Decipher History

Costly! The costs of vising the wreck twelve times for research and footage, not to mention the cost of the film production overall. The extreme profitability of this film and James Cameron in general.

First, second, and third class on the same ship. Titans of industry. Runaway capitalism. The class divide and point of view before The Great War. The modern “royalty” by virtue of their wealth.

The pace of technological development in industries, especially intercontinental travel by steamship. Comparing the early 1900s to other periods of technological progress like the 1980s and 1990. Noting the nature of the automobiles in the film: literally the design of a “horseless carriage.” The cutting-edge wireless technology aboard the ship.

Three engines! Of two varieties. Steam-driven piston engines and steam-driven a turbine. Note: you cannot reverse a turbine. Peak power: 46,000 horsepower. 600 tons of coal daily. An anecdote about Mr. Diesel.

The nature of many disasters, probably including Titanic: a series of small problems, adding up to a catastrophic failure under the rigt (wrong) circumstances. Rich people hogging the Marconi wireless. Out of date lifeboat regulations. Loading lifeboats (badly). The reality of “women and children first.” Avoiding chaos until it’s too late.

The inquiries from shortly after the event, and the great surprise you may experience when realizing that the company men consistently pushed blame back up the chain of command. Modern evidence changing our conception over time. Actually ultimately coming to the consensus that this particular ship on this particular voyage was mostly operated in a way that was totally normal in almost all respects and simply got very unlucky.

All told, it does seem that Titanic was really really well-engineered and did remarkably well under the circumstances.

It was really good! One-shot gimmicks of the past and appreciating the technical complexity of what was done here.

The demographic makeup of the British military. Young average infantryman age. “Pals battalions” and serving alongside your friends.

The scale of WWI versus what came before. Rising contemporary appreciation for the study of this conflict. How much was the war a “modern war” and how much did it help usher in the modern world? Horses and tanks.

The shovel as a tool of war for millenia. How do we wind up with stalemate trench warfare? A hint of trench warfare in the American Civil War. Really impressive trench engineering. Tanks, tech, strategy, and the eventual end of trench warfare. Rats - yuck! Rats in the trenches.

Barbed wire. Mechanized warfare. Horses in WWI and WWII. Tanks! Really slow and not very great tanks. Radio reliability. Hard-line comms. Sending messages by foot, radio, or… dropping it out of a plane? Medical infrastructure and what modern medicine owes to WWI.

Versions! So many versions. The best version of the film: The Ultimate Cut.

Ancient Greece after 300. The Peloponnesian War (which Ryan is in the middle of on his show!). The rise of Philip. Olympias.

Putting Macedon at center stage in ancient Greece. Technical and logistical innovations. Planning the invasion of Persia right before his suspiciously untimely death.

Alexander and Olypmias. Purging royal competition in the ancient world. Plutarch and gossip about “powerful women” in antiquity.

The loss of contemporary sources and the reliability of what remains. Plutarch’s gossip column.

What makes an historical figure “The Great,” instead of “The Terrible” or just forgotten? So many Alexandrias! Conquest, culture, and Hellenization.

“Homosexuality” in the ancient world and different norms of power and masulinity. Alexander and Hephaestion. Achilles and Patroclas.

Heavy Macedonian drinking and Alexander’s downward spiral. Conflicting reports and also modern interpretations of possible causes of death. Indeterminate succession. Alexander’s body floating around for centuries.

Roland Emmerich and Mel Gibson and historical rigor (or lack thereof).

Rocking chairs! Pushing the edge of period chair technology. Actually a relatively new thing, so you could see why Mel might have been having some trouble. Smooth-bore firearms and the eventual transition to Longrifles. Militias vs armies and the frequency of rifled weapons between them. Reload times. Minié balls, loading speed, and rifle accuracy.

Maybe the name was too deliciously posh and British? So they changed it to William Tavington. Maybe kind of a jerk, but clearly not the caricature we see in the film. Blowing your inheritence on women and gambling vs buying hundreds of horses. Buying your military commissions whether you deserve it or not.

Should we even try to approach the legitimacy of the “hero?” Humans: always flawed through some lens and operating within their time and experience.

Militias vs armies. The problem in modern armies of humans not really wanting to kill other humans.

Ungentlemanly conduct. Continental congress early investigations for propaganda. Zero documented mass-slaughter church-burnings.

Do not be misled: it was happening during this period. Especially in South Carolina. Promises (lies) of post-war freedom. Numbers on the British and Patriot sides.

Creating the dialects, idolects, and accents of the five points. Historical Language sleuthing. Daniel Day Lewis’ vocal performance.

“A drama, not a documentary.” The overstatements of the loose source book “The Gangs of New York.” Compressed timeframes. Framing the story of the “gangs of New York” through the lens of the Italian mobs of the early 20th century.

“The Great Famine” and “The Potato Famine.” Blight: not a fungus! Actually non-photosynthetic algae. Living on only potatoes: pretty doable! How the blight was delivered from America and was able to flourish under the seasoncal conditions in Ireland.

Migration of Irish into (mostly) New York City. Staying where you land because you lack the resources to move on. The conditions on the long boat ride over.

New York: like now, but smaller and mostly woods and marshes etc. Draining and filling the stinky sewage lake to make a place for the five points. American growth and the spoilage of nature.

Not as crimey as you heard! But, maybe just as grimey. Discerning quality of life in the five points from archaeology, correspondences, censuces, bank records, and other sources. Common people, eating meat; for every meal! Chain immigration.

Using the Irish vote. Competitive firefighting. Tweed’s truly impressive corruption.

