From Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-800 - Keith Thomas
posted June 21, 2026

“In 1689 Edmund Hickeringill, an English cleric who had once been to the West Indies, spoke disdainfully of 'the poor silly naked Indians' as just one degree (if they be so much) remov'd from a monkey.' Many saw the Irish in a similar light. They lived ‘like beasts', thought the Elizabethan Barnaby Rich;’ in a brutish, nasty condition', said Sir William Petty. They ate raw flesh and drank hot blood from their cows. The Irishman's animal nature had been discovered long before those Victorian caricatures which depicted him with simian features. In the 1650s a captain in General Ireton's regiment told how, when an Irish garrison was slaughtered at Cashel in 1647, they found among the bodies of the dead 'divers that had tails near a quarter of a yard long'; and when the story was challenged, forty sol diers came forward to testify on oath that they personally had seen them.”

Favorite Songs - Week of June 20, 2026
posted June 20, 2026

Three In One - Upsetters
Magical Dream - 808 State
De Chungking a Mendoza - sueter7
Crab Yars - The Upsetters
I Think I'm in Love - Spiritualized
Black Vest - Upsetters
Cabelo Raspadinho (Ao Vivo) - Chiclete Com Banana
Estudio #1 - Sebastiao Tapajos, Pedro Dos Santos
Beija-Flor - Timbalada
Laberinto - Sebastiao Tapajos, Pedro Dos Santos
Nobre Vagabundo - Daniela Mercury
Rapunzel - Daniela Mercury
Musa Calabar - Daniela Mercury
The Wrong Thing - The Congos

From Doggy People: The Victorians who Made the Modern Dog - Michael Worboys
posted June 18, 2026

“[Queen Victoria] led the introduction into Britain of several breeds, the best-known being the Pekinese. Her first was Looty, the name deriving from the fact that she was allegedly stolen from the Summer Palace in Beijing”

From Looking at Pictures - Kenneth Clark
posted June 5, 2026

“I fancy that one cannot enjoy a pure aesthetic sensation (so-called) for longer than one can enjoy the smell of an orange, which in my case is less than two minutes.”

From Lula!: The Man, The Myth and A Dream of Latin America
posted June 4, 2026

"By July 1979, Lula was important enough to warrant an interview conducted by the Brazilian edition of Playboy. In it, Lula appears almost deliberately to cultivate an image of political naivety. He joshes with Marisa about posing in the nude and happily confesses to having lost his virginity in a São Paulo brothel. He admits to admiring Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong and Tiradentes (the dentist executed for his role in Brazil’s eighteenth-century independence movement), but also, somewhat bizarrely, Adolf Hitler. ‘Even though he was wrong, he expressed his ideas forcefully and in a dedicated way,’ he told his interviwer"

On cattle culture in Acre:

"Cattle were desired by these groups for various reasons. For a start, cows supply milk, a reliable source of protein. Cattle could be used, albeit in a limited way, for transportation. Many smallholders deployed their animals to help transport nuts and rubber short distances from their homes to roads, from where the produce could be moved by truck. Moreover, as an asset, a cow or bull was a versatile entity. Unlike a rubber or nut tree, it didn’t just produce at one time of the year. Owning a cow or two was a helpful way to hold savings, as they could be easily sold in times of need. Jeffrey Hoelle also found lots of evidence for the growing cultural popularity of the rancher economy. Cattle – either in the simplest form of owning a cow or working on a ranch – were a passport to social mobility. From eating steaks to listening to what Brazilians call sertanejo, a particularly brash form of country music, and from wearing cowboy boots, wide-brimmed cowboy hats and plaid shirts to attending rodeos, it was all attractive to most young Acreans. Some 40 per cent of the beef produced in the state was consumed by its residents. The people of Acre ate more beef per head than those of any other state. And just like in the rest of the vast soya and beef belt of the centre-west, in Acre, rodeos rival the national obsession with football...Hoelle’s interviewees viewed cattle culture positively, but associated forest activities, such as rubber tapping or nut gathering, with poverty."

Quoted from Brazil: A Biography - Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling
posted June 3, 2026

Governor Pedro Miguel de Almeida e Portugal, the Count of Assumaron Minas Ginas

“The earth appears to exude rebellion; the water to emanate tumult; the gold to provoke confrontation; the wind to disseminate revolt; insolence is vomited from the clouds; insurgencies are determined by the stars; the climate is tomb for peace and a cradle of mutiny; nature is ill at ease with itself, replete with inner turmoil, as it is in hell"

Operation Mincemeat
posted May 31, 2026

“ British intelligence took the body of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who had died after ingesting rat poison, dressed it as a Royal Marines officer, and floated it off the coast of Spain carrying fake invasion plans. Michael was buried with full military honors in Huelva, Spain, under the invented name Major William Martin. His real identity stayed secret for over half a century; only after an amateur historian uncovered declassified files in 1996 was his name added to the headstone, in 1998, acknowledging that Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin. For decades a fictional officer occupied a real grave.”

From Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America by Stephen Prothero
posted May 31, 2026

On early cremationist Dr. France Julius LeMoyne

"A wealthy and philanthropic physician of French Huguenot ancestry and 'a life-long radical,' LeMoyne was, according to one source, a person of 'exceptional force, high culture and broad humanity.' According to another, however, he was simply a 'fool.' More objective biographers have noted that LeMoyne was an advocate of scientific farming and educational reform and an outspoken critic of slavery. Long before his estate was notorious for housing the first American crematory, it reportedly served as a stop on the Underground Railroad....

LeMoyne's social and religious radicalism earned him at least a few outspoken enemies. One dismissed him as a 'filthy old man in bad clothes.' That slander concerned not sexual peccadilloes but hygiene, since among LeMoyne's odd convictions was reportedly the belief 'that the human body was never intended by its Creator to come in contact with water.'"

From The Political Lives of Dead Bodies by Katherine Verdery
posted May 30, 2026

"The debate [about the fate of Lenin's corpse] was briefly sidetracked by a report in Forbes magazine, also carried on U.S. TV programs such as ABC's Evening News, that Lenin was to be sold for hard currency at international auction"

From Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia - Nina Tumarkin
posted May 30, 2026

“In 1961, Stalin himself disappeared from public display. His preserved body was removed from the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum and buried next to it. This was the climactic moment in the history of DeStalinization”

“In 1994 and 1995, Communist demonstrators at protest rallies against Presiden Yeltsin and his government mostly carried portraits of Stalin, and only rarely those of Lenin.”

"In 1970, many of these made fun of the Lenin cult, a bad sign for the organizers of the jubilee. A department store selling beds for newlyweds, it was said, was displaying a bed for three, since 'Lenin is always with us.' … A widely recounted anecdote described the results of an official contest for the best statue of Alexander Pushkin: third prize went to a statue of Lenin reading Pushkin; second prize, to a statue of Pushkin reading Lenin; and the first prize was awarded to a statue of Lenin! "

"In cult literature, Lenin's eyes had been typically described as brilliant, penetrating, shrewd, and powerful. Early in his book, Volkogonov adduces quotations from people who found Lenin physically repulsive, highlighting negative descriptions of his eyes. For example, Volkogonov quotes the writer A. I. Kuprin, who maintained that Lenin's eyes were the same color as those of a lemur he had seen at a Paris zoo, 'the only difference being that the lemur's pupils were bigger and more restless, while Lenin's were no more than pinpricks from which blue sparks seemed to fly.' "