I went down some kind of rabbithole of French sacred wells last night and here's a pretty great website/database of them if you need a pleasant distraction
history
"Disposable Palestinians: Israel's Wars and Genocide in Gaza" by Bashir Abu-Manneh. My rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Published in 2026.
Book description: Palestinians are undergoing another era of disposability and their existence in Palestine is in peril. "Disposable Palestinians" tackles this reality head on. It advances disposability as a key concept for understanding Israel's restructured settler colonial regime during the Oslo period. It explains how a flawed peace process becomes a war process that targets Palestinian society, and why every Israeli war since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000 is more violent, more destructive, and consistently popular in Israel – leading to the current genocide in Gaza.
This book was very informative, and also extremely disturbing, especially given much of the world's acceptance of the ongoing genocide, and the world's complicity in it. Israel could not engage in this genocide, if the countries of the wold did not close their collective eyes to it.
#nonfiction #genocide #history #Israel #MiddleEast #Palestinians #books #reading @bookstodon
#lispyGopherClimate #live on #peertube again !
https://toobnix.org/w/ogFTHRwVNXm4GXmkNyqg58
#archive Thanks all
Joined by @kentpitman and @jhlagado ( @ramin_hal9001 had a meeting )
Viz the #climateCrisis about the #debian #llm thing viz @cwebber https://gamerplus.org/@cwebber@social.coop/117508713815802595
the wonderful @nosrednayduj clued me into #symbolics #lisp discussions and the paper on failure https://www.chai.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/Symbolics.pdf
ALSO our @dougmerritt and #unix and #gamedev and #softwareArchaeology
Chat in #lambdaMOO #VR as always!
Edited 16d ago
"The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath" by Dan Stone. My rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Published in 2015.
Book description: A moving, deeply researched account of survivors’ experiences of liberation from Nazi death camps and the long, difficult years that followed. Decades have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, the author/historian draws on archival sources and eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives.
This is a well written and detailed history and portrait of these times. I highly recommend this book.
#nonfiction #history #Holocaust #WWII #freedom #Nazis #Jews #books #reading @bookstodon
World-famous or local legend? New study investigates global and local forms of collective memory and group identity
by Adrian Chalifour
https://phys.org/news/2026-10-world-famous-local-legend-global.html
Original article:
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/10/pgag308/8825253?login=false
Books about Political science at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/800
The hidden hornbook: a handy educational tool from the Middle-Ages
by Ken Gibb
Books about Education in middle ages at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=education+%2B+middle+ages
CFP: Women in Long Eighteenth-Century Scotland & Beyond
6–9 July, Sorbonne, Paris
Exploring the roles, agency, representations, constraints, & historical memory of women in Scottish society, culture, politics, religion, & everyday life, c.1660 to c.1830
https://ecsss.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PARIS-2027-CFP-DEF.pdf
#Scottish #Scotland #literature #history #culture #politics #religion #18thcentury #long18thcentury #callforpapers #litstudies #culturalstudies #womensstudies
Edited 14d ago
A 1580 Map Shows Why Data Visualization Is Never Neutral
Nearly 450 years ago, an unnamed Ñudzahui painter mapped his community’s history and land claims for a Spanish king — on his own terms.
By: Lauren F. Klein
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-1580-map-shows-why-data-visualization-is-never-neutral/
Medieval ghost stories featured rotten flesh, the walking dead and spoon-stealing spirits
by Alex Brown
Medieval ghosts shapeshifted, rose from their graves, and begged for help in making amends for their misdeeds.
Medieval ghosts at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=medieval+ghosts
New research challenges long-held beliefs about Robert Burns and Jamaica
edited by Swati Mestri, reviewed by Andrew Zinin
https://phys.org/news/2026-10-held-beliefs-robert-jamaica.html
More information:
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/burns.2026.0157
Books by Robert Burns at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/583
Mary Chesnut Was the South’s Civil War Diarist
Mary Chesnut’s private diary offers an intimate and colorful glimpse into what life was like for the South’s elite class during the Civil War.
https://www.thecollector.com/mary-chesnut-civil-war-diarist/
"A Diary from Dixie" at PG:
“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees & thank God it was not yours.”
What is the secret of Glamis Castle?
1/5
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-monster-of-glamis-92015626/
#Scottish #literature #history #folklore #legend #Glamis #19thcentury #Halloween
"Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl's Escape from the Warsaw Ghetto" by Janina Bauman. My rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Published in 2026.
Book description: Janina Bauman was a year older than Anne Frank when the Second World War broke out. When Hitler's decree forced her family into the Warsaw Ghetto, bright, lively Janina suddenly found herself in a cramped flat hiding with other Jewish families. At first, the curfews and casual cruelty meted out by the German occupiers could not dim her passion for books, boys and romance. Then came the raids, and Janina with her sister and mother, had to keep on the move, hiding in the ruins of the ghetto to avoid being one of thousands rounded up every day and deported to the camps. Their escape to the 'Aryan' side was followed by two years in hiding, taking shelter with those willing to help them and living in constant fear of betrayal, told through her teenage diaries.
