More thoughts on American history, politics and culture.
2 thoughts on “Strange Seeds On Distant Shores”
How do you find this stuff? Very interesting reading.
Eh, I choked on the writer’s rather tendentious and overwrought attempt to redefine the conflicts of the English Civil War to align with our contemporary political divides. It flatly doesn’t work, mischaracterizes the issues in question, the groups in conflict, and the stakes involved.
Back in my college days, I came across a work of historiography that noted the main problem with British history of his day was that for a thousand years, every hyper-specialized historian of their own little fifty-year slices of staked-out concern described a world where the English upper classes were in decline, the lower classes were developing into a proletariat and there was an emerging and aggressive middle class seizing political power. Everyone saw the past in the prism of their particular social-cultural concerns, projecting the issues of their own day back into the past.
“The past is another country, they do things differently there.”
How do you find this stuff? Very interesting reading.
Eh, I choked on the writer’s rather tendentious and overwrought attempt to redefine the conflicts of the English Civil War to align with our contemporary political divides. It flatly doesn’t work, mischaracterizes the issues in question, the groups in conflict, and the stakes involved.
Back in my college days, I came across a work of historiography that noted the main problem with British history of his day was that for a thousand years, every hyper-specialized historian of their own little fifty-year slices of staked-out concern described a world where the English upper classes were in decline, the lower classes were developing into a proletariat and there was an emerging and aggressive middle class seizing political power. Everyone saw the past in the prism of their particular social-cultural concerns, projecting the issues of their own day back into the past.
“The past is another country, they do things differently there.”