Historic recurrence

Repetition of similar events in history

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Mark Twain: "[A] favorite theory of mine [is] that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often."[1]

Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history.[a][b] The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to overall human history (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.[4]

Hypothetically, in the extreme, the concept of historic recurrence assumes the form of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which has been written about in various forms since antiquity and was described in the 19th century by Heinrich Heine[c] and Friedrich Nietzsche.[d]

While it is often remarked that "history repeats itself", in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true.[e] In this interpretation of recurrence, as opposed perhaps to the Nietzschean interpretation, there is no metaphysics. Recurrences take place due to ascertainable circumstances and chains of causality.[f]

An example is the ubiquitous phenomenon of multiple independent discovery in science and technology, described by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman. Indeed, recurrences, in the form of reproducible findings obtained through experiment or observation, are essential to the natural and social sciences; and – in the form of observations rigorously studied via the comparative method and comparative research – are essential to the humanities.

André Gide offers a kindred thought: "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."[10]

In his book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, G. W. Trompf traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the west since antiquity.[4] If history has lessons to impart, they are to be found par excellence in such recurring patterns. Historic recurrences of the "striking-similarity" type can sometimes induce a sense of "convergence", "resonance" or déjà vu.[g]

## Authors

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Polybius

Ancient western thinkers who thought about recurrence were largely concerned with cosmological rather than historic recurrence (see "eternal return", or "eternal recurrence").[11] Western philosophers and historians who have discussed various concepts of historic recurrence include the Greek Hellenistic historian Polybius (c. 200 – c. 118 BCE), the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE – after 7 BCE), Luke the Evangelist, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Correa Moylan Walsh (1862–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975).[4]

An eastern concept that bears a kinship to western concepts of historic recurrence is the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, by which an unjust ruler will lose the support of Heaven and be overthrown.[12] Confucius (ca. 551 – ca. 479 BCE) urged: "Study the past if you would define the future."[13]

In the Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) wrote that asabiyyah (social cohesion or group unity) plays an important role in a kingdom's or dynasty's cycle of rise and fall.[14]

G. W. Trompf describes various historic paradigms of historic recurrence, including paradigms that view types of large-scale historic phenomena variously as "cyclical"; "fluctuant"; "reciprocal"; "re-enacted"; or "revived".[15] He also notes "[t]he view proceeding from a belief in the uniformity of human nature [Trompf's emphasis]. It holds that because human nature does not change, the same sort of events can recur at any time."[16] "Other minor cases of recurrence thinking", he writes, "include the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity, and the preoccupation with parallelism, that is, with resemblances, both general and precise, between separate sets of historical phenomena" (emphasis in original).[16]

## Lessons

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G. W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for ... future action"—that "the same ... sorts of events which have happened before ... will recur".[7] One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (a Greek polymath, native to Apamea, Syria; c. 135–51 BCE), who argued that dissipation of the old Roman virtues had followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge to Rome's supremacy in the Mediterranean world.[17]

Toynbee

The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, would be picked up two thousand years later by Arnold J. Toynbee.[18]

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE - after 7 BCE), while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessors[h]—Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia—anticipated Rome's eventual decay. He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires—an idea that was to be developed by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and by Pompeius Trogus, a 1st-century BCE Roman historian from a Celtic tribe in Gallia Narbonensis.[20]

By the late 5th century, Zosimus (also called "Zosimus the Historian"; fl. 490s–510s: a Byzantine historian who lived in Constantinople) could see the writing on the Roman wall, and asserted that empires fell due to internal disunity. He gave examples from the histories of Greece and Macedonia. In the case of each empire, growth had resulted from consolidation against an external enemy; Rome herself, in response to Hannibal's threat posed at Cannae, had risen to great-power status within a mere five decades. With Rome's world dominion, however, aristocracy had been supplanted by a monarchy, which in turn tended to decay into tyranny; after Augustus Caesar, good rulers had alternated with tyrannical ones. The Roman Empire, in its western and eastern sectors, had become a contending ground between contestants for power, while outside powers acquired an advantage. In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements.[21]

The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution, drawing an analogy between an individual human's life cycle and developments undergone by a body politic: this metaphor was offered, in varying iterations, by Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca (c. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (c. 74 CE – c. 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE – after 391 CE).[22] This social-organism metaphor, which has been traced back to the Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle (384–322 BCE),[23] would recur centuries later in the works of the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the English philosopher and polymath Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).[23]

Freud

Can the mental ills of a social organism be treated, analogously to those of an individual? Sigmund Freud offered a tentative view, at the end of his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents:

> If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual ... may [it not be the case] that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization — possibly the whole of mankind — have become ‘neurotic’? ... [I]n spite of [the] difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities.[24]

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton writes that "falsehoods and lying have become [widespread, but access to] factual truth ... can bring psychological relief".[25]

Many depressive and anxiety states prevalent in society respond to cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychotherapy that challenges cognitive distortions – maladaptive thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes – and their attendant behaviors in order to improve emotional regulation and assist in the development of salutary coping skills.[26] Mass media, to the extent that they offer true facts, can have a salubrious cognitive-behavioral effect on the social organism.

Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli, analyzing the state of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:[27]

> when states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.[27]

Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune.[27] Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior. Machiavelli wrote in his Discorsi:

> Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples ... ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of events.[28]

Ibn Khaldun

In 1377, the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddima (or Prolegomena), wrote that when nomadic tribes become united by asabiyya—Arabic for "group feeling", "social solidarity", or "clannism"—their superior cohesion and military prowess puts urban dwellers at their mercy. Inspired often by religion, they conquer the towns and create new regimes. But within a few generations, writes Ibn Khaldun, the victorious tribesmen lose their asabiyya and become corrupted by luxury, extravagance, and leisure. The ruler, who can no longer rely on fierce warriors for his defense, will have to raise extortionate taxes to pay for other sorts of soldiers, and this in turn may lead to further problems that result in the eventual downfall of his dynasty or state.[29][i]

Joshua S. Goldstein suggests that empires, analogously to an individual's midlife crisis, experience a political midlife crisis: after a period of expansion in which all earlier goals are realized, overconfidence sets in, and governments are then likely to attack or threaten their strongest rival; Goldstein cites four examples: the British Empire and the Crimean War; the German Empire and the First World War; the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the United States and the Vietnam War.[30] Suggestions that the European Union is suffering a political midlife crisis have been put forward by Gideon Rachman (2010), Roland Benedikter (2014), and Natalie Nougayrède (2017).

