Calvin University axes programs, trims faculty amid academic overhaul Campus Reform
Click the Source link for more details
Calvin University axes programs, trims faculty amid academic overhaul – Campus Reform
Scientists Identify the Evolutionary “Purpose” of Consciousness
Summary: Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum explore why consciousness evolved and why different species developed it in distinct ways. By comparing humans with birds, they show that complex awareness may arise through different neural architectures yet serve similar purposes. New research examines why consciousness evolved by comparing humans with birds. What evolutionary purpose does consciousness […]
Click the Source link for more details
A Tiny Red Dot in Deep Space May Be a New Kind of Cosmic Monster
A newly proposed type of supermassive black hole surrounded by a dense gas shell may account for the small red dots seen in images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. In the summer of 2022, less than a month after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began releasing its first scientific images, astronomers spotted […]
Click the Source link for more details
The 100-Year-Old Teaching Method That’s Outperforming Modern Preschools (and Saving Money)
Public Montessori programs enhance early learning and reduce costs, confirming the enduring benefits of Montessori education in modern classrooms. The first national randomized study of public Montessori preschool students revealed that by the end of kindergarten, participants demonstrated stronger long-term gains in reading, memory, and executive function than children from traditional preschools. The findings are […]
Click the Source link for more details
Scholar Uncovers Secret Lost for 1,500 Years Hidden on the Back of a Roman Glass Cup
A flipped Roman glass cup revealed symbols once thought decorative but now understood as ancient makers’ marks. In the quiet atmosphere of a museum gallery, Hallie Meredith noticed an unexpected detail hidden in plain view on a piece of ancient Roman glass. During a February 2023 visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New […]
Click the Source link for more details
These Strange Bald Eagles Fly the “Wrong” Way Each Year
Arizona’s young Bald Eagles head north, not south, during migration. Their habits reveal crucial habitats and major threats. Birds do not always follow the patterns we expect from them. A recent study in the Journal of Raptor Research describes how Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) in Arizona take an unusual approach to migration by traveling north […]
Click the Source link for more details
Current Heart Health Guidelines Are Failing To Catch a Deadly Genetic Killer
New research reveals that standard screening misses most people with a common inherited cholesterol disorder. A Mayo Clinic study reports that current genetic screening guidelines overlook most people who have familial hypercholesterolemia, an inherited disorder that can lead to dangerously high cholesterol and early heart disease. This condition can move quietly through families for many […]
Click the Source link for more details
A Healthy 47-Year-Old Ate a Hamburger. Hours Later, He Was Dead
Scientists have confirmed the first death caused by tick-induced “meat allergy,” a condition triggered by sensitization to alpha-gal after Lone Star tick bites. University of Virginia School of Medicine scientists have reported what they describe as the first documented death linked to the tick-associated “meat allergy.” The case involved a previously healthy 47-year-old man from […]
Click the Source link for more details
More Than Drought Behind Ancient Maya Civilization’s Collapse
Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Between 750 and 900 CE, the Maya lowlands in Central America underwent a significant demographic and political decline. Scientific studies have long linked this collapse to repeated episodes of intense drought during that period. For many years, the prevailing theory was that the climate crisis played a central role in the downfall of the Maya civilization.
Mayan Temple in Chichen Itza. Credit: Scratchbotox – CC BY-SA 4.0
However, recent analysis of sediment samples dating back 3,300 years offers new insights that partially challenge this established view. Benjamin Gwinneth, a geography professor at Université de Montréal and an expert on environmental change affecting Maya civilization, has conducted extensive research at the Itzan site in present-day Guatemala.
What Happened?
By examining core samples from sediments collected at Laguna Itzan—a lake near the archaeological site—Gwinneth and his team are reconstructing both human activity and climatic conditions over time. Their work is helping to build a more nuanced understanding of how environmental factors may have influenced historical events in the region.
No evidence of drought has been found in the region. However, the Maya population declined simultaneously with areas in Guatemala and Mexico that did experience drought conditions.
So what happened?
