This book should be seen as a nuanced representation of the relationship between folklore studies and a socialist-totalitarian state, based on some of the significant issues in the history of folklore studies in the three countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, often referred to as “the Baltic countries.” This is not a complete and comprehensive history of folkloristics in the Baltic countries, nor is it an even representation of all....
In the annals of history, few monarchs have left as lasting an imprint on both the political and intellectual spheres as Frederick II, commonly known as Frederick the Great. Born in 1712, Frederick ascended to the throne of Prussia in 1740, embarking on a transformative reign that combined military prowess with an unparalleled commitment to philosophical discourse. The present English selection of Frederick’s writings aims to shift the focus from...
Phoenix currency
Consider the title page of The Economist in 1988, (9 jan. 1988) presented above, which insinuated another world money and noticeably included “2018” on the spread. Most realize that the financial world often arrange things decades ahead of time. The euro currency is such a case. “THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same world currency.” The Rise of […]...
Wendell Holmes
History is a lie. History is, as Wendell Holmes stated, “what the people who won say it is.” It has been warped over vast periods of time to fit with each generation’s idea of what is fact and what is truth. Without the existence of the secret societies, our history would have been totally different. The history of mankind is like a vast jigsaw puzzle. Only when all the pieces...
Righteous Judges Rechtvaardige Rechters
The iconography of The Ghent Altarpiece has since a long time fascinated  researchers. When it was finished in 1432, the work of art became instantly the most famous in Europe. It was the first real oil painting. Oil had been utilized to tie shades to artistic creations since the Middle Ages, however Jan van Eyck was the first to exhibit the genuine capability of oils, which permit far greater subtlety...
Sophists
TIDBITS The sophists were skeptics who doubted the possibility of attaining true knowledge of anything. They emphasized the practical application of rhetoric in civic and political life. Some claimed that they could teach both a thing and its opposite, simultaneously arguing both thesis and antithesis. One of the founders of sophism was Gorgias a Sicilian philosopher, orator, and rhetorician who settled in Athens where over his long life of 108 years he made large sums of money from his lecturing. […]...
‘The Friends n. General slang for members of an intelligence service; specifically British slang for members of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.’  ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalise the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring...
By 1945 World War II had ended, but in Lithuania the war against the Soviet Union had only just begun. One of the bloodiest battles of the Lithuanian armed resistance, the battle of Kalniškės, was fought only days after “VE day”. Lithuanian farmers, school teachers, university professors, university and high school students, and a small number of remaining non-commissioned officers and lower ranking officers from independent Lithuania’s military, organized themselves...
Marta Hillers’s only consolation was that she had refused to put her name on the extraordinary manuscript in which she had so meticulously recounted the Soviet conquest of Berlin during the cold spring of 1945. It had been a time when her life—like that of tens of thousands of other Berlin women and girls—had become a nightmare of fear, hunger, and rape. Published for the first time in German in 1959, the book had brought to life one of the […]...
Over a period of more than two centuries, the Pontic dynasty of northern Asia Minor evolved from modest beginnings into one of the most powerful states in the Greco- Roman world. Its founder, Mithridates I, was a refugee from the unforgiving and violent politics of the years after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 bc. The dynasty culminated in its last and most famous king, Mithridates VI the...
Man Rune
Man rune or Algiz  and its traditional link with the Grail mysteries. In its origine a rune is a puzzle and a mystery above all else. Only in a later epoch Runes became also letters or writing symbols. In antiquated times only a certain codified group rune staves became writing signs or an alphabet. In the later obscure German custom of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, supernatural hypotheses about how and when...
conspiracy eye
FDR once said “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” He was in a good position to know. We believe that many of the major world events that are shaping our destinies occur because somebody or somebodies have planned them that way. If we were merely dealing with the law of avenges, half of the events affecting our nation’s well-being should be good for America. If we were dealing with […]...
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