Perhaps history can teach us, after all. Here are some fascinating stories that surfaced in the past few weeks. My paragraphs will give you highlights and I encourage you to read the originals. ‘Follow the Consensus’ Looking back, most of us see the American prohibition era (1920–1933) as a giant, foolhardy mistake. It destroyed businesses, …
I recently became acquainted with an arcane language containing symbols like RFS, RINs, eRINs, RVOs, WTE, RNG, even HBIIP. It is spoken by groups with their own esoteric names, such as RFA and ABFA and WTEA. There is a reason for this obscurity: This is the language of lobbying for the multi-billion-dollar “renewable fuel industry …
Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War? We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand …
As you know, I’ve paid a lot of attention to child labor in British factories during the Industrial Revolution. Child labor was a big issue back then; public agitation probably started in 1796, when the Manchester Board of Health issued a devastating paper about the health of families in that increasingly industrial city. But it …
I hadn’t planned on studying the Middle Ages, but one semester the only European course that looked good to me was History of the High Middle Ages, the period from 1000 to about 1300. (For climate aficionados that was the time of the Medieval Optimum, when it was warm enough to grow grapes in England …
