History Shows are Cool
I’ve been watching lots of shows about history lately, and I can’t get enough of them. An untapped reservoir of entertainment resting at my fingertips! I’ve just found my newest hobby.
What I like about this is that there has been, as of late, a surge of interest and debate on history, at the places online where I typically hang out. You won’t believe how much abuse there is at the misrepresentation of history by stupid people harboring peculiar agendas. So now I’m arming myself with facts by watching all these videos about history. Currently, it’s all about Rome and Italy, but I can see myself moving on to stories about Persia and England.
I’ll leave a link just in case you’d like to follow me on this journey. I thought this video was really good.
12 comments on “History Shows are Cool”
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Digital Empire 
For nearly 10 years, I dedicated almost all of my television time to the History Channel and similar shows. I don’t watch much TV now, but I love history! Like you said! Know the facts! 😊
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Great minds think alike! The abundance of choice that you find online, and the freedom of choosing when to watch is what makes it so convenient.
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Absolutely!
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I too am a member of avoids mainstream television gang. It’s been a few years since I’ve watched anything new. Agendas are very hard, if not impossible to avoid. That being said, the last TV show I remember enjoying was, ironically, an HBO production by the name of Rome. It had good production quality and wasn’t shy about much. That being said I’d actively encourage anyone taking it seriously to have read a handful of books, hopefully each from a different time period. A block of ten years between publications can have a profound effect on sublimated confirmation biases.
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That’s an interesting observation. If I can find easy examples of this phenomenon to show to normies, it would blow their minds away.
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I can try and find the names of books, but over the course of the last two years I’ve read about eight books on/about Rome. It wasn’t intentional they were all from different decades, but I’d found that books written until around the sixties ranged from good to very good – by the diminished return of comparison to modern writing acumen. The 60s-80s looked like a big editorial turning point in which the “Culture of Critique” seems to have ramped up. The name that pops into mind is “The Roman Experience,” which was I think the 1980s. It harangues the reader about some victimocracies but is otherwise good. Compare to Nigel Rodger’s Rome, he is more concerned with proving how totally not racist Rome was than presenting a functional narrative of Rome itself, made all the more ironic by Rome’s occasional use of selective ethnic cleansing. Rodger’s I believe wrote in the late 00s.
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Funny story. I did a Google search for “The Roman Experience Book,” and the first result was a book called “Blacks in Antiquity,” written in 1970, which was obviously not what I was looking for. Google’s agenda to misdirect and decieve no doubt. But this only encouraged me to dig deeper.
I eventually did find what I was looking for: https : //www. cambridge. org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies/article/abs/l-p-wilkinson-the-roman-experience-london-paul-elek-1975-pp-224-6-bound-325-paper/4318AEC13E1E508B436668C12A939E40
And the first thing that we see on this page is a scathing review by Nicholas Horsfall. Underneath it was a rebuke of Horsfall’s retardation. Sadly it doesn’t show the name of the person who did the rebuking.
And then I thought about you mentioning the “Culture of Critique,” and sure enough this is what came up while searching for Nicholas Horsfall:
Every single time
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But yeah. You’re right, it was Wilkinson- I wasn’t near my bookshelf when I wrote you. That whole downside to reliance on written word they warn you about: short term memory, man. Oh, another book I liked was “The Greek Way,” by Edith Hamilton.
It strikes me that one of the big changes is authors no longer glorify their subjects. A question I ask folks is: why write about something you hate, if you have no ulterior motive? If you hate Rome, why write, much less read about Her? What’s the pay-off? After all – I could live the rest of my days rather comfortably without a single mention of anything having happened before 1990. Ish.
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I didn’t know about the book, nor did I know who the author was before you mentioned it, but thanks for that. The best discoveries are usually unintentional, and a valued discovery it was indeed.
I’m not sure why authors no longer glorify their subjects. Maybe it’s a learned behavior; discarded scraps of nihilism picked up and incorporated into their work, to make it appear as good as the ones made by their peers.
It’s really difficult to be positive these days. I’ve noticed that it has become common for people to be triggered with automatic revulsion at the mere mention of anything positive. Or maybe it’s just my personal bias… hard to tell.
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I’d share that bias. I think, that somewhere along the line it became fashionable to equate objectivity with denigration. Because critical thinking has tanked, it’s become unthinkable that one could admire X without by default rejecting Y. For example, one could take famous personages from history whomst are unpopular to admire and acknowledge that they had some good ideas, maybe lots of good ideas. The kneejerk is to assume the worst possible sycophancy. And, well, because it’s so fashionable to relate things to certain people from certain times, you can’t really have anything respectable unless it’s been through a very modernist meat-grinder. ………………….Of course I’ve been wrong about more important things. Like, I thought it was going to rain today.
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Well, you could try and teach people new behaviors. Starting out small and hoping to make a big enough ripple to kick off similar adjacent ripples. And finally turn it into a full fledged ideology. A colossal task that would require collaboration between thousands of well intentioned people. Something benevolent.
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Absolutely! I do believe that’s possible.
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