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  • The Balkan Wars

    Or, the Hateful stumble towards the first World War. The Balkan Wars took place in the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. In the First Balkan War, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war upon the Ottoman Empire and defeated it, leaving only Eastern Thrace under Ottoman control. In the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria fought…

  • 1848: Red Books and Gold Rushes

    In the 1840s, some God really hated Europe. Poverty, patchwork unemployment, and cultural distress spread sticky like an oil spill across the continent. By 1846, even the potatoes had forsaken those funny-talking wretches. And by 1847, people went to bed nervous and woke up broke. Naturally, they started rioting over bread. What happens when too many people…

  • Philip K. Dick

    Born in Chicago in December 1928, died in Santa Ana in March 1982. Philip Kindred Dick started his life six weeks early, along with a twin sister, who died six weeks later. After this, the Dick family left Chicago and spent several years moving around the West Coast following Father Dick’s job assignments with the…

  • Socialism

    “Contrasts of wealth were, of course, not new. There had always been some who deplored or denounced them from the pulpit… Now, though, differences were becoming more noticeable, partly because such evils were concentrated very visibly in the new cities and in new and unfamiliar forms. One outcome was the emergence of a new ideology…

  • Carl Jung

    Born July 1875, died June 1961. Carl Jung was a Swiss shrink who founded the proverbial school of analytical psychology. He was born in the canton of Thurgau, the progeny of a forever broke rural pastor and a chronically depressed mother who believed she was being harassed by ghosts every night. Carl came out an…

  • Treaty of Vienna

    “The foundation deed of the 19th century international order was the treaty of Vienna of 1815.” The treaty closed the era of the French wars and intended to prevent their repetition, as well as contain the influence of the French Revolution. This was done by insistence of the principle of legitimacy, which was the ideological…

  • Have We Turned Fourthly Yet?

    A Re-Skim of that Trendy Fourth Turning Book This post is based on the predictions put forth in The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, written by William Strauss and Neil Howe in 1997. It’s a fun read, but it’s essentially pop-sociology. I read it around six years ago. When I finished, I put a hot…

  • Chapter Three: The Graveyard of Definitions

    House Usher I spent the last week working casual surveillance at the Cremorne, and how do I describe it? It’s the jewel of Rook Island, an entry-level Highland town the new money types like to move to. If you’re a member of a House or at least have a close relation that is you’re treated…

  • A History of Europe

    J.M. Roberts, 1996 This review may as well be the story of how I became better at any bar’s Trivia Night. My former condition was likely a common one. I knew a chartered education’s worth of Western history and some saturated spots here and there when I was compelled to take odd college electives. I…

  • Cormac McCarthy

    Born July 20, 1933, and dead June 13, 2023 Writer of southern gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic fiction. All of it bleak, many of them moderately violent. He rarely used literary agents and never owned a computer. His favorite novel was Moby Dick, and he thought little of any writer whose stories did not predominantly deal…

  • Scams of Old

    What was the South Sea Bubble? What was “Law’s Swindle on the French”? These questions were inspired by a passage in J.M. Roberts, The History of Europe, page 214 So began the rise of paper as a substitute for coin, in domestic as well as in international commerce. In the eighteenth century came the first…

  • War of the Spanish Succession

    What turned the transfer of a crown that had passed through so many into a struggle the ended on a pile of bodies, an outrageously burst economic bubble, and a Spanish flavor of the house of bourbon? “Sometimes a nation’s luck runs out. Spain had had a good run, but centuries of Hapsburg inbreeding had…

  • The Sun King

    The man who made France the most magnificent of kingdoms. “The role of defender of the traditional constitution was taken up by special interests, notably the parliament of Paris, the corporations of lawyers who sat in and could plead before the first law court of the kingdom.” J.M Roberts, A History of Europe At the…

  • The Meaning of Bohemian

    As a buyer of clothes and enjoyer of moderate debauchery, I’ve long been familiar with the term “bohemian” and its indication of loose-fitting floral prints and collections of expressive people sharing a single living space. But as a relatively newish reader of history books, I kept getting mildly confused every time I read about Bohemia.…

  • Company Towns

    While reading about copper mining out in the wild west, I came across this term, “company towns”. I was hot off of reading a Jane Jacobs collection, so I was curious if this was another one of those types of planned communities that Jacobs always bitched about. Essentially, it’s a crappy little two-horse town where…

  • Our Technetronic Era: Global Ghettos

    AN ANNOTATED READING OF BETWEEN TWO AGES, BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, 1970, PAGES 19-26 Previous Entries: Chapter three, Chapter two, chapter one, introduction This chapter leads from the argument that the Third World is an inevitable victim of the Technetronic Revolution. It’s an argument that has aged decently in some ways, less so in others. The evolution…