History beyond wars: pop music, religion, and prehistory

@AskYatharth @abhayance there's also MORE to history that's often not found in "History" classes my fav history course, by an absurd margin, was MUSIC 140: Popular Music and Culture (UWaterloo). it was the history of pop music, from late 1800s slave & minstrel songs, thru jazz, rock, funk, hiphop

@AskYatharth @abhayance the thing is, I learned so much about the history of america, culture, the context of the wars, the depression, race relations, etc but all of it was relevant to my own life and experience, both because it was about people not battles, & because I could listen to the same songs!

@AskYatharth @abhayance if you search for "history" you'll often get war by default I vaguely associate this with some sense that not that many generations ago, the only people who got a history education were the upper class folks who would be military generals if need be idk if accurate tho

@AskYatharth @abhayance another issue is that eg most religions (and some political states) want to seem eternal, and/or don't want their internal narrative or origin story contradicted by historians digging up other authors from the same time & place

@AskYatharth @abhayance so yeah, as you realized, you kind of have to ask "history of what"? and if you want history of civilizations, what's the dimension you care about that's not about how the took over each other?

yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth · Dec 27, 2023

@visakanv @abhayance @relic_radiation gotcha, this is helpful. so there is a history of food. there is a history of grass. there is a history of empire (default). helpful to think about history that way x.com/forshaper/stat…

quoting @forshaper: @AskYatharth I don't think there's a decent introductory survey, other than Wikipedia. I will say that a history of civilizations is mostly a history of grasses.

@AskYatharth @abhayance I'm very interested in the moral/philosophical/religious/coordination development of civilizations which last night had me reading about how Islam spread, and what Arabic religion looked like before it (some Judaism, Xianity, Zoroast., some polytheistic idol-worship)

this in part inspired by watching The Secret of Kells, set in ~900s Ireland, when the Church was starting to establish power compared to local celtic pagan traditions. those were my ancestors' indigenous cultures! and... they maybe included human sacrifice. hmm 😬😅