Yes, I cannot emphasise how much I would encourage you to read more history.
There are so many threads you can tug at and they always lead back to the same themes, if not the very same things themselves. There’s a reason why historians often end up implicitly Marxist, if not out and out card-carrying communists, and it’s not by accident. (There’s another comment I wrote under this post somewhere where another person also nudged me to talk about some completely different threads of history which I wove together into a little crash course in history that you might find interesting too.)
I have my criticisms of Joseph Jacotot but he was one of the good liberals imo and I really think that, at least when it comes to matters of history and pedagogy, his panécastique model is valid and I think the spirit of it is embodied in that Carl Sagan quip: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe”; I genuinely believe that if you tug at one thread of history long enough you can arrive at anything else in history. (This might be my galaxy-brain autistic/ADHD mind speaking lol - genuinely, this is kinda how combined-type ADHDers describe their thinking.)
The trick is to find whatever sparks inspiration in history and to just chase that down every rabbit hole it leads you to. It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be guns, it could be cars, it could be knitting, it could be the complex economic and social organisation of a particular aboriginal Australian country that sprang up around the aquaculture of eels. It doesn’t matter in the slightest; one of the most captivating books I’ve ever read was a book about Salt by Mark Kurlansky. Just find that topic that sparks wonder in you and wring it for all you can because you’ll end up following it across countries and time periods and all sorts of events and figures in history.
The more you learn, the more exciting and wilder it gets.
There’s literally a direct through-line that runs between fish that display iridescent colours on their scales, British-Australian imperialism and the displacement of the Banaba people, the Incan word for shit and the genocide and colonization of the Americas, the two world wars and the German chemical industry that would go on to enable Nazis putting “undesirables” to the gas chamber, the invention of methamphetamine, all the way to Rockefeller and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
(And there’s so many detours along that route: do you want to follow IBM and how US industry such as Ford enabled the Nazi war machine and its industrial-scale genocide and how during WWII Germans learned to take shelter in Ford factories if there weren’t any bomb shelters nearby when bombs started dropping? Do you want to learn about the early German concentration camps in Namibia that formed the blueprint for the Nazi concentration camps? Do you want to go down the Operation Paperclip route and to examine how post-WWII was a renazification in the west? Do you want to go down the Ha’avara Agreement path? Do you want to go down the eugenics path to learn about Carnegie and how his fortune is a direct product of the Opium Wars, the century of humiliation, the Chinese civil war and the establishment of the CPC and how this ties into the Forbes dynasty and the genocide of Native Americans?)
You can legit go from what makes shiny fish shiny to the goddamn Opium Wars and the US politician John F Kerry, and in doing so you will travel across the whole world.
Just find that one thing and dive in then chase it until you tire of it. Then find the next thing and do the same. The real trick, though, is seeing if you can find a way that the first and second things happen to connect up. And just keep doing that.
History is so cool. I should read more about it.
Yes, I cannot emphasise how much I would encourage you to read more history.
There are so many threads you can tug at and they always lead back to the same themes, if not the very same things themselves. There’s a reason why historians often end up implicitly Marxist, if not out and out card-carrying communists, and it’s not by accident. (There’s another comment I wrote under this post somewhere where another person also nudged me to talk about some completely different threads of history which I wove together into a little crash course in history that you might find interesting too.)
I have my criticisms of Joseph Jacotot but he was one of the good liberals imo and I really think that, at least when it comes to matters of history and pedagogy, his panécastique model is valid and I think the spirit of it is embodied in that Carl Sagan quip: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe”; I genuinely believe that if you tug at one thread of history long enough you can arrive at anything else in history. (This might be my galaxy-brain autistic/ADHD mind speaking lol - genuinely, this is kinda how combined-type ADHDers describe their thinking.)
The trick is to find whatever sparks inspiration in history and to just chase that down every rabbit hole it leads you to. It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be guns, it could be cars, it could be knitting, it could be the complex economic and social organisation of a particular aboriginal Australian country that sprang up around the aquaculture of eels. It doesn’t matter in the slightest; one of the most captivating books I’ve ever read was a book about Salt by Mark Kurlansky. Just find that topic that sparks wonder in you and wring it for all you can because you’ll end up following it across countries and time periods and all sorts of events and figures in history.
The more you learn, the more exciting and wilder it gets.
There’s literally a direct through-line that runs between fish that display iridescent colours on their scales, British-Australian imperialism and the displacement of the Banaba people, the Incan word for shit and the genocide and colonization of the Americas, the two world wars and the German chemical industry that would go on to enable Nazis putting “undesirables” to the gas chamber, the invention of methamphetamine, all the way to Rockefeller and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
(And there’s so many detours along that route: do you want to follow IBM and how US industry such as Ford enabled the Nazi war machine and its industrial-scale genocide and how during WWII Germans learned to take shelter in Ford factories if there weren’t any bomb shelters nearby when bombs started dropping? Do you want to learn about the early German concentration camps in Namibia that formed the blueprint for the Nazi concentration camps? Do you want to go down the Operation Paperclip route and to examine how post-WWII was a renazification in the west? Do you want to go down the Ha’avara Agreement path? Do you want to go down the eugenics path to learn about Carnegie and how his fortune is a direct product of the Opium Wars, the century of humiliation, the Chinese civil war and the establishment of the CPC and how this ties into the Forbes dynasty and the genocide of Native Americans?)
You can legit go from what makes shiny fish shiny to the goddamn Opium Wars and the US politician John F Kerry, and in doing so you will travel across the whole world.
Just find that one thing and dive in then chase it until you tire of it. Then find the next thing and do the same. The real trick, though, is seeing if you can find a way that the first and second things happen to connect up. And just keep doing that.