Final post! (well... maybe, kind of)

So here we are, at the end of a fantastic journey.  7 months, 11 posts, and countless revisions age, I had very little idea where I was going to go with this blog.  Now, I'm wrapping it up for the year.  For this "last" post, I wanted to leave you with some "wisdom" or "philosophy" (in the absolute loosest sense of the terms).

1) Leave any place better than how you found it

This is as close a thing to a motto that I'll ever have.  It takes the totally unachievable goal of "make the world a better place" and makes it manageable.  It's also not supposed to be a burden.  I know that I don't have to make every place I visit into a utopia before I leave.  I just know that I have to make it the slightest bit better than it was before, whether by helping clean up, telling a joke, or just not making things worse.

2) Find fun

I know the more common phrase is "have fun," but I like this one better.  There will be things in life that are required, and many of them will not be fun.  But these things are required, so you may as well try to have some fun with them.  Whether it means making it into a game or something as simple as giving yourself little rewards for finishing, there's always a way to find fun within any task.

3) Don't dwell on the past, but don't forget it either

The past is the past.  There's nothing you can do to change it, and while lying is always an option, it is permanent.  So don't spend too much time looking back on mistakes or successes lest you let the present slip by.

That said, don't forget the past.  This blog was all about the past, whether important or inane, and there were lessons that could be learned from all of it.  The past, whether your personal past or the past of a civilization long gone, is full of knowledge that can only help.  Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Well, that's all I've got for now.  Thank all of you for taking the time to read this blog, and I hope I did enough to make it enjoyable.  So for now, I leave you with one last quote:

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.  --Aldous Huxley

Guest Post! North Korea

Hey everyone. My name is Faith Savaiano, and I'm very excited to be doing a guest blog for Brian. I'm one of Brian's classmates, and he's always been jealous of me because of how much better at history I am than him. Just kidding...

Anyways, Brian talks a bit about repeating history and learning from those repetitions. Or not. This is quite apparent recently in the U.S.'s (and everyone else's) ongoing tensions with North Korea. Many people are quite frankly freaked out by North Korea's recent actions, while others find it mildly amusing.

There are, indeed, historical reasons to back up both of these reactions:

ALARM - The main reason for alarm is the man, or boy, calling the shots, Kim Jong-Un. Not only is he young and impulsive, but because of North Korea's veil of secrecy, no one really knows who he is. So when he threatens to hit South Korea or mainland USA with a preemptive nuclear strike, it's hard to know how long we can call his bluff. Kim Jong-Un is a man without a clear history, and that makes him scary.

AMUSEMENT - On the other hand, North Korea has a long history of making idle threats against the U.S. and others. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, relations have been less than friendly between North Korea and the U.S., so we've exchanged our fair share of empty threats on both sides. Also, the complete control North Korea has over it's media often results in humorous publications, such as a 2011 Global Happiness Index, conducted by North Korea, which ranked China as the happiest country in the world, followed closely by North Korea in second (got to appreciate that modesty). "The American Empire" ranked a sad last on the list.

New Historicism

New Historicism is an interesting combination of literature and history.  And when I say that it's a combination of literature and history, I mean that it looks at literature to examine history.  It's a very postmodern idea, and is one of the few aspects of postmodernism that I actually can understand.

Fun fact: Calling something "Postmodern" is a great way to look intellectual without actually knowing anything.

Back on topic, New Historicists believe that classical works can't be examined through modern viewpoints, because those viewpoints are modern constructions.  Because they didn't exist when the piece was written, we can't apply them to the work.  Also, they believe that any analysis or criticism of a piece of literature will tell you more about the time in which the analysis criticism was written than anything about the actual literature.

So how do New Historicists look at literature?  They get back into the mind-frame of the time.  Think a character has a mental illness?  Then you've got to think about it in terms of the mental health treatment of that period, even if it seems insane now.  They can use concurrent literature as sources (with a broad definition of "literature" meaning anything that was written, including records), but works from other times are out.

Missing History

Despite what your US history textbooks may have tried to tell you, we will never have a complete understanding of history.  History is essentially one infinitely long game of telephone: things get corrupted and then accepted as fact, some parts drop out, some parts get added.  The view of history changes so often that there's a whole field dedicated to just studying views on history.

The reason that people are able to study how our view of history has changed (and a major part of studying history itself) is books.  Books are able to keep records of knowledge for thousands of years, passing their wisdom onto future generations.

Our wisdom for future generations.

Which is why it's such a shame when books, especially famous and important books, get lost.  The worst example of this is the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.  At the time, the Library was the single largest collection of knowledge anywhere in the world.  It was originally ordered by Alexander the Great, who wanted a collection of his empire's knowledge.  Although he never lived to see its completion, his dream lived on.

For a while, anyway. Like the lighthouse before it, the library proved that nothing famous in Alexandria can stay forever.  Amazingly, no one even knows who destroyed the library.  Suspects have ranged from Julius Caesar to Theophilus, a Patriarch of Alexandria, to Caliph Omar.  What is known, however, is that very few of the works held in the library survived.

The loss of the Library of Alexandria is possibly the reason that there are holes in every World History textbook.  No one really knows exactly what was lost with the library, but there is no doubt that invaluable historical texts were destroyed.  If the library still stood, who knows what we would have access to?

