Kim Jong Il Dead

[Temo]

You think handwriting is the only thing that details history? Written documents of what were current events at the time only describe a current view. Not the whole true.

Written documents are only a starting point to finding truth. Evolution of man is proven. Even in recent history shows humans change over time. That change is an evolution of man.

I'm not interested in debating evolution (besides, I think we agree there).

History as an academic discipline is, in layman's terms, trying to find out what "really happened" in the past. It's a much harder thing than it appears initially, because of the unreliability of human memory. People's perceptions of events in the past, are proven scientifically to be a very, very inaccurate measure of "reality". The strength of first person written documents is that they are written at a time close to the actual event. The further away you get from first person, the more unreliable the evidence is.

I studied the classics in High School and some in college. When studying Greek and Roman history, you have a ton of written accounts from various historians over time as to the events of the day.

And even then, it is not unusual to see one historian say one thing happened, only to have another say the opposite. This is one of the reasons why Caesar was/is so widely studied: he was perhaps the first politician in history to keep a personal record and memoir of his life, providing us with first person testimony as to the events of his time.

 

[Temo]

At one time the History channel was pretty good. Pretty Straight forward documentaries and so on. Although to be fair it had a nickname of the Hitler Channel by many because most of the programming was about WWII and Hitler (still do have quite a few shows on that topic). I did not mind it much because that is an interesting topic to me.

Now however, as someone pointed out earlier, it seems they are going somewhat mainstream and having reality shows and such that really have nothing to do with history topics (pawn stars, american pickers, swamp people, big shrimping, ice road truckers and others).

Although I like some of these new shows and although some of them do deal with items of history...it really is not that tied into what the channel used to be.

I think the problem with some of the documentaries is that they just wanted as many shows as they could starting out that they tended to take any history documentaries and in turn got some of the more out there conspiracy theory or attention grabbing types of shows.

All in all most of their history shows are pretty good though...especially if you like stuff dealing with WWII.

On a side note...got a couple of early gifts this year. Two books on WWII and one of them was written by a guy that runs a WWII museum that is pretty cool. Lots of pull out reproductions of post cards, propaganda posters, military memos and such in it...it looks like a big scrap book of sorts.

That sounds horrible. The last time I watched the History Channel was in high school, when my Latin teacher would show us these documentaries that they aired about Roman history. I used to love those, inspired me to read Gibbons on my own and take some history courses in college.

 

[joseephuss]

I didn't realize he was such a good athlete.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports...y+books/5885033/story.html?cid=megadrop_story

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/s...ong-ils-ventures-into-the-sporting-world.html