Bill the Butcher. 19th century gang names. The dueling origin stories of the “Dead Rabbits.” Inter-linguistic phono-semantic matching.

History washing over local squabbles. Lynchings. Violently protesting the purchasability of draft vexceptions. Thge New York Times offices and machine guns and molten lead.

Isaac Meyer’s History of Japan Podcast!!

Tokugawa rule. Can historical economics be interesting? The introduction of tightly-controlled Dutch trade in Japan preceeding the Meiji restoration. Western opposition. Fighting over western presence and figuring out how much Western influence Japan can tolerate while still being Japanese. The return of the Emperor.

Recognizing the relative militrary reputations of Britain, France, Germany, and the US at the time. French military advisors in irl Japan during the Meiji restoration. Jules Brunet as the closest real-life analogue to Tom Cruise’s Algren. Spheres of influence.

War basically between and within the Samurai class. Samurai with side jobs. Disbanding the social class with the swords. Samurai civil war armor and its increasing disutility as firearms improve. The point of the elaborate headpieces.

The irl analogue for Ken Watanabe’s character. Trying to fight Korea. Accidentally creating revolutionaries. Takamori’s last stand after his forces ran out of bullets. “The Last Samurai” and the ease of Japanese punning.

English-born “Samurai” and how/whether a foreigner could actually become a real samurai. The (probably) African-born “samurai” Yasuke, working as personal bodyguard for daimyō Nobunaga.

Creating your warrior narrative after your period of real marshall utility. Analogy with European chivalry. The carrying of Bushido culture from Samurai time into WWII Japan. The circumstances where ritual suicide begins to seem like a reasonable option.

Arqebuses all over the joint before the period of the film. Samurai gun-kata. Wooden cannons, howitzers, and artillery classification.

Worrying the minimum amount about your speech. The difficulty of quoting noisy radio transmissions.

Recognizing the small temporal distance from the first powered flight to the first moon landing. The cutting edge of the early space program. Test piloting. Gemini.

Defining the edge of space. The “Karman Line”: transition from atmospheric lift to orbital velocity. Complications and redefinition of where “space” begins. Geopolitics, ruining everything since forever.

Badass engineer pilots. Moving fast and breaking things. Selection testing. Giving prospective astronauts ice-water wet willies. The importance of simulation in the early space program and the difficulty of simulating things we haven’t actually ever done or seen up close.How hard it really is to stay conscious under high-g stress.

Monocular depth cues. Light and shadow, unfamiliar objects, and depth perception. Equatorial noon on the equinox when stuff looks creepy: Lahaina Noon.

Retroreflectors and really really powerful lasers. Tiny photonic returns: 1 out of every 10¹⁷ photons shot at the moon mirror make it back for our detection. Multi-mile laser beams. Confirming relativity ftw.

… from the moon! And some regolith to boot. Vacuum transport for moon samples and how we work with them on Earth’s surface without contaminating. The difficulty of maintaining a a very strong vacuum vs nonreactive gasses. Detecting the provenance of proposed moon rocks. NASA’s moon-rock cataloguing system.

Viewership numbers. NASA’s custom video encoding and the incredibly analog conversion methods employed to bring it to television.

What if it didn’t work out? The Nixon speach made ready just in case. “In Event of Moon Disaster.”

Why we have no rockets now to match the power of the Saturn V. Loss of engine-production expertise. Looking at near-future Moon and Mars missions.

Zach Snyder’s strengths in creating comic book panels on film. Slo-mo blood spatter. Abs and glistening man-meat.

Ancient Greece and “western civilization.” The birth of “democracy” in nearby Athens. Juxtaposing your historical culture with the “other.” Like George Washington crossing the Delaware but with way less man-meat. And 100% less codpieces.

The dawn on the Spartan state. The nature of the Helot slave class. “Land-bonded” slavery vs chattel. Ancient Greek and Spartan combat methods. Heavy infantry. Training by doing crunches all.day.long. Ancient combat analogues with early UFC.

Greece as a poor backwater on the edge of the Persian Empire. The Ionian Revolt, The Battle of Marathon, The Battle of Thermopylae, Battle of Plataea.

The incredible change that was the development of the professional standing army. Modern soldiers and modern combat compared and contrasted with ancient. Dying gloriously. Army sizes at Thermopylae as recorded closer to the time vs modern estimates.

Ancient sources and the lack of writing from the actual place and time. “The Spartan Mirage,” and the crafting of the Spartan image. Any training as a unit is better than none.

The universality of shield walls and spear hedges, aka the “spiky steamroller.” Strategically busting out in individual slow motion. Spear-length evolution. Learning whether “dragoons” are at all related to dragons.

So yeah, Mel Gibson is bad. But then the movies are… really good? Trying to get past his framing. The tug of war between historical accuracy and entertainment. Anthropological criticism.

The problem with burning nearly the entire written history of a people. Deciphering scant ancient texts. The remaining resources: art, stelae. Mayan hieroglyphic writing.

The Maya pre-classic, classic, and post-cassic periods. The scale of the height of Mayan civilization. The abruptness of its fall. The period in which the film takes place and the ways in which it is not actually entirely apparent. Classic-period pyramids in the post-classic era.

The mixing of astronomy and astrology in the Mayan tracking of the heavenly bodies for religious purposes. The Mayan written mathematical system. “Inventing” zero. Extensive calendaring and that whole 2012 kerfuffle.

The factors that may have contributed to the Mayan collapse. Plaster and mortar production. Deforestation for fuel.

The possibility for cultural confusion in the film. Aztec and Maya sacrificial practices.