00:00 - Introduction 00:07 - On The Trail Of Genghis Khan: Tim Cope 01:57 - Upheaval: Jared Diamond 05:05 - The Forgotten Highlander: Alexander Urquhart 06:36 - Power Of Geography: Tim Marshall 08:34 - Red Notice: Bill Browder 10:04 - Off The Edge Of The Map: Michael Rank 11:37 - Disunited Nations: Peter Zeihan 12:54 - The Count Of Monte Cristo: Alexandre Dumas 14:18 - Blood River: Tim Butcher 17:02 - Beauty Will Save The World: Bjorn Persson 18:19 - Plato & A Platypus Walk Into A Bar 19:14 - Honourable Mentions
The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist Ambrose Bierce, consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce's witty definitions were imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version as The Devil's Dictionary in 1911.
On 26 May 1897 Bram Stoker’s Gothic horror novel Dracula was first published. Although not the first ever vampire novel, Dracula was enormously influential in defining modern ideas of vampires, and for forever associating them with Romania.
Vlad III was the ruler of Wallachia, an area that covered a large part of Romania’s current land mass. It was due to Vlad’s apparent lust for blood that he was given the epithet ‘the Impaler’. However, during his lifetime he also had another, more instantly recognisable name. Vlad III was known as Dracula and many people therefore reported that Stoker based his character on a real historical character, but the evidence does not support this.
Vlad III’s father, Vlad II, was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric order charged with fighting the enemies of Christianity. In the case of the Wallachian ruler, this meant the Turks on his southern border. As a member of the Order of the Dragon, Vlad added the Romanian word for dragon – dracul – to his name, and became known as Vlad Dracul. As son of the dragon, Vlad III was referred to as Vlad Dracula. Importantly, however, the word dracul has a dual meaning in the Romanian language as it also means ‘devil’. This made Vlad III the son of the devil.
We know from his notes that Bram Stoker read the 19th Century British Consul William Wilkinson’s book about life in Romania, ‘Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia’. The book made several references to the term Dracula, but Stoker’s only interest in the word was that it was associated with people who portrayed devilish or cruel behaviour. It was because of the literal meaning of the word that Stoker took it to name his blood-sucking creation.
Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist, but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, hunt Dracula and, in the end, kill him.
Dracula was mostly written in the 1890s. Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes for the novel, drawing extensively from Transylvanian folklore and history. Some scholars have suggested that the character of Dracula was inspired by historical figures like the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler or the countess Elizabeth Báthory, but there is widespread disagreement. Stoker's notes mention neither figure. He found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while holidaying there, picking it because he thought it meant devil in Romanian.
Following its publication, Dracula was positively received by reviewers who pointed to its effective use of horror. In contrast, reviewers who wrote negatively of the novel regarded it as excessively frightening. Comparisons to other works of Gothic fiction were common, including its structural similarity to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859). In the past century, Dracula has been situated as a piece of Gothic fiction. Modern scholars explore the novel within its historical context—the Victorian era—and discuss its depiction of gender roles, sexuality, and race.
Dracula is one of the most famous pieces of English literature. Many of the book's characters have entered popular culture as archetypal versions of their characters; for example, Count Dracula as the quintessential vampire, and Abraham Van Helsing as an iconic vampire hunter. The novel, which is in the public domain, has been adapted for film over 30 times, and its characters have made numerous appearances in virtually all media.
Cliodynamics (from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of why things change with time) is the new transdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of historical macrosociology, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.
Cliodynamics is a transdisciplinary area of research integrating cultural evolution, economic history/cliometrics, macrosociology, the mathematical modeling of historical processes during the longue durée, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Cliodynamics treats history as science. Its practitioners develop theories that explain such dynamical processes as the rise and fall of empires, population booms and busts, spread and disappearance of religions. These theories are translated into mathematical models. Finally, model predictions are tested against data. Thus, building and analyzing massive databases of historical and archaeological information is one of the most important goals of cliodynamics.
Computer simulations show that warfare may have been the main driver behind the formation of empires, bureaucracies and religions.
