Some research projects just don’t pan out. I’m going to tell you about one of mine.
Several years ago, for a course on the High Middle Ages, I decided to study primogeniture—the custom of handing property and titles down to the elder son (if there is a son). Primogeniture expanded across Europe in the Middle Ages. In many cases it replaced partible inheritance, in which property was divided among offspring, with daughters sometimes included.
Here are two more stories about history I found in recent articles:. One is about the Chinese family, one about the fall of Rome.
The End of the Chinese Extended Family
Nick Eberstadt argues in Foreign Affairs that the past kinship patterns of Chinese will be forced to change. Surprisingly, they haven’t yet.
Reliance on an extended family has been a fixture of Chinese history over 2500 years, he says, and the change will be “absolutely momentous.” In spite of the well-known one-child policy (which ended in 2015), he doubts that the Chinese Communist Party realizes how severe the impact will be on economic growth. Eberstadt is a respected writer about population and demographics who works for the American Enterprise Institute.
Recently, I have been unable to do the kind of research I need in order to prepare features for this blog. But I do have the time and inclination to share with you some of the interesting stories about history that I see around me. Here are two, one a biblical controversy and one about a smallpox discovery.
A Precursor to the Book of Deuteronomy?
The New York Times has written a fascinating story about a discovery even more exciting than the Dead Sea scrolls found in 1947—unless this discovery is a fake! The story goes back to 1883, when a dealer in antiquities claimed to have found fragments of the original book of Deuteronomy—far older than the Dead Sea scrolls, which go back to the third century BC. Continue reading “A Biblical Mystery . . . A Slave’s Early Prevention of Smallpox . . .”
It is now accepted that Joseph Stalin perpetrated mass murder in the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. A famine occurred throughout the Soviet Union but the most severe impact was in the vital wheat-growing Ukraine because Stalin wanted to wipe out Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets.
“Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food,” writes Anne Applebaum in Britannica. “Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food.” Apparatchiks even entered homes and stole food. (The Soviets could requisition as much food as they wanted from those who produced it.) Millions died.
Many Western observers visited the Soviet Union around that time, but few revealed the true conditions. Most famously, Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for his generally positive stories from the Soviet Union in 1931; the worst horrors were going on a year later, but he did not report them.
This is a guest post by Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in Raleigh.
An oft-repeated phrase is that “history is written by the winners.” That’s not always true; sometimes, history is written by those who can write the best, even if they were the losers.
That seems to be the case with the historical period that many still call “The Dark Ages,” which supposedly began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire around 400 AD and lasted until the 800s. The commonly accepted view is based largely on written accounts by Roman or Romanized observers who lamented the collapse of their civilization, according to Peter S. Wells, a University of Minnesota anthropologist, in his 2008 book Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered. The non-Roman European world that was in ascendance was largely pre-literate until the so-called Dark Ages were well under way. Continue reading “The Dark Ages Were Brighter Than You Think”
