I’m working on my MA in History through Goddard. By the time I’m done, i should have enough information on the Celts to write a book which could do a lot of damage to how we today view the development of European culture. I will have to let you know as things go along.

Some of this is more my own research than anything else. I found out about the link between the Suez Canal and the cotton trade through the encyclopedia. I was taking a course on the American South and we covered the destruction of the South’s cotton during the Civil War. My professor was none to pleased that I mentioned the Suez Canal, though. The canal opened in 1869, four years after the Civil War came to an end. Cotton was commonly grown in Persia, India and Egypt, and had been imported into Europe beginning in the Middle Ages. However, it was expensive to both import over land and around Africa. Combined with the Civil War and the opening of the Suez, cotton was much more readily available from India and Persia than from America.

The information on the Celts would take roughly a five page bibliography. There is a great deal of back and forth on the meaning of a lot of what the Celts did. However, the notion of the Athenian Democracy being the instigator of American Democracy was a myth created, I believe, by the Founding Fathers in order to distance themselves from Britain which had practiced some form of democracy for two millennia by that point. The House of Burgesses in Virginia was fairly close to the councils that most towns had used for some time.

I would have to think through a lot of what I know. I have an adverse belief in mythology being taught as history. BTW, I did read through the list from the site you mentioned and all of those I knew of from a long time ago.

Take care.

There are a lot of myths that get taught as truth in grade schools from the idea that Democracy derives from Athenian government to how the Civil War was the great destroyer of the South. The reality on Democracy is that most cultures had what we could call a proto-democracy. The Celtic Kings, for instance, ruled at the will of the Clans and the Druidach. Many of the early English monarchs were elected by the lords. In many ways, democracy has been evolving for centuries rather than undergoing this amazing revolution with the creation of the United States. What destroyed the South was far less the Civil War and the opening of the Suez Canal which completely obliterated the price of cotton on the world market. The Suez Canal made it far easier and cheaper to import cotton from East Africa and India. The South could not compete with the new prices, and likely would not have been able to do so even with slavery.

Just thought I would add this.