 "There is the irony that, long before the nostalgia industry hijacked Vaughan Williams, he, to an extent, hijacked it. His collecting of folk-songs in the first decade of the last century was an act of massive cultural importance"  Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest...  "What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin..."  The Russians have a saying that there is no such thing as cold weather, only the wrong kind of clothing. Prior to Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis could have...  Ancient trade originated in the migratory patterns of prehistoric nomadic people who ranged over long distances across the continents of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America, for thousands of years...  Almost a century before the Romans arrived in 43 AD, a town of up to 10,000 people was laid out...  "The barbed wire and watchtowers of the former death strip have all gone. The only visible trace is a seemingly endless tank track, constructed from perforated, and now weed-covered, concrete slabs."
 The famed trading hub on the Silk Road, on which caravans carrying silk and jade from China...  Cobb admirably traces the evolution of local resistance groups, which in the early years of occupation...  "The time is the winter of 1915 and the spring and summer of 1916. Hundreds of thousands of British and Empire soldiers, are preparing for The Big Push, the biggest British offensive of the 1914-18 war..."
 A cache of some 70,000 glass beads from all over the world has been unearthed at an island off Georgia, comprising the largest repository ever from what was...  Afghan shoppers began to come back into the area and the drug peddlers, who had long made Murad Khane one of their central markets, moved elsewhere... |
 "We sit around a table as a young woman meticulously embarks on the Taiwanese ceremony of serving tea, from the warming of the clay teapot and cups with hot water, the filling of the pot with tea leaves, then the pouring of the water until it overflows..."  Hasutai is a Manchu, descendant of a nomadic warrior tribe that conquered China in the 17th century and ruled it for more than 250 years. Generations of persecution have all but eliminated the Manchus' language.  The Second World War was, when filmed propaganda came into its own, one of the reasons...  "Europe invented, named, and shaped all eras of history -- and will continue to do so in the future. The classical world is defined by the flourishing of Greece; the Middle Ages followed the sacking of Rome..."
 "The Shang and Zhou eras are pictured as a golden age where everyone knew his or her place in the great harmonious hierarchy of Chinese life. Rulers ruled and everyone farmed, studied or practiced an appropriate trade."
 At elevations above 12,000 feet, snowstorms are common even in the summer, and the Tibetan tribesmen considered the Nangchen horse essential to survival when navigating the wild rivers...
 From here to Gilgit, the Karakoram Highway passes through a green oasis: a river valley terraced with fields and lined by apricot groves. The road clings to the river, into which glaciers – walls of rugged ice, dazzling...
 Wells’s version of socialism, with its barbed attacks on Victorian gentility and its promise of sexual and artistic liberation, was far more appealing to American intellectuals than the...  "Massive computing power and speed have improved our killing machines beyond recognition and made it possible for police, prod-nosed bureaucrats and bullet-headed salesmen to spy on every move we make."
 “At Dashanzi, the bauhaus-style factory transformed into a trendy arts precinct in northeast Beijing, any number of contemporary artists make fun -- and money -- at Mao's expense...” |
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