Norman Sicilia: The Origins of Pasta in the Crossroads of the Midieval Mediterranean

The history of Italian cuisine is the history of Italy. With millennia of wars, battles, shifting politics, dynamic trade, and often rigid, oppressive social structures, a retelling of this history ought to reflect this if it wishes to capture all of Italy’s complexity and nuance as a nation. In his history, author John Dickie does not shy away from the blood of the persecuted, nor the sweat of peasants. In fact, he fully recognizes they are vital pieces of information. Italy and Italian food are often thought of as uniform for the sake of convenience. In response, I’ve heard many try to push back against this and explain the differences between Lazio, Lombardia, and Ligûria. However, Italian language, culture, and yes food, when zoomed in further, differs from one rural village or city neighborhood to the next. Dickie’s quote of Walter Benjamin stood out to me, “[that] there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” (Dickie 8). What we label “civilized” and barbarous, what we place upon marble pedestals or look down upon most of the time says more about us-our own ideas and ideals, beliefs, flaws, and biases-than anything of the subject of our judgement. This goes for me and my preconceived notions of Italy being born and raised in a thoroughly Americanized 3rd Generation Italian-American family, but also for Italy’s inhabitants today, looking upon their own history.

The Birth and Growth of 20th Century Jamaican Music

    Jamaica’s musical customs go back centuries, but noticeably became popular on the world stage beginning after World War II. Much of this music has influences that themselves come from around the world, including Africa, Europe, the M.E.N.A. region, and the island’s neighbors in the Americas.

The Compagnie and the Code

The French West Indies Companies (Fr.-Compagnie des Indes occidentales françaies) wrote their first Code Noir in 1685 on behalf of King Louis XIV. They compiled a list of articles that fall somewhere between law and early corporate policy, all signed off by the Sun King as royal decree. This list details how exactly they felt the French Caribbean should work politically, legally, economically, and socially. All of it is fundamentally based on their financial objective of making personal profit and increasing royal taxes, as well as their view of the world and how it works.

Columbus's "Letter to Luis Sant'Angel": Questioning a First Contact Scenario

    Christopher Columbus first spotted land in the New World on October 12, 1492. The subsequent report of his findings that he wrote to the Spanish Crown, in today's historical records, is titled "Letter to Luis Sant'Angel". While it's details might be objective at face value, the Genoese explorer might not might have written as reliable a report as he tries to make it come off as.

Bronze Age: The Collapse

    Ever since individuals dispersed the seed of wild grasses along the banks of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean region built a world that seemed to be becoming smaller and easier to control. With agriculture, their populations grew, cities developed, and more individuals were free from the task of feeding themselves and their families. With this spare time and labor, they looked beyond their immediate homes to their neighbors, as well as to the world around them. These cities sought to acquire more resources in order to become political overlords, trade hubs, cultural centers, havens of science and technology, and places of heaven on Earth. They cooperated and competed with one another-sharing ideas and innovations, fighting wars, intermarrying, and trading goods-forming and strengthening bonds found within what we could imagine as a large web. This web developed to become more interconnected and more complex as time marched on, until it gradually emerged as what we might call a "civilization", as we might with the West, the Islamic world, or East Asia. However, this came at a cost of the entire system becoming more and more vulnerable to disaster-disaster that would come in the form of what we today call the Late Bronze Age Collapse.