David Hackett Fischer has identified four waves in European history, each of some 150–200 years' duration. Each wave begins with prosperity, leading to inflation, inequality, rebellion and war, and resolving in a long period of equilibrium. For example, 18th-century inflation led to the Napoleonic wars and later the Victorian equilibrium.[31]

Sir Arthur Keith's theory of a species-wide amity-enmity complex suggests that human conscience evolved as a duality: people are driven to protect members of their in-group, and to hate and fight enemies who belong to an out-group. Thus an endless, useless cycle of ad hoc "isms" arises.[32]

## Similarities

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One of the recurrence patterns identified by G. W. Trompf involves "the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity".[7]

Johnson

In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson wrote that people are "all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure".[33] According to Freya Johnston,

> "His attacks on [the pursuit of originality in the writing of literature] were born of the conviction that literature ought to deal in universal truths; that human nature was fundamentally the same in every time and every place; and that, accordingly (as he put it in the 'Life of Dryden'), 'whatever can happen to man has happened so often that little remains for fancy or invention.'"[34]

Karl Marx, having in mind the respective coups d'état of Napoleon I (1799) and his nephew Napoleon III (1851), wrote acerbically in 1852: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."[35]

Putatively Plutarch

Poland's Adam Michnik believes that history is not just about the past because it is constantly recurring, and not as farce as Marx had it but as itself. Michnik writes: "The world is full of inquisitors and heretics, liars and those lied to, terrorists and the terrorized. There is still someone dying at Thermopylae, someone drinking a glass of hemlock, someone crossing the Rubicon, someone drawing up a proscription list."[36] The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."[37]

Becket (center)

Plutarch's Parallel Lives traces the similarities between pairs of historical figures, one Greek and one Roman.[38]

In 1079 Stanislaus of Szczepanów, Poland's Catholic primate, was murdered by his former friend, King Bolesław the Bold; and in 1170 England's Catholic primate Thomas Becket was murdered at the behest of his former friend, King Henry II.

Cook

Mongolian Emperor Kublai Khan's attempted conquest of Japan (1274, 1281) was frustrated by typhoons;[j] and Spanish King Philip II's 1588 attempted conquest of England was frustrated by a hurricane.

Hernán Cortes's fateful 1519 entry into Mexico's Aztec Empire was reputedly facilitated by the natives' identification of him with their god Quetzalcoatl, who had been predicted to return that very year; and English Captain James Cook's fateful 1778 entry into Hawaii, during the annual Makahiki festival honoring Lono, the fertility and peace god, was reputedly facilitated by the natives' identification of Cook with Lono,[39] who had left Hawaii, promising to return on a floating island, evoked by Cook's ship under full sail.[40]

Poland's Queen Jadwiga, dying in 1399, bequeathed her personal jewelry for the restoration of Kraków University, which would occur in 1400; and Leland Stanford's widow Jane Stanford attempted, after his 1893 death, to sell her personal jewelry to restore Stanford University's financial viability, ultimately bequeathing the jewelry to fund the purchase of books for Stanford University.[k]

On 27 April 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, in the Philippine Islands, foolhardily, with only four dozen men, confronted 1,500 natives who defied his attempt to Christianize them and was killed.[41] On 14 February 1779, English explorer James Cook, on Hawaii Island, foolhardily, with only a few men, confronted the natives after some individuals took one of Cook's small boats, and Cook and four of his men were killed.[42]

In 1812, French Emperor Napoleon - born a Corsican outsider - was unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire, precipitating the fall of the French Empire; and in 1941, German Führer Adolf Hitler - born an Austrian outsider - was unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire's Soviet successor state, which was ruled by Joseph Stalin, born a Georgian outsider, thus precipitating the fall of the Third Reich.[43]

Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead; Martin Luther King Jr. worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead.[44]

Countries, when politically stressed, have turned to religion for support and consolation. The Iranian revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran was led mainly by the religious leader Ruhollah Khomeini; and Pope John Paul II has been credited with helping end communist rule in his native Poland and the rest of Europe.[45]

Over history, confrontations between peoples – typically, geographical neighbors – help consolidate the peoples into nations, at times into frank empires; until at last, exhausted by conflicts and drained of resources, the once militant polities settle into a relatively peaceful habitus.[46][l] Martin Indyk observes: "Wars often don't end until both sides have exhausted themselves and become convinced that they are better off coexisting with their enemies than pursuing a futile effort to destroy them."[48]

The importance of economic infrastructure to a country's – especially a great power's – capacity to wage war is reflected in Ferguson's law, which states that a great power that spends more on national-debt service than on defense risks losing its status as a great power. This law is supported by historical case studies and is relevant to the current situation of the United States, which in 2024, for the first time in nearly a century, began violating Ferguson’s law.[49]

The rise of some great empires has been conditional on the dentition of a quadruped animal. Wendy Doniger explains:

> "Unlike cows, horses, whose teeth are quite dull, pull up grass by the roots rather than biting off the blades, or they nibble it right down to the ground, thus quickly destroying the land, which may require some years to recover.... [H]orses in the wild... range constantly to find new territory... [T]he horse came to symbolize conquest through its own natural imperialism. The steppes bred nomadic horses and nomadic hordes.... Men waged war to get other people's horses so that they could wage war. Horsepower... remained the basic unit of power for centuries.... But the horse-breeding people of the steppes never succeeded in conquering the part of the world west of the Carpathians and the Alps, nor civilizations.... where sea power... was decisive."[50]

Polities ignored Jan Bloch's 1898 warnings of the railroad-mobilized, industrialized, stalemated, attritional total war, World War I, that was on the way and would destroy an appreciable part of mankind;[51] and polities ignore geologists', oceanographers', atmospheric scientists', biologists', and climatologists' warnings of tipping points in the climate system that are on course to destroy all of mankind. Joshua Busby, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that "climate change matters more than anything else."[52][m] Christopher de Bellaigue writes:

> "Like the Maya and the Akkadians we have learned that a broken environment aggravates political and economic dysfunction and that the inverse is also true. Like the Qing we rue the deterioration of our soils. But the lesson is never learned. [...] Denialism [...] is one of the most fundamental of human traits and helps explain our current inability to come up with a response commensurate with the perils we face."[54]

There has been, and is, no paucity of threats to humankind's continued existence.

Hobbes Newton

Humans tend to behave in accordance with the principles of social physics, some of which were described by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes after he met in Florence in 1636 the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei (who had been placed under permanent house arrest by the Roman Catholic Church for championing Copernicus' heliocentric theory).[55][56] When, half a century later, primacy in physics had migrated northward and Isaac Newton in 1687 published his Principia, further societal analogs to physics laws became discernible – to Newton's three laws of motion, including the third law, which states that "If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions."[57]

Humans, empirically-minded, tend to doubt what has not been presented by their own senses or by unquestioned authorities, and inertly to not act unless compelled by forces of circumstances. John Vaillant, author of the book Fire Weather, writes – in reference to the global-warming crisis – of "the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally."[58] Time Magazine points out that "Extreme heat is not recognized as a disaster in the U.S. – despite its being the largest weather-related killer in the country."[59]

Naomi Oreskes cautions:

> In 2017 the [Svalbard Seed V]ault suffered a flood caused, ironically, by climate change. [p. 68.] [T]he seed vault assumes that we know enough to plan effectively and that people will pay attention to what we know. History shows this is often not the case. [T]he most important thing we can do right now is not to plan to respond to climate disaster after it happens but to do everything in our power to prevent it while we still have that chance.[60]

