A forgotten history of the largest slave auction ever on American soil
Source: The Weeping Time – The Atlantic
Category: History
Tyler Cowen’s “The Complacent Class”: America has lost its legendary ambition — Quartz
Another way of thinking about progress, sometimes stressed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, is to ask whether the era of grand projects is mostly over.
If we look at the last 25 years or so, what do we have to count as grand projects?
Source: Tyler Cowen’s “The Complacent Class”: America has lost its legendary ambition — Quartz
How to build a medieval castle | History Extra
The Norman Conquest triggered a boom in castle building, but the process of creating a fortress from scratch was far from simple, as John Goodall finds out…
- Choose your site carefully
- Agree on a workable design
- Source a large, and skilled, workforce
- Secure the building site
- Landscape the area
- Lay the foundations
- Fortify your castle
- Deal with water and sewage
- Decorate as required
Syneidesis, a billionaires’ club run by William Doll, wants to stop Donald Trump’s anti-globalization agenda — Quartz
For starters, there is the question whether Trump’s accusations are legitimate. Is globalization truly to blame for the ills that he decried during the election?
For decades, scholars have discerned patterns in the long arc of events. Big, sprawling history appears to move in cycles, at turns reinforcing and at others annihilating the existing way.
if the story of 2016 is one of a cycle turning—which seems to be the case—it’s understandable that scholars, journalists and other observers have been rushing to give the doomed epoch a name. Figuring out what precise cycle has ended has proved to be much harder than it seems it should be, but doing so is crucial if you care about what comes next
on a scale from negative to plus 100, investments can be gauged for fairness to labor, capacity to strengthen strategic geopolitical relations, and their potential to sustain surrounding jobs and markets after a deal has run its course
“I don’t think globalization is the real issue. The real issue is automation and artificial intelligence,” Ted Goertzel, a professor at Rutgers University
If automation is the genuine, hidden source of the anger in rust belts everywhere, worse is on its way—far worse.
For democracy to work, an unconditional requirement is a hard-and-fast societal insistence on the truth: Facts have to matter, and those who demonstrate a light regard for them or outright lie must face scorn.
American leaders could not lie, and they had to stand up to power that did. This fanaticism about truthfulness is why the world more or less knows what went down in Iraq over the years. It is ultimately why Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are consequential people—because revelations about NSA spying, global diplomacy and hidden wealth are facts, and not someone’s fevered imagination.
Joel Mokyr: Progress Isn’t Natural – The Atlantic
Humans invented it—and not that long ago.
Why might people in the past have been hesitant to embrace the idea of progress? The main argument against it was that it implies a disrespect of previous generations. As the historian Carl Becker noted in a classic work written in the early 1930s, “a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress … until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known.”
Progress, as was realized early on, inevitably entails risks and costs. But the alternative, then as now, is always worse.