David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest. Looks at members of the US government that came into office with JFK in 1961 (and continued to serve with LBJ after 1963) and their failure to come to grips with the Vietnam War.

Edwin Black - War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.

Eric Rauchway - Why the New Deal Matters.

Landon R.Y. Storrs - The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left.

Robin D.G. Kelley - Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.

Be sure to include the time Hirohito visited Disneyland in 1975.

The year in Ancient Egypt was divided into two parts: harvest season and flood season, when the banks of the river Nile overflowed. That meant that for half of the year, the Egyptian state had access to large numbers of idle laborers.

Add to that that they had long experience in building monuments (the Great Pyramid was hardly the first colossal monument built by Egypt).

They also had a stable system of government, which meant that they could build their monuments over a long period of time.

Also, the pyramids were built next to a quarry, and a short way from the Nile meaning that they could easily ship in stones.

We also have writings of the engineering teams who built the pyramids, along with other archeological evidence from the construction.

Oh, I misunderstood, maybe Patrice Lumumba, the first elected leader of the independent Congo then?. They recently returned his remains (a single gold tooth) to Congo. After his death his body was dissolved in acid.

The assassination of president John F Kennedy in 1963 is the one that has been written about the most. Lots of unsound conspiracy theories in particular. It's a commonly expressed view that his killing changed America, that he would've pulled out of Vietnam etc.

I think they needed to be more advanced. In the Korean War helicopters were mainly used for search and rescue.

But who knows? The Germans (IIRC) scrapped plans to station gyrocopters (they're an earlier form of helicopter) on their ships on the outbreak of WWII. Maybe if they had used them, other nations would have followed suit and made more advanced helicopters. There was a lot more money for R&D during WWII compared to the Korean War.

>Which leads me to add one remark, that the number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the new comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth.

​Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, People of Countries, Etc.” (1751)

Prejudice blinds you to the facts of reality I guess.

It's more of a case of who was defined as "white". Benjamin Franklin once warned Americans to be vary of "swarthy" people, like the French and Swedes. Irish people weren't considered white initially and it was common for places looking for workers to display the sign "Irish need not apply". In turn, later Italian immigrants had to build their own churches because they, albeit Catholic, weren't allowed to use Irish churches.

Jews were also not considered white, and establishments that didn't allow Jews were labeled "restricted". More recently, Hispanics are more and more considered to be white in America, which they weren't previously.

Nothing really. At some point, she was mixed up with another women (in the Gospel of John), "the woman taken in adultery", and they are not the same person.

The Gospels aren't really historical documents and Mary Magdalene was probably not a real person. She's just there in the story to witness three important events: the crucifixion, burial and empty tomb of Jesus.

There are plenty of alternative theories about her role in Jesus' life, but generally not espoused by serious scholars. As part of fiction writer Dan Brown marketing of the novel the Da Vince Code, Brown claimed that Mary Magdalene married Jesus and had a child by him. That child was supposed to have living descendants, etc etc. You can watch a thorough debunking of this claim here: https://youtu.be/UAtoP5nFhh4

I'd recommend Direct Action by James Tracy. It's about a group of radical American pacifists who met in prison camps where they were confined for refusing to serve during WWII. They were quite influential on the tactics of the antiwar and civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s.

Israel Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed sort of covers this topic for the Old Testament.

Edit: and IIRC, Bart D. Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted does the same for the New Testament.

>Perhaps this is just a fantasy thing, but how did we get to the point where dungeons are typically underground mazes? Building underground is always going to be more difficult than building above ground level, or rather ground water level. If people did build underground, was it mainly as a way to store food because we did not have refrigerators back then?

This might have its origin in catacombs as found under Rome and Paris, which are quite labyrinthine but not built to any central plan.

I found the behind-the-scenes documentary The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys interesting. It looks at the making of Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. The Battle of Brazil: A Video History is about another Gilliam film, Brazil, his struggles to release it in the US (the studio wanted a happy ending among other things).

MLK Jr.

Fred Hampton

>Like the Christian physiologists and Ellen White, Kellogg believed that the human body at any one time had a finite supply of vital energy or force and that this force contributed to the state of one’s overall health. To waste vital energy through masturbation or excessive sexual activity led to a serious and perhaps permanent decline in one’s health.

​ Brian C Wilson - Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic, ISBN 978-0-253-01455-9, p.45

Ministry - "Jesus Built My Hotrod"

1940s-50s maybe? That was a "golden age" of the American middle/working class of sorts, but then the US was the last man standing industrially in a world ravaged by war, China today has to contend with more aggressive competitors.

You might enjoy A Bright Shining Lie - John Paul Van and the American War in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, a colleague of Halberstam's during the early part of the Vietnam War. It covers the early part of the Vietnam War, through the lens of US adviser to the RVN John Paul Van.

Another colleague of Halberstam's was Michael Herr, who wrote Dispatches (I think it's a collection of reports he filed during the war). More of an impressionistic picture of the war, less of a history. You might recognize some of the scenes from the film Apocalypse Now from this book (IIRC, it was a while since I read it).

Not a history of the war, but William W. Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War is a story about the young journalists (Halberstam among them) who caused the US government so much grief through their reporting on the Vietnam War. Find out why some called it "Halberstam's War".

German Autumn by Stig Dagerman - it's a collection of articles written by the Swedish author as he traveled through Germany in the autumn of 1946.

Native Son by Richard Wright

Ancient Romans would discard unwanted children after birth (if they had deformities) on refuse piles.

The Killing of America (1981) - doc about violence in America from the 60s to 1981. The real kicker is that it only got worse during the 80 and 90s.

IIRC, modern hand grenades were tried in the US Civil War, but the impact fuses worked poorly and it was common that the targets of hand grenades to throw them back. I imagine the same thing happened with black powder grenades with wicks.

The Edge (1997) - Rated R for language and some adventure gore/violence

Any decade now..