Posted on 01/13/2013 12:37:34 PM PST by EveningStar
When you think of the Middle Ages, chances are you picture gallant knights sitting astride brilliant destriers galloping through a sea of plagues, ignorance, and filth. And you can hardly be blamed for that, when everything from the movies you watch to your high school history teacher (who was mainly the football coach) has told you that ...
(Excerpt) Read more at cracked.com ...
There was an upside to some of that stuff!,
The piece starts out with an error ~ imagining that the Dark Ages started in some sort of association with the Fall of Rome, the arrival of barbarians, etc. Actually, there was a climate anomaly that followed what may have been a serious comet strike somewhere in the North Atlantic ~ in 535 AD! Tree rings show something really bad happened that left Europe without summer weather for maybe as long as 7 years ~ just enough to depopulate and economically destroy all of Western and Northern Europe ~ took them back to a level even lower than found in Eastern Europe.
After that everything that went on in Western Europe was a step up!~
An interesting element of the pre-Industrial age that was so typical that nobody made a point about it, had historians puzzled for many years. They kept noticing references to “first sleep” and “second sleep”, until finally it clicked.
Almost nobody slept the night through. Halfway through the night, everybody would get up for an hour or three, to stoke the fire, go to the toilet, likely prepare bread that would be risen in time to bake fresh for breakfast, whatever; and then they would all go back to bed until before morning, when they would get up for pre-dawn farm chores.
Such a sleep pattern made all sorts of sense when you lived an agrarian life. However, with industrialism, people would “work all day and sleep all night.”
However, after all those years on a two-sleep pattern, we seem to have physically and psychologically adapted to it; which may explain all the sleep problems that exist today.
But what about people who still live an agrarian life? The answer to that is that the two-sleep pattern only seems to have existed in the Temperate climates. North of there, darkness prevails much of the year, so the middle of the night is the same as the middle of the day. And South of there, in more Tropical climate, different sleep patterns as well, because of an abundance of light.
But Industrialism came to the Temperate climates first.
I think the Powers That Be want to bring back serfdom — and the next version of serfdom is probably going to be a lot less pleasant than the Medieval version.
You're right, ClearCase_guy, with this difference: the obligations will be a one- rather than two-way street. Feudalism depended upon paired obligations. People higher up the social pyramid had obligations to those lower down as well as to those above themselves.
The self-styled "progressives" who've eviscerated our constitutional republic in all but name and replaced it with an oligarchy regard the obligations as proceeding as they did in the Soviet Union and still do in communist China: only up the pyramid. We of the vast majority owe the very few who rules us unquestioning obedience, whereas the very few owe us nothing. They view us more as cattle than serfs.
And the only Pakistani Nobel Prize winner is virtually unknown in his home country because he was part of a politically disfavored religious minority.
The role Muslim dominated Spain had in the renaissance of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages has been way overblown. And Driftdriver is right. Many of the early Muslim scientists were not Arabs. They were Assyrians who already were experts in science before the Arab Muslims showed up. Muslims later turned against much of the scientific development they themselves had helped foster. The Muslim world gradually became a backwater - and remained one until now. The Jordanian Minister of Education (maybe it was Culture?) admited a few years ago that the entire Arab Muslim world translated fewer books into Arabic over its entire history (1400 years) than Spain translates into Spanish in a single year. BACKWATER!
And the compass was invented in China.
And the compass was invented in China.
True. Much of “Islamic civilization” is claiming the civilization built up in Persia and Egypt prior to Islamic conquest plus, perhaps, a minor flowering with the mixture of ideas after conquering but before the majority was Muslim.
I get sick of how they don’t teach the history of Islam and the atrocities committed through Jihad. My daughter is learning about the crusades and she doesn’t learn what evils the Muslims did but only that the crusades were the cause of anger in the Muslim world towards Christians.
No where in this article was this time period defined and in one reference was commingled with the “Dark Age(s)”. So basically this writer is describing myths in a period ranging from 450 to 1550 or so in Europe. Try defining something like that for the past 1100 years in our country. History miss-mash at best.
Yeah, that’s common. If your daughter is too young to tackle these books herself, you might want to pick these up and tell her about their contents:
And I would add: http://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Church-Built-Western-Civilization/dp/0895260387/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358114743&sr=1-4&keywords=thomas+woods
I think the reintroduction of western Europe with Roman and Greek culture at Constantinople, during the Crusades, had more to do with the Renaissance than anything the muslims brought to the table. Roman culture survived at Constantinople for a thousand years after Rome had fallen and was a revelation to the Crusaders passing through on their way to fight the saracens. Byzantine art and architecture greatly influenced the Gothic style that appeared in Europe shortly after the First Crusade ended.
Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
True, but look at it as an example of how to reach the low information voters out there.
I lasted about two paragraphs and knew it wasn't going to get better. Horribly juvenile...about 7th grade or so.
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