Gwinneth and his team analyzed three key geochemical indicators in the Itzan lakebed sediment to gain insights into past environmental and human activity. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were measured to assess the intensity of slash-and-burn fires, while leaf waxes provided information about vegetation types and precipitation patterns. Additionally, fecal stanols served as a proxy for estimating population density.
By examining these indicators together, the researchers were able to reconstruct changes in population size, agricultural practices, and climate from the earliest evidence of human presence around Laguna Itzan 4,000 years ago up until its abandonment approximately 1,000 years ago.
“The data revealed that the first permanent settlements appeared 3,200 years ago,” said Gwinneth in a press release. “There were slash-and-burn fires and an increase in population. During the Preclassic period, between 3,500 and 2,000 years ago, the Maya used fire extensively. They practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, using fire to clear the forest and then growing crops on the fertile ashes.”
New Farming Practices
A radical change occurred during the Classic period, between 1,600 and 1,000 years ago: although populations were much denser, the use of fire decreased considerably. “This probably means that most of the land had been cleared, which could have led to a change in agricultural strategy,” said Gwinneth.
The data suggest a major intensification of agriculture, including ridge and furrow ploughing to reduce erosion and intensive gardening. “Fire was no longer an important component of their farming practices,” Gwinneth said. “This transformation reflects gradual urbanization and suggests that the Maya were changing agricultural strategies to feed a growing population.”
This change in agricultural practices is consistent with what archaeologists and anthropologists know about the Maya civilization at its peak: it was a complex, urbanized society with increasing specialization and advanced agricultural techniques adapted to the environment.
The Stable Climate Riddle
However, analysis of hydrogen isotopes has shown that, unlike Maya sites further north that suffered drought, Itzan seems to have had a stable climate due to its geography.
“Itzan is located near the Cordillera, where atmospheric currents from the Caribbean generate regular orographic (mountain-related) rainfall,” Gwinneth explained. “While other Maya regions suffered devastating droughts, Itzan appeared to have a stable climate.”
Gwinneth considers this discovery significant because some archaeologists have argued that the Maya collapse began in the southwestern region, where Itzan is located. If Itzan did not experience drought, this can’t have been the initial cause of the decline, he said.
“Even though there were no drought conditions locally, the population of Itzan declined sharply during the Terminal Classic period, between 1,140 and 1,000 years ago,” Gwinneth continued. “Population markers show a dramatic fall, signs of agriculture disappear, the site was abandoned.”
How can we explain that a community with water and favourable conditions suffered the same fate as its neighbours, who were afflicted by drought?
Fatal Interdependence
“The answer lies in the interconnectedness of Maya societies,” said Gwinneth. “The cities did not exist in isolation; they formed a complex network of trading relationships, political alliances, and economic dependence.
“When the central lowlands were hit by drought, this may have triggered a cascading series of crises: wars between cities over resources, the collapse of royal dynasties, mass migrations, disruption of trade routes, and so on.”
Sampling of tree leaves in northern Guatemala. Credit: Jonathan Obrist Farner
According to this theory, Itzan’s decline was not due to a shortage of water, but rather to its entanglement in the upheaval that followed the collapse of the broader system it belonged to. The interconnectedness of Maya cities meant that a drought in one area could trigger widespread disruption. Even if drought conditions were localized, their effects rippled outward, leading to a domino effect that contributed to the collapse of cities throughout the region.
“The transformation or “collapse” of the Maya civilization was not a mechanical result of a uniform climate catastrophe; it was a complex phenomenon in which climate, social organization, economic networks and political dynamics were intertwined,” Gwinneth concluded.
See also: More Archaeology News
“Regional socio-political and economic factors played a decisive role.”
Gwinneth considers these findings significant for our current era, as they offer valuable insights into how civilizations adapt to environmental changes. This perspective can help us better understand the challenges we face today and inform our responses to ongoing environmental shifts.
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer
Click the Source link for more details
Books of the Year 2025: Part 1
‘This is much more than the history of a place’
Erik Linstrum is Professor of History at the University of Virginia
Sam Wetherell’s Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Head of Zeus) is a mesmerising panorama of the postwar, postimperial, postindustrial city as a vision of the British future. Forget about ‘decline’, Wetherell argues, with its nostalgic tinge and neglect of inequality; Liverpool is a case study in ‘obsolescence’. Drawing on forgotten stories of mass deportations, tropical diseases, shipping containers, and, yes, the Beatles, this is much more than the history of a place. It is a portrait of the multiracial working class, stranded in the wreckage of a pitiless political economy.