Oreskes adds that "we do not have enough time for nuclear power to save us from the climate crisis";[61] and that "nuclear fusion is not the solution to the climate crisis".[62]

Geoff Mann writes:

> "[W]e are in desperate need of a politics that looks [the] catastrophic uncertainty [of global warming and climate change] square in the face. That would mean taking much bigger and more transformative steps: all but eliminating fossil fuels... and prioritizing democratic institutions over markets. The burden of this effort must fall almost entirely on the richest people and richest parts of the world, because it is they who continue to gamble with everyone else's fate."[63]

Philosopher Jim Holt writes: "Whether you are searching for a cure for cancer, or pursuing a scholarly or artistic career, or engaged in establishing more just institutions, a threat to the future of humanity is also a threat to the significance of what you do."[64]

While it was clear from the laws of physics that rising levels of "greenhouse gases" in Earth's atmosphere must eventually cause disastrous climate warming, with consequently intensified droughts, floods,[n] forest fires, and cyclones,[65] people were easily lulled into complacency by the mendacities of fossil-fuel interests. Similarly, navies continue building aircraft carriers, at enormous expense, despite their clear vulnerability to attack, because their construction creates civilian jobs and because, says Stephen Wrage, political science teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy, "Historically, the top leadership of military organizations has not abandoned obsolete prestige weapons until compelled to do so by a calamity."[66]

"Renewable energy" likewise involves environmental costs. In a matergetic cycle, the production of renewable energy requires the use of material things such as dams, solar panels, or wind turbines; and, conversely, the production of material things requires the use of energy. Rice University environmentalist Casey A. Williams writes:

> Building enough wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries to power a growing global economy with net-zero emissions would, for instance, require quadrupling cobalt production over twenty years. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which contains 70 percent of the world's cobalt reserves, would bear the ecological costs of this growth. Already water pollution from mining has decimated crop yields and been linked to high rates of miscarriage in the DRC's mining communities – trends that show little sign of reversing.[67]

People ignore warnings about the dangers of nuclear power plants,[68] until anticipated nuclear power-plant accidents occur; and people ignore warnings about the dangers of nuclear weapons,[69][o][71] which in 1945 destroyed two Japanese cities, have on several occasions come close to destroying more of the world's cities, and could still do so in future. The dangers of the fissile-fossil complex (nuclear-power generation; and fossil-fueled power generation) have been denied or minimized by power interests, as the dangers of tobacco smoking have been denied or minimized by tobacco interests.

The power that moneyed interests can exert on the course of politics is described by Daniel Mandell, author of The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600-1870:

> [T]he Founders [of the United States] believed great wealth would corrupt their republic. Their beliefs were shaped by sources including Roman historians who blamed the empire's decline on such inequality; English "radical Whigs" who decried the corruption of British politics; and Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke who argued that individuals should not hoard wealth. ... Even the wealthiest Southern planters needed the support of poorer yet property-holding neighbors. ... In a 1773 Connecticut election sermon, Benjamin Trumbull warned that the community needed to keep property "as equally divided as possible" to avoid the tyranny of a wealthy few. Three years later, such a measure proposed by Benjamin Franklin nearly became part of Pennsylvania's first constitution. ... By 1800, nearly every state had abolished entail (permanent barriers to altering property) and primogeniture (total inheritance by the eldest son) in order to encourage the division of property. Unfortunately ... as trade and manufacturing flourished, power was increasingly measured in dollars rather than acres. When wage labor and inequality increased in the early 1800s, states extended the vote to white men regardless of property. This severed the connection between property and polity, relieving pressure to limit wealth while making the racial barrier explicit. But America's egalitarian tradition would be revived by workingmen's parties in the late 1820s, communitarian efforts in the 1840s, calls in the mid-1860s to redistribute Confederate plantations to freedmen, and labor and farmer movements into the 20th century. More persistent has been the widespread fear that great wealth poses an existential threat to America's democracy.[72]

Jessica Tuchman Mathews, daughter of The Guns of August author Barbara Tuchman, observes that "powerful reasons to doubt that there could be a limited nuclear war [include] those that emerge from any study of history, a knowledge of how humans act under pressure, or experience of government."[73] Apposite evidence for this is provided in Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon, which makes clear, on the basis of recently declassified documents, that it was a matter of sheer chance that war was averted during the Cuban Missile Crisis: numerous events, had they taken a slightly different course, could each have precipitated nuclear war.[74][p]

Nuclear war being viewed as impractical, superpowers have instead waged proxy wars in non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.[76][77]

Madison

Fintan O'Toole discusses, using historic examples, how external threats to a country – or even mere allegations of such threats – can serve politicians' efforts to suppress internal liberties and dissent:

> [I]mperial fantasies create the conditions for an imperial presidency... that leverages supposed foreign dangers to justify domestic tyranny. In 1793 James Madison warned that "war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." International adventures, he wrote, inflate the persona of the president [of the United States] and unleash the "strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast: ambition, avarice, vanity." Five years later Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."[78]

In a similar vein, Laleh Khalili writes:

> The United States... has waged a war of some sort in every year of its existence. Silicon Valley knows that war is good for business. And many of its most powerful people want us to stop worrying about frivolities like ethics or ecology and love the bomb.... For the armchair techno-warriors of Silicon Valley, the barbarians at the gate are a useful solution.[79]

Shira Lurie, author of The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for American Democracy in the Early Republic, writes:

> While American history is full of those claiming the revolutionary right to resist, it is also full of officials fighting to shut them down. George Washington came down hard on the Whiskey Rebellion, a 1794 tax revolt in western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland by frontiersmen who claimed to be keeping alive the spirit of '76. ... President John Adams used the same playbook when another tax rebellion broke out in Pennsylvania... Government officials, and police, have attempted to muzzle activists fighting for every progressive cause in the nation's history, from abolition to LGBTQ+ rights.[80]

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. writes:

> "Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity—the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat—fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests at stake. Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity."[81]

Gellhorn

O'Toole writes about American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998):

> Her dispatches were not first drafts of history; they were letters from eternity. ... To see history – at least the history of war – in terms of people is to see it not as a linear process but as a series of terrible repetitions ... It is her ability to capture ... the terrible futility of this sameness that makes Gellhorn's reportage so genuinely timeless. [W]e are ... drawn... into the undertow of her distraught awareness that this moment, in its essence, has happened before and will happen again.[82]

Casey Cep, describing a dissonance between William Faulkner's documented personal racism and Faulkner's depiction of the American Confederacy, writes that Michael Gorra, in The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020),

> posits that [the character] Quentin [Compson, who suicides in Absalom, Absalom!] represents Faulkner's view of tragedy as recurrence. "Again" was the saddest word for the character and the author alike because it "suggests that what was has simply gone on happening, a cycle of repetition that replays itself, forever." ... "What was is never over", Gorra writes, pointing out that the racism that ensnared Faulkner in the last century persists in th[e 21st] ... "Again. That's precisely why Faulkner remains so valuable – that very recurrence makes him necessary."[83]

