Essentially, the lecture covers the period for which I have data and models. My periodization is somewhat different from Prof. Synder's and was based more on periods over which I wanted to estimate models:
Thursday, August 6, 2026
A World of Empire
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Hitler, Stalin and You: What is History?
The video above is a lecture by Prof. Timothy Snyder that introduces a series of his lectures on Hitler and Stalin Today. The first lecture (above) starts by asking the question "What is History?" The ten lecture series is available on YouTube at Timothy Synder: Hitler and Stalin Today.
For me, the lecture is interesting because it provides an opportunity to explain how Quantitative History, Cliometrics or General Systems History differ from the academic discipline of History.
My interest in General Systems Theory and General Systems History is as a framework for developing quantitative, historical models of societal development.
There are a few points from the lecture that I want to emphasize:
- It's difficult to make policy change without knowing history. We have to know what is possible and what is meaningful.
- What Can Happen: (1) It's not true that "anything can happen". There are limits. (2) It is also not true that "Nothing is possible". Everything isn't over-determined. Some things are possible and somethings are not! The more you know about the past, the more you understand what is possible.
- Lines Coming from the Past in History: If you are not on one of these lines, the present will seem confusing (see below).
- No one knows what is going on right now. There is no way to start from the present and try to understand the future. You can have some confidence in things that have happened in the past!
- History Doesn't Repeat. You can recognize patterns. Living people are the actors.You cannot go back to the "Golden Age". Nazism and Stalinism (and Trumpism?) are schemes about the past that are designed to disempower you.
- The things that actually happened must be possible because they actually happened. If you are aware of the terrible things that have happened (mass murder, concentration camps, genocide, etc.) you can make them less likely to happen in the future.
- History involves Testing Hypotheses and finding out that some hypotheses are wrong.
- History, Texts and Data: History is Imperial (consuming everything) as long as there are texts. No texts, no history. For Quantitative History, no data, no history (we do have some data all the way back to the year zero from the Maddison Project).
- Mental models vs. Mathematical Models From the standpoint of General Systems Theory, historians deal with mental models, flexible generalizations that can be used to explain events. Quantitative history deals with formal models (usually mathematical) that are applied to historical data. In the early days of Quantitative history, a lot of sterile academic arguments revolved around whether formal models were better. They are not; they are complementary and one cannot exist without the other.
- History is a guard against simplifying narratives. For example, 19th Century Germany failed because it had a Welfare State.
- In History, everything is related to everything. Good history asks what is meaningful.
- History has to be communicated using narratives that people understand. This is a problem for Quantitative History, Cliometrics and General Systems History.
Spaghetti Plots: Lines from the Past
The graphic above is taken from the IPCC Climate Scenarios that show actual historical CO2 emissions (the early dark black line) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) which are possible future emissions pathways, lines of the past projected into the future. The RCPs show what is thought to be possible.
The graphic above shows Global Temperature projects from my WL20 World Model (see Global Temperature Projections) given various input variables: RW (Random Walk), W (World System), TECH (Technological Change), CO2 (Only CO2 emissions as an input variable) and BAU (Business as Usual, no input variables). Notice how the actual data from 1970 to beyond 2000 diverges from all projections.
In the sense of RCPs and WL20 World Model projections, lines of the past are projected into the future using different Geopolitical inputs, a link between Quantitative and General History. There are other links between mental and formal models; one is neither right nor wrong without hypothesis testing.
Playlist
- What is History? Reviewed in this post.
- A World of Empire
- What is Fascism?
- What is Communism?
- What is Ukraine?
- Why was Communism Appealing?
- How was Mass Killing Possible?
- Back to Colonialism
- East European Dissident Thought
- Oligarchy, Neofascism and Liberation
Notes
- Timothy Synder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. From 2017 to 2025 he was the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University.
- Tadeusz Borowski a Polish writer and journalist. His wartime poetry and stories dealing with his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz are recognized as classics of Polish literature.
- History the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened.
- Nazism also known as National Socialism (NS), is the far-right, ultranationalist, totalitarian ideology associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). It emerged in Germany during Hitler's rise to power and was frequently called Hitlerism. Nazism is a form of fascism that emphasizes pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy which identify ethnic Germans and Nordic Aryans as a master race.
- Stalinism a political ideology advocating for the totalitarian means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by dictator Joseph Stalin and in Soviet satellite states between 1944 and 1953. Stalinism included the creation of a one man totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, forced collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.
