A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

Little says more about the soul of America than the fact that one of its greatest painters was briefly  an anarcho-McCarthyist Sometime towards the beginning of the year, I came across an interesting counterpoint to some of the reconsiderations of lore and its functions that bloggers had been posting about in an anonymous blog comment. It was a little more elaborate (and a lot more insulting) but the heart of the argument went something like this: things like conventional gazetteers are useful for providing the same contextualizing depth that historians rely upon when studying or writing, without this you can't have a truly grounded world of play. The actual argument being made is not interesting imo - it's already been dealt with by Sandro's post above . What makes this idea worth exploring to me is that historians themselves are often unclear or weird or both about what they mean when they say "historical context." Maybe even unclear or weird in ways that so...

Gorgeous example of bwami bwa kifebwe art - male elder mask with a powerful sorcerer's crest and pre-carnivalization coloring. Studied by Hersek "in the field" near Kikomo, now owned by a private collecting fuck from Venice Beach You don't have to be very familiar with the Northern Italian roots of microhistory (in the work of Ginzburg, Levi, Poni, Grendi, et al.) as a methodological approach to be aware of its products - classics like The Cheese and the Worms , The Return of Martin Guerre , and The Great Cat Massacre are still v popular both in and out of the classroom - or understand its dissatisfaction with Annales school longue durée analysis + grand narrative (Muir's " gigantification of historical scale ")...but it does help with blog posts! Channeling Marcia’s Freudposting on this one. Zooming In The microhistorical approach raises questions about selectivity and significance. By what criteria are names to be picked out and how representative of ...