Amis

British novelist Martin Amis observes that recurring patterns of imperial ascendance-and-decline are mirrored in the novels published; according to Amis, novels follow current political trends. In the Victorian era, when Britain was the ascendant power, British novels were large and tried to express what society as a whole was. British power waned during the Second World War and ended after the war. The British novel was then some 225 pages long and centered on narrower subjects such as career setbacks or marriage setbacks: the British novel's "great tradition" increasingly looked depleted. Ascendance, according to Amis, had passed to the United States, and Americans such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike began writing huge novels.[84]

O'Toole writes, of the prevailing demise of absolute monarchy, especially in capitalist polities:

> There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. ... [C]apitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. ... [S]cience, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth – and ... giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it [i.e., power]."[85]

Novelists and historians have discerned recurrent patterns in the histories of modern political tyrants.[86]

García Márquez

> Gabriel García Márquez, in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), ... create[d] a composite character: a mythical, unnamed autocrat who has held sway, seemingly forever, over an invented Caribbean country akin to Costaguana in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. To portray him, García Márquez drew upon a motley cohort of Latin American caudillos ... as well as Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco ...[87]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), writes Ariel Dorfman, documents the "viral recurrence" around the world, over the past century, of despots and authoritarians "with comparable strategies of control and mendacity". Ben-Ghiat divides the narrative into three – at times, overlapping – periods:[88]

> The era of fascist takeovers runs from 1919 and the ascent of Mussolini until Hitler's defeat in 1945, with Franco as the third member of this atrocious trio ... [In] the next phase, the age of military coups (1950–1990) [t]he main representatives ... are Pinochet, Muammar Qaddafi, and Mobutu Sese Seko, along with minor figures like Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and Mohamed Siad Barre. Finally, starting in 1990 [is] the ... cycle of new authoritarians, who win elections and proceed to degrade the democracy that brought them to power. Ben-Ghiat primarily dissects Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, with Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan given perfunctory assessments.[89]

Dorfman notes the absence, from Ben-Ghiat's study, of many authoritarian rulers, including communists like Mao, Stalin, Ceaușescu, and the three Kims of North Korea. Nor is there mention of Indonesia's Suharto or the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, "though the CIA engineered coups that led to both ... lording it over their lands, and the agency can also be linked to Pinochet's military putsch in Chile." Dorfman believes that Juan Domingo Perón would also have been an instructive example to include in Ruth Ben-Ghiat's study of Strongmen.[90]

Evan Osnos observes: "Oligarchs-in-chief don't like to retire, because civilian life leaves them vulnerable to retribution from those they ejected from their club."[91]

British political commentator Ferdinand Mount brings attention to the ubiquitous recurrence of mendacity in politics: politicians lie to cover up their mistakes, to gain advantage over their opponents, or to achieve purposes that might be unpalatable or harmful to their public or to a foreign public. Some notable practitioners of political mendacity discussed by Mount include Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia, Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Clive, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump.[92]

Jonathan Freedland identifies another tactic in addition to mendacity – humor – in the armamentarium of 21st-century politicians:

> "Perhaps what galled [Rory] Stewart and his Tory allies most, just as it infuriated their Never Trump counterparts in the Republican Party, was the flight from truth. The embodiment of the malaise was Boris Johnson... [Stewart] might also have mentioned humor, which was a secret weapon for Johnson just as it remains for Trump. US readers are likely to think of Trump when Stewart reflects that Johnson was dangerous precisely because 'he alone could cloak a darker narrative in clowning.' Both men allowed and, in Trump's case, still allow 'the public to indulge ever more offensive opinions under the excuse that some of it might be a joke.'... The grief that runs through [Stewart's] book is not for his party only. It is for his country.... Britain's international influence is now at the margins, especially after the country's exit from the EU.... [Stewart] has contempt for the media's fixation on the trivial and the personal... Stewart discovered that, in contemporary politics, the liar who is brazen about his lies is seen as refreshingly honest, while the honest candidate who errs, but fails to brag about it, is the liar.... The reluctant, introspective, intellectual pol[itician] can flourish for a while; they can even capture the imagination, especially of those voters who pride themselves on not falling for anything so shallow as charisma. But they rarely win."[93]

The very languages in which humans communicate show some striking similarities. Allison Parshall offers an example:

> "Many languages have an interjection word for expressing pain. [Katarzyna Pisanski et al., writing in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, have] found that pain interjections tend to contain the vowel sound 'ah' (written as [a] in the International Phonetic Alphabet) and letter combinations that incorporate it, such as 'ow' and 'ai.' These patterns may point back to the origins of human language itself." (p. 16.) "Researchers are continually discovering cases of symbolism, or sound iconicity, in which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of linguistic theory, which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... [Many words onomatopoeically imitate a sound. Also] there's the 'bouba-kiki' effect, whereby people from varying cultures are more likely to associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with a rounded shape and 'kiki' with a spiked one.... [S]omehow we all have a feeling about this,' says Aleksandra Ćwiek... [She and her colleagues have] show[n] that people associate the trilled 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L' sound with smoothness. Mark Dingemanse... in 2013 found [that] the conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be universal." (p. 18.)[94]

## See also

[edit]

* The Anatomy of Revolution
* Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs (405 BCE) noted that bad coin drives good coin out of circulation (as per the later Gresham's law), even as ruthless politicians drive "upright, blameless" men out of a polity's governance.
* Artificial intelligence
* Authoritarianism
* Benford's law
* Big Bounce (pulsating-universe theory)
* Cliodynamics
* Cognitive inertia
* Collapsology
* Critical period hypothesis
* Cultural genocide
* Dunbar's number
* Dynastic cycle
* Ecocide
* Eternal return (or "eternal recurrence")
* Eureka: A Prose Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1848 (Big Bang theory)
* Exceptionalism
* Failed states
* Ferguson's law[q]
* Fractal
* Gerontocracy
* Hegemony
* History of scholarship
* Intermarium, Three Seas Initiative
* Iron law of oligarchy
* Is the Holocaust Unique?
* Kakistocracy
* Kleptocracy
* Language death
* Linguicism
* Linguistic discrimination
* List of empires
* List of former monarchies
* List of genocides
* List of great extinctions
* List of military nuclear accidents
* List of modern great powers
* List of multiple discoveries
* List of nuclear power accidents by country
* List of nuclear powers
* List of proxy wars
* List of totalitarian regimes
* Logology
* Mattergy
* Miscarriages of justice
* The New Science
* Nuclear close calls
* Oligarchy
* "On Discoveries and Inventions"
* Pareto principle
* Peace and conflict studies
* Plutocracy
* Power law
* Repetition, a related concept by Søren Kierkegaard
* The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
* SNAFU
* Social cycle theory
* Social organism
* Social physics
* Societal collapse
* Socioeconomic inequality
* Surviving Progress
* Thucydides Trap
* Tipping point (sociology)
* Tipping points in the climate system
* Yuasa Phenomenon – migration of center of activity of world science
* Zipf's law

