Alaska Question

 On British Smuggling, The Hays Code, and Art Under Tariffs One reason I started this blog was that I occasionally go down random rabbit holes on specific topics for other projects, and there's nothing else to show for the byproduct of my research. One recent topic I dove into was the history of smuggling along the British coast. I didn't think it all that interesting on its own to write about. Then the tariffs came, and my research suddenly felt very relevant. My deep dive took several turns, and while there are plenty of names and dates I could recite about who was smuggling what, the more interesting parts included poetry by Kippling and a Hitchcock film, but I'm getting ahead of things. For starters, there was a lot of smuggling in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was practically its own industry. Up and down the coast, there were secret bays and hidden cellars where gangs moved contraband. Why? Tariffs. Taxes were paid on imported goods, so if someone could b...

 On The Final Meeting of the Roman Senate Nobody knows when the Roman Senate had their final meeting. The Roman Senate was once the most powerful governing body in the world, or at least it was according to the Romans. Then Rome became an Empire. The Senate didn't go away when that happened, but its power diminished. It continued to decline as the power of the Emperor grew. The Empire fell to the Goths, and the Senate, still in existence, continued to dwindle. However, even then it didn't go away entirely. By the early Middle Ages, the once mighty Senate of Rome, the very one that once dominated the known world, was little more than a social club. That's right, the organization that was a direct continuation from the days of the republic continued to meet and have opinions, but those opinions were meaningless when it came to setting policy. The ruling Emperor didn't even live in Rome anymore, and territory in Italy was being passed around to various states like the Lomb...

 On Felon 47 Being the New Pharaoh Akhenaten It's easy to make parallels of trump to Hitler and other evil dictators of the modern world as many have, but what about the ancient world? There are plenty of terrible kings of old that he can be compared to, but perhaps the one most associated with extreme change opposed by their subjects is Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh that ruled from roughly 1353 to 1336 or 1351 to 1334 BCE. Already you can tell what we know about the guy is fuzzy. Some of that was intentional on the part of the ancient Egyptians who were slightly less ancient than him. Akhenaten is known for making quite a few changes in Egypt during his reign. He abandoned their traditional polytheism that was welcoming of lots of gods and instead forced a monotheistic worship of a god called Aten onto his people. He even changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, which meant "One Who is Effective for the Aten." Worshipers of other gods were persecuted und...