every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
history
thank you Herodotus and Thucydides for inventing this study. I know, or think I do, that it's mostly just the propaganda of the winners written as if it were true, but it's also what we know of what happened in the world and what machinations produced what happened. if we waited for truth, well, we'd still be waiting. ever since before school, I've loved the wonderful stories of history, of Greece doing this and Persia doing that while Egypt did some other thing, of Napoleon doing this, and Wellington doing that, and Czar Alexander I doing something else! how fun to see empires build, expand, endure, then crack up. and how mystifying to figure out that Africa had no history until the Arabs invaded it, that the Americas had no history until the Europeans invaded them, that Japan had no history before the United States sorta invaded, that China had no history before England France Germany and the United States invaded, that India had no history before England and Portugal invaded, that Afghanistan had no history even after its invasions - somehow one knows these are all just lies, but what a fantastic web of lies! fiction can't do as well!
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