Podcast
MakingHistory
Hosted by Dan Allosso · EN
Blog and Podcast about History including my original content, primary sources, and historiography.
21episodes
Episodes
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Roadside History: Hjemkomst
Mar 6Tap to summarizeFirst in a series of videos I'm going to make on roadtrips this spring and summer. In this one, I visit the Hjemkomst Viking longship replica that was sailed across the Atlantic by Minnesotans in 1982, and the Stave Church replica built by other Minnesotans in the 1990s. Both very impressive and beautifully displayed by the City of Moorhead MN.
Transcribe →It's Time for Secular History
Mar 5Tap to summarizeI have a lot of friends who sort-of shake their heads when I tell them I occasionally watch Tucker Carlson’s videos on YouTube. I remember very clearly when he and Jon Stewart famously clashed in 2004. Stewart is my age and Carlson is about 6 years younger, and in 2004 I was 100% on Stewart’s “side” and thought the takedown that has been credited with hastening the end of the Crossfire show was appropriate and hilarious. In the two decades since then, a lot has happened. I still like Stewart, but I’m no longer 100% in support of every position he takes. And I think Carlson has changed. He regularly acknowledges he has been wrong about important issues and has been on the wrong side of momentous public debates like his support for the Iraq War. He seems to take himself less seriously and frequently acknowledges that his judgment is biased by his emotional responses. Even the giggling laugh he breaks into during his monologues or interviews (which many people find a bit obnoxious) often appears to me to be a way of laughing at himself and the absurdity of the seeming seriousness of the pundit/talking head role he inhabits. And by a lot of measures, Tucker is the most influential conservative commentator in American media today. I don’t agree with many of his positions, although I’ve found I do agree with some of them, such as his claim that collective punishment is never legitimate. And I’m curious about what messages his viewers are getting and how Tucker is affecting their understanding of the world and what’s happening in it. Today, I noticed Tucker has posted a 97-minute long “War Update” that spends a half hour explaining the importance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam of Mt. Moriah, also known as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This discussion is relevant because, as Tucker reports, not only have US military officers been telling their soldiers that the current war is “for Jesus” and is about hastening the Apocalypse, but many Israeli IDF soldiers are apparently running around with official Third Temple patches on their uniforms. I don’t think you just get to slap any random patch on a military uniform; so this seems significant. As a person who does not belong to any of these three “Abrahamic” religions, this is all very weird for me. Carlson acknowledges that these blatantly religious developments have gone largely unreported and unnoticed in the very secular Western society that modern America has become. He claims to be a religious christian, but not of the same flavor that seems to (or at least claims to) believe in these prophecies of the Apocalypse. It’s interesting to me that as a believer, Tucker seems to want to respect the supernatural religious beliefs by which others claim to be motivated. I suppose that’s an internally consistent position to take. If your own motivations rest on supernatural claims and you are aware that you might be wrong, it seems reasonable to avoid directly attacking others. Tucker even suggests that his (Episcopal) upbringing taught him that it’s usually best to keep those beliefs to yourself!That’s all well and good, of course, unless the others are taking their supernatural claims out of the privacy of their own religious beliefs and killing people over them. There have been a bunch of commentators on YouTube in the past day or so, comparing claims made by US leaders that the government of Iran is a crazed theocracy with statements of our own leaders that sound every bit as crazed and theocratic. It’s entirely possible, I suppose, that at the highest levels, the people making these statements are just cynical liars intent on deceiving gullible “base” constituencies who don’t have the interest or ability to think critically. But this has been a feature rather than a bug of organized religion in the West, as long as there has been organized religion in the West. Another YouTube video I listened to yesterday was a talk by Matthew Stewart on his recent book, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. () It was a talk sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities in the UK, and Stewart connected the deistic ideas of the Founders with the European Enlightenment and particularly with Spinoza. None of it was surprising to me or broke new ground, but I felt it was a very timely description of how and why secular social institutions became important and remain so. I had a conversation with my Dad, later in the day, about the story of Jefferson and the bible and scissors, and the different ways christianity can be imagined. Some people seem to see it as a set of moral teachings about kindness, peace, and charity, while others seem to focus on weird prophecies of end times wars and genocide. How are these even contained in the same religion? This has all reinforced my feeling that although I appreciate Carlson’s religious modesty: the idea that because he might be wrong he won’t “judge” others’ beliefs, I’m not sure that’s going to protect us from Armageddon. I can easily imagine sensible, rational, kind people being rolled over by insane zealots. In fact, I might even say this is the norm. So how do we prevent that? It’s no secret that for the past couple of decades I’ve been very interested in the Freethinkers of especially American History. I went to Ashfield and accidentally discovered the peppermint oil industry, while looking for Dr. Charles Knowlton, and I wrote a biography of Knowlton five years before I completed my dissertation on the Peppermint Kings. I remain very interested in the ways liberalism and radicalism (in the Enlightenment senses of the words) and freethought seem to support, reinforce, and maybe even create each other. I’m thinking it’s time to devote more time to exploring and communicating these ideas. Although I get regular messages from the FRFF (Freedom From Religion Foundation) including frequent “Action Alerts” telling me that a school district (typically in a former confederate state) has begun requiring prayer in school or a courthouse has erected a statue of the Ten Commandments, I’ve been ignoring them. Maybe this has been because, as Tucker Carlson suggested, I was content that I was living in a secular society where these were just silly, local annoyances that it was safe to ignore. But maybe that’s no longer the case, when the Secretary of War is hosting prayer meetings of top Pentagon officers and the chain of command is supporting the idea that we are attacking Persia to bring about the end of the world. To do my part, I’m going to begin posting a bit more on the history of freethought and secular society.
Transcribe →The Week in Blogs and Vlogs
Mar 1Tap to summarizeThis week’s posts on Zibaldone.net. 2-21-26: First meeting of the book club’s 34th iteration, discussing the first two sections of César Hidalgo's new book, The Infinite Alphabet and Laws of Knowledge. It's so new that Chris hadn't received his hard copy yet!2-22-26: I took a morning walk with my new camera, as a way of getting to know what it can do. I think I’m going to like using this!2-24-26: Some musings about the Axial Age, which we discussed this week in World History 1, and the Carlson-Huckabee debate, and schismogenesis.2-26-26: Carlson, Huckabee, or a secular society?
Transcribe →Axial Age & Schismogenesis
Feb 24Tap to summarizeModern-day model of Jerusalem during the reign of Solomon (10th century BCE)In World History 1, the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about the period after the “Bronze Age Collapse” in the Mediterranean world (which wasn’t really a collapse elsewhere). One of the elements of the era we’ve been covering is a phenomenon described by German psychologist/philosopher Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age. The way he understood history, there seemed to be a flowering of religious and philosophical thinking throughout the world, which changed the ways people understood themselves and their places in the world. Jaspers saw similarities between ideas from the Upanishads and early Greek philosophy, or between Zoroastrianism and the traditions that became Judeo-Christianity. It almost seemed like some supernatural shift in the global zeitgeist happened around the sixth century BCE, he suggested.But only if you squinted. Zoroastrian ideas go back about 3,500 years and were nearly a thousand years old when Cyrus the Great became a sort-of patron of the Hebrews whom he released from their “Babylonian Captivity”. So the idea of monotheism and of a cosmic dual between good and evil wasn’t new. The shift away from the Vedic “varna” or caste system by “renouncers” such as Mahavira and the Buddha was a change, but the majority of Indians remained Hindu. And while the ideas of Maya, Parmenides’ doxa, or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave all seem a bit “Matrix-y”, it’s not clear to me that