I love when people try to excuse founding fathers for owning slaves and trying to say they were really against slavery and weren’t all that bad when one of their contemporaries and “forgotten” founding father Robert Carter III manumitted all his slaves, gave them the land he felt he owed them as well as training and apprenticeships, and was promptly ostracized from Virginia and political society by the likes of Jefferson for making them look like assholes. Jefferson and Washington and all of them could have freed their slaves. They could have abolished slavery. They didn’t. Stop excusing them and the atrocities they committed.
The fact manumission was ILLEGAL is some serious savagery.
How about we stop being apologists for anyone who owned slaves in the first place? Ever think of that?
THIS IS A REALLY FUCKING EXCITING THING, BUT OF COURSE NOBODY SEEMS TO GIVE ENOUGH OF A FUCK ABOUT MESOPOTAMIAN SHIT TO ACTUALLY REPORT THIS ANYWHERE SOMEONE MIGHT SEE IT.
IT’S REALLY FUCKING COOL. TRUST US.
yesssssss
and I guess this makes the Gilgamesh fandom the winner in the contest of who had the longest time between updates…
So the Smithsonian posted this an hour ago. Just because.
The Smithsonian is pulling no punches.
“But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.
When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed The Washington Post.
Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.
In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.”
We are literally. Repeating history.
WE ARE ACTUALLY REPEATING HISTORY. The parallels are terrifying and they are very, very real.
Read “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson. It’s a good 101-course in this complete and total clusterfuck.
Ninety-year-old Freddie Oversteegen was one of the few women that were active in the Dutch resistance during WWII – along with her sister Truus and the famous Hannie Schaft, who was killed just before the end of the war. When Freddie was 14 years old, a gentleman visited her family home to ask her mother if she would allow her daughters to join the resistance – no one would suspect two young girls of being resistance fighters, he argued.
And he was right. The Oversteegen sisters would flirt with Nazi collaborators under false pretences and then lead them into the woods, where instead of a make-out session, the men would be greeted with a bullet.
tactics!!!
DAMN 👀👀👀
The real Black Widow
She should teach a class! I’ll sign up in a heartbeat!
I’m willing to bet there will be a follow up article about how scholars have made a startling discovery that the gold was used for crafts and the craft people of the world will just be like “…..Really?”
I love how they just kind of leap to “A PRIEST KING MUST HAVE WORN THIS SHINY GOLD STUFF!”
“Everything is mysterious! We have no idea! It, uh… it was for a ritual, yes.” “…don’t you say everything is for a ritual?” “Shhh, ancient peoples liked rituals.” “But there’s a giant painting on this wall showing how this was used, and modern crafters you could ask.” “SHHH. RITUALS.”
I have a very strong urge to email that researcher.
This keeps happening, you know.
For decades we thought water or oil was poured onto the rocks being used to build Egyptian pyramids for “ritual purposes”. Turns out if you ask people who have worked on sand they can tell you that wet sand is A LOT EASIER TO DRAG ROCKS ACROSS.
We spent centuries unable to figure out how the hair styles of ancient civilisations were constructed, typically going with “all the women wore wigs” (seriously. That was literally the solution) until a hairdresser with an interest in the hairstyles she saw in classical art turned her hand to them and BLEW THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY AWAY with her incredibly accurate recreations of hairstyles using tools available to the original peoples.
Academia has this real, huge problem where you’ve got a whole bunch of insulated people who know a lot about history and research and academia but shit-all about anything else. And who, when presented with something they can’t figure out, they turn to other academics rather than to people who might have some practical experience with similar stuff.
And it spreads into popular culture in a really unhealthy way. Because there is so much stuff that academia leaves as “ritual purposes” or “we don’t yet know how X was done”, which becomes “it’s a mystery!!!1!” in popular science shows and magazines. Which winds up fuelling the fires of people who would rather believe that ALIENS BUILD THE FUCKING PYRAMIDS than that the Egyptian people might actually have been competent at this thing they did.
Yep. Interesting thing about the hairstylist: there was a word that kept being used in documents about hairstyles that could translate as two different things, one of which was something like “sewing needle”. Academics ruled out that translation of the word, because “lol, sewing hairstyles. That’s ridiculous.” The hairstylist who recreated them… looked at that word, at the available tools of the time, and tried a sewing technique with needles to keep hair in place. AND IT WORKED.
The silo effect in academia is a major problem.
