How Chaos Theory Explains Trump’s Rise to Power

Amanpour and Co: In his new book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters political scientist Brian Klaas "asks whether every move we make could potentially produce a domino effect. With reference to the mathematical concept of chaos theory, Klaas draws attention to the fact that small, seemingly trivial events can have far-reaching …

Optimistic, Pessimistic About 2024? Whatever Happens, It’s Not Inevitable

Happy New Year! I’ve spent a lot of time pondering whether 2024 will be an extraordinarily good year or an extraordinarily bad year. Whatever happens, I tend to believe it will be a historic turning point for the United States and possibly the world. “The future is never inevitable,” historian Heather Cox Richardson observed in an interview …

Does Impeachment History Provide Guide for Future? Yes and No

In assessing the first impeachment of President Trump in 2019 and 2020 Senate trial, many observers mainly remembered the impeachment of President Clinton, which backfired politically against Republicans in the short-term. They lost congressional seats in the 1998 midterms. Even John Boehner, one of the leaders of the Clinton impeachment, said decades later in his …

Origins of Witch Hunts? Are We Still Ferreting Out and Persecuting Witches?

John Green's Crash Course lecture #10 on European History: "Wars, disease, climate changes, and shifts in religious and political power threw the European world into turmoil. People were looking for a scapegoat, and for many it was a time of magical thinking. So, maybe witches were responsible for all the problems? It was a popular …

1917 Russian Revolution in 13 Minutes

Epic History TV in this video explains "the major events of Russia's TWO revolutions of 1917– the February Revolution that ended Tsarist rule in Russia, and the October Revolution, that brought the Bolsheviks to power. We explain the causes of Tsar Nicholas II's growing unpopularity - the role of the mysterious Siberian mystic Rasputin, Russia's …

Philosophical Underpinnings For Studying History

Did Cleopatra’s Nose, Henry the VIII’s Libido, Richard III’s Horse and Your Ancestors’ Luck Make Crucial Historical Differences? Exploring Divine Providence, Retribution, Destiny, Predestination, Teleology and Chaos Theory Chaos Theory or Butterfly Effect Has Idea of Progress Disappeared? Why Counterfactuals Are So Popular ‘Inevitable’ Triumph of Democracy, Capitalism Now Very Much in Doubt Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction Power of Counter-Factual …

Was 9/11 Avoidable, Preventable?

Al Qaeda's attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, seemed like a black swan or a bolt out of the blue at the time, an unprovoked, sudden and shocking event that dramatically changed Americans' perceptions of the contemporary world. Osama Bin Laden and 19 hijackers, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, changed the world …

Black Swan Theories Become Fashionable

Political pundits in 2016 tried to attribute their failure to accurately assess the chances of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination and election by asserting that it is a "black swan," meaning a totally unanticipated event that suddenly and completely alters world history. Jack Shafer wrote in Politico that "the Trump phenomenon is a Black …

Chaos Theory or Butterfly Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect The details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) are influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Edward Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a …

Exploring Divine Providence, Retribution, Destiny, Predestination, Teleology and Chaos Theory

Writing history as if every event is inevitable is called "teleology." It is probably what has turned more students off the study of history than anything else, the notion that history is fixed and pre-determined. Entire academic courses of philosophy or theology can be devoted to debating it. Amazon.com lists 800 books on the subject. …