Notanda 7.26
July 7, 2026: A Newsletter from Historically Thinking
Hello,
It’s been a while since I’ve sent a Notanda. My apologies. This one is not a compilation of six months of random information…I wouldn’t do that to me or to you…but just some things that I’ve run across as a trawl for conversation topics on the podcast. It ranges from catchphrases to wargaming to conspiracy theories; and there’s also a subtle Chaucerian undercurrent, that might result in a conversation or two in the next few months.
There’s also an agricultural theme. Part of this is the image of farms and agriculture, such as North Carolina’s desire to stop you and me from writing “sweet potato”, for whatever reason that emerged from a fevered Tarheel imagination. But it’s also how farmers became evermore muscular in advertising and popular imagination as their job was increasingly technological. There’s also an essay arguing that the production of fertilizer is a historically persistent geopolitical question, and another on meadows in medieval England’s imagination and actual agricultural practice.
And now the links…
Curiosities & Essays
I will miss “6-7!”—but I know something else will replace it, because something always has:
But as media scholars who study children’s culture, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. Instead, we thought back to our own childhoods on three different continents – and all the secret languages we spoke.
There was Pig Latin. The cool “S” doodled on countless worksheets and bathroom stalls. Forming an L-shape with our thumb and index finger to insult someone. Remixing the words of hand-clapping games from previous generations.
6-7 is only the latest example of these long-standing practices – and though the gesture might not mean much to adults, it says a lot about children’s play, their social lives and their desire for power.
Do we have to be media scholars to view 6-7 without bewilderment or exasperation? I should hope not; that would be icky. You don’t even have to be a historian, amazingly enough. Just reading a few semi-old novels reveals similar transitory verbal practices, like “23 skidoo!”, which I think remains my favorite.
The only thing better are laborious attempts to explain such memes, all of which should be regarded with at best suspicion. For a collection of examples that give you a hernia just reading them, I give you Professor Wikipedia.
Ixnay upidstay planationsexay Offesssorpay Ikipediaway.
Grapefruits, like other citrus, have disturbing sex lives
They also don’t taste like grapes, have an uncertain history, created Florida, were part of a terrible diet, and have strange drug interactions.
North Carolina Wants You to Stop Saying “Sweet Potato”
They don’t want you to say “yam”, either.
Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement
No further comment should be required.
The Geopolitics of Fertilizer
Few questions are as strategically consequential, and as historically persistent, as those that concern the production of fertilisers. Time and again, the supply of usable nitrogen has shaped wars, driven technological breakthroughs, and influenced the map of geopolitical power. The dependencies underpinning that supply chain have never disappeared; they have simply relocated from one source to the next. As the world once again confronts questions of supply chain resilience, that pattern deserves renewed attention.
Summertime
The Meadows of Medieval Summer
…For people involved in agricultural work the mead was a place for important labour. Haymaking was a significant stage in the agricultural calendar because a good stock of hay enabled animals to be fed through the winter months. As a result there was a complex economic and social structure attached to mowing rights and obligations and the regulation of hay production.
The Making of the Muscular Farmer
Farming is one of the great success stories of automation: over time, the need for manual labor has dropped dramatically. Yet, as historian J.L. Anderson writes, over the past 80 years, the dwindling need for muscle on farms has coincided with increasing depictions of masculine strength in advertisements targeting farm markets.
If Your Summer Travel Isn’t Already Scheduled…
“33 of the World’s Most Mysterious Tombstones”
Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed (con’t)
Is There a Science of Writing?
For roughly a decade, the phrase “science of reading” has dominated literacy discourse in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most Anglophone education systems. The phrase refers to a large body of converging evidence about how the brain learns to decode print, the centrality of phonemic awareness, and the role of background knowledge and vocabulary in comprehension. It has reshaped statute, curriculum, and teacher preparation in roughly thirty US states, in England through the statutory phonics screening check and the systematic synthetic phonics requirement embedded in the national curriculum. Writing, by contrast, has been almost entirely absent from this conversation. The natural question is whether there is a comparable science of writing, and if so, why is it so unknown?
In an Age of Distraction: Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students
AI promises efficiency, personalization, and speed. This combination is appealing to college students who are dealing with academic pressures and a fast-paced world. History teachers are now faced with the tension between student demand for quick results (which AI provides) and the slow, thoughtful process of learning to think historically. This tension is not merely about plagiarizing papers; it cuts to the heart of what it means to nurture intellectual and moral maturity at a time when universities are moving away from the humanities and neglecting the very practices that once defined liberal arts education.
And Yet It Persists
“Standardized tests are back from the dead. That’s probably a good thing.”
Essay–Episode Callbacks
Bede: Father of English History
Listen to Venerable Bede: Rory Naismith on Britain’s First Great Historian
Peter Mancall, “The US founders’ other revolutionary choice: Separating religion and government”
Listen to Contested Continent: Peter Mancall on the Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680
Chloe Chapin, “Unbuttoned: an interactive history of the suit”
Listen to Suitable: Chloe Chapin on the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Man
Christine Abigail L Tan, “No one is self-made: The idea that success is deserved has great traction in the world. But Zhuangzi argues that it is a deeply flawed notion”
Listen to The Great Historian: Andrew Meyer on Sima Qian and the Invention of History
“The Ghost Roads of Ireland’s Great Famine”
Listen to Rot: Padraic X. Scanlan on the Irish Famine and Its Imperial Legacies
(Possible) Episode Previews
How Do Academics Handle Conspiracy Theorists?
I wish I knew, tbh
Chaucer’s England
Who were Chaucer’s thirty-three pilgrims, and why were they heading to Canterbury? What do they and their tales tell us about medieval England as a place, and about the daily lives of its people?
Nicholas Orme, one of our leading historians, brings literature and history together to answer this question, using the Canterbury Tales and the other great writings of Chaucer’s day. In ten chapters, he explains what people thought: about time and space, religion and the social system. He shows their wide degree of literacy and how they spent their leisure. He takes us through the politics of the day, the crusades, and the lifestyles of the nobility, clergy, townsfolk, and country dwellers, along with the landscapes they lived in.
The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory
Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic—it seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)?
Warmly,
Al Zambone