A History of the World in 12 Maps

What are we looking for when we look at a map? According to Jerry Brotton maps are far from being purely objective documents, they are inevitably subjective expressions of the people who created them, tied to the views and agendas of particular times and places.

From Ptolemy's Geography to Google Earth, from cuneiform to computer screens we will study the environments and circumstances of the communities in which those maps were made.

The twelve world maps that we will analyze are taken from different cultures and moments in world history. We will examine the creative process through which those cultures tried to resolve the problems faced by their makers, from perception and abstraction to scale, perspective, orientation and projection.

Interview with History

Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006) was a highly praised, and sometimes highly criticized, Italian journalist who famously interviewed the world’s movers and shakers, people who otherwise did not allow interviews. She obtained these interviews because of her reputation and strength of character. It was impossible to talk about Fallaci without being awed, as in this Christopher Hitchens obit that refers to our core book https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/12/hitchens200612, and as in many of the articles about her.

The core book: In 1976 she published one of her many books, Interview with History. This core book has 14 interviews for our 14 week SDG.

You ask: Who are the interviewees in our core book? Some were famous, some were not so famous but they will interest you. Written during the time of the Vietnam War, she interviewed Kissinger and Vietnamese President Thieu of South Vietnam; she interviewed General Giap who commanded Vietnam forces against the Japanese, against the French and against the Americans. Apropos of the ongoing Middle East conflict she interviewed Golda Meir, Yasir Arafat and King Hussein. Fallaci interviewed the Indian and Pakistani governmental heads: Indira Gandhi and Ali Bhutto. The Bhutto interview had an effect on history as Hitchens wrote. She interviewed Willy Brandt and the Shah of Iran.

We will discuss these and the other Interviews with History, but for us 50 years later there is more history to parse than was available to Fallaci. In each session we will expand on Falacci’s interviews using links to online analyses. With today’s perspective, we will examine what the interviewees and Fallacci knew in the 70’s, and what we know now.

Come, join our SDG. You will be amazed at the interviews.

Napoleon: A Life

Napoleon was one of the great conquerors in history. Over the course of his career, he fought sixty battles and lost just seven, a record any general could envy. His battles, however, were not his greatest achievement. He ended the chaos in France after the Revolution and he established institutions that embodied the best parts of the Revolution and that have infused European life ever since.To this day, the Napoleonic Code is the foundation of European law.

Andrew Robers, in Napoleon: A Life, radically transforms our understanding of the man. In 2004, the Foundation Napoleon began publishing more than 33,000 surviving letters which Andrews used extensively in his research to paint a picture of an exceptional man who had charm, humor, and self-awareness. In his book, we discover the extraordinary general, tactician, and strategist who came very close to establishing hegemony over Europe between 1794 and 1811. More than that, we find a man who, though no revolutionary, republican or democrat, was committed to establishing the Revolution's ideas. Meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, and sound finances are among the ideas he consolidated, codified and geographically extended. To these ideas, he added rational and efficient local administration, the encouragement of the arts and sciences and the most extensive codification since the fall of Rome.After fifteen years of his rule, even the Bourbon restoration could not revive the Ancien Regime.

It is interesting that, unlike many conquerors in history, Napoleon did not seek to extend direct French rule in the countries he conquered. Instead, he implanted the Napoleonic Code and efficient administration everywhere he went, laying the foundation for the modern world.

Join us as we take a new look at Napoleon.

Seven Music Films: “Untold” Stories of Mostly Sixties’ Rock, Pop, Blues, and Soul

Seven music films with seven unique slants on mostly sixties' rock, pop, blues and soul. Each film offers a perspective less widely told in the mainstream media of the time. Recognition is belatedly given to Native American musicians, studio musicians, soul music festivals, and rebel DJs. Conversational interviews with storytellers David Crosby, and the Beatles' loyal secretary, round out the list. Released from 2009 to 2021, these films may enhance your memories of the music you enjoyed. Check out the movie trailers for each week, and even if you don't join this SDG, you might take a recommendation or two at your leisure. (Sorry, Elvis! Ran out of weeks!)

Story of the Cell--An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

While genetics and gene therapy get most of the attention in the press, the real workhorse of medicine is cellular biology. The discovery of cells—and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem—announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID – all can be viewed as the result of cells, or systems of cells functioning abnormally. And all can be perceived as amenable to cellular therapies leading the way to creating a ‘new human’.

We will follow the growth of cellular biology from the 1600s when a Dutch Trader first looked through a single-lens handmade microscope and saw tiny living organisms in a drop of rainwater to major recent innovations in cellular technology. We will learn about basic working of cellular units, assemblages of cells to make organs and related cell pathologies. Along the way we will also meet many ‘new humans’ that are not science-fiction augmented characters, rather it is you and me, rebuilt using modified cells to alleviate suffering and curing real diseases.

