A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As an addendum on to our four-part look at the general structures of the farming of cereal grains (I, II, III, IV) this post is going to briefly discuss some of the key ways that the structures of … Continue reading Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice!
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the fourth and final part (I, II, III) of our look at the basic structure of food production in the pre-modern world (particularly farming grain to make bread), this week we're going to look at how at … Continue reading Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the third part (I, II, III, IV, A) of our look at the basic structure of food production in the pre-modern world (particularly farming grain to make bread) we're going to finally look at how one actually … Continue reading Collections: Bread, How Did they Make it? Part III: Actually Farming
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This is the second part (I, II, III, IV, A) of our look at the basic structure of food production (particularly grains to make bread) in the pre-modern world. Last week, we began by looking at the great … Continue reading Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part II: Big Farms
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of the basics of how things in the past, particularly in the ancient world, were made. This isn't a how-to guide … Continue reading Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!
This week's post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I'm going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we've already discussed in some detail), a term I'm creating to encompass a set of related pop-history theories which are flourish, evergreen … Continue reading Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
We're going to talk about the comically nonsensical logistics of the "Battle of the Goldroad" from Game of Thrones (S7E4), commonly just called the 'Loot Train battle.'
This week, we're looking more at what life was actually like in Sparta, this time focusing on wealth and property. Last time (here), we looked at the question of daily life for women in Sparta and concluded that the oppression faced by the vast majority of women in Sparta - the female helots - far … Continue reading Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth
Today, in part III of our seven part look at Sparta (I, II, IV, V, VI, VII) we're going to take a close look at the role of women in Spartan society, keeping in mind the Spartan social hierarchy we established last time. Sparta has a reputation - often aided and abetted by textbooks - … Continue reading Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women
Last week, we looked at a model for what the countryside around an 'ideal city' might look like. Today we're going to introduce some complications to that model (you will recall, our ideal city existed in a perfectly flat plain of uniform fertility) and see how they change the patterns of land use which in … Continue reading Collections: The Lonely City, Part II: Real Cities Have Curves