- Trumpism the political ideology behind Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, and his political base. It is often used in close conjunction with the Make America Great Again (MAGA) political movement. It comprises ideologies such as right-wing populism, right-wing antiglobalism, national conservatism, Christian nationalism, and neo-nationalism, and features significant illiberal, authoritarian,[1][2] and autocratic beliefs and practices.[b] Other ideologies include nativism,[5][6] economic nationalism,[7][8] anti-environmentalism,[25] interventionism, and anti-intellectualism..\
- World History a field of historical study examines history from a global perspective. It emerged centuries ago; some leading practitioners have included Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). The field became much more active (in terms of university teaching, textbooks, scholarly journals, and academic associations) in the late 20th century.
- Societal Collapse (also known as civilizational collapse or systems collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence.
- The Maddison Project also known as the Maddison Historical Statistics Project, is a project to collate historical economic statistics, such as GDP, GDP per capita, and labor productivity.
- Quantitative History a method of historical research that uses quantitative, statistical and computer resources. It is a type of the social science history.
- Cliometrics sometimes called 'new economic history' or 'econometric history', is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history (especially social and economic history). It is a quantitative approach to economic history (as opposed to qualitative or ethnographic). There has been a revival in 'new economic history' since the late 1990s.
- General Systems Theory the transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e., cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" when it expresses synergy or emergent behavior.
- Complex Systems a system composed of many components that interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as a power grid, transportation or communication systems, complex software and electronic systems, social and economic organizations (like cities), an ecosystem, a living cell, and, ultimately, for some authors, the entire universe.
- Heterarchy a system of organization where the elements of the organization are unranked (non-hierarchical) or where they possess the potential to be ranked a number of different ways. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same "horizontal" position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role. In biological taxonomy, however, the requisite features of heterarchy involve, for example, a species sharing, with a species in a different family, a common ancestor which it does not share with members of its own family.
- World-Systems Theory (also known as world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective) is a multidisciplinary approach to world history and social change which emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis. World-systems theorists argue that their theory explains the rise and fall of states, income inequality, social unrest, and imperialism.
- Geopolitics the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. Geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them. According to multiple researchers, the term is currently being used to describe a broad spectrum of concepts, in a general sense used as "a synonym for international political relations", but more specifically "to imply the global structure of such relations"; this usage builds on an "early-twentieth-century term for a pseudoscience of political geography" and other pseudoscientific theories of historical and geographic determinism.
- Level of Analysis used in the social sciences to point to the location, size, or scale of a research target. It is distinct from unit of observation in that the former refers to a more or less integrated set of relationships while the latter refers to the distinct unit from which data have been or will be gathered. Together, the unit of observation and the level of analysis help define the population of a research enterprise.
- Spaghetti Plots (also known as a spaghetti chart, spaghetti diagram, or spaghetti model) is a method of viewing data to visualize possible flows through systems. Flows depicted in this manner appear like noodles, hence the coining of this term.
ChatGPT
Route 66: On a Motorcycle
Juy 28, 2026 2 Wheels, 14 days, 2,447 Miles: A Motorcycle Tour of Route 66 NY Times
Pure Nostalgia
- U. S. Route 66 one of the original highways in the United States Numbered Highway System. Established on November 11, 1926, with signage erected the following year,[4] the highway ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before terminating in Santa Monica, California, covering 2,448 miles (3,940 km).
- Route 66: The TV Series an American adventure crime drama television series that premiered on CBS on October 7, 1960, and ran until March 20, 1964, for a total of 116 episodes.
- The Dust Bowl of the 1930s a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of natural factors (severe drought) and human-made factors: a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion, most notably the destruction of the natural topsoil by settlers in the region.
- U. S. Interstate Highway System The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, or the Eisenhower Interstate System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. The system extends throughout the contiguous United States and has routes in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico.
- The Okies Many of these migrants—often referred to at the time as "Okies", especially those from Oklahoma—traveled along the highway, a movement later depicted in works such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
- Great Depression in the United States commonly (though not universally) dated to the Wall Street crash of October 1929. The nadir came in 1931–1933, and recovery came in 1940. The stock market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, famine, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth as well as for personal advancement. Altogether, this period represented a traumatic loss of confidence in the economic future.
- Blog Roll: The Great Depression The name is a misnomer.