The book we will be using, “The Song of the Cell”, (October 2022) by Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee. His two earlier books, “The Emperor of All Maladies” and “The Gene” were both bestsellers. The new book is both scholarly yet filled with emotional stories of real patients and the doctors and nurses who treat them. The book’s reviews have been uniformly positive. The Boston Globe, “What makes Mukherjee’s narrative so remarkable is that he imbues decades of painstaking laboratory investigation with the suspense of a mystery novel and urgency of a thriller.” The Washington Post, “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories….and swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability and occasional flashes of poetry.” Paul Nurse, 2001 Nobel Prize Winner of Medicine, “Deeply researched, The Song of the Cell is an extraordinary journey through the history of discovery of the most innovative cellular medicine practiced today and the promise of what lies ahead.”

The Nature of Consciousness

"Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?"  ANIL SETH

Our SDG will take both a scientific and a philosophical approach to this age-old question. The central text is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness  by Anil Seth (2021), a UK neuroscientist from Cambridge and UCSD, and now Sussex. He will try to convince us that our mind is inseparable from our body, and that consciousness developed from our biological interaction with our surroundings and the need to predict events around us.

You don't need to agree with his thesis to enjoy researching and debating the issues this book raises. En route we will glance back at Plato, Descartes and David Hume, and consider the views of contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett. No prior learning is required, just intellectual curiosity about ... ourselves.

British Post World War II Drama--New Directions

The British theatre tradition was upended after World War II. Theretofore, it had focused on serious historical drama, comedies of manners, operettas and farce. The end of the War seemed to release a flood of plays with themes and styles outside the mainstream. Plays now dealt with economic and personal problems after the War, non-realistic situations and characters and idiosyncratic (and sometimes dystopian) takes on modern life. One example of this change: Lawrence Olivier was known for roles in classic English plays and Shakespeare, but after the War started playing more down-to-earth roles, as in John Osborne’s “The Entertainer.”

I have chosen four playwrights to illustrate the post-War theatre. Their plays are excellent in themselves as well as representing their era. The playwrights are Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, John Osborne and Alan Ayckbourn. We will discuss the lives of the playwrights, the themes and meanings of the plays and their relationship to their time. Where appropriate, I hope to have presenters do short readings from the plays. There are, of course, many more playwrights during the period who are worthy of reading and discussion. The decision here is read several works of each of a smaller number of playwrights and gain a fuller understanding of each of them. 

I’m not aware of a single book that covers all of the plays, but there is plenty of material on line on the lives of the playwrights and all aspects of the plays. Most of the plays have been made into movies.

We will devote the first week to a discussion of both British pre-War theatre and to Stoppard’s background and life. As indicated below, we will spend more time on Stoppard than the other playwrights. His plays are so varied and provocative that they are entitled to the disproportionate amount of time assigned to him and to his plays. Participants will also be encouraged to read a new biography of Stoppard: “Tom Stoppard: A Life” by Hermione Lee. After the first week, we will then discuss the plays, as indicated below.

Shakespeare's Tragedies at the Movies

In this S/DG, we will spend two sessions per play, exploring and discussing seven of Shakespeares popular tragedies. For the first week of the pair, we will read and discuss the play. All of these plays address very discussable topics issues including gender, power, morality and family relationships. The plays are in chronological order, so we can also see how Shakespeare's craft develops from 1595 to 1606. During that time, Spain and England are at war, Queen Elisabeth dies, King James ascends to the throne, and the Gunpowder Plot is discovered. The history is reflected in the plays.

In the second week, we will watch a selected movie version of that play, focusing on the screen attributes. The films were produced between the years of 1985 (a highly acclaimed Japanese version of King Lear) and 2021 (a riveting Macbeth staring Denzel Washington). each of the films has a 4+ star rating. Needless to say, the plays are superb. 

The Sea and Civilization

In this SDG we seek nothing less than to change your understanding of the geography and history of the world by focusing your attention on the 70 per cent of the map that is blue. Our shift of emphasis from the land to the seas will reveal many trends and patterns of world history that are otherwise not apparent, such as trade routes established long before their seemingly sudden emergence. For example, trade networks of the Indian Ocean, pioneered at least four thousand years ago, were a point of departure and destination for merchants and mendicants from across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal long before events conspired to thrust them into the historical limelight.

Our core book is The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World, by the highly acclaimed author, Lincoln Paine.

Paine’s highly acclaimed maritime history offers unique insights into human affairs and history from disciplines such as the arts, religion, language, the law and political economy. Paine explains, for example, the critical role of the sea for the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, and how the ancient Phoenicians, Greeks and others used the seas to spread their language, goods, religions and culture. He also covers a wide range of other topics such as shipbuilding, oceanic exploration, human migration and naval history, the importance of the Spice Islands, the Vikings, pirates, slave-traders and the Ming dynasty.

Unlike other maritime histories that focus on the age of European sailing, Paine takes us to places we rarely study, such as Oceania, Africa, Southeast and East Asia, the Indian Sea and the Caribbean, as well as more familiar seas like the Mediterranean, the North Sea and the Baltic.

The Sea and Civilization has been called “[a]n accomplishment of both great sweep and illuminating detail”, “a stunning work of history”, and “a mesmerizing, rhapsodic narrative of maritime enterprise”. As one reviewer concluded: “In short, one cannot find enough praise for Paine’s work.” Exploring this seminal work will provide a new and unique way for PLATO members to study world history.