I expected this book to be similar to "A Diary of a Young Girl, but this story is much different in perspective, and I loved it every bit as much, and the story does not end there, but continues on after the war. I highly recommend this book.
#nonfiction #memoir #history #Holocaust #WWII #persecution #jews #Books #reading @bookstodon
I did not have this find on my bingo card for the year...
...Deep in a cave in Tennessee, thousands of feet underground, as I rounded a bend of the river passage leading a group of biology students and recent graduates in a bioinventory of the cave....I stopped suddenly and definitely swore a little "WTF is that?! GAR!?"
Yes my friends, a friggin' Gar, about four feet long, just swimming in one of the pools.
Not a single person I know of has ever seen this in a cave before. Critters from the surface do get washed in at times, and this cave has connection to surface water. However, the creeks above it are not really Gar habitat, so even us biologists are at a bit of a loss.
Well, not the property manager, who promptly said "wow, he was only this big *mimes a few inches with his fingers* when I put him in there!" (sarcasm, in case you cannot tell!)
So...enjoy a big gar, with a human for scale.
Fun fact: it was starved for light, it would follow the light from our headlamps around, like a little kitten following a feather toy
Boost if this made you smile today!
#fish #gar #monster #cave #caves #caving #biology #nature #shock #river #ecosystem #Mesozoic #ancient #history
Edited 45d ago
This Week in Literary History: Sinclair Lewis Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
The First Writer from the United States to Do So
Books by Sinclair Lewis at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/278
How Sir Isaac Newton Predicted The World Will Change In 2060
Sir Isaac Newton predicted that the world would end in 2060, but never published these studies during his lifetime.
by Mike Cohen
https://www.thecollector.com/how-isaac-newton-predicted-end-of-the-world/
Books by Newton at PG (including Newton's Principia):
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/6288
7 Best Museums for Renaissance Art Around the World
The Renaissance revolutionized the way the West looked at the world and created its art. Check out the seven museums where its greatest masterpieces live.
by Laura Pattara
https://www.thecollector.com/renaissance-art-museums/
Books about Renaissance at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/1534
47 years ago today
The Ramones' movie Rock & Roll High School opens in theaters. The title song becomes one of their classics, and the film gains a cult following.
#punk #punks #punkrock #ramones #rocknrollhighschool #history #punkrockhistory #otd
Historicising Robert Burns’s Jamaica, 1786–1834
Stephen Mullen & Craig Lamont, 𝘉𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘴 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 135/1 (2026)
Re-evaluating Burns’s connections with Jamaica, 1786–1834, & establishing a model with implications for how Burns and Caribbean slavery is interpreted in civic Scotland
Free via Open Access
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/burns.2026.0157
#Scottish #literature #history #18thcentury #RobertBurns #slavery #Jamaica #Caribbean #CaribbeanSlavery #transatlanticSlaveTrade
"The Trial of the Edmund Fitzgerald: Eyewitness Accounts from the U.S. Coast Guard Hearings" by Michael Schumacher (Editor) My rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Published in 2019.
Book description: Drawn from testimony at the Coast Guard’s official inquiry, looks anew at one of the most storied, and mysterious, shipwrecks in American history, The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. One of the most famous shipwreck stories in Great Lakes history. It is also one of maritime lore’s great mysteries, the details of its disappearance as obscure now as on that fateful November day in 1975.
This book contains so much detail, and the full reports of the agencies that investigated this tragedy. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested.
#nonfiction #history #GreatLakes #shipping #books #reading @bookstodon
Timgad, The ‘Pompeii Of Africa’ That Spent 1,000 Years Buried In The Algerian Desert
By Natasha Ishak
Built by the Romans in 100 C.E., Timgad was effectively forgotten after it was abandoned in the 8th century — and its ruins remain incredibly well-preserved to this day.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/timgad
Books about Timgad at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=timgad
Who Are The Ainu People? Inside The Rich History And Culture Of The East Asian Indigenous Group
By Ella Spitz | Edited By Cara Johnson
The Ainu were hunter-gatherers who lived across Japan and into southeastern Russia, but centuries of forced assimilation have virtually eliminated their language and traditions.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/ainu
Books about Ainus at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/15285
#books #literature #folklore #indigenous_people #history #culture
Happy Birthday Greg Graffin, lead singer of Bad Religion, born on this day in 1964 in Madison, Wisconsin
Bad Religion - American Jesus / L.A. Is Burning - Live in Brazil
#punk #punks #punkrock #badrelegion #greggraffin #history #punkrockhistory #otd
There's an account called Vecinos which is making English-language history videos about Latin America exclusively for PeerTube.
If this sounds interesting to you, you can follow them at: