Ghulf Genes

One of the striking features of the Decline and Fall of Rome is the persistent longing for its reestablishment by those who inherited its p...

In developing the last post on Arianism, the quite different concept of Aryanism spontaneously came to mind—simply by sound associations an...

[Fourth in a series on the Middle Ages: first , second , and third .] One of the more interesting but not often mentioned aspect of the...

I recall reading or hearing someone who said that people only have a few favorite records and they play them over and over again. That must...

The main problem of understanding a period like the Middle Ages—560 some odd years after it ended in 1453—is forming a reasonably ...

[Second in a series on the Middle Ages. The first is here .] If the Middle Ages saw the victory of barbarism and the triumph of Christi...

It gave me inordinate pleasure when Brigitte handed me a story in the New York Times today about Florence Nightingale (1820-1910). Nightin...

One might say that time is a river and that its banks are human memory; time is always ungraspably mobile; memory is static. To mark when o...

The Grosse Pointe Public Schools had put a $50 million bond issue on the ballot; it was voted on February 25. The public rejected it by a 7...

The Olympic Games, it seems to me, illustrate the difficulties of seeing very large social events with any kind of precision, whether it is...

There are three forces which operate in the history of the world—God, fate, and human freedom. That accounts for the complexity of human hi...

While on the subject of words, I might as well record my latest discovery. As usually in English, such come about because English is a kind...

The roots of the word legacy are two-fold but have the idea of “appointment” in common. In one sense the Latin verb legere means “to appo...

Long before the International Olympic Committee official permitted the participation of professionals,  following the 1988 games, in what h...

A while back now (June 3, 2013)—but I glimpsed it again just the other day while making order—I saw an op-ed column by Bret Stephens in the...

Four years is a long time. Every four years, about this time in an Olympics, I get confused when I see the country rankings.  In today’s pr...