Speech made by President Fidel Castro Ruz, at the ceremony for the 51st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes fortresses. Santa Clara, July 26, 2004. Dear fellow Cubans; Distinguished guests: On this 51st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada fortress on July 26, 1953 I shall address a sinister character that keeps threatening, insulting and slandering us. This is not a whim or an agreeable option; it is a necessity and a duty. On June 2...

THE ARYAN MYTH To even suggest a division between Western and non-Western civilizations is chauvinistic. Essentially, the notion of a continuous stream of history, extending from Greece, through Rome, to Europe, is a contrivance that resulted from specific trends in scholarship, that sought to isolate Greece, among the ancient civilizations, as the ancestor of modern Europe. Effectively, it was Europe’s military successes against the Ottoman Turks, and the beginnings of colonialist expan...

Dave Ramsden June 17, 2004 Most of us are aware of the extreme inflation that paper money experienced in the German Weimar republic in the 1920's. Many of us have also heard of the paper money collapse in Eighteenth century France under John Law. We are also aware of rampant inflation and fiscal crises in various third world countries from time to time. You have probably also heard that the Chinese were the first to use paper currency . What was not clear to me was whether the Chine...

THRACIAN - PELASGIAN & MACEDONIAN THRACE - region, 3,310 sq mi, SE Europe, occupying the southeastern tip of the Balkan Peninsula and comprising NE Greece, S Bulgaria, and European Turkey. It is bordered by the Black Sea in the northeast and the Sea of Marmara and Aegean Sea in the south. Tens of thousands of years ago the Balkans, as in much of the rest of Europe, held sparse populations of small, close-knit clans of nomadic hunters and gatherers near fresh water sources. Several prehi...

The Central-Asian steppe has been the home of nomad tribes for centuries. Being nomads, they roamed across the plains, incidentally attacking the urbanized countries to the south, east and west. The first to describe the life style of these tribes was a Greek researcher, Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BCE. Although he concentrates on the tribes living in modern Ukraine, which he calls Scythians, we may extrapolate his description to people in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekista...

The Ainu People "Ainu" means "human." The Ainu people regard things useful to them or beyond their control as "kamuy"(gods). In daily life, they prayed to and performed various ceremonies for the gods. These gods include : "nature" gods, such as of fire, water, wind and thunder ; "animal" gods, such as of bears, foxes, spotted owls and gram-puses ; "plant" gods, such as of aconite, mush-room and mugwort ; "object" gods, such as of boats and pots ; and gods which protect houses, gods of mo...

When broke the dawn of that civilization in Egypt whose wondrous perfection is suggested by the fragments supplied to us by the archaeologists? Alas! the lips of Memnon are silent, and no longer utter oracles; the Sphinx has become a greater riddle in her speechlessness than was the enigma propounded to the king of Thebes; the Pyramids still keep their secrets unbroken through the lapse of centuries. It is these vast and timeless monuments which make Egypt to us "the land of mystery." How ca...

Sumerians The earliest known people of the Fertile Crescent were the Sumerians. About 4000 B.C. they lived in southern Mesopotamia in a number of independent city-states. Each consisted of a small city and its surrounding area. The rulers of these city-states constantly warred with one another. A. Cities Sumerian cities were often rectangular in shape, surrounded by high, wide walls. Inside the city gates were broad avenues used for religious processions or victory parades. The la...

The story of European civilization really begins on the island of Crete with a civilization that probably thought of itself as Asian (in fact, Crete is closer to Asia than it is to Europe). Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up around palace centers on Crete: the Minoans. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual culture, and their records. Mountains of...

The many meanings of the word "globalization" have accumulated very rapidly, and recently, and the verb, "globalize" is first attested by the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1944. In considering the history of globalization, some authors focus on events since 1492, but most scholars and theorists concentrate on the much more recent past. But long before 1492, people began to link together disparate locations on the globe into extensive systems of communication, migration, and interconnectio...