Πίνακας της Ελλάδας στα πρόθυρα θανάτου στο Μεσολόγγι το 1825, του Γάλλου ζωγράφου Eugene Delacroix, 1827.  Τις 9 Δεκεμβρίου 2021, έκανα μια διάλεξη για την Ελληνική Επανάσταση του 1821. Ομίλησα με τον Διεθνή Ελληνικό Ομιλο της Ελλάδας.  Να ο σύνδεσμος για την διάλεξη και συζήτηση,  https://youtu.be/H0yx_J1AndQ Εδώ ο σύνδεσμος ομιλίας μου περί του Μηχανισμού των Αντικυθήρων (στα Ελληνικά) https://www.facebook.com/ dimitris.voggolis/videos/ 893253847991746

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I taught at Humboldt State University in northern California, the American University in Washington, DC, and the University of New Orleans in Louisiana.   Learning out in the open   My teaching was about our environmental tragedy: how corporate business money captured the government, academia, journalism, and the medical establishment, with the result of giving polluters a free hand. The consequences of this massive corruption, I told my students, was cancer and debilitating neurological diseases and ecocide pushing wildlife towards extinction -- and the rising climate chaos.   I tried to mingle theory with observation. In each of the universities I taught, I invited speakers and took the students to a field trip.   In northern California, we spent a couple days with the Hoopa Native Americans, learning their painful history and seeing them dancing their traditions, and eating salmon they had caught and cooked.   In sout...

  Fear -- and the Ukrainian War   Prologue   Thucydides says that fear sparked the Peloponnesian War. Fear was behind Sparta’s attack on Athens.    In the 50 years or so after the Persian wars, 479-431 BCE, Sparta watched the rise of Athenian power with grave concern – and fear. This was the main reason for the breakout of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE.   The united forces of Sparta and Athens, and their Greek allies, defeated the vast armies and navies of the Persian Empire in early fifth century BCE.   At the end of the Persian wars and the expelling of the Persians from Greece, Athens, and Sparta parted ways. Sparta remained the Greek superpower in Peloponnesos. It refused, however, to join Athens in protecting Hellas, Greek poleis (city-states) spread all over the Mediterranean, from the Persians.   Athens founded the Delian League in Apollo’s sacred island of Delos in the Aegean and close to the Ionian coast dotted by Greek poleis. The Per...

Astronomy and the Trojan War: Solar eclipse over Ithaca, October 30, 1207 BCE, Odysseus killing the suitors (right). Painting by Evi Sarantea. Courtesy Evi Sarantea.   I read Homer in High School. And slowly, in my college classes in ancient, medieval, and modern Greek history, I realized Homer’s epic poems were at the very core of Hellenic civilization.    The more I read the Greek tragic poets and historians of the fifth century BCE, the larger the icon of Homer became in my mind.   Homer in antiquity   According to the second century philosopher, Athenaios, Aischylos said that the stories of Homer became a banquet for the Greeks ( Deipnosophistai  8.347d), a source of wonderful stories, and a ceaseless fountain of inspiration and pride from which philosophers, scientists, dramatic poets, rhetoricians, military strategists, and men of ideas borrowed for the creation and enrichment of Greek literature and civilization.    The Greeks also sang the...

  The US EPA remains in deep crisis. The industry wants a pliant agency or no agency at all. I worked for the EPA from 1979 to 2004.  I wrote Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA (with Mckay Jenkisn, Bloomsbury Press, 2014).  I am adding a link to a YouTube video of a recent conversation about EPA:    https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fGmZlwKaOJ4

  Marble column showing an uprooted woman in honor of the hundreds of thousands of Greeks uprooted from Asia Minor. Park in Nikaia, near Piraeus, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.   100-meter sprint   In 1960, I was a high school junior in Argostoli, Cephalonia, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea between Greece and Italy. In addition to my regular classes in science and humanities, I was also learning English. I had decided that, at the end of my senior year, I would leave Cephalonia and Greece for the United States for a college education.   My years in high school, 1956-1961, were the happiest in my life. I was thoroughly innocent of the dangers of the raging Cold War, though I had vague memories of the Greek Civil War, 1946-1949, from stories I heard.     I was an outstanding student. I excelled in athletics as well, especially in 100-meter sprint. My boyfriends were also athletes. We trained together and often, when the weather was nice, we walke...

  I was delighted that a Greek journalist, Achilleas Rodites, interviewed me about the reasons I wrote my book on the history of the Antikythera Mechanism, essentially studying how and why the ancient Greeks created this computer of genius 2,200 years ago. I spent about ten years in this book, starting with mythology, then philosophy, then science and, finally, politics, so I could understand the Greeks and their science and civilization.  I concluded the following: that the Greeks had a dream of a unified Cosmos made up of the sky and Earth working together in harmony and beauty. Pythagoras captured that dream beautifully. Add to that the science and vision of Aristotle passed on to Alexander the Great and the dream becomes real. Aristotle advised Alexander to unify Greece, which he did, then to conquer Persia because Persia, in the fourth century BCE, threatened freedom and democracy in Greece. Alexander defeated superior Persian armies and turned that vast empire into a Gre...