I know some of these days are completely uninteresting, and thats okay! They’re pretty meh to me too. The reason why I even write posts about these days is because I am just keeping track of my time at university, the Chronicles are basically like journal entries that I share with my comrades. So even if a day sucks and the post is super short that begs no comments, I’ll still post it for a record.

For day 7 it’s my Europe classes, and my early Europe class today is still nothing worth writing in detail about. I mean no disrespect to my professor or historians of early Europe, I just mean there is nothing really relevant to write here, I will try to connect my experiences in my classes to being a communist in a western university. Today was focused on finishing up about Spain (Ferdinand and Isabella) and moving on to Italy, when it wasn’t Italy and was just a bunch of city-states within the Italian Peninsula. There is something worth talking about that I did learn in this class: how banks were made. So banks back then used to be private, mainly family banks. A wealthy family would store their money and lend it out to the poor. The problem with this, though, is that in Christianity lending money at interest is essentially illegal, it’s not allowed. So to bypass this religious law, they forced Jewish people to be bankers since they were not bound by that law (so I guess that’s where that super antisemitic stereotype comes from). Eventually the church became more lenient on lending and allowed there to be an interest fee capped at 5%. Which just seems super evil to me but whatever. I guess this was an early credit system, and that sucks. This was between 1300s and 1400s, I didn’t realize how far back these systems went.

My Modern History Class we learned about the stages during the first phase of the French Revolution, where it was a sort of protest by the 3rd estate against the 2nd and 1st, then it escalated further and further as the stages go on. I had no idea that Marie Antoinette nearly got merc’d by an angry mob of drunk women, so thats interesting. During stage 2, which was the storming of Bastille, we saw a drawing of those two guys (the governor and his son in law) with their heads on stakes! Crazy! I knew the revolution was brutal, what with the guillotine, butI had no idea the violence started. So far back. I remember writing a post on here a while back asking about why the French Revolution is seen as “better” than the Russian one even though heads were being lobbed off in France rather than guns a blazing in Russia (the answer I got was “anti-communism,” which makes sense but I’d like to research it more), and this class got me thinking about that again and how, nowadays on social media, people are trying to “demonize” the French Revolution and exonerate Marie Antoinette. Has anyone else seen this happening? Anyway, we finished class with the liberal phase and I think in the next one we will get on to the Revolution phase where the big blade is taken out.

Also I am sorry that this post came out so late, my days with my European classes run long so by the time I eat home I only have around two hours to do whatever needs to be done at home before I go to bed.