In What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea (Allen Lane), Fara Dabhoiwala poses a simple question about the principle beloved by culture warriors. Stopping in London’s Grub Street, New World slave plantations, Enlightenment-era Scandinavia, and British-ruled India, he shows that free speech has never been much of a principle at all. Rather, it has been a polemical weapon and an ambiguous slogan, riddled with hypocritical loopholes in practice, that has only ever made sense as a means to higher ends. The pursuit of truth – not speech for its own sake – should be our lodestar.
-
Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain
Sam Wetherell
Head of Zeus, 448pp, £25
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea
Fara Dabhoiwala
Allen Lane, 480pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘One of his generation’s leading archival, narrative historians of modern China’
Julia Lovell is Professor of Modern Chinese History & Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
I loved Stephen R. Platt’s The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II (Knopf), a biography of Evans Carlson. We live in an era when engagement with China in the anglophone world is riven with political polarities. Carlson (1896-1947) was a pioneering, controversial Marine intelligence officer during the 1930s and 1940s, whose interactions with the rising Chinese Communist Party offer, in microcosm, a history of modern America’s fraught relationship with China. Platt is one of his generation’s leading archival, narrative historians of modern China, and he brings the era to life in grippingly vivid prose.
I was also enthralled by the paperback edition of Jessica Rawson’s Life and Afterlife in Ancient China (Penguin). Drawing on some 50 years of immersive study of material life and burials in Chinese antiquity, the book interprets – in elegant, accessible language – an archaeology that is fascinatingly distinct from that of the Egyptian and classical European worlds. Analysis of deep history remains crucial to contemporary Chinese identity; this richly evidenced book is an essential guide to society, belief, and economy during a foundational period of China’s development.
-
The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II
Stephen R. Platt
Knopf, 544pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Life and Afterlife in Ancient China
Jessica Rawson
Penguin, 560pp, £16.99
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘A brilliantly witty “autobiography”’
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at the University of Cambridge
Pride of place must go to a superb fresh translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War by nonpareil translator Robin Waterfield with introduction and notes by Polly Low (Basic Books). Thucydides may not be everybody’s ‘Father of History’, but his many fans are determined to vindicate his immodest claim to have written ‘an acquisition for all time’.
In humorous vein, Peter Acton has composed a brilliantly witty ‘autobiography’ ostensibly by an Athenian comic poet-dramatist (and younger contemporary of Thucydides), Aristophanes son of Philip: Clouds, Birds, Frogs and Me (Vanguard Press).
James Romm, series editor of Yale University Press’ ‘Ancient Lives’, is himself a biographer of distinction. His Plato and the Tyrant (W.W. Norton) is a rare biographical portrait of (non-democratic) Athenian philosophical supremo Plato in incongruous and ineffectual intercourse with the strong man of Sicily, Dionysius I of Syracuse. Lessons for today? As often, yes, many. Connoisseurs of Xenophon’s Hiero dialogue (another of Waterfield’s translated masterpieces) will understand.
-
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides (translated by Robin Waterfield)
Basic Books, 752pp, £35
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Clouds, Birds, Frogs and Me
Peter Acton
Vanguard Press, 340pp, £12.99
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Plato and the Tyrant
James Romm
W.W. Norton, 368pp, £25
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘Emphasises the historical battle in the US between physical force and moral persuasion’
Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University
On the surface these three books appear to have little in common. Jill Lepore’s We the People: A History of the US Constitution (John Murray) traces the history of constitutional amendment and the significance of the constitutional tradition to the American state. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’ Allan Pinkerton: America’s Legendary Detective and the Birth of Private Security (Georgetown University Press) focuses on a famous detective agency, its founder, and the earliest iterations of private security in the service of the state. And Ferdinand Mount’s Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality (Bloomsbury) considers the formative significance of an emotion in Britain from medieval times onwards, with the occasional foray across the Atlantic.
