academia

The Age of Númenor begins after the destruction of Beleriand in the War of Wrath during the First Age of Arda. The history of the First Age is the story of the long defeat of the Eldar (the Elves) and the Edain (Men) by Morgoth and his armies. A defeat eventually reversed when Eärendil the...

A "landmark" paper appeared in Science this month, making a bold entry into the "Great Divergence" literature--the long-standing debate about what, if anything, was "special" about the West that caused so much of modernity to begin there. The paper's entitled "The Church, intensive kinship, and...