## Notes

[edit]

1. ^ Mark Twain writes of "a favorite theory of mine—to wit, that no occurrence [Twain's emphasis] is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often." (A "repeat occurrence" is the definition of "recurrence".)[1] A similar thought of uncertain attribution has been ascribed to Twain: "History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."[2]
2. ^ Herman Melville, in his poetry, "declare[d a] belief... that all history is mere iteration ('Age after age shall be/As age after age has been')..."[3]
3. ^ Philosopher Walter Kaufmann quotes Heinrich Heine: "[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them are also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again..."[5]
4. ^ The concept of "eternal recurrence" is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. It appears in The Gay Science and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and also in a posthumous fragment. Walter Kaufmann suggests that Nietzsche may have encountered the concept in the writings of Heinrich Heine.[6]
5. ^ G.W. Trompf writes: "The idea of exact recurrence... was rarely incorporated into... these views, for in the main they simply presume the recurrence of sorts of events, or... event-types, -complexes, and -patterns."[7]
6. ^ In 1814 Pierre-Simon Laplace published an early articulation of causal or scientific determinism: "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect, nothing would be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes."[8] A similar view had earlier been presented in 1763 by Roger Boscovich.[9]
7. ^ This sense is somewhat suggested, in popular culture, by the film Groundhog Day.
8. ^ His was thus a quasi-exceptionalist view.[19]
9. ^ Toynbee regarded Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima as "undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place."[29]
10. ^ The original kamikaze ("divine wind").
11. ^ The Stanford University Museum of Art displays a painting of Jane Stanford's jewelry, commissioned prior to the jewelry's anticipated sale.
12. ^ Victor Bulmer-Thomas writes: "Imperial retreat is not the same as national decline, as many other countries can attest. Indeed, imperial retreat can strengthen the nation-state just as imperial expansion can weaken it."[47]
13. ^ On 8 October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report stating that, if drastic changes in the global energy base and lifestyle are not made by about 2030—within a dozen years—civilization on planet Earth will become unsalvageable.[53]
14. ^ Warmer air holds more water, which subsequently comes down in more massive rainfalls.
15. ^ Nuclear weapons continue to be equally hazardous to their owners as to their potential targets. Under the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, nuclear-weapon states are supposed to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons from the world.[70]
16. ^ One of the many factors that fortuitously combined to avert Armageddon was President Kennedy's earlier experience involving Cuba: according to Ted Sorensen, after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion "he was more skeptical of the recommendations which came to him from the experts", most of whom now advised invading or bombing Cuba.[75]
17. ^ Ferguson's law states that a great power that spends more on debt service than on defense risks losing its status as a great power. The "Ferguson limit" is the point when interest payments exceed military spending, marking a potential tipping point where the debt burden diverts resources from national security. This law is supported by historical case studies and is relevant to the current situation of the United States, which in 2024, for the first time in nearly a century, began violating Ferguson’s law.[95]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b Twain, Mark (1903). The Jumping Frog. Illustrated by F. Strothman. Harper & Bros. p. 64.
2. ^ "History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes". Quote Investigator. 12 January 2014.
3. ^ Helen Vendler, "'No Poetry You Have Read'" (review of Hershel Parker, ed., Herman Melville: Complete Poems, Library of America, 990 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 19 (5 December 2019), pp. 29, 32–34. (p. 32.)
4. ^ a b c G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, passim.
5. ^ Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1959, p. 276.
6. ^ Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1959, p. 276.
7. ^ a b c G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 3.
8. ^ Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay, New York, 1902, p. 4.
9. ^ Carlo Cercignani, chapter 2: "Physics before Boltzmann", in Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms, Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-19-850154-4, p. 55.
10. ^ André Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse ("Treatise on Narcissus")
11. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 6–15.
12. ^ Elizabeth Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China, Sharpe, 2002, ISBN 0-7656-0444-2, passim.
13. ^ Khalifa, Sherif (2022). Geography and the Wealth of Nations. Lexington Books. p. 201\. ISBN 9781666900521.
14. ^ Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. Archived 2021-04-13 at the Wayback Machine.
15. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 2–3 and passim.
16. ^ a b G.bW. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 3 and passim.
17. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 185.
18. ^ Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 volumes, Oxford University Press, 1934–1961, passim.
19. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 192.
20. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 186–87.
21. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 187–88.
22. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 188–192.
23. ^ a b George R. MacLay, The Social Organism: A Short History of the Idea that a Human Society May Be Regarded as a Gigantic Living Creature, North River Press, 1990, ISBN 0-88427-078-5, passim.
24. ^ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated from the German by James Strachey, 1930, p. 52.
25. ^ Robert Jay Lifton, "When a Nation Embraces a False Reality: Trump's election calls to mind other pivotal historical moments in which truth was a victim", Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 5 ( May 2025), pp. 77–78. (p. 77.)
26. ^ Judith S. Beck, Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond, 2nd ed., New York, The Guilford Press, 2011, pp. 19–20.
27. ^ a b c G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 256.
28. ^ G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 258.
29. ^ a b Malise Ruthven, "The Otherworldliness of Ibn Khaldun" (review of Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography, Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780691174662, 243 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), p. 23.
30. ^ Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, 1988, passim.
31. ^ David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, 1996, passim.
32. ^ Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Human Evolution, Watts, 1948, passim.
33. ^ Freya Johnston, "'I'm coming, my Tetsie!'" (review of Samuel Johnson, edited by David Womersley, Oxford, May 2018, ISBN 978 0 19 960951 2; 1,344 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 9 (9 May 2019), pp. 17-19. (p. 19.)
34. ^ Freya Johnston, "I'm Coming, My Tetsie!" (review of Samuel Johnson, edited by David Womersley, Oxford, 2018, ISBN 978 0 19 960951 2, 1,344 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 9 (9 May 2019), pp. 17–19. (p. 19).
35. ^ "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1852), in Marx Engels Selected Works, volume I, p. 398.
36. ^ Paul Wilson, "Adam Michnik: A Hero of Our Time", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 6 (April 2, 2015), p. 74.
37. ^ George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense, 1905.
38. ^ James Romm, ed., Plutarch: Lives that Made Greek History, Hackett, 2012, p. vi.
39. ^ Jenny Uglow, "Island Hopping" (review of Captain James Cook: The Journals, selected and edited by Philip Edwards, London, Folio Society, three volumes and a chart of the voyages, 1,309 pp.; and William Frame with Laura Walker, James Cook: The Voyages, McGill-Queen University Press, 224 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), p. 19 (total review: pp. 18–20).
40. ^ Ross Cordy, Exalted Sits the Chief: The Ancient History of Hawai'i Island, Mutual, 2000, p. 61.
41. ^ "The Death of Magellan, 1521". Eyewitness to History. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
42. ^ Collingridge, Vanessa (2003). Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History's Greatest Explorer. Ebury Press. ISBN 978-0-09-188898-5., p. 410.
43. ^ Englund, Steven (March 2006). "Napoleon and Hitler". Journal of the Historical Society. 6 (1): 151–169\. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5923.2006.00171.x.
44. ^ Morselli, Davide; Passini, Stefano (2010). "Avoiding crimes of obedience: A comparative study of the autobiographies of M. K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr". Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. 16 (3): 295–319\. doi:10.1080/10781911003773530. ISSN 1532-7949.
45. ^ Lenczowski, John (2002). "Public Diplomacy and the Lessons of the Soviet Collapse". JSTOR review.
