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Human History Revealed…
A few facts from the library stacks to inspire you to think.
I like to do a lot of reading on history. Apart from giving me a sense of temporal continuity, it affords me the opportunity to dispel popular myths ingrained in me from my childhood, such as the legend of Washington and the cherry tree, Franklin and the kite in the storm, or the fact that people DIDN’T widely think the world was flat up until just recently in history. There are also things like ghosts, the existence of which can easily be dispelled as improbable by analyzing history and comparing the number of ghost sightings with the sheer number of people who HAVEN’T seen one…the same goes for UFOs or the absurd number of purported Lake Monsters or other cryptids claimed as real.
Now, October 19th is a special day in history for a very special reason. It’s the day that falls between October 18th and October 20th. It is, of course, an artificial construct because October 19th didn’t exist as we know it today, prior to the invention of calendars, and it’s certain that we didn’t call this day October 19th until someone spoke enough Modern English to be able to call it October 19th. And this is one of the greatest misconceptions of history, that English has always existed and that people didn’t speak a wide variety of languages in the run up to our modern day. Many people don’t…