Academic Area of Specialization

What is your specialist subject, the thing that makes you feel happiest and eager learning about? That makes life feel better?

I think mine mine is Ancient Civilizations. I’m listening to lots of different Books on Audible. Lots of Great Courses, which are amazing, as they are university level lectures presented by doctors who are absolutely passionate about their subjects. I’m listening to one about Mesoamerica another about Native Americans and an audio book about Ancient African Kingdoms. No one I know cares about any of these though. Nobody ever talks to me about their academic passions. I have no clue if I’m on any spectrum but all the people I have known in the past who said they had Asperger’s were much more cerebral than the average person. 

  • Gosh the Byzantine empire sounds intriguing. Thank you so much for describing it to me. You should be a teacher. I even love the word. I love Etymology. Just looked it up and it said it’s Latin. Latin is a very interesting language. I love the vocabulary of medicine because of all of the Greek and Latin words. I just read that Constantinople is now Istanbul. I remember seeing a BBC series where they went underground in cities that was about Istanbul. It was absolutely stunning. I think Islamic architecture is so interesting. I had no idea that the Roman’s had Egypt!?. 

    The dark ages in Britain sounds fascinating too. I wonder why nothing was written?. Gosh with the birth of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalities being born I’m intrigued to know what that looked like. I love accents. Was shocked to discover I’m welsh. None of my family knew they were either. 

    Amazing to hear about your grandfather. My nan told me a lot about her life but my grandma died when I was 8. What I find fascinating is that I don’t think my mom or aunties asked her about her life. I’m sad about that I’d love to know what t was like. She was born in 1901. Her daughter my nan used to look after me a lot when my mom was working though so she’d tell me about her life. I think I mentioned this in another comment but my nan grew up surrounded by horses. Traveling on her dad’s horse and cart. She’d tell me how it would take a day to travel somewhere. Apparently her dad was a coal merchant why he had the horse and cart and committed suicide when cars were invented because he refused to get rid of his horses. 

  • According to a pedigree created in 1913 by Charles Bernau, one of the founders of the London Society of Genealogists, I am Winston Churchill's 9th cousin once removed. However, the pedigree might not be entirely reliable - but it does exist, I have a scan of a version of it drawn up in 1933.

  • On surname distribution maps, I can see when the family of one of my gt grandmothers moved from London to my home county, just before the 1871 census. This is because the name count goes from zero to being the third most populous in the whole country. There were 8 of them!

  • The Byzantine Empire is often thought of as beginning around 641 AD when the great Arab/Islamic conquests took Syria and Egypt from the East Roman Empire, though earlier dates have some validity, it ended with the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror (who then took the title Kayser-i Rûm, "Caesar of Rome"). Lots of things happened in between, the most culturally important being the conversion to Orthodox Christianity of the Bulgarian, Russian, Georgian and Serbian peoples. The Dark Ages in Britain began around 410 AD when Roman rule in Britain ended, and ended in the early 700s when the Venerable Bede started writing narrative history in and concerning Britain again. It is a fascinating period because there was so little written at the time, so many uncertainties exist and it was the period when the English, Scottish and Welsh nationalities were being formed.

    My grandfather worked with horses in WWI, I have two photos of him in his uniform and spurs. His family were all coachmen or otherwise connected with horses, so he became one of the wagon drivers (there were 11 in each infantry battalion) that brought supplies to their comrades in the trenches and evacuated the wounded. They were often singled out for artillery and machine gun fire as they were large targets. He was invalided out of the army in 1917 after being gassed on the Western Front in France, one of his comrades won a VC in the same action.

  • Oh interesting. What defined the Byzantine and dark ages? What notable things happened? 

    Sad thing I heard on A House Through Time the other day was how hundreds and thousands of horses died in WW1. So sad. 

  • Skilled trade, very sought after. Have you any idea how much your average ship cost? It was a fair bit.. 

  • Shipwrights? Interesting. 

    Mine were humble farmers in the Scottish Lowlands... Exotic!

  • My surname, in its entirely, can be tracked down to a single area about 200 years ago, from that point backwards they were generation upon generation of shipwrights..

  • My antecedents were Scottish.. I traced them back to a nowhere place currently inhabited by a National Treasure of the  acting world... 

    Bizarrely. Sweat smile

  • Cake? 

    Where? Cake

  • There are only about 20 families in the UK with my name.. it would be a piece of cake to zero in on me..Sweat smile

  • I know Pegg, I know you’re not like that..Slight smile .. I meant self-doxxing..Sweat smile

  • I wouldn't do that Unamused

  • But alas.. doxxing..Sweat smile

  • I tend to latch on to a particular topic and I slide into something connected to it. My passion for pirates led me to read the C S Forrester 'Hornblower' books, then to an obsession with Horatio Nelson, and finally to an interest in the Napoleonic period in general. My big interests in history are Napoleonic, Late Roman and Byzantine and 'Dark Age' Britain. I wrote 6 articles on Napoleonic cavalry, 3 online and 3 in print journals, one of them won a prize.

  • They did do public autopsies, and rats did spread the plague, yes- via their fleas. There was person to person transmission as well, I think, because it tended to make people quite... oozy.

    There's a lot of stuff in medical history that makes for pretty grim reading, actually. But a big part of why I like it so much is that there are so many stories about how people fixed things too. Joseph Bazalgette's new sewers that sorted out the Great Stink of 1858 is a favourite of mine!

  • Slight smile Intriguing... 

  • It’s way more catchy than you’ll be able to guess..Sweat smile

  • I have a pretty interesting last name, that lent itself well to WW2 propaganda

    Churchill?Thinking (just kidding!) 

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