Tag: history

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Nero was only 16 when he became Emperor. His coming to power had nevertheless been enabled by several murders and/or suspiciously timely deaths. Claudius may or may not have died accidentally, but Narcissus, who favored Britannicus and the Senator Silanus, were poisoned almost certainly on the orders of Nero’s mother. (more…)

4,287 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Alexander Bätz
Nero: Wahnsinn und Wirklichkeit
‎Hamburg: Rowohlt Buchverlag, 2023

Among those able to name any Roman emperors, Nero is likely to be on their list. Although he was Roman Emperor for only 14 years, from 54 to 68 AD, he is widely viewed as one of the most famous or infamous of all of them, strongly associated with the persecution of the Christians and the murder of both his mother and wife, and he is widely seen as the embodiment of tyranny. (more…)

Francis Fukuyama heralded a return to a Western-centered universal conception of history — but one which sees universal liberalism as its endpoint.

4,196 words

Part 7 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 6 here)

We have no standards to judge what are “good” and “bad” forms of being a human, since there are no subjects existing outside the contingencies of historical time and power relationships. All we can do is engage in “discourse analysis” so as to uncover existing hierarchies by analyzing the fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. We can engage in questioning how we came to be the “humans” we think we are, such as how we came to think that we have natural rights to life, liberty, and happiness, but such a questioning can only show us how our current way of being human is historically contingent and thus changeable. (more…)

Justus of Ghent, Saint Augustine, c. 1475

4,344 words

Part 2 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Emerging of a Christian Historical Consciousness

For all we have said about Greek and Roman historiography (and there were other historians, such as Suetonius, Appian, and Casius Dios), contemporary scholars invariably agree that the ancients remained a “non-historical” people. Herbert Butterfield is convinced “the Greeks did not achieve historical mindedness, and never could have achieved it, because they had the wrong view of time and the time process.” The Greeks “only knew of a comparatively short history behind them — they thought that the historical past extended back for only a very few hundred years.” (more…)

Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros (1478)

6,611 words

Part 1 of 7 (Part 2 here)

One of the most startling historical truths is that Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese who maintained for centuries a tradition of chronological writers, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording the deeds of rulers or the construction of genealogies devoid of reflections on historical causation. This would not have been judged a controversial view a few decades ago. (more…)

Portrait by Joshua Reynolds

5,714 words

How fares the Truth now? — Ill?
— Do pens but slily further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?
— Thomas Hardy, “Lausanne, In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11-12 p.m.”
The 110th anniversary of the completion of the Decline and Fall at the same hour and place

Edward Gibbon was born in Putney, England on May 8, 1737. He was the sole survivor of a family with seven children; he had five brothers and one sister who all died in infancy. (more…)

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Philippa Jayne Langley (Sally Hawkins) is an office frump  in Edinburgh — and a depressed one. She is passed over for promotion because she isn’t charming enough, which is true. She dresses like she gets her clothes from a bad aunt’s closet, her hair is clipped, and her doleful eyes suggest a mousy wife whose marriage to John (Steve Coogan) is in freefall. Her two sons are obsessed with video games, and her husband openly tells Philippa that he has a mistress. This is not done out of bitterness; for all their marriage’s failings, John and Philippa are honest and rational. They may not be happy, but they are decent in the old English way. (more…)

6,341 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

1. Fichte on the Nature of the State

We began to explore Fichte’s political philosophy in the last installment, as expounded primarily in his 1796 work Foundations of Natural Right. It is a basic principle of Fichte’s philosophy that subjectivity, what he calls the “I,” must bring nature under the control of reason. (more…)

4,571 words

Imagine that you’re an organic dairy farmer in Pennsylvania, as trad as can be. One day, while you’re supposed to be milking the cows by hand, someone catches you at your side gig. Specifically, you’re working on your cloud-hosted Hyper-V cluster, adding a DNS reverse lookup zone to the Active Directory domain controller so the DHCP server can assign PTR records when it leases IP addresses. Obviously, your Amish brethren won’t cotton to that. They might shun you for apostasy, and perhaps stack one count of felony TCP/IP administration onto your sentence. Still, luckily for you at least the Amish Ordnungspolizei won’t put out a contract on you. (more…)

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Note: This essay, whose author wishes to remain anonymous, is based on a talk recently given at a private nationalist gathering in the United States.

History, as we know, does not flow evenly. Those of us old enough to remember the Cold War will recall that for several decades the east and west blocs faced off like two tectonic plates, as the world waited for an earthquake that never seemed to arrive. (more…)

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Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads. — Shelby Foote (more…)

Mircea Eliade

187 words / 2:00:22

The eclectic scholar Kathryn S. was host Nick Jeelvy‘s guest on the latest broadcast of The Writers’ Bloc, where they discussed Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane and answered viewer questions, and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:04:54 Mircea Eliade’s background and influence
00:06:56 Parallels to Jung and Freud
00:12:01 Influence on Camille Pagllia (more…)