>>>>>>>It is actually not plural but is Revelation...... unless you are a Southerner... and many of us Southerners in fact do say Revelations....:)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>I think a proper understanding of the the Book of Revelations
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>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Interesting! As a fourth generation San Franciscan and Roman Catholic, we always say the Book of Revelations. Perhaps that is because my mom was a Cummings! :)
>>>>>
>>>>>I have a copy of the King James Version (really!) and there it is called "The Revelation of S. John the Divine."
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>>>>The Catholic version is not the KJV though but the Douey (sp?)
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>>>I understand that there are different versions, and I was not trying to correct Tom W. It was more in the nature of an FWIW.
>>>
>>>Somewhat related, the Coursera class I am taking is "The Modern World Since 1750." I am enjoying it greatly. Yesterday my daughter Emily asked "Why are you doing that?" and I said it's a knowledge for knowledge's sake kind of thing. I was not raised by wolves and know something about it but wanted to know more. And even though it is only the end of the first week, which emphasizes the period around 1760, I am already learning a lot. For example, the reasons the nation-states of western Europe gained an advantage over other empires at that time. It's fascinating. IAC your knowledge of history is one of the things that inspired me to do this. Not in an effort to compete with you, because I could spend the rest of my life studying history and still not catch up to you, just in the sense of inspiration.
>>>
>>>Coursera follows actual college timeframes and this semester is already underway. (It even has a spring break week, which cracks me up for an online class). The grade, which really doesn't matter to anyone other than the student, consists of a total of scores on weekly quizzes. 40 million people around the world are taking this class, which is a tip of the hat to the internet. In the related discussion groups, which I only peeked in at in the beginning, the main topics were how to obtain the recommended textbook and the translation to non-English languages feature. The professor is a real, living, breathing University of Virginia history prof with a comforting bedside manner. There is nothing "eat your peas" about it. Terrific stuff.
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>>Sounds very cool. It is indeed amazing how the internet makes learning so much more accessible. I'm so geeked out on Pluralsight and now Lynda.com. Much more my style than scheduled classes like in college. If they had on-line learning and Ritalin in 1964 I'd own the world now :-)
>
>Maybe Ritalin would have dulled down the things that have made you you.
>
>Professor Zelikow's thesis is already clear. History consists of repeated cycles of problems, reactions, choices, and consequences. He instills the idea that history might be quite different if different choices had been made. That sounds obvious on the surface but he walks us through specifics.
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>Here is one example. He talks about the need for cheap labor in the Caribbean, which at the time was per capita the most valuable place on earth due to valuable natural resources like sugar and rum. The development of finance and feudal-military arrangements with governments, plus technological advances like shipbuilding, had made transoceanic commercial voyages feasible. What the European nations lacked was labor. Attention turned to Africa. European nations attempted slavery on their own, with dim results due to high death rates from disease. They made arrangements with tribal powers on the west coast of Africa, who captured inland Africans by the millions and sold them to the new world. This could be presented explosively -- "Next on Oprah!" -- but Prof. Zelikow does not present it that way. He is a dispassionate and apolitical historian, which I like. He mentions that at the time there were many more slaves in the Caribbean than there were in the future U.S. by an order of magnitude. Cotton was still ahead and the money and slaves had not shifted there yet. One detail is that Caribbean slaves perished at a far higher rate, something horrifying like 40 year average lifespan, due to harsher temperatures and harsher mistreatment.
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>UPDATE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you already knew that. Or may disagree with it. It was aimed at those who have not given Coursera a shot (did I mention it's free?) -- the seekers among us.

No, I think his points are all right on. An interesting side note in the history of the slave trade is the role Arab slave traders played in both black and white slavery. There are subthreads involving incentive to convert to Islam as that would discourage enslavement, or change the status of those enslaved ( Christianity would in some cases follow similar patterns ) .

Back in the 60s when none of this was politically correct among the few historians who cared to go into the slave trade in depth, a friend who really got into it and subsequently spent time in Kenya with the Peace Corps wrote me a long thing expressing his amazement that Swahili was becoming so en vogue among African Americans ( they were called Blacks at the time ) as Swahili was bastardized Arabic and the lingua franca of the slave trade. (and that it was an East African language and most American Blacks had West African ancestry)

But of course Islam,. like Christianity, has teachings which in theory should have made slavery abhorrent. The problem, of course, was with the Christians and the Moslems. In fairness to the former, the anti-Slavery movement in Britain was very much driven by the Christian great awakening of the 18th century and no similar movement ever evolved in Islam.

No doubt the African slave trade would have never succeeded had Africans not been complicit. Goes back to one my historical maxims, that identifying bad guys does not reductively identify good guys.

Glad you're enjoying the course. I go through periods where as much as I like fiction I find myself being drawn back to history books. I have a library of them that rivals some universities :-)