underscored

@underscored

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I was trying to find the human side of history, and humans were often my best source. When I thought about Sacajawea in the Rockies, trying to keep her infant son alive, I thought about my own kids at that age—about my wife breastfeeding them, both parties always hungry, always thirsty.

Craig Fehrman
1w ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Fishtail Parka Edition

In the decades after the war, surplus U.S. military gear flooded Japanese markets, and a generation grew up with an almost archaeological fascination with the objects themselves: the stitching, the hardware, the fabric weight, the precise shade of olive drab. What emerged was a cottage industry of reproduction specialists who approached American workwear and military garments the way a watchmaker approaches a complicated movement, with complete seriousness, no shortcuts, and a conviction that the original was worth getting exactly right.

2w ago

But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia) long. During this time, what we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions (Copernicus's model of circular orbits around the sun was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model).

3w ago
3quarksdaily.com
The Uncommon Enemy

The West's Cold War propaganda focused on decrying Communist totalitarianism and championing democratic freedoms, but the United States and its closest allies were mostly concerned with preserving their largest businesses' access to capitalistic markets and resources.

4w ago

Great Britain knew that it had a problem and that its calendar was less accurate, but inertia is a powerful force, and calendar reform was deferred until 1751.

1mo ago

History is contingent — the Equal Rights Amendment failed ratification by only three states out of 38, and never really got a second shot. If Hillary Clinton had won a few more votes in 2016, Roe v. Wade wouldn't have been overturned, and affirmative action in college admissions would be legal to this day.

1mo ago

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

1mo ago

How are things different now from the way they were in the golden age? The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine.

1mo ago

The hatred for anything giving us pain, which wreaks itself on the manifest cause, and which leads even a civilized man to kick a door when it pinches his finger, is embodied in . . . doctrines of early Roman law.

1mo ago

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

1mo ago

Man can embed himself in history only by understanding the way his ancestors embedded themselves in it; but he can understand his ancestors only by re-creating their experiments in his own mind and life.

1mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Gregorian Calendar Edition

By the 1500s, the incredibly slight discrepancy between the actual length of the solar year (365.2422 days) and the average length of the Julian calendar year (365.25 days) had created some problems.

1mo ago

The poets make all the words, and therefore language is the indelible record of mankind's being.

1mo ago

I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread.

1mo ago

Although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills.

1mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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