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When the Iraqi prime minister’s plane touched down in Baghdad last week after an official visit to the United States, its cargo included 17,000 archaeological artifacts returned by a prominent museum and an Ivy League university in the largest-ever repatriation of looted Iraqi antiquities.
 

this is a chestnut in the professional roman business, so i'll throw in my $0.02. the very phrase "downfall (sometimes "collapse") of the roman empire" contains loaded language. the result of this "downfall" was a greater degree of local control, as a result of a loss of control at the center. how "local" is the question. did towns or individual farmers and smallholders have more control over their lives? a question about which reams have been written. but within my ambit of knowledge on this topic, minerals in the water would coat the lead pipes used to transport the water within a space of time, meaning that the lead was no longer leaching. the whole lead thing is a canard (sorry RedRedRose) for socio-political developments.
 
Letters to Stalin:


How did the arch-dictator and seminary student drop-out hear from the subjects of his vast empire? The answer may surprise you!
 
Fantastic interview with Hugh Beynon and Ray Hudson on their book examining the South Wales and North East miners. The interview examines how mining communities were able to build working class power, resources and become didactic places of cultural production. Their book examines the rise and fall of mining communities, the miners union, the defining 1984-5 strike and the effect of Deindustrialisation. The book is superb, this discusses many of its themes:

 
The Soviet Jewish experience that influenced the creators of Cheburashka.

Less well known, even among those who grew up with these cartoons on something of a perpetual loop, is that the series’ creative team was made up almost entirely of Yiddish-speaking Jews who had lost their families and homes in the genocidal campaigns during WWII. The director Roman Kachanov typifies the classic refugee background of many of the Jewish men that he drew into the project. Kachanov was born in a poor Jewish neighborhood in the city of Smolensk and pursued boxing in the cultural atmosphere of Smolensk’s Labor Zionist Movement before his father and sister were murdered point-blank at an execution site near Smolensk as Jews.

Jewish artistic works from the Soviet Union are typically thought of as “underground,” and made their way to the West via smugglers and defectors. Yet, as this animated series demonstrates, despite systematic anti-Semitism and narrow dogmatism, a lively and active Jewish culture developed in the centralized animation studio Soyuzmultfilm—the largest animation studio in all of Eastern Europe—right in the middle of Moscow. The embedding of Jewish material into the series by its Jewish creators calls into question the narrative that Jewish self-expression was wholly suppressed in Soviet popular culture.
 
a fair question


Since modern consumption of alcohol is more diverse, let us put the historical consumption of wine and beer in terms of pure alcohol and compare it to latter rates of alcohol consumption. When this is done we see that consumption of pure alcohol was at least 2-4 times higher in the past.
 
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this ones about the death of spencer perceval, the only assassinated brit PM


The rebels in this week’s drama aren’t either of the main actors – they’re the audience.

When the prime minister was shot dead on this date, around teatime in the lobby of the House of Commons, people all over the nation literally danced in the streets with joy, much to the disgust (and fear) of their remaining rulers.

One contemporary reporter in the Potteries recorded disapprovingly how “a man came running down the street, leaping into the air, waving his hat around his head, and shouting with frantic joy, ‘Perceval is shot, hurrah! Perceval is shot, hurrah!’”

1812 had this in common with 2024: it was a time when the alienation of governed from government could hardly have been wider. Then as now, the view in Westminster on almost every imaginable issue of the day was opposed to that held by most people.
 
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