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.

Cities of Mesopatamia

This is a map of major cities founded throughout history along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This region has gone by many names over the centuries-Sumer, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, etc. Today, it is the sovereign state of Iraq.

 

I find it fascinating that so much history has occurred in this area. While the political, economic, and social pinnacle of each individual place might be separated by hundreds, maybe thousands of years, they aren't that far away. So much history here overlaps in a long epic of human activity.

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Religious and Political History of Bosnia and Herzegovina

    Bosnia and Herzegovina (or ‘Bosnia’) is a country in Europe with a long and bloody history of religious conflict. A former Jugoslav republic, it often served as a borderland between different cultures. In ancient times, it was home to the Illyrians, a people we do not know too much about. Illyrian was, as far as we know, an Indo-European language.[1] Just as with the religious traditions of the Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Italic, and Vedic peoples, early Illyrian religious beliefs could probably be traced back to the Eurasian Steppes, featuring a ‘sky-father’ as a major member of the Illyrian pantheon, perhaps reflecting a patriarchal society.

Domestication of Flora and Fauna

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End of the War, Beginning of a New Age

    World War II in the Pacific Theater began in the 1930’s, with Japanese Imperial expansion in mainland Asia. In late 1941, The Imperial Armed Forces attacked Pearl Harbor, with the United States responding with a declaration of war. Since then, it had been four years of sinking ships, downed aircraft, and people on both sides ruthlessly slaughtered, military personnel and civilians alike. On both the Allied and Japanese sides, the war seemed to be dragging on, even for those who refused to surrender. Newly appointed to the Oval Office after the death of Pres. Roosevelt, Pres. Truman’s objective was to bring the war to a close. After Midway, the Japanese had been put on the defensive. The Allies just needed to finish the job and bring peace. Since Midway, Operation Orange (codename for military action against Japan) entailed a strategy of ‘island hopping’, taking strategically located islands one-by-one and establishing airfields on them until the Japanese Archipelago was in range of effective bombing campaigns, just like Operation Black against Germany. This was accomplished upon the capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, at great cost. At this rate, a full invasion and occupation of Japan was projected to be much worse.