Cross-posted from the BLM thread…
Around 27:50, she starts talking about the Viking ship. Yes, it was actually sailed from Norway. It lived under a roof with open sides in Lincoln Park near the original totem pole (and the BEST climbing tree, sadly no longer there) east of Addison and Lake Shore Drive for decades, until it was moved indoors to a suburb. I believe it is still available to be seen at that new location. But growing up in the 60’s, it was just something in an open shed near a playground. There are a lot of remnants like that from the Columbian Exposition, still available if you know where to look.
I’ve been behind the scenes at the Museum of Science and Industry (only permanent building built for the Columbian Exposition, because it housed the world’s fine art…and still standing) in their archive vaults and seen odd bits there, including a part of the Viking ship, which I thought was weird because they do have the ship on display in the suburbs. It was taken off when the ship was put in the outside shed thing, to preserve it. Also, a very specific styrofoam packaging that made me say “that looks like it held a Calder mobile” at which point the person showing me got very large eyes and said “I know which mobile you mean!”.
all the things that would be fascists conveniently forget about when they glorify Sparta.
Of course, it could always give right wingers ideas. Waiting for de Santis to take inspiration from
This weirdness played out no more conspicuously than in the forced military education system for Sparta’s boys, which amounted to a Boy Scout troop from hell, taking children from their homes at the age of 7 and forcing them to fight each other and steal food in order to survive.
I suspect that at least some of these fascists see stuff like that as a feature of the Spartan way, not a bug…
And they defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnese Wars not by doing what they were famous for, but adopting Athenian’s methods and tactics. Diplomacy and developing a navy of their own.
The Spartans got their collective asses handed to them by a Theban general who basically unleashed their greatest fear, he freed their slaves.
Diplomacy and developing a navy of their own, notably including selling out Ionia to the Persians to pay for it. The Athenian Empire was at least founded on the idea of protecting those cities, the Spartan attempt at one was pure cynical ambition from the very start.
Victor Davis Hanson wrote two decent books about Ancient Greece before his descent into a neo nazi shitgibbon pundit:
The Soul of Battle (1999), where Epaminondas is compated favorably to Sherman and Patton as a liberator
A War Like No Other, (2005) which gives a detailed study of the Peloponnese War and how it was fought.
I don’t recommend anything he wrote after 2005. The guy let white privilege rot his brain after getting some acclaim.
I had read Hanson’s The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (1999) back in the day and he really pushes that there is something special about the Greek yeoman soldier compared to all others. I understand he is also the one behind the idea of literal othismos, that Greek hoplites fought in some peculiar ritualized way completely unlike all the other contemporaries, despite themselves never commenting on any of it. It makes me think a desire for European exceptionalism was already warping his understanding even then.
Totally agree. He was a professor at my college in the 80s, and I knew him ever so slightly through a former friend. He had a good reputation as a classicist and then went totally batshit crazy after 9/11. He embraced his Hoover fellowship, the neocons, and thought his niche expertise in ancient Greece translated to overall expertise in current US foreign policy and international relations. 
Bananas are the real gateway drug.
Yeh, I mean, just look at them.
[ETA] on a different note…
The women’s knitting economy was not just in Iceland. My Nana participated in the black market for knit sweaters that saw them produced at homes in northern England and sold in certain well-known high street stores in Edinburgh in the 60’s and 70’s. 