Conspiracy Theories

I love conspiracy theories.  They are the alternate history (or present) that usually make my craziest ideas seem pretty sane by comparison.  But while almost all conspiracy theories sound pretty crazy, that doesn't mean that they're all wrong.  In fact, some of the craziest sounding conspiracy theories wound up being right on the money.  These theories turned out to be things like:

Operation Snow White

You may have heard of Scientology, the religion that was founded by a Science Fiction writer and has had some issues with public relations in the past, both recent and not so recent.  So in the 1970's the Church of Scientology decided to go with the basic reaction of any group with a bad public image: they infiltrated the government to get rid of any records that portrayed them in an unfavorable light.

Over the course of about 2 years, the Church of Scientology had as many as 5,000 covert agents infiltrate various branches of the government, including the IRS, the Coast Guard, and the DEA.  The main goals were to gain a tax-exempt status as a religious group and to remove any evidence of Scientology's crazier plots (including when they tried to get a journalist committed to a mental institution).

Amazingly, the plan worked.  Then, in early 1977, one of the agents got arrested while breaking into a government building.  After that, it all unraveled very quickly, culminating in 11 high-ranking members, including the founder's wife, getting indicted in 1978.  6 of the 11 went to jail for four years, and each had to pay a $10,000 fine.

I would call that pretty light punishment for the people who orchestrated the single largest infiltration of the government in the history of the United States.

Government Media Control

Everyone has heard at one time or another the theory that the government actually controls everything that we see and hear in the media.  Most of the time, the people that you hear it from are also convinced that a secret organization actually rules the world, so I wouldn't put too much stock in the theory itself.

Then again, reality can be a strange thing.  In 1948 Frank Wisner, who was in charge of the sinister-named Office of Special Projects, started Operation Mockingbird.  This goal of this operation was to infiltrate every major media outlet with reporters who were on his payroll.

The program was astonishingly successful.  In under ten years, there were over 400 reporters on the government's payroll, including some of the big shots at ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, and the Associated Press.  This level of infiltration allowed the government to suppress any story they didn't like as well as planting pro-government stories.  Apparently, this was all so easy because, as one operative noted, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."

Luckily for us, the entire operation was disbanded in the mid-1970's.  Or not, according to much of the internet.


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For this post, much of my research and some of my sources came from Cracked.com, who I strongly recommend that you check out, especially this article:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18955_6-crackpot-conspiracy-theories-that-actually-happened.html#ixzz2JQs0GPDN

Interesting History: Troy

Troy is an ancient city made famous first by Homer in the Iliad (c. 1250 BC) and then by Brad Pitt in the film Troy (c. 2004).  It is best known as the namer of the Trojan Horse and the site of the Trojan War, which serves as something of a prequel for The Odyssey, making it the bane of high school students everywhere.  The city itself was thought to be mythical for a while, on account of how no one could find it.  And that's where the story gets interesting.

The man who actually discovered Troy was Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist.  When he got to the site, he discovered that there were actually ruins of at least nine ancient cities, all stacked on top of each other.  This was fairly common practice in ancient times, because if somewhere was good enough to live (and like Troy, right on a lucrative trade route), there was no reason to let a few ruins get in your way.  You just built right on top of them.

When Schliemann saw this, he figured that since the Troy of the Trojan war was from Grecian times, it had to be on the bottom.  So he went right to blasting.  He went all the way down to the bottom level, where he claimed that he had discovered Troy and King Priam's treasure.  The only problem was that this left about a thousand-year gap in Troy's history.  But screw that, he found treasure!

See, treasure!

People just accepted this for about 20 years, until another archaeologist found that one of the other cities in the pile matched up with Homer's description much better.  A city five freaking levels above where Schliemann had claimed Troy was and almost 2,000 years younger.  So in his fervor to find Troy, Schliemann had actually blown straight through it, and did such a good job of it that archaeologists are still complaining about how much he destroyed to this day.

For those of you who haven't heard of We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel, it is a song about history.  More specifically, it outlines every major event (and several boxing matches) in American history from about 1949-1990 in chronological order.  It's actually extensive enough that a book of American history used the song as a guide for what to talk about for the period from 1949-1990.  It also has a fairly famous video.

What's almost amazing as the depth of the song itself is the sheer number of adaptions and parodies made to the tune (scroll down a little on the linked page for the list).  Some of them have just used the (admittedly catchy) tune, but others have continued to use the history theme, and some of them have been fairly impressive.  Here's a list of the three most impressive random histories I've seen set to Billy Joel.

Singapore (a.k.a "I Live in Singapura")

This song is the epitome of a random history.  I didn't know anything about Singaporean history until this video, but this song and video were hilarious anyway.  And while the song is still funny even in a vacuum, a little context can go a long way in making the video even better.

Political Scandals (a.k.a "We Didn't Start Satire")

This one is a pure song.  The video helps with some context, but the song is the real humor here.  It outlines almost every political scandal in Washington (and some in other states as well) starting in 1981.  This was written for the 30th year of Capitol Steps, a satire group from DC, and their knowledge shows.

Video Games (a.k.a "The Wii Didn't Start the Fire")

This is definitely my favorite song and video on the list.  These guys did a great job with the lyrics (which cover the history of video games from their beginning until about 2010), the sound effects (they frequently use sound clips from the things they're referencing, which are awesome if you recognize them), and the video (which uses video clips from virtually everything they mention).  They even kept the video in a similar style to Billy Joel.