Fresno Pacific University History Program

08/11/2024

Happy August 11 (5138?)! Glad for my student, now colleague, Alfredo Ramirez -- because of him, I have thought about the long-count calendar: Wikipedia, "The Long Count calendar identifies a date by counting the number of days from a starting date that is generally calculated to be August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6 in the Julian calendar (or −3113 in astronomical year numbering). There has been much debate over the precise correlation between the Western calendars and the Long Count calendars. The August 11 date is based on the GMT correlation."

TLDR: Did the world start on August 11?

The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is a non-repeating base-20 and base-18 calendar used by several pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya. For this reason, it is often known as the Maya Long Count calendar. Using a modified vigesimal tally, the Long Count calendar identifies a....

07/20/2024

The perfect pangram today was instantaneous for us Romanists.

07/06/2024

FPU Student Colleagues: please be sure to apply for Private Donor Scholarships! We don't want you to miss them because of their mid-summer release!
Scholarships.Fresno.Edu

07/05/2024

I did a review of Bregman's _HumanKind_ for the next _Pacific Journal_ -- please read the book if you have time this summer. If you are also a child of the end of the last millennium, it is likely to shift your paradigm as much as it did mine. Here is a wordcloud of the review; thanks to the amazing Chris for turning me on to the scholar and the work. I have been so busy arguing against concepts like the "perfectibility of man" and the "end of history" that I didn't examine my own assumptions enough.

https://www.amazon.com/Humankind-Hopeful-History-Rutger-Bregman/dp/0316418536

06/27/2024

The annual plaques are inscribed for another year and displayed in the Honors Hall: congratulations to Jan, Jasmine, Joseph, and Bre!

06/21/2024

The Minoan site that has been excavated near where the new Cretan airport will be gives us another chance to gently rib our Archaeologist friends for resorting to religious ritual when we have insufficient evidence. Lucky for us, Classicists and Philologists never assume major literary connections based on a few, possibly random, verbal similarities. Anthropologists never construct a whole civilization based on one questionable artefact.

06/19/2024

I hope it will be a meaningful Juneteenth for all of us. I appreciate my friend John posting this flyer as a clear “lest we forget.” As Julie Roys posted yesterday, “Leading up to Juneteenth, historian
urges taking time to remember the crushing reality & sorrows of slavery. ‘Many people in U.S. are quick to gloss over the unpleasantness of human bo***ge & simply celebrate the freedom that came afterwards.’"

06/03/2024

Time for my annual reminder to you all that one reason to live the life of the mind is that you get rich!

05/28/2024

Today is Veronica Day! Our friend Vero is the cover and five pages of Pacific Magazine! Thanks for leavening our world, VIMG. I'm so fortunate to have been part of your journey.

05/27/2024

I hope it is a meaningful Memorial Day for you, friends! And I hope you have amazing heroes in your family like my Uncle’s Brother, Charlie Carr – check out the Serpens Monument if you are ever at Arlington Cemetery. And I don’t think you’ll find a better small-town memorial to our heroes than Jackson’s Veterans Park, just a block from the McKibben House.