Here is a copy of what I am sending out to my mailing list today.
The Xenophile Historian Newsletter, #13
( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/ )
Greetings once again to all my loyal readers! Charles Kimball is back at last, to give you the latest news on my world history website. It has been eleven months since I last wrote a newsletter, the longest gap between newsletters to date. Yes, I’ve been busy in the real world again, though not as much as I was in 2006. Early in the year my wife and I sold our house in Florida, bought a new one in Kentucky, and bought furniture to put in it. We also had another wedding and another funeral in the family last August.
If you want to keep up with my current adventures, feel free to visit the blog I launched nearly a year ago, The Xenohistorian Weblog. My original intention behind the blog was to announce updates to The Xenophile Historian there more frequently than I do in these newsletters, and post random thoughts worth writing down as I get them. I am doing those things, all right, but because the blog turned out to be an easy way to report news to the rest of the family, since most of them are out of state, most of the time I end up writing stuff that only close friends and relatives are likely to find interesting. Like the video I recently made of our parrot hanging upside down and screaming, to get attention. Here’s the link to the blog’s home page:
http://xenohistorian.wordpress.com
If you only want to read my entries pertaining to the website, click where it says “Website Articles,” or just use the next link:
http://xenohistorian.wordpress.com/category/website-articles/
Actually, I wanted to wait until I had some real news worth reporting, like the uploading of a new history paper. I’m not inclined to send a newsletter at weekly or monthly intervals, whether anything is happening or not. Well, I finally have news for you now. The main thing is that I finally finished proofing the draft to my world history textbook, after putting it on the shelf for two years. Last January 5 I sent it back to the publisher. The worst part was that their desktop publisher removed all the page numbers from the table of contents and the index, and because I didn’t trust my own software to do it right, I had to look up all my references and put in the page numbers manually. The index alone took up all my free time in November and December that I had hadn’t alloted to something else. I took a whole week off work in each month around Thanksgiving and Christmas; officially it was because I was in a “use it or lose it” situation regarding vacation time, but the real reason was to devote more effort to getting the manuscript proofed. Now it looks like it will finally see the light of day in a few months, hopefully by the time my next newsletter goes out.
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, go here to see a sample chapter and the three appendices to my book, “A Biblical Interpretation of World History”:
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/worldhis/
The good news is that aside from the index, the changes I have made in the proofreading are minor; correcting a typo, removing an extra space, deleting a footnote that’s no longer relevant, and so on. How often can you say that about a ten-year-old manuscript that discusses current events, among other things?
For my Middle Eastern History series, I did a complete rewrite of Chapter 2. And boy, do I mean rewrite; even the name of the chapter was changed, from “New Nations, New Peoples” to “The Chariot Age.” I introduced some new nations and new peoples when I rewrote Chapter 1 in 2006, so it didn’t make sense to keep that name on another chapter. I also changed the beginning and the end dates; now they run from 1777 to 950 B.C. The changes came because I added quite a bit of new material, especially in the sections on the Hittites, Hurrians and Elamites, so even if you have read Chapter 2 before, I think it would be worth the effort to read it again. Here are the links and the subheadings:
Part I ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/neareast/ne02a.html )
The Amorite Period
The Assyrian Debut
Hammurabi
The “Hittites”
The Hurrians
The Kassites
Israel Becomes a Nation
Part II ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/neareast/ne02b.html )
The Warrior Pharaohs
The First Arabs
The Middle Assyrian Empire
The Middle Elamite Period
The Other Nebuchadnezzar
Suppiluliumas the Great
Tiglath-Pileser I
Israel: The United Kingdom
When I got done it occurred to me that a lot of the names and places mentioned in Chapter 2 are too obscure to mean much to the typical modern reader. For example, there probably isn’t anything in the sections on the Elamites that can be related to the modern world. To help put the events of the narrative in the proper perspective, I created a timeline of Middle Eastern history, from 3200 to 500 B.C.
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/neareast/Timeline.htm
In other news, I made several additions to not-entirely-serious philosophy folder, which I call “The Holy Book of Universal Truths, K.U.P.” (Kimball’s Unauthorized Perversion).
For Chapter 1, my page of smart quotes, I created a new section for those special Southern quotes:
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/kup1.html#South
For Chapter 3, my page on politics in general, I wrote “Global Warming: Good Science or Bad Religion?”, where I give thirty-three reasons why the current hysteria about global warming makes it more of a religion than a science.
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/warming.html
I also wrote “In Defense of Christmas,” because this season I felt the politically correct crowd had gone too far:
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/xmas.html
In Chapter 4 I did a commentary on who is tolerant and who isn’t these days, called “For I Have Tasted the Fruit”:
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/kup4.html#fruit
For Chapter 6, I gave my views on the current theories about the world ending in 2012, comparing the Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, and the Book of Daniel:
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/2012.html
This weekend my newest history paper went up. Instead of looking at what happened in a specific time and place, I tried to put all of history into one package, compressing down the most important points I’ve learned, after studying history for thirty-nine years. Back in 1968, Will Durant, the most important historian of the past century, wrote a little book called “The Lessons of History,” which summarized his other works, like the eleven-volume “The Story of Civilization.” Now I guess I’ve done the same. If you only read one of my history papers, read this one.
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/history.html
And finally, belated birthday wishes are in order, because as of last December 14, The Xenophile Historian had its tenth birthday! Yes, the site is now ten years old; in Internet time that’s like seventy years, right? It seems like a lifetime, anyway.
For those who didn’t see the site in its early days, it spent most of its first two years on Geocities. I expected the site to be successful, but I didn’t think it would grow this big. While Geocities allowed me up to 15 megs of server space, the site now takes up more than 60 megs with Freeservers, its host since September 2000. It also had a Moorish tile pattern on the front page that I thought was cool, but now I shudder to think how tacky it must have looked to others. Because of real-world distractions, it isn’t growing as fast as it did from 1998 to 2000, when I had plenty of papers to convert and upload, but I’m still tweaking it to perform better almost every day.
So what have I got planned for 2008, besides publishing the textbook? Well . . .
1. Chapter 4 of the North American history series. Called “Industrial America,” it will continue the narrative I started in 2006, covering the years 1861-1933. I got started on that paper in July, lost it in September when a system crash forced me to re-format my hard drive, and at this point I’m up to 63 pages, so when I’m done, it should be at least as long as Chapter 3 was.
2. A rewrite of Chapter 3 in the Middle Eastern series. Not as many new archaeological discoveries for this period (950-627 B.C.) as we had for Chapters 1 & 2 (except for the tombs of four Assyrian queens, discovered intact at Calah in 1989-90), so it shouldn’t take as long as the others. There will be more about the Hittites, Armenians and Elamites, and I plan to move the section on the Phoenicians here from Chapter 2, and the battle of Kadesh from Chapter 4. There will probably also be a Trojan War tie-in, since it now appears that conflict took place around 860 B.C.
3. After I complete those projects, and update the papers that need updating, I still have to tackle Central Asia and the South Pacific (Oceania) before I can claim to have written the history of just about everybody. Still, the site and I have come a long way. Where will we be in another decade? Keep in touch to find out. 
Take Care and God Bless,
Charles Scott Kimball
