day!

 

[Free]

Original parking demands in NYC.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Africans in Early Medieval England

A New Archeological Discovery Provides More Evidence for a Permeable Medieval Europe

buttondown.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Garden of Forking Paths | Brian Klaas | Substack

Wandering around an infinitely complex, ever-changing world. Click to read The Garden of Forking Paths, by Brian Klaas, a Substack publication.

www.forkingpaths.co

Free to read, I think.

History is therefore not just what happened, but is rather a written narrative, often filtered through a single mind, built upon an arbitrarily selected pile of surviving evidence, and subjectively stitched together.

Here, the exact contours of this story are less important than the idea: that our lives are swayed by natural forces, even as we obsess about our histories as though they are solely authored by us. They’re not, and the more that we understand ourselves as an interacting component in a much larger, maddeningly complex system that we call the Earth, the fewer mistakes we’ll make when we try to learn from our own histories, tragic or triumphant.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Travel in the Middle Ages

A Conversation with Larisa Grollemond about a New Exhibition at the Getty Museum (LA)

buttondown.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Yeh, that's been conventional wisdom for some years now.

 

[Free]