In fact, each has a lot to tell us about the others. Lepore’s study draws out the wider implications of amendment in the sense of to mend, or repair. She, like Jeffreys-Jones, emphasises the historical battle in the US between physical force and moral persuasion. And Mount draws out the links between moral persuasion and sentiment, reminding us that change comes from choice, and choice in history has often had a sentimental inflection.
-
We the People: A History of the US Constitution
Jill Lepore
John Murray, 720pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Allan Pinkerton: America’s Legendary Detective and the Birth of Private Security
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Georgetown University Press, 328pp, £24
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality
Ferdinand Mount
Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘An illuminating snapshot of editing as care work’
Marlene L. Daut is Professor of French and Black Studies at Yale University
Dana A. Williams’ Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (Amistad) is not just a biography of the inimitable author of Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye, but a compelling portrait of Toni Morrison’s time as a senior editor at Random House in the 1970s and early 1980s. Morrison’s careful stewardship of writers including Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, and Gayl Jones presents an illuminating snapshot of editing as care work.
Ryan Hanley’s Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (Yale University Press) tells the story of a mixed-race radical activist from colonial Jamaica, the freed child of an enslaved woman, Rosanna, and her Scottish enslaver. Focusing on Wedderburn’s famous antislavery newspaper The Axe Laid to the Root (1817), Hanley traces how the memory of the beatings Wedderburn’s mother and grandmother suffered at the hands of white men – painstakingly described by Wedderburn in his autobiographical The Horrors of Slavery (1824) – drove his many crusades to defend the oppressed and downtrodden in England and its colonies.
-
Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship
Dana A. Williams
Amistad, 368pp, £25
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist
Ryan Hanley
Yale University Press, 248pp, £18.99
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘Explores how interpretations of Rome’s physical remains shift with time and belief’
Stefan Bauer is Research Integrity Facilitator at King’s College London
The election of a new pope is always an unpredictable leap. In Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church (Knopf), Philip Shenon revisits recent papacies, though his moralising division between ‘good’ reformers and ‘bad’ conservatives oversimplifies matters. Still, his vivid accounts of Vatican II, abuse investigations, and the global enthusiasm for Francis allow us to reflect on Leo XIV’s options.
Historians now agree that the Roman Inquisition was less despotic than once believed, bound by strict procedure and limited use of torture. Stefania Tutino’s 1626: A Year in the Life of the Roman Inquisition (Oxford University Press) goes further, revealing the Inquisitors’ own struggle between rule and discretion as they handled cases touching on sex, money, doctrine, and politics. Similarly, Roland Mayer’s The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press) explores how interpretations of Rome’s physical remains shift with time and belief – few today would share Byron’s notion of their ‘ruinous perfection’.
-
Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church
Philip Shenon
Knopf, 608pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
1626: A Year in the Life of the Roman Inquisition
Stefania Tutino
Oxford University Press, 448pp, £98.90
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History
Roland Mayer
Cambridge University Press, 394pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘Exemplifies how disciplines can partner to transform the way we do history’
Sophie Thérèse Ambler is Reader in Medieval History and Co-Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster University
History is often the pursuit of the lone scholar, but two major projects have shown in 2025 how team research can transform our understanding of war. The first volume of Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice Heuser’s The Cambridge History of Strategy (Cambridge) assembles 25 scholars to consider military strategy – usually studied as a 19th-century European concept – in societies from ancient China to the Ottoman Empire and 18th-century America, enabling us to consider strategy as a global historical concept for the first time.
In Medieval Warhorse: Equestrian Landscapes, Material Culture and Zooarchaeology in Britain, AD 800-1550 (Liverpool University Press) Oliver Creighton and his interdisciplinary team investigate a technology that was central to warfare until very recently. Drawing from documents, bones, armour, sculpture, and landscape they uncover the infrastructure that made the warhorse and examine changing horse morphology. The book exemplifies how disciplines can partner to transform the way we do history.
