Tales of Times Forgotten

Yes, There Were Black People in Britain in the Nineteenth Century

It seems that, with my characteristically late timing, I have only just gotten around to watching the show that everyone was talking about six months ago. On 25 December 2020, Netflix released the period drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813 during the Regency Era. The show has triggered enormous controversy over the fact that it portrays a large number of British aristocrats who are not white, including one of the main characters, Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings, portrayed by the Black British actor Regé-Jean Page. Many people on the internet are predictably outraged over this, insisting that the show is not historically accurate and that it is “blackwashing” history.

The show, however, for its own part, makes very little pretense at historical accuracy in the first place. After all, most of the music is modern pop music played in a “traditional,” orchestral style. Furthermore, the show is not quite as historically inaccurate as some people might think. It is true that there were no Black people who held titles of nobility in Britain during the period when Bridgerton is set, but there were certainly free Black people living in Britain at the time who were both prominent and prosperous.

How Have Works of Greek Drama Survived?

It is widely known that the vast majority of all works of ancient drama have been lost forever. We have record of literally hundreds of playwrights who wrote plays in the Greek language in ancient times, but only five of these playwrights have any plays that have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete under their own names. Three of these playwrights were tragedians: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. The other two playwrights—Aristophanes, and Menandros—were both comedians. All five were Athenian citizen men who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

Many people who do not have any degrees in classics have heard these authors’ names and maybe even read some of their plays in translation, but very few people who do not have degrees in classics know how and why any of these authors’ works have survived to the present day when so many other works of ancient Greek drama have been lost.

Peter Singer’s Extraordinarily Bad Take on Apuleius

On 30 May 2021, the online open classics journal Antigone published a piece written by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer about the ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass, which was originally written in Latin in the late second century CE by the North African writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE). Antigone promoted the article on their Twitter account. Their announcement begins with the words: “Today we are delighted to share an article by Peter Singer, renowned philosopher and animal rights advocate…”

Antigone’s publication and promotion of Singer’s article immediately sparked backlash over the fact that Singer has spent the past three and a half decades publicly advocating that infants who have observable physical disabilities at birth should be killed. He even co-authored and published an entire book in 1985 titled Should the Baby Live?: The Problem of Handicapped Infants, in which he advocated this.

Many classicists, myself included, feel that Antigone should not have published Singer’s article about Apuleius because, even though the article itself did not discuss infanticide, he is not the sort of person that they should be platforming. Even beyond this, though, Singer’s take on The Golden Ass is so extraordinarily bad that, even if he didn’t have a long history of advocating infanticide, no classics journal should have published it.

Is Yoga Really Ancient?

Yoga has become quite an international cultural phenomenon in the past few decades. It is now estimated that somewhere around three hundred million people practice yoga worldwide, which is nearly the same number of people who live in the entire United States. Yoga is consistently advertised—both by the yoga industry and by the current government of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi—as an extremely ancient Indian spiritual and physical practice that dates back thousands of years in more-or-less its present form.

This narrative, however, is not entirely accurate. It is true that there was an ancient Āstika philosophical school called yoga and that modern yoga has been influenced by traditions that ultimately grew out of this school. Nonetheless, nothing closely resembling modern āsana-centered yoga-as-exercise ever actually existed in the Indian subcontinent in ancient times. Haṭhayoga, the immediate precursor to modern postural yoga, only first started to emerge around a thousand years ago during the medieval period and did not start to develop into modern yoga until the nineteenth century, under the heavy influence of European “physical culture” exercise regimes.

Article Deleted and Restored, 28 May 2021

Earlier today, I published an article titled “Why Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Bad.” Within only a few hours, at least three different people who are on my mailing list left comments objecting to this post, insisting to varying degrees that they are sick of my political opinions, that they didn’t sign up for “Tales of the Woke,” and that this blog should be reserved exclusively for content that is immediately relevant to pre-modern history.

I initially decided that these commenters have a point and deleted the post, thinking that those who want to read it could still read it on Quora, where I have published it as an answer. After some more thought, though, I decided that, since I already published the article here, I would restore it.

I have, of course, written about politics on this blog ever since the beginning. One of the very first articles I ever published on this website nearly five years ago in November 2016, when I was much younger and much more naïve, was partially a commentary on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the past, however, I have generally kept my commentary on this blog relevant to pre-modern history in some fashion and reserved my less historically relevant commentary for Quora alone. By double-posting my not-at-all-historically-relevant commentary on trans athletes to this blog, some readers evidently felt I crossed a serious line.

Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

“Rewriting History” Is Not Inherently a Bad Thing

There seems to be something of a trend going on right now in politics where people have developed a habit of accusing their opponents of wanting to “rewrite history.” I’ve mostly seen conservatives accusing progressives of this, but I’ve also seen a few cases of progressives accusing conservatives of it without further clarification. In all cases, people who accuse other people of wanting to “rewrite history” portray this as something unambiguously bad.

The problem is that “rewriting history” is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, “rewriting history” is literally a historian’s job description. It is inevitable that each generation will rewrite history and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop it. It is, however, extremely important that the people who rewrite history do so honestly, using correct evidence and correct methods of interpretation. When we talk about “rewriting history,” what matters is not whether people are doing it, but how they are doing it.

Why Singular ‘They’ Should Be Grammatically Acceptable

If you’ve ever used the English language, you’re probably already aware that the word they is most commonly used as a third-person plural personal pronoun to refer to multiple entities as a collective. You may also be aware that this same word is sometimes also used as a singular third-person personal pronoun to refer to a person of unspecified gender or a person who identifies as non-binary.

English teachers have been vocally condemning the use of the pronoun they to refer to a singular antecedent for years and most people who have gone through the United States public education system have probably been told at some point that using the pronoun in this manner is “wrong.” In this article, however, I intend to argue that it is (and should be) completely grammatically acceptable to use the pronoun they to refer to a singular individual.

Why We Should Avoid Using the Name ‘Anglo-Saxon’

As many of my readers are probably already aware, on 16 April 2021, Punchbowl News released documents, which revealed that Trump allies in the Republican Party, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, had founded what they were calling the “American First Caucus,” which was supposed to be dedicated to promoting “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.”

The caucus was immediately denounced as white supremacist. According to this article from The Washington Post, Greene is now trying to distance herself from the proposed American First Caucus, insisting that the documents Punchbowl News released were “a staff level draft proposal from an outside group.”

This relates to a controversy that has been boiling in the field of medieval studies for years now over the use of the name Anglo-Saxon. The term has been widely used for over two centuries to refer to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain after the Germanic invasions of the fifth century CE until the Norman conquest in 1066. Now, though, many scholars, especially young scholars and scholars of color, argue that people should avoid applying the name in this way, because it is largely anachronistic, it inherently implies racial whiteness, and it alienates people of color. Below is a discussion of the issue, along with a few of my thoughts on the matter.

What It Means If Biden Recognizes the Armenian Genocide

On 21 April 2021, The New York Times published an article reporting that President Joe Biden plans to declare that the mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918 was an act of genocide. The declaration is planned to take place on 24 April, which the Republic of Armenia has designated Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

This declaration will mark the fulfillment of a campaign promise that Barack Obama made in 2008 but never fulfilled and a campaign promise that Biden himself made last year. The declaration is controversial, however, because it may further harm the United States’ already-frayed relationship with the Republic of Turkey, whose government officially maintains that the genocide never happened. As a student of history, I thought I would give some background on the Armenian Genocide and what Biden’s declaration might mean.