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founding

I like where you're going with this. My wife and I returned last night from a month on an alumni tour with nearly two dozen fellow alums considering the archaeological ruins of Türkiye led by a Turk with some Greek ancestry and a wealth of knowledge accumulated as a tour guide for more than thirty years. We visited numerous mosques, museums, archaeological digs, battlefields, art galleries, restored cities, countless monuments and extended bus rides filled with detailed discussion of current events, historical analysis of national development, Eastern Orthodoxy, population migrations, genocides, colonial exploitation, boat tours of the Hellespont and the Bosphorus and the roles those geographical features have played as the gateway between the East and the West. It's a lot of material to digest in just a few weeks. Several of my fellow alums had been, like me, English majors, back in the days when that degree was still a synonym for unemployable. I remember when that and fifty cents could get you a cup of coffee. Substitute teaching then required a teaching credential from an authorized school of education. Fifteen hours of period lit would fulfill a requirement. Sixty or more was disqualifying. One of those fellow alums had taken courses from two of the English professors from whom I had taken multiple courses. One of those courses had only three texts, the collected works of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Dero Saunders abridged edition. Our tour guide greatly appreciated having at least one or two people aboard who understood what he meant when he called something Byzantine. I spent my third year of college on the rooftop of the Moody Towers men's dorm in Houston reading both volumes of Spengler's Decline of the West (Das Untergang des Abendlandes) instead of going to class, and for that I was expelled from the Honor's Program. The advisor was a history professor. Toynbee was part of the curriculum. Spengler was not. Both Heidegger's 'Being and Time' and Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' were banned books in the philosophy department. At least the English Department would let you read 'Les Nausea. The tour ended with three nights in Cappodocia spent in a hotel that consisted entirely of cliffside cave dwellings. It was perfect for surveying the otherworldly landscape from a hot air balloon.

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Interesting, Kevin!

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I'm very excited to read this book. I've never encountered a writer who says exactly what they mean better than Coates does. And you post make a fine point; whenever we examine the stories told about our past, we need to recognize that all the story-tellers have an axe to grind and consider in what context and for what purpose and audience they were devised.

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author

And one thing that Coates reminds us of is that each and every one of us is also a story teller.

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