- The Roaring Twenties sometimes stylized as Roaring '20s, refers to the 1920s decade in music and fashion, as it happened in Western society and Western culture. It was a period of economic prosperity with a distinctive cultural edge in the United States and internationally, particularly in major cities such as Berlin, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York City, Paris,] and Sydney. In France, the decade was known as the années folles ('crazy years'), emphasizing the era's social, artistic and cultural dynamism. Jazz blossomed, the flapper redefined the modern look for British and American women, and Art Deco peaked.
- The Jazz Age a period from 1920 to the early 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles gained worldwide popularity. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as mainly sourced from the culture of African Americans, jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on popular culture continued long afterwards.
Video
Route 66, The TV Series. an American adventure crime drama television series that premiered on CBS on October 7, 1960, and ran until March 20, 1964, for a total of 116 episodes. The series was created by Herbert B. Leonard and Stirling Silliphant, who were also responsible for the ABC drama Naked City, from which Route 66 was an indirect spin-off. Both series employed a format with elements of both traditional drama and anthology drama, but the difference was where the shows were set: Naked City was set in New York City, while Route 66 had its setting change from week to week, with each episode being shot on location.
The Route 66 Centennial in 2026 marks 100 years of the iconic Mother Road, featuring nationwide events, restoration projects, and cultural celebrations across all eight states from Chicago to Santa Monica.
Overview of the Centennial
The Route 66 Centennial commemorates the 100th anniversary of the highway’s official designation on November 11, 1926, celebrating its legacy as a symbol of American freedom, adventure, and road-trip culture
. Although decommissioned in 1985, Route 66 remains a cultural icon, and the centennial highlights its historical, economic, and social impact through a variety of events, restoration projects, and interactive experiences
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Key Events and Activities
- National Kick-Off Celebration: Springfield, Missouri, hosted the official Centennial Kick-Off from April 30 to May 2, 2026, featuring a globally livestreamed concert, a 1920s-themed gala, historical programming, and community events
- route66roadmap.com
. - Caravans and Rallies: Organized caravans, including the “Main Street of America” Route 66 Caravan and vintage car rallies, allow travelers to journey along the historic route from California to Illinois
- Only In Your State
. - Motorcycle Tours: Harley-Davidson’s H.O.G. Ride 365® includes five special rides along Route 66, offering participants exclusive challenge coins and commemorative experiences
- route66centennial.org
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. - EV and Innovation Road Trips: The Electric Duo and Bosch Wiper Blades are conducting 2,400-mile road trips along Route 66, showcasing electric vehicles and automotive innovation while celebrating the highway
- route66centennial.org
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. - Cultural and Educational Programs: Initiatives like the All-American Boys Chorus’ “Voices of Route 66,” immersive dome experiences, and documentary screenings explore the highway’s history, music, and storytelling
- route66centennial.org
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. - Festivals and Local Celebrations: Each state along Route 66 hosts centennial events, including car shows, bike weeks, heritage runs, and town-specific festivals in cities like Kingman, Flagstaff, and Amarillo
- Only In Your State
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Restoration and Preservation Efforts
The centennial also emphasizes preservation, with projects including:
- Restoration of historic motels, gas stations, bridges, and neon signs.
- Installation of new Route 66 Centennial Monuments and interactive markers with QR codes linking to local history.
- Grants and support for small businesses and tourism infrastructure along the route
- route66roadmap.com
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Planning Your Centennial Trip
- Timing: Most centennial activities occur from spring through late autumn 2026, with peak events in June and November
- theroute66planner.com
. - Route: Route 66 spans eight states—Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—covering approximately 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica
- route66roadmap.com
. - Tips: Book accommodations early, combine official events with personal stops at diners, museums, and roadside attractions, and follow local Route 66 associations for updates
- theroute66planner.com
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Special Highlights
- Art and Music: The Route 66 Centennial Orchestral Suite and Art Quilt Project celebrate the highway’s cultural impact
- route66centennial.org
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. - Interactive Experiences: American Truck Simulator now features a full digital recreation of Route 66, allowing virtual exploration
- route66centennial.org
. - Community Engagement: Programs like “One Good Thing Along Route 66” encourage travelers to perform acts of kindness at 100-mile intervals along the route
- Only In Your State
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The 2026 Route 66 Centennial is not only a celebration of the past but also a living tribute to the road’s enduring spirit, offering travelers a unique opportunity to experience history, culture, and adventure along one of America’s most legendary highways - route66roadmap.com
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