/lit/ - Literature

From the things-were-awful-but-are-getting-better-believe-it-or-not school

>>4616044
>I don't have a political opinion,
Yes you do.
>I just want everyone to be happy, even psychopaths, rapists and all those unfortunate enough to be turned into monsters by the forces that shape humans.
That's your political opinion.

>is going to lead to chaos and unfairness.
This is the way things are now.

>>3154640
Wait, what do you mean?
While studying history I have been piecing together the major narrative of it all.

>>3122688
Some pretty rancid stuff happened in the distant past, you can't deny it.

>>3123726
Troll

>>2872033
Which reminds me. Has anyone read this one yet?

>>2872035
>Experience can never be reduced to physical processes.
I find experience can be manufactured. You know reading and using your imagination...

>>2669497
You may or may not be off topic, but you are certainly baseless. There are many forces at work in this modern world and casually blaming the feminine for "evil" is laughable if it weren't so pervasive. Please be joking or look seriously into this before believing this.

>>2669494
>>2669498
Please stop using the moniker.

>>2644389
Persuasion doesn't always imply domination

>>2644393
BUT HITLER BUT HITLERRRRRR
Did you see how that turned out? Today we see the weaker neo-nazis and their kind making their move, and boy-howdy, is it ever weak. Still dangerous, but we don't have to let them win elections and ruin the country and the world.

I'm a big history nut, so I look at the really big picture and long range trends.

>>2573873
Bingo! I want this one myself.

Has anyone gotten into this one? OP?

>>2491599
The "Celtic" people aren't really related to the Celts at all! Only in language and maybe some cultural aspects, but I think they developed it on their own after conquest... The true Celts in England can be found in central, English territory, mixed with the Angles and the Saxons and the Romans and the Normans.
I don't idealize any groups or cultures. They all have their fair share of bastards and loons. What I said was there was no shame in it.
I like to know ancestry just for the sake of placement, but I take more pride in knowing how far we've come, and take heart that we could very well do better.

>>2402070
At ease Centurion.

>>2322415
<-Have you read this?
Thinking of getting it someday.
>>2322436
Oh you don't understand that disparity yet?

I like him. Don't know if I'd get a book of his...

OP, are you currently reading this or just fishing for what we think?

Fifteen years ago Mr. White was just a local-history buff with a vague dream of creating a historical atlas of Richmond. But one day, for reasons he is hard pressed to explain, he drew a map illustrating the collapse of the Soviet Union and posted it on the World Wide Web, which was then new. More maps followed, and his grandly titled “Historical Atlas of the 20th Century” was born.

The obsession with body counts came later, along with a steady accumulation of citations by recognized scholars: 377 published books and 183 scholarly articles to date. (Yes, Mr. White has the stats.)

In his foreword to “The Great Big Book” Mr. Pinker — who drew on Mr. White’s work for own new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” — credits him with compiling “the most comprehensive, disinterested and statistically nuanced estimates available.”

Charles Maier, a historian of modern European history at Harvard who stumbled on Mr. White’s Web site five years ago when searching for reliable death counts in the two world wars, doesn’t put it that strongly but welcomes his painstaking efforts nonetheless.

>>2168635
Brutal but fun.

The "enlightenment age" (partially caused from ancient Greek lit sifting out before the fall) is what helped us along to our relatively more peaceful age [of revolutions] My favourite, Thomas Paine is far better than any Byzantine I've ever heard of, but the men of Constantinople who kept those books safe, transcribing them over the centuries are owed a debt.

Anyone read this 800 page beast? I'm about 4% into it...