Historians may be a bit leery about scientists making this sort of attempt, since history is driven by a complex set of of events, some of them seemingly one-time only. But Peter Turchin thinks otherwise. Through an approach he calls cliodynamics (named after Clio, the Greek muse of history), he wants to unravel the past by testing hypotheses against data.
For his latest work, he joined with Thomas Currie, a lecturer in cultural evolution at the University of Exeter. In the new study, they use a computer simulation to model the largest societies in the years between 1500 BCE and 1500 CE.
Their model uses a map of Africa and Eurasia split up into cells that are 100 kilometres on each side. The properties of each cell are its natural landscape, height above sea level and the possibility of agriculture (which was the main driving force behind societies). The borders are seeded with military technology, starting with the use of horses. That technology then spreads as societies fight it out virtually. What emerges is the probability that each [100 km x 100 km] cell of land could or could not be occupied by civilisations as time progresses.
“Remarkably, when the results from the simulation are compared with real data from the past, the model predicts the rise of empires with 65% accuracy,” Currie said. If military technology is removed as a factor, the model’s accuracy falls to a mere 16%. “It seems warfare created intense pressure that drove these societies.”"
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"“The model fails to predict the emergence of large empires in Central Asia. Something not in the current model is going on there.” [I suspect that the problem is one of scale -- flat terrain eliminates natural boundaries to movement (topographic defenses), and low population density facilitates militaristic expansion, meaning that the units of analysis (cells) for flat-low-population areas ought to be much larger than the 100 sq km arbitrarily assigned initially.]
The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." For the book, which is an expansion of his essay "The End of History?" (published in the summer of 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall), Fukuyama draws upon the philosophies and ideologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegeland Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear progression, from one socioeconomic epoch to another.
History should be viewed as an evolutionary process.
Events still occur at the end of history.
Pessimism about humanity's future is warranted because of humanity's inability to control technology.
The end of history means liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. There can be no progression from liberal democracy to an alternative system.
According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution, liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives.
The most basic (and prevalent) error in discussing Fukuyama's work is to confuse "history" with "events". Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term, although it may suffer "temporary" setbacks (which may, of course, last for centuries).
Some argue that Fukuyama presents "American-style" democracy as the only "correct" political system and argues that all countries must inevitably follow this particular system of government. However, many Fukuyama scholars claim this is a misreading of his work. Fukuyama's argument is only that in the future there will be more and more governments that use the framework of parliamentary democracy and that contain markets of some sort. Indeed, Fukuyama has stated:
The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.
In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small, chance events can divert our lives and change everything. In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different. Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents? Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.
[modified] Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right-wrong edge of American politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after American troops had begun fighting abroad in World War 2, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that their natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.
That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right-wrong paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.
At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.
None of it went as planned.
While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.
That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.
On 20 February 1939 a pro-Nazi rally was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, organised by the German American Bund.
The German American Bund was the successor to the Friends of New Germany organisation. This had been established, with support from Nazi Deputy FührerRudolf Hess, by recent German immigrants to America who supported the Third Reich. It was soon investigated for being unpatriotic and, after it closed at the end of 1935, the German American Bund was established.
Under the leadership of Fritz Julius Kuhn, a naturalized American citizen of German descent, the organization gained momentum although it never received financial or verbal support from the Nazi government in Germany.
On February 20, 1939, at an event that arguably marked the height of the organisation, Kuhn addressed approximately 20,000 at a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Nazi flags, swastikas, and propaganda adorned the venue while an enormous portrait of George Washington hung behind the stage.
Amidst this ocean of symbolism, Kuhn delivered an anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler speech, reflecting the organization's loyalty to Nazi Germany. President Roosevelt was repeatedly referred to as ‘Frank D. Rosenfeld’ while his New Deal was called the "Jew Deal" and the product of a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy.
Meanwhile, outside the building, 1,500 police officers had to hold back enormous crowds of anti-Nazis who had come to protest. Some protesters managed to gain access to Garden, where members of the militant arm of the Bund engaged in in fistfights with the hecklers. After the rally, Kuhn was found guilty of embezzlement and forgery, and the organisation rapidly declined.