46. ^ Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York, Random House, 1987, ISBN 0-394-54674-1, passim.
47. ^ Jackson Lears, "Imperial Exceptionalism" (review of Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States, Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-300-21000-2, 459 pp.; and David C. Hendrickson, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition, Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0190660383, 287 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), pp. 8–10. (p. 10.)
48. ^ Martin Indyk, "The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution: How an Unimaginable War Could Bring About the Only Imaginable Peace", Foreign Affairs, vol. 103, no. 2 (March/April 2024), pp. 8–12, 14–22. (p. 22.)
49. ^ Niall Ferguson, "Ferguson’s Law: Debt Service, Military Spending, and the Fiscal Limits of Power" (working paper), Hoover Institution, Hoover History Lab, Applied History Working Group, 21 February 2025.
50. ^ Wendy Doniger, "The Rise and Fall of Warhorses" (review of David Chaffetz, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires, Norton, 2024, 424 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 6 (10 April 2025), pp. 17–19. (p. 17.)
51. ^ Jan Bloch, Future War and Its Economic Consequences, 1898.
52. ^ Joshua Busby, "Warming World: Why Climate Change Matters More Than Anything Else", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4 (July / August 2018), p. 54.
53. ^ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, 8 October 2018.
54. ^ Christopher de Bellaigue, "A World Off the Hinges" (review of Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Knopf, 2023, 695 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no. 18 (23 November 2023), pp. 40–42. (p. 41.)
55. ^ George Croom Robertson, "Hobbes, Thomas", Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 13, 1911, pp. 545–552.
56. ^ Stewart Duncan, "Thomas Hobbes", in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2021 edition, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021.
57. ^ Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687 (published in English in 1728 as The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).
58. ^ John Washington, "Burning Up" (review of John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, Knopf, 2023, 414 pp.; and Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, Little, Brown, 2023, 385 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 8 (9 May 2024), pp. 40–42. (p. 41.)
59. ^ "The Brief", Time Magazine, vol. 206, nos. 1-2 (7 July 2025), p. 4.
60. ^ Naomi Oreskes, "Parable of the Svalbard Seed Vault: An Arctic repository for agricultural plant diversity embodies the flawed logic of climate adaptation", Scientific American, vol. 331, no. 3 (October 2024), pp. 68–69. (p. 69.)
61. ^ Naomi Oreskes, "Breaking the Techno-Promise: We do not have enough time for nuclear power to save us from the climate crisis", Scientific American, vol. 326, no. 2 (February 2022), p. 74.
62. ^ Naomi Oreskes, "Fusion's False Promise: Despite a recent advance, nuclear fusion is not the solution to the climate crisis", Scientific American, vol. 328, no. 6 (June 2023), p. 86.
63. ^ Geoff Mann, "Treading Thin Air: Geoff Mann on Uncertainty and Climate Change", London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 17 (7 September 2023), pp. 17–19. (p. 19.)
64. ^ Jim Holt, "The Power of Catastrophic Thinking" (review of Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Hachette, 2020, 468 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 3 (February 25, 2021), pp. 26–29. (p. 28)
65. ^ See the September 1970 Scientific American "Biosphere" issue, passim; and the September 1971 Scientific American "Energy and Power" issue, passim.
66. ^ Timothy Noah, "Dead in the Water: Aircraft carriers are costly and vulnerable to attack. And they employ workers in more than 364 congressional districts", The New Republic, June 2023, pp. 7–9.
67. ^ Casey A. Williams, "The Red and the Green" (review of Kohei Saito, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom, Astra House, 260 pp.; Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Verso, 312 pp.; and Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge University Press, 276 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 12 (24 July 2025), pp. 32–34. (p. 33.)
68. ^ Sheldon Novick, The Careless Atom, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969, passim
69. ^ Thomas Powers, "The Nuclear Worrier" (review of Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017, ISBN 9781608196708, 420 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 1 (18 January 2018), pp. 13–15.
70. ^ Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Penguin Press, 2013, ISBN 1594202273. The book became the basis for a 2-hour 2017 PBS American Experience episode, likewise titled "Command and Control".
71. ^ Laura Grego and David Wright, "Broken Shield: Missiles designed to destroy incoming nuclear warheads fail frequently in tests and could increase global risk of mass destruction", Scientific American, vol. 320, no. no. 6 (June 2019), pp. 62–67.
72. ^ Daniel Mandell, "The Founders saw the dangers of concentrated wealth", Time Magazine, vol. 206, nos. 1-2 (7 July 2025), p. 25.
73. ^ Jessica T. Mathews, "The New Nuclear Threat", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 13 (20 August 2020), pp. 19–21. (p. 20.)
74. ^ Elizabeth Kolbert, "This Close; The day the Cuban missile crisis almost went nuclear" (a review of Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, Knopf), The New Yorker, 12 October 2020, pp. 70–73.
75. ^ Elizabeth Kolbert, "This Close; The day the Cuban missile crisis almost went nuclear" (a review of Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, Knopf), The New Yorker, 12 October 2020, p. 72.
76. ^ Tom Stevenson, "In the Grey Zone" (review of Eli Berman and David A. Lake, Proxy Wars: Suppressing Violence through Local Agents, Cornell, 2019, ISBN 978 1 50173 306 2; Tyrone L. Groh, Proxy War: The Least Bad Option, Stanford, 2019, ISBN 978 1 5036 0818 4; Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli, Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the 21st Century, Georgetown, 2019, ISBN 978 1 62616 678 3), London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 20 (22 October 2020), pp. 41–43. "Nuclear weapons – judged, for now at least, to be too powerful to be used – seem to preclude wars of destruction between major powers today." (p. 43.)
77. ^ Graham Allison, "The Myth of the Liberal Order: From Historical Accident to Conventional Wisdom", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4, 2018, pp. 124–133.
78. ^ Fintan O'Toole, "From Comedy to Brutality", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 4 (13 March 2025), pp. 10–13. (p. 12.)
79. ^ Laleh Khalili, "Collective Property, Private Control" (review of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Bodley Head, February 2025, 295 pp.; and Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, Scribner, August 2024, 319 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 47, no. 10 (5 June 2025), pp. 21–23. (p. 23.)
80. ^ Shira Lurie, "The U.S. tradition of repressing protest", Time Magazine, vol. 206, nos. 1-2 (7 July 2025), p. 25.
81. ^ Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "History and National Stupidity", 27 April 2006 [1]
82. ^ Fintan O'Toole, "A Moral Witness" (review of Janet Somerville, ed., Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War, 1930–1949, Firefly, 528 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 15 (8 October 2020), pp. 29–31. (p. 31.)
83. ^ Casey Cep, "Demon-driven: The bigoted views and brilliant fiction of William Faulkner", The New Yorker, 30 November 2020, pp. 87–91. (p. 90.)
84. ^ Sam Tanenhaus, "The Electroshock Novelist", Newsweek, July 2 & 9, 2012, p. 52.
85. ^ Fintan O'Toole, "Forced Amnesia", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 9 (29 May 2025), pp. 18–20. (p. 20.)
86. ^ Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27.
87. ^ Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27. (p. 25.)
88. ^ Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27. (p. 25.)
89. ^ Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27. (p. 25.)
90. ^ Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27. (P. 26–27.)
91. ^ Evan Osnos, "Oligarch-in-Chief: The greed of the Trump Administration has galvanized America's ultra-rich – and their opponents", The New Yorker, 2 June 2025, pp. 32–39. (p. 35.)
92. ^ Ferdinand Mount, "Ruthless and Truthless" (review of Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, Simon and Schuster, February 2021, ISBN 978 1 3985 0100 3, 192 pp.; and Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Political Advice: Past, Present and Future, I.B. Tauris, February 2021, ISBN 978 1 83860 004 4, 240 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 9 (6 May 2021), pp. 3, 5–8.
93. ^ Jonathan Freedland, "A Feigned Reluctance" (review of Rory Stewart, How Not to Be a Politician, Penguin Press, 2024, 454 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 19 (5 December 2024), pp. 26–28. (p. 28.)
94. ^ Allison Parshall, "Pain Language: The sound of 'ow' transcends borders", Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 16–18.
95. ^ Niall Ferguson, "Ferguson’s Law: Debt Service, Military Spending, and the Fiscal Limits of Power" (working paper), Hoover Institution, Hoover History Lab, Applied History Working Group, 21 February 2025.