there weren’t natural explanations for the spread of ideas between India and Greece before Alexander.It does seem a bit suspect to me, actually, that this idea of an “axial” shift in consciousness happened to occur just at the moment that a lot of records were produced that are available to modern scholars. If we had the benefit of abundant literature from five centuries earlier, what would we discover? Is the idea that all these interesting philosophical and religious innovations happened at that particular time mostly a function of availability bias and wishful thinking?In any case, addressing this idea of an Axial Age was (I hope!) a useful way to line up all these religions and philosophies and talk about them. It also gave me an opportunity to talk a bit about religious traditions that are taken as history. I used the example, almost “ripped from the headlines”, of the putative history of the Hebrew people. It’s timely, if a bit controversial, because it has just been used by the US Ambassador to the modern nation of Israel to assert “it would be okay” if its military conquered and occupied all the land between the Nile River and the Euphrates, based on a claimed covenant with their god described in their scripture.Does it need to be said that if any other religious group in the world claimed that their god had ordered them to invade a land or make war on a rival people, that the reaction would be different? One of the big problems with biblical “history”, which I mentioned to my students, is that events that are believed to have happened, such as the covenant between YHVH and the Hebrew people or the Moses story, were not written down until about half a millennia after they supposedly happened. But there’s a lot of confusion, such as the claim that the first five books of the Torah (the Pentateuch), which seem to have been written between 900 and 600 BCE, were authored by Moses, who supposedly lived about 1300 BCE.There does seem to be archaeological evidence that settlements began to appear in the Levant of people who shunned eating swine. But these communities lived alongside other communities that did eat pigs, which suggests that the newcomers did not completely overrun and displace the Canaanites (cousins of the Phoenicians) or the Philistines (descendants of the Sea Peoples). I wonder what David Reich, author of Who We Are and How We Got Here, would say about the genetic evidence? He’d probably avoid looking at the question, for fear of the controversy.The argument between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee was absurd on several levels. First, because Carlson apparently doesn’t really question the validity of using religious texts to make historical claims, he just questions whether the people who claim to be carrying on the covenant are actually who they claim to be. He does at least observe that there are plenty of people who are currently being targeted for displacement or worse, who were very probably indigenous to the region. But part of his counter-argument seems to be that the “new covenant” to which he adheres replaces and invalidates the previous one. Again, why is it so difficult for us to imagine how the rest of the world react if any any other faith group based decisions of national policy, war and peace, on supernatural claims?Carlson also exposes the shifting nature of the justif...
Transcribe →Infinite Alphabet Meeting 1
Feb 21Tap to summarizeIn this meeting we discuss the first two sections of César Hidalgo's new book, The Infinite Alphabet and Laws of Knowledge. It's so new that Chris hasn't received his hard copy yet!
Transcribe →This week in Blogging
Feb 21Tap to summarizeThe road through the north woods, south of BemidjiThis is another weekly summary of posts I’ve made on my personal blog, Zibaldone.net. Some of them are reproduced during the week, but not all. You can enjoy them over there — especially the summary pages of the Book Clubs with their links to the videos and timestamped summaries.2-15-26: Third book club, in which we read two books: The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul and Too Much to Know by Ann Blair. We met five times in April 20222-16-26: Book Club check-in about note-making techniques and apps, between books, May 7, 2022. 2-17-26: Between May 21, 2022 and July 23, we read and discussed Thomas Piketty’s 2021 book, A Brief History of Equality. Lots to talk about in this one; it took us eight meetings!2-21-26: Reflection on my trip to Bemidji and likely move to California.
Transcribe →Hide an Empire Meeting #3
Feb 14Tap to summarizeOur final meeting to discuss Part II of Daniel Immerwahr's book. Interesting elements of it included Herbert Hoover, Air travel, standardization, Sony, asymmetric warfare, and Jeffrey Epstein.
