@RickiTarr All over the place, but I was wondering why my great-grandfather (13) and his sister (8) came to America from Sweden in the 1880's by themselves. I never thought to ask him about it 🙄, and all the things he could have told me about their history.
@RickiTarr It used to be 1366 & London ceramic phase 11. And then medievalism got hijacked by fascism. I don't let myself get obsessed with particular time periods anymore :-(
@RickiTarr I'm a fan of the overlapping Mesoamerican civilizations, particularly since we don't know why some of them ended - they just disappear from history. If I had to pick one of them, maybe the Zapotec, who were around for 2000 years and bridge from the Olmec to the Aztec civilizations. That's awe-inspiring...
@justafrog
The big problem here is that we just don’t know a lot about it. There just isn’t the documentation like there is for “Western” civilizations and cultures. And there are gaps in all this stuff too. Same for all the African civilizations. Same for 40,000 years of human habitation on Australia and Southeast Asia. LiDAR is revealing thousands of structures hidden in the jungles of central and south america and that technology is less than 20 years old.
@RickiTarr (interesting thing about the Roman empire here: we have some of the clearest and most informative records of how important migration was in Roman times. Soldiers on the wall here came from all over the empire, as far afield as northern and northwestern Africa and eastern Europe. This was a deliberate policy, the empire was extremely pro-migration. So if anyone's imagining ancient Rome as some kind of white supremacist thing... lol no. It was fantastically diverse.)
@RickiTarr@RolloTreadway Yes! Very much so. And their ideas, philosophy and narratives too. Not their cooking. The casual dismissal of it is rather ahistorical and ignorant from a European perspective. The Roman empire still exists too, although the less we talk about the catholic church the better perhaps.
Otoh, as a scandinavian I have to admit I find people who obsess over vikings kind of sus at a distance
@RickiTarr interesting question
Never thought of it as obsession., but I am fond of contemplating pre-Columbian N. America. How people lived, interacted, dealt with winters etc
around where I live now
@RickiTarr obsessed is a strong term, but I keep revisiting the Colonial America period up to the War of 1812. So many twists of fate went into the formation of the United States, with a huge global impact.
@RickiTarr Speaking on behalf of my husband who isn't on social media, he gets into whatever period historical fiction he happens to be reading. Last month it was Genghis Khan. Now he's reading a Roman Empire series (so no period specifically. :)) Our niece asked her dad and my hubby because of the tik tok trend, and both replied nope, not the Roman Empire, but if anything they quote the Godfather quite often.
@RickiTarr My husband is all about the Roman empire.
I'm 30+ but not a man. Can I answer this anyway? Good, because I'm going to. 😁 I am currently obsessed with the nineteenth century, especially (but not limited to) the 1848 revolutions.
@RickiTarr I guess you could say "the golden age of railroads" like the history of the Orient Express, etc.
In particular the post WW2 decimation of light rail (trams, trolleys etc) due to a coordinated campaign by both the oil industry and the automobile industry.
@RickiTarr 51 years, here. Not exactly a period, but I'm obsessed with the history of alchemy. So roughly the Hellenistic through the Enlightenment. But only in reference to that topic. Freemasonic history then becomes a secondary curiosity, since alchemy was sublimated (see what I did there?) into that fraternity, and any remnants of the earlier Craft can only really be found in that tradition.
The only other time period would be the Civil Rights Era, when humanity seems to have finally taken a turn toward real enlightenment.
@RickiTarr
I’m vastly interested in pre-history. Everything historical was written by the winners. Hugely biased. Writing was invented maybe 5-6000ya, before that was all oral tradition so still probably biased. I wanna know what was it like 20 or 30 or 40 thousand ya, for early H. sapiens, and before them, a couple hundred thousand ya for Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Recommend: “Kindred : Neanderthal life, love, death and art”, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
@Lazarou
Something i read a couple months ago looked at the past 5 million years, since our ancestors and chimpanzee ancestors split from our common antecedent, and followed what we’ve found out about that progression. If i can find that title I’ll add it here. Another one about the invention of textiles.
@RickiTarr For me, it’s the 1960s. I was born in ‘67, so I wasn’t aware of what was going on at the time, but now I love the music, the TV shows, the movies, the cars, the technology, etc. from that time. And my childhood and teen years had extensions of the Cold War, the space program, civil rights, etc., so the 60s feels like “recent history”.
@RickiTarr Various, but primarily the period in western Europe between the fall of the Roman empire and the Albigensian crusade. Languedoc had its own culture, language and religion which was annihilated by the Catholic church and the northern French nobility.
@RickiTarr 1963. All the best and worst of this country wrapped up in a bow. Everything from terrorist bombings and assassinations to the inspiring words of a man of peace. The Sound of Young America ruled the airwaves.
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