## Sources

[edit]

* Graham Allison, "The Myth of the Liberal Order: From Historical Accident to Conventional Wisdom", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4, 2018, pp. 124–133.
* Judith S. Beck, Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond, 2nd ed., New York, The Guilford Press, 2011.
* Jan Bloch, Future War and Its Economic Consequences, 1898.
* "The Brief", Time Magazine, vol. 206, nos. 1-2 (7 July 2025), p. 4.
* Joshua Busby, "Warming World: Why Climate Change Matters More Than Anything Else", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4 (July / August 2018), p. 54.
* Casey Cep, "Demon-driven: The bigoted views and brilliant fiction of William Faulkner", The New Yorker, 30 November 2020, pp. 87–91.
* Carlo Cercignani, chapter 2: "Physics before Boltzmann", in Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms, Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-19-850154-4.
* David Christian, Maps of Time: an Introduction to Big History, University of California Press, 2005.
* Christopher de Bellaigue, "A World Off the Hinges" (review of Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Knopf, 2023, 695 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no. 18 (23 November 2023), pp. 40–42.
* Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, new ed., W.W. Norton, 2005.
* Wendy Doniger, "The Rise and Fall of Warhorses" (review of David Chaffetz, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires, Norton, 2024, 424 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 6 (10 April 2025), pp. 17–19.
* Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27.
* Stewart Duncan, "Thomas Hobbes", in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2021 edition, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021.
* The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in Marx Engels Selected Works, volume I.
* Englund, Steven (March 2006). "Napoleon and Hitler". Journal of the Historical Society. 6 (1): 151–169\. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5923.2006.00171.x.
* Niall Ferguson, "America's 'Oh Sh*t!' Moment," Newsweek, November 7 & 14, 2011, pp. 36–39.
* Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, Penguin Press, 2011.
* Niall Ferguson, "Ferguson’s Law: Debt Service, Military Spending, and the Fiscal Limits of Power" (working paper), Hoover Institution, Hoover History Lab, Applied History Working Group, 21 February 2025.
* Jonathan Freedland, "A Feigned Reluctance" (review of Rory Stewart, How Not to Be a Politician, Penguin Press, 2024, 454 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 19 (5 December 2024), pp. 26–28.
* Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated from the German by James Strachey, 1930.
* David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, 1996.
* André Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse ("Treatise on Narcissus")
* Joshua S Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, 1988.
* Gordon Graham, "Recurrence," The Shape of the Past, Oxford University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-19-289255-X.
* Marshall G.S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
* Jim Holt, "The Power of Catastrophic Thinking" (review of Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Hachette, 2020, 468 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 3 (February 25, 2021), pp. 26–29.
* Martin Indyk, "The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution: How an Unimaginable War Could Bring About the Only Imaginable Peace", Foreign Affairs, vol. 103, no. 2 (March/April 2024), pp. 8–12, 14–22.
* Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, 8 October 2018.
* Freya Johnston, "'I'm coming, my Tetsie!'" (review of Samuel Johnson, edited by David Womersley, Oxford, May 2018, ISBN 978 0 19 960951 2; 1,344 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 9 (9 May 2019), pp. 17-19.
* Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1959.
* Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Human Evolution, Watts, 1948.
* Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987, ISBN 0-394-54674-1.
* Ibn Khaldun, Muqadimmah, 1377.
* Sherif Khalifa, Geography and the Wealth of Nations, Lexington Books, 2022, ISBN 9781666900521.
* Laleh Khalili, "Collective Property, Private Control" (review of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Bodley Head, February 2025, 295 pp.; and Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, Scribner, August 2024, 319 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 47, no. 10 (5 June 2025), pp. 21–23.
* Elizabeth Kolbert, "This Close; The day the Cuban missile crisis almost went nuclear" (a review of Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, Knopf, 2020), The New Yorker, 12 October 2020, pp. 70–73.
* Andrey Korotayev, Arteny Malkov, Daria Khaltourina, Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends., Moscow, 2006, ISBN 5-484-00559-0. See especially chapter 2.
* David Lamb and S.M. Easton, Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress, Amersham, Avebury Press, 1984.
* Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay, New York, 1902.
* Jackson Lears, "Imperial Exceptionalism" (review of Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States, Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-300-21000-2, 459 pp.; and David C. Hendrickson, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition, Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0190660383, 287 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), pp. 8–10. Bulmer-Thomas writes: "Imperial retreat is not the same as national decline, as many other countries can attest. Indeed, imperial retreat can strengthen the nation-state just as imperial expansion can weaken it." (NYRB, cited on p. 10.)
* Robert Jay Lifton, "When a Nation Embraces a False Reality: Trump's election calls to mind other pivotal historical moments in which truth was a victim", Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 5 ( May 2025), pp. 77–78.
* Shira Lurie, "The U.S. tradition of repressing protest", Time Magazine, vol. 206, nos. 1-2 (7 July 2025), p. 25.
* Daniel Mandell, "The Founders saw the dangers of concentrated wealth", Time Magazine, vol. 206, nos. 1-2 (7 July 2025), p. 25.
* Geoff Mann, "Treading Thin Air: Geoff Mann on Uncertainty and Climate Change", London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 17 (7 September 2023), pp. 17–19.
* Jessica T. Mathews, "The New Nuclear Threat", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 13 (20 August 2020), pp. 19–21.
* Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, University of Chicago Press, 1973.
* Morselli, Davide; Passini, Stefano (2010). "Avoiding crimes of obedience: A comparative study of the autobiographies of M. K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr". Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. 16 (3): 295–319\. doi:10.1080/10781911003773530. ISSN 1532-7949.
* Ferdinand Mount, "Ruthless and Truthless" (review of Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, Simon and Schuster, February 2021, ISBN 978 1 3985 0100 3, 192 pp.; and Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Political Advice: Past, Present and Future, I.B. Tauris, February 2021, ISBN 978 1 83860 004 4, 240 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 9 (6 May 2021), pp. 3, 5–8.
* Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687 (published in English in 1728 as The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).
* Timothy Noah, "Dead in the Water: Aircraft carriers are costly and vulnerable to attack. And they employ workers in more than 364 congressional districts", The New Republic, June 2023, pp. 7–9.
* Naomi Oreskes, "Breaking the Techno-Promise: We do not have enough time for nuclear power to save us from the climate crisis", Scientific American, vol. 326, no. 2 (February 2022), p. 74.
* Naomi Oreskes, "Fusion's False Promise: Despite a recent advance, nuclear fusion is not the solution to the climate crisis", Scientific American, vol. 328, no. 6 (June 2023), p. 86.
* Naomi Oreskes, "Parable of the Svalbard Seed Vault: An Arctic repository for agricultural plant diversity embodies the flawed logic of climate adaptation", Scientific American, vol. 331, no. 3 (October 2024), pp. 68–69.
* Evan Osnos, "Oligarch-in-Chief: The greed of the Trump Administration has galvanized America's ultra-rich – and their opponents", The New Yorker, 2 June 2025, pp. 32–39.
* Fintan O'Toole, "Forced Amnesia", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 9 (29 May 2025), pp. 18–20.
* Fintan O'Toole, "From Comedy to Brutality", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 4 (13 March 2025), pp. 10–13.
* Fintan O'Toole, "A Moral Witness" (review of Janet Somerville, ed., Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War, 1930–1949, Firefly, 528 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 15 (8 October 2020), pp. 29–31.
* Allison Parshall, "Pain Language: The sound of 'ow' transcends borders", Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 16–18.
* Elizabeth Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China, Sharpe, 2002, ISBN 0-7656-0444-2.
* George Croom Robertson, "Hobbes, Thomas", Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 13, 1911, pp. 545–552.
* James Romm, ed., Plutarch: Lives that Made Greek History, Hackett, 2012.
* Malise Ruthven, "The Otherworldliness of Ibn Khaldun" (review of Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography, Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780691174662, 243 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), pp. 23–24, 26.
* George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense, 1905.
* Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "History and National Stupidity", 27 April 2006 [2]
* Scientific American "Biosphere" issue, September 1970.
* Scientific American "Energy and Power" issue, September 1971.
* Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics: a Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships, Boston, Porter Sargent Publishing, 1957, reprinted 1985 by Transaction Publishers.
* Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: from the Big Bang until Today, Amsterdam University Press, 1996.
* Tom Stevenson, "In the Grey Zone" (review of Eli Berman and David A. Lake, Proxy Wars: Suppressing Violence through Local Agents, Cornell, 2019, ISBN 978 1 50173 306 2; Tyrone L. Groh, Proxy War: The Least Bad Option, Stanford, 2019, ISBN 978 1 5036 0818 4; Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli, Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the 21st Century, Georgetown, 2019, ISBN 978 1 62616 678 3), London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 20 (22 October 2020), pp. 41–43. "Nuclear weapons – judged, for now at least, to be too powerful to be used – seem to preclude wars of destruction between major powers today." (p. 43.)
* Sam Tanenhaus, "The Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes On American Excess," Newsweek, July 2 & 9, 2012, pp. 50–53.
* Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 volumes, Oxford University Press, 1934–61.
* Arnold J. Toynbee, "Does History Repeat Itself?" Civilization on Trial, New York, Oxford University Press, 1948.
* G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, ISBN 0-520-03479-1.
* Mark Twain, The Jumping Frog: In English, Then in French, and Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil, illustrated by F. Strothman, New York and London, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, MCMIII. [3]
* John Washington, "Burning Up" (review of John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, Knopf, 2023, 414 pp.; and Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, Little, Brown, 2023, 385 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 8 (9 May 2024), pp. 40–42.
* Casey A. Williams, "The Red and the Green" (review of Kohei Saito, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom, Astra House, 260 pp.; Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Verso, 312 pp.; and Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge University Press, 276 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 12 (24 July 2025), pp. 32–34.
* Paul Wilson, "Adam Michnik: A Hero of Our Time," The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 6 (April 2, 2015), pp. 73–75.
* Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, Free Press, 1979.

## Further reading

[edit]

* James Gleick, "The Parrot in the Machine" (review of Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, Harper, 274 pp.; and James Boyle, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood, MIT Press, 326 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 12 (24 July 2025), pp. 43–46. "[C]hatbox 'writing' has a bland, regurgitated quality. Textures are flattened, sharp edges are sanded. No chatbox could ever have said that April is the cruelest month or that fog comes on little cat feet (though they might now, because one of their chief skills is plagiarism). And when synthetically extruded text turns out wrong, it can be comically wrong. When a movie fan asked Google whether a certain actor was in Heat, he received this 'AI Overview': 'No, Angelina Jolie is not in heat.'" (p. 44.)
* Ed Helms, SNAFU: the Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups, New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2025. "Spanning from the 1950’s to the 2000’s ... SNAFU ... offers ... insights that ... might [help] prevent history from repeating itself again and again."
* The Editors, Scientific American, "There Are No Climate Havens: Special regions or areas people can move to that are untouched by climate change do not exist", vol. 332, no. 5 (May 2025), pp. 76–77.
* Elizabeth Kolbert, "Rat Pack: The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future", The New Yorker, 7 October 2024, pp. 60–63.
* Bolesław Prus, "Mold of the Earth", an 1884 microstory about the history of the world, reflecting the ebb and flow of human communities and empires.
* M. V. Ramana, Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change, Verso, 2024.

## External links

[edit]

Quotations related to Historic recurrence at Wikiquote

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNuuYKieHRY&ab_channel=ScientificSir

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* Torsion mangonel myth

Organizations, publications

* Heritage registers
* Historical society (list)
* History institutes
* History journals
* template

Related

* Commemorative plaque
* Documentary film
* Hagiography
* Historical fiction
* Historical realism
* Historiographic metafiction
* Historical geographic information system

* Category
* Multimedia

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