Transcribe →Week of 2-8-26 in Blogging
Feb 14Tap to summarizeHere are links to all the posts I made on my blog, Zibaldone.net, this week. Some of them were mirrored here, but several are only available there. You can also add its RSS feed (https://zibaldone.net/feed/) to your reader. 2-8-26: A post and video about retrieving old peppermint industry research I had done in the app, Tinderbox, and adding detail to the story of the Peppermint Kings. 2-9-26: An announcement that I’m going to begin a “blog” within my Obsidian-vault web-book of the Peppermint Kings Annotated project, to focus on some less formal content and create a place where I can list weekly additions to the site. 2-11-26: A rant about Substack’s clunky interface, cross-posted to MakingHistory.2-11-26: A post about the images of early Peppermint Essence ads from the Revolutionary era, that I’m adding to my web-book. 2-12-26: A post with links to the three YouTube videos of January 2026’s Book Club meetings discussing Stephen Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, along with time-coded summaries, generated pretty effectively by AI. I’ll be adding more of these summary posts for each of the previous book club books, in chronological order. Perhaps also for other YouTube videos of mine, as this AI summarizing is an interesting way for me to begin making keyword lists for my own system. 2-12-26: A post with links to all the YouTube videos of the Book Club meetings covering Stephen Pinker’s recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, along with AI-produced summaries with timestamps. 2-12-26: Some thoughts about transcribing and summarizing videos and the tools I’m using to do that. 2-12-26: A repost of a YouTube video I made in June 2020 about the free tools Zotero and Hypothesis and how I was using them in my very early White Pine Lumber research, with an AI-generated, timestamped summary.2-13-26: The very first book club in December 2021 and January 2022, including links to the videos and AI-generated summaries with timestamps. The book was Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.2-14-26: The second book club, in which we discuss Sönke Ahrens’ book, How to Take Smart Notes, from early February to early March, 2022.
Transcribe →Dawn of Everything Book Club
Feb 13Tap to summarizeI look forward to my Book Club Zoom meeting, which I host nearly every Saturday morning. It has become a part of the rhythm of my week, these last five years. We’ll be finishing up our thirty-third book this week, moving on to number 34 next. But I’ve also started using AI tools to summarize what went on in each one to two hour session, which has been a helpful way to review what we discussed in each one and visit the timestamps to jump back in.Here’s a link to the very first set of book club meetings, in which we discussed David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything. A lot of people participated in that one, from all over the world. So many that I split the discussions into two groups that met at different times to accommodate people’s time zones. As a result, there’s some duplication in what is discussed in each session — an additional reason the summaries are useful. I’ll be posting all of the book clubs on zibaldone.net in this format, so go ahead and visit if you haven’t yet and bookmark the site!
Transcribe →Summarized Book Club Videos
Feb 12Tap to summarizeThe YouTube Summary plugin appears on the bottom right, below the video window.Today I’ll start processing through my videos. I’ll create posts for entire book club series on zibaldone.net, where all the YouTube links for a particular book are on a single page. These will be blog posts like this one, but they’ll all be in the category “Video”, so they’ll be easy to find. These pages also include AI-generated summaries, so that what I’m actually doing, beyond making the videos available in a more obvious way to outside viewers, is integrating the metadata from these videos into my own PKM system. The idea is that my output at a particular time on my own videos and the discussions in the book club each week become input for a future me who wants to understand my thinking on a particular issue, as I was developing my thoughts. In that sense, these are just another medium for Source Notes, although they’re longish and will still need to be refined. I asked Grok if there was a good AI app to “listen to” YouTube videos and make summaries or keyword lists, and it suggested a Chrome plugin called “YouTube Summary with ChatGPT and Claude”. It also said (after I asked specifically) that Heptabase can do this too. So I tried that first.It actually does not work. When I asked Heptabase to summarize a video it thought for a minute and then returned a little summary of features of AI generally and Gemini specifically. The information contained in these summaries is interesting but has nothing to do with the videos I asked it to summarize.OTOH, the Chrome plug-in did provide a useable transcript (powered by Glasp) and a summary of the main points which was fairly accurate. I used it on a two-hour video of the last book club meeting and it generated a transcript quickly and an 11-bullet summary with time-stamps. That might be useful. I can choose Grok to do the AI summarizing, which I’m already paying for. I had assumed if I chose Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, I’d quickly blast through the free usage limits and be asked to buy a subscription. But apparently it’s based on Glasp alone. You get three free transcriptions and summaries a day, then you have to buy a $10 per month Pro plan. I like Grok’s responses better though, so I’ll stick with its summaries.But I’ll do it via the extension, because when I compared the Glasp-mediated summary with just pasting the YouTube url into Grok and asking for a bulleted summary, I liked the Grok summary a bit better. But Grok didn’t seem to have access to the entire transcript on its own; only to parts of it that had already been transcribed by YouTube. So ultimately I decided to try Glasp, on a month to month basis.
Transcribe →