Book 1
A Deep History of the Internet
The received history of the Internet is a story about technology. The primary record tells a different story.
Royalties are donated to Girls Who Code.
About the book →A book series by Lloyd W. Taylor
What Actually Happened
Not who, but what. Each book takes a received historical narrative, goes back to the primary record, and looks for the mechanism the standard account misses.
Every major historical event has a standard account — the version that became settled, taught in schools, repeated in biographies and anniversary retrospectives until it acquired the texture of fact. Standard accounts are not fraudulent. They become standard for reasons. They are simply incomplete in a particular way: they name who did it without explaining why it was nearly inevitable that someone would.
What Actually Happened is a popular press historical series built around a different question. Not which individuals acted, but which structural conditions made the outcome probable regardless of who the specific actors were.
The pattern, once seen, is hard to unsee: the mechanism was already in place before the decisive actor arrived; the actor’s role was to find it.
The books
Book 2
A Deep History of the English Bible
At each turning point, the book asks a deceptively simple question: What did the institution authorizing the text need that text to do?
Royalties are donated to Internet Archive.
About the book →