Looking Back On Where We’ve Been

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  • Glass wasn’t always ordinary. In ancient Egypt, it was as precious as gems. Making it required the right mix of rare materials, extreme heat, and years of apprenticeship. Everyone knew it was hard, and that is why it had value. Today, you flip a factory switch and glass appears. Cheap. Uniform. Abundant. So abundant that you are more annoyed at having to…

    Read more: Do You Know How to Make Glass?
  • China has mandated “AI education” for every child. The reaction was immediate: China is pulling ahead. America is falling behind. Beijing is about to win the future. This rests on the old fantasy that central planning can mandate brilliance, as if it were a software update. But China’s record with mandates isn’t impressive. It’s lethal. The Great Leap Forward was the first…

    Read more: China’s AI Kids
  • The History Think Blog is on YouTube. For the first History Think video essay, I tried to take a different approach to conspiracy debunking by looking at the death of Stalin. No leader has arguably been more effective at maintaining control than Stalin. He was the uncontested and unquestioned leader of the USSR—the largest country in terms of land size—for decades, but…

    Read more: History Think Blog is on YouTube
  • Conspiracy fans love to quote Oswald saying, “I’m just a patsy,” like it’s some secret confession. I watched Jesse Ventura pull that stunt at the 40th anniversary in 2003. But Ventura isn’t a historian digging for truth—he’s an entertainer. Wrestling, Hollywood, politics, “investigative” TV—it’s all performance If you actually read the full quote, it’s simple. When asked, “Did you shoot the president?”…

    Read more: JFK Fact: Oswald Was Not a Patsy
  • A Hundred Years Ago This Month A hundred years may seem like a long time, but in historical terms it isn’t. Just a century ago, in 1925, Washington, D.C. saw its first of two massive Ku Klux Klan rallies (the second was a year later). These weren’t hidden, nighttime gatherings in remote southern towns; these were broad daylight parades down Pennsylvania Avenue,…

    Read more: The Klan Marches in Washington, D.C.