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  1. Twelve Byzantine emperors you should know about
    Posted on 25-Apr-07. Filed in Byzantium, Late Antiquity, Rome. Comments (0)
    A friend recently tipped me off to a podcast series that highlights 12 important Byzantine rulers, starting with Diocletian all the way through Alexius. (I seem to recall that things started getting pretty grim for Byzantium after that.) I’ve not listened to all of the lectures, but what I have listened to is interesting. You […]
  2. Cold War, we miss you
    Posted on 13-Dec-06. Filed in Books, Cold War, Radio, Soviet Union, Technology. Comments (1)
    CONELRAD is an interesting site with lots of curiousities from the Cold War era. I was tipped off to this site by my parents, who experienced more of the Cold War than I did. Alas, the cruel whims of history dictated that I would grow up in the least interesting part of the Cold War–the […]
  3. Mad Kings and stranger things
    Posted on 04-Nov-05. Filed in Germany. Comments (0)
    Prior to our trip to Germany, everything I knew about “Mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886, reigning from 1864 until his death) came from two sources: (1) The poster of one of his castles, Neuschwanstein, in the snow which is ubiquitous at all college poster sales; and (2) Betsy and the Great World, by […]
  4. The way the world ends
    Posted on 08-Aug-05. Filed in Books, Military, World War 2. Comments (2)
    The Second World War has always been a topic of interest to me, but it’s been especially on my mind as the 60th anniversary of the war’s end approaches. Today I started reading Max Hasting’s Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, which sets out to tell the tale of the bloody, drawn-out, and surprisingly difficult defeat […]
  5. near eastern archaeologists
    Posted on 27-May-05. Filed in Ancient Near East, Historians. Comments (0)
    Looks like there’s some rain in the forecast for this Memorial Day weekend. It’s like I always say; what better way to spend a rainy weekend than reading online articles about the lives of the founders of Near Eastern Archaeology? Okay, I’ve never said that. But if you find the above contention strangely compelling anyway, […]
  6. History and the Bible
    Posted on 17-May-05. Filed in Ancient Near East. Comments (3)
    There are many annoying things about history, and for me, one of them is the debate over “biblical minimalism”: the argument that the Old Testament Bible is not a useful historical source, because it was written more or less de novo in the Hellenistic period. Despite the fact that more “mainstream” scholars reject this argument […]