I love reading for information. But these days watching videos about things have become a good source of information. If you have some interesting videos you came into about anything to increase a wide range of knowledge. Please share.
My family told stories about watching Shakespeare plays in Denver in the 1860s, when Denver was a pretty rough and tumble place and seemingly not a home for lovers of Shakespeare.
Here’s a bit of history that explains the early, 19th-century bifurcation of the arts in America into arts for the 1% and arts for the 99, a riot (over Shakespeare!) in Manhattan’s Astor Place in the Bowery in 1849 that rivals the weekend’s Paris riots.
Now that you mentioned it, the antebellum period gets skipped over or fast forwarded a lot. It’s like boom and the civil war happened after independence. Maybe they don’t like to talk about the slave economy in places or the civil war is just more impactful and interesting.
And antebellum history varies state by state, the country was pretty different place to place so perhaps that’s why they don’t teach it as whole much. In Texas we learned a lot about the Texas history during the time, like texas revolution and succession after independence.
There’s an interesting theory in the book 1491 as well. Passenger pigeon bones are almost absent in pre-1491 Indian middens, which would be really weird if they were so abundant. Indians managed the forests and harvested the mast. When the Indians were gone, the pigeons found themselves sitting on a huge untapped food source and their population exploded. Essentially they were on a boom cycle, which wasn’t natural at all.
Vsauce? The guy is great, have been watching for a long time, really enjoy his videos. The is also other 2 Vsauces with other hosts but under him focused on different things like gaming etc. The paid videos are great too.
Used to work with a guy who was a US Air Force mechanic on the SR-71, the stories he told.
Nice to learn that my friend wasn’t bullshitting when he complained about having practically to rebuild the aircraft after each flight, and how he was attached to a single aircraft. He said this aircraft was subject to such extreme environments that the leakage of jet fuel was built into its design - and it leaked like a sieve. He said his aircraft used to return to base filthy with fuel on the exterior skin, and was a royal pain to clean.