Ayn Rand: goddess of the market

She was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the eldest daughter in a haute-bourgeois Russian Jewish family that was ruined by the 1918 revolution. When she came to the United States in 1926, she reinvented herself as Ayn Rand, charismatic philosopher and novelist who inspired a generation of rebels and free-market theorists.
Historian Jennifer Burns, author of the new [...]

The REAL story of Thanksgiving (redux)

In honor of turkey day, I pulled this from the DIY Scholar archives:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Pilgrims, the Indians, the feasting — we learned all that stuff in school. But what’s the real story?
Check out American as Pumpkin Pie: A History of Thanksgiving (website, iTunes), a recent episode of the podcast BackStory – With the [...]

The Russian revolution on Mars

Here’s an offbeat bit of cinema for your weekend viewing pleasure: Aelita: Queen of Mars, a 1924 silent film made in the Soviet Union about space travelers who arrive on Mars and help the downtrodden workers unite and throw off their exploiting overlords. You might want to fast-forward through the early bits to get [...]

Reading Homer as an anthropologist

What happens when you stop thinking of the Iliad as a work of fiction but instead see it as a primary text to help explain an ancient society?
That’s what archaeologist Tara Carter does in lecture 21 and lecture 22 of her great UC San Diego course Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).
She presents the [...]

Unwanted side effects of democracy

Maybe it’s the legacy of the Cold War — all of those years of being the bastion of freedom and democracy — but somehow Americans got in the habit of viewing democracy as something completely good, something that everyone in his or her right mind must want, like a chocolate sundae with no calories.
But democracy, [...]

The Cold War is history

Many conditions were necessary for the end of the Cold War to happen as it did.
In an academic conference, entitled The Cold War is History (iTunes, website), Stanford historian James Sheehan reminds us that even when the Berlin wall fell, reunification of Germany was not a done deal. In fact, there were two enormously important [...]

Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror

Economist and blogger extraordinaire Brad DeLong takes a whirlwind tour of economic history in his recent talk, Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror (weblink).
First comes the tale of the Panic of 1825. As DeLong tells it, this was the first time a central bank (Bank of England) intervened to avert a financial crisis by [...]

Archaeologist Isabelle Pafford teaches new course

University of Santa Clara archaeologist Isabelle Pafford is back with a new course about heroic narratives, Heroes & Heroism (iTunes). The course covers heroic figures in ancient works like the Iliad, the Gilgamesh epic, and the Bhagavad Gita, and explores the historical background behind these tales.
Pafford has many fans among my readers who have praised [...]

Treasure trove of courses at UCSD

University of California San Diego is offering a record 63 courses available for free download on its podcast website this quarter, enough to fill your mp3 player for months to come. But carpe diem, seize the day. Most of these riches will only stay on the website until the end of the quarter (roughly mid-December), [...]

When the modern world began

For much of human history, most people lived in the world of poverty and hard labor described by that most dismal of early economists, Thomas Malthus. In brief, Malthus reasoned that any increase in food supply would be quickly outpaced by increased population, thus forever depressing living standards to bare subsistence.
So when did we [...]