HeyJaredA History of Mankind
The entire history of mankind, in regular installments. Not just European stuff, but the history of all mankind, from the Americas to Sub-Saharan Africa & Oceania
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 12
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- Oct 1, 2026
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- Sep 10, 2026
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What’s Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Theory? (opens the original)
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When I was a foreign affairs correspondent, my biggest strength was knowing about the history of places I reported from. The way I saw it, it’s basic physics: if you don’t know where things come from, it’s really hard to track any consistent line showing you where things are moving to next.For instance, in five years in Singapore I became as much of an expert on Southeast Asian history as I could, reading not just the obvious choice — the memoirs of Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew — but also st
Q&A for History of Mankind (50) (opens the original)
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Subscribe nowTo check all newsletters in the History of Mankind series, organized by subject, you can click here.This is the fiftieth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.As usual, a quick reminder: all new paying subscribers get an electronic copy of my 2023 book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history o
How the Byzantine Black Legend Was Created (opens the original)
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The myth of the House of Wisdom is multi-faceted, and it took on increasingly absurd traits over time.For instance, some Muslim scholars came up with a new wrinkle that Byzantines were poor keepers of their own treasures, and their books were eaten by insects, as the bibliographer Al-Nadim wrote in a second- or third-hand anecdote about some guy who visited Constantinople and was sad to see some ancient temple filled with neglected books, later widely quoted, and included in his Index of 9871. T
The House of Wisdom, the Biggest Myth in Islamic History (II) (opens the original)
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The story behind the survival and transmission of Ptolemy’s classic “Geography” is a good example of the exaggerated claims made for the influence of the House of Wisdom and Abbasid-era translators. Compiled in Greek around 150 AD, on the basis of older Greek and Persian cartographic treaties, Ptolemy’s book was influential to the point that its rather mistaken calculation of the Earth’s curvature – which minimizes its size – eventually convinced Columbus and other Italians that sailing to Asia
How the Right Became the Counter-Culture (opens the original)
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One of the least-known features of the Protestant Reformation is the popularity of astrology and related occultism among the protestant flock. While Catholics had been fighting astrology for centuries, protestants embraced it with great enthusiasm.Despite Martin Luther’s personal skepticism toward the art of stellar prediction, German protestants were particularly drawn to popular calendrical astrology. Its most energetic promoter was the astrology lover Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), Luther’s
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