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HISTORY154 - Entertainment

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I owe this blog topic to my financial advisor, who suggested it recently.  After a few minutes looking at the subject online, however, I was overwhelmed with how many forms of entertainment there are today (Wikipedia lists well over a hundred), let alone how many forms have existed since prehistoric times and the thousands of years since.  So, my approach was to hit the high points, trying to represent the evolution of entertainment, along with evolution of humans and technology. After an introduction, defining entertainment, I will discuss the history of entertainment in historic periods, starting with prehistoric times, then ancient civilizations, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, followed by the 18 th , 19 th , 20 th , and 21 st centuries.  I will finish with a list of the 20 most popular forms of entertainment today. As usual, I will list my principal sources at the end.   Introduction Entertainment is any activity, performance, or media designe...
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HISTORY153 - Isthmus of Tehuantepec

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Recently I gave a talk at the Hacienda at the Canyon retirement community in which I live about my Great Grandfather Eugene Ring’s adventures during his unplanned travels to the California Gold Rush in 1848 - 1850.  Part of those travels included crossing southern Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec (see map below), under duress, in 1850, after being abandoned with nine other shipmates on the Pacific coast by his sailing ship while they were ashore looking for much-needed water .  (For those interested, my Great Grandfather’s memoir of his complete travels is attached.) The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is a narrow land bridge in southern Mexico.     After giving my presentation, I realized that there was still a lot I didn’t know about the overall history of this fascinating place where my Great Grandfather was so sorely tested.  So, this blog will cover the History of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. After an introduction, I will discuss the Isthmus’s early Mesoamerica...
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