-
The Cambridge History of Strategy: Volume 1, From Antiquity to the American War of Independence
Beatrice Heuser and Isabelle Duyvesteyn
Cambridge, 634pp, £138
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Medieval Warhorse: Equestrian Landscapes, Material Culture and Zooarchaeology in Britain, AD 800-1550
Beatrice Heuser and Isabelle Duyvesteyn
Liverpool University Press, 464pp, £62.50
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘A unique take on living – and sleeping – under fascism’
Kristin Semmens is Associate Professor of History at the University of Victoria
Despite my profession, I rarely dream of Nazis. Two books I read this year gave me nightmares. The first was Damion Searls’ new translation of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation (Princeton University Press). From 1933 until she fled in 1939, Beradt – a Jewish journalist – collected the dreams of Germans. Her insightful analysis of these ‘diaries of the night’ provides a unique take on living – and sleeping – under fascism.
Richard J. Evans’ Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Allen Lane) shows how valuable a biographical approach to the past can be. The book combines gripping individual portraits, all exhaustively researched and deftly painted. The usual suspects appear: Hitler, Eichmann, and the ‘loudmouth’ governor-general of occupied Poland, Hans Frank. Yet Evans also challenges us to consider how Hitler’s fantasies inspired people such as Luise Solmitz, a Hamburg schoolteacher. In her diary Solmitz described the Nazis’ rise to power as ‘the fulfillment of my old German dream, a truly united Germany’. Taken together, these books reveal the Third Reich’s euphoric daytime visions and its haunting nighttime dreams.
-
The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation
Charlotte Berady (translated by Damion Searls)
Princeton University Press, 152pp, £20
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
Richard J. Evans
Allen Lane, 464pp, £14.99
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘Skilfully draws out the complexity of the challenges facing this bookish, ambitious, and self-styled “British” king’
Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick
Books commemorating historical anniversaries are not always especially memorable, but 2025 has seen a couple of corkers. Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (Basic Books) is a deeply impressive account of the devastating rebellions that in 1524-25 shook Germany to its foundations. It maintains a compelling narrative thread without much sacrifice of detail, and Roper empathetically draws readers into the worldview of the alienated peasantry while resisting the temptation to idealise it. The misogyny of medieval rural society is a recurrent theme.
In contrast to Roper’s plebeian canvas, Clare Jackson’s The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I (Allen Lane) paints a vibrantly revealing portrait of a monarch. James, who died in 1625, has always been something of an enigma, and scholarly assessments of him differ. Jackson skilfully draws out the complexity of the challenges facing this bookish, ambitious, and self-styled ‘British’ king, and rightly insists on paying equal attention, after 1603, to his rule in Scotland as well as England.
-
Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
Lyndal Roper
Basic Books, 544pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I
Clare Jackson
Allen Lane, 560pp, £27
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
‘Delivered the thrill of discovering that everything you think you know is wrong’
Kimberley Chrisman-Campbell is a historian and curator of fashion based in Los Angeles
I’m drawn to histories hiding in plain sight, the myths that collapse under scholarly interrogation. This year two books delivered the thrill of discovering that everything you think you know is wrong.
Cally Blackman’s The Colour of Clothes: Fashion and Dress in Autochromes, 1907-1930 (Thames & Hudson) is a study of fashion as captured by an early colour photo technique, restoring luminous colour and crisp detail to the black-and-white world of the teens and twenties. Autochromistes – whether amateurs or professionals such as Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz – went ‘colour-mad’ for all kinds of subjects, but especially fashion, with its kaleidoscopic hues and inherent modernity.
Sara Catterall’s Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon (Belt) delves beyond the notoriety Bloomer achieved by wearing baggy trousers (dubbed ‘bloomers’ though she did not invent them or wear them for long). Far from a fashion rebel or radical feminist, Bloomer was a pious moral crusader who eventually concluded she’d be more influential in conventional dress. Catterall paints a sympathetic portrait of a woman as misunderstood as bloomers themselves.
-
The Colour of Clothes: Fashion and Dress in Autochromes, 1907-1930
Cally Blackman
Thames & Hudson, 336pp, £75
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) -
Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon
Sara Catterall
Belt, 304pp, £19.75
Part 2 will be published on 2 December. Please check back soon.
Click the Source link for more details