A Tunguska sized airburst wiped out middle-Bronze Age City. This was the largest long term occupied city site until its destruction n this cosmic event. More sensationalist reports are linking this to the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom, but the linked article focuses on the study of the destruction of the site known as Tall-el-Hammam near the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea.

Here's the abstract of the article form the journal Nature...



Full article at the link above.

For a more sensationalized lay account of the study you can look here at the weather channel site

-M

John Dee is one of the most fascinating characters of the Elizabethan era, whose interests and expertise in areas like alchemy, astronomy, cryptography, theology, and philosophy were renowned. He ran in many of the same circles as Shakespeare and though there is no proof that the two knew each other, it is difficult to imagine that Shakespeare would not have known of Dee. A case can be made, at least circumstantially, that Dee, whose famous library contained thousands of volumes, was a model for Prospero.

Thanks for this, mrp!

Dee is a figure who flitted in and out of a lot of my graduate research into the relationship between early modern science, natural philosophy, the Hermetic tradition and other occult traditions coming out of the late medieval period. Dame Frances Yates' books (in particular The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and The Occult Philosophy in Elizabethan Age) and Nicholas Clulee's John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion are must reads if you are interested in such topics.

-M

Interesting article about deciphering new elements about the development of Arthurian legends from medieval fragments recently discovered. The documents are providing new literary information about how the story developed, but also historical evidence of the timeframe of how the stories moved throughout the medieval world and where some of the stories' contextual changes occurred. It's a general interest article (it's on Nerdist) not a scholarly one, but it surveys the scholarly work being done on the articles for a general audience.

-M

It hasn't been considered the best, at least not by professional historians/other scholars, since, well, forever. When I was a history undergraduate in the late 1980s and taking a seminar course on the New Right/fascism in Europe, I recall the TA cautioning us about using Shirer's book, since he was a journalist and his understanding of German and wider European history was limited (so that he made many questionable or just wrong-headed assessments and conclusions). I know many historians in Germany itself (*not* the Nazi-sympathizing kind) and other European countries really do not like it and/or don't consider it very important.
Edited to add: All that said, if the copy on sale is really cheap, it's probably still worth getting. Its scope is impressive, and as a journalist, Shirer provided a good account of events as he witnesed them. I know I have a copy sitting on a shelf somewhere (one of my objectives in life is to read it straight through, cover to cover, instead of just reading chunks of it here and there).

Certainly, Albert Speer's memoir, Inside the Third Reich, is worth reading, for an insider perspective, recognizing the flaws in it.

As I say, recognizing the flaws within.  The mini-series was quite good and had the benefit of knowing when Speer was massaging things to suit himself.

ITV's The World at War series is a tremendous resource to that whole period, especially since they focused more on the military aspects.  They go in depth, with firsthand accounts, of life in both the Axis and Allied countries, and within occupied territory.  They do a really good job of covering the state of Germany under the Weimar government and the rise of the Nazis as a real political force, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch.  It also looks at life in Japan and the rise of the militarists and checks in on both when things are going well for the Axis and when things go south and after.  One of the most harrowing eyewitness things I recall is an English woman, Christobel Bielenberg, living in Nazi Germany and her accounts of how crowds reacted and then how fear led her to ignore her own humanity.  She tells of allowing a Jewish woman and child/children stay for a night in her basement and then them disappearing the next morning and then the guilt she felt for "having become one of them," because she only let them stay a night, for fear for her own children.  It's one thing to read it on the cold page; it's quite another to hear someone tell their story and see the emotion come over them as they tell it.

Here's an interview with her, in 1987....

(EDIT-at about the 17:40 mark, she recounts the story she told in The World at War)