Side note: IDK if this is the same lady or not (it probably is) but there’s an entire youtube channel devoted to not only period-correct hairstyles from ancient greece/rome and egypt all the way up to the napoleonic and civil war eras but also a few needle/fiber/cloth crafts like beading, dyeing, etc.
The ones that bug me are always the textiles stuff – naturally, as I do that myself. Like the vase paintings of ancient Greeks and Romans and their warp-weighted looms. Archeologists kept saying shit like, “No, that must be an artistic rendering, that couldn’t possibly work like that,” and meanwhile people in Scandinavia are still using nearly identical looms today. Because nobody ever thought to ask actual weavers. The nitwits looking at women preparing wool and spinning on vases, and coming up with completely ridiculous explanations for this shit, and any spinner could glance at it and go, “Um, no.” Just. Argh.
I think this also ties into who is seen as an “expert” in our culture. Laborers who do work that is looked down in our society, such as hair stylists and landscapers, are not perceived as experts unless you’re going to get your hair done or your yard remodeled–and even then, they tend to be perceived as a worker providing labor, as opposed to a consultant or expert professional using their knowledge to preform a specialized skill or art. But these people ARE experts. Academics, however, have internalized cultural values around who is an expert and whose knowledge translates to expertise valuable enough to site in a paper.
So honestly, this is a bigger issue than academia, because our society as a whole doesn’t tend to perceive laborers as experts in hardly any capacity. Academia is just one institution that reflects this classist disdain.
Just gonna say, this problem is even worse than most people think. Academics tend not to think to even ask OTHER ACADEMICS whose specialty is relevant about these things, they just ask the people they work with. Hell, for practical shit, there’s SO many times that physicists have spent a decade or so trying to deal with some problem, but when they finally ask a mathematician the answer is so often “Oh, we did that like, a hundred years ago. Why didn’t you just ask?” (and in the occasional case, a physicist going “This is new and revolutionary!” and mathematicians going “Oh, that is cool. Haven’t seen that.” and a historian of math going “Umm…you guys. This shit’s from 600 BC in India. What the hell?”)
Like, the devaluing of knowledge and expertise of laborers is a HUGE problem in society at large, but on the problem of academics and tunnel vision, ignoring anyone who isn’t them and just saying “ritual” or “too hard” that’s to the point where no one asks anyone anything unless they’re in the exact same field.
Plus, all the examples above are historians and the like, but I also wanted to point out that physicists, who you wouldn’t think offhand would pull this, do it to.
Yep. Thankfully there is starting to be movement in some circles towards more interdisciplinary work in academia but it is slow and small and yeah.
Funny, I just rebloobed a post the other day about popular Sayings and how, over time, we tend to shorten or truncate them. Very often changing the meaning/ point of those Sayings ENTIRELY. Example-
Jack of all trades. Master of none.
-Is repeated QUITE often, but RARELY In its complete form which is-
Jack of all trades. Master of none. But better that. Than a mere Master of One.
I don’t know who Megan Kelly is but I wanna piss her off
dis bitch
“Verifiable fact” 😭😂
I’d PISS ON HER tbh
btw Saint Nicholas, whom Santa Claus is based on, was a black guy
and we don’t know exactly what jesus looked like, but here’s an artistic reconstruction of an average 20-something male from his ethnic group at the time
DOES THIS LOOK FUCKING WHITE TO YOU
I want this post everywhere
jesus was represented more or less accurately as an ethnically jewish arab man up until the reign of pope alexander vi, in the late 15th century. since he was viciously persecuting roman jews during this time, alexander wanted to make them less sympathetic to the public, and did so in part by ordering that portrayals of jesus be based off of his son, cesare borgia.
the reason “jesus is white” is because someone purposefully attempted to alter the perception of history to benefit his goal of persecuting a targeted ethnic group.
Fun History Fact: The overwhelming majority of cowboys in the U.S. were Indigenous, Black, and/or Mexican persons. The omnipresent white cowboy is a Hollywood studio concoction meant to uphold the mythology of white masculinity.
Thank you.
I will always re-blog this
I think it was high school when i overheard some white girl put on her best semi-disgusted and confused voice and go “why do so many Mexicans dress up like cowboys?” and I had to be the person to tell her.
Why do you think the whites say buckero? Cause they couldn’t say vaquero.
I dunno if I reblogged this before but fuck it, y’all gon learn today.
Teach the children.
also, cowboy culture was hella gay. like, write-poems-about-your-cowboy-partner gay.
IF people acknowledge it, they play the necessity card– there weren’t any women out on the range, so they had to “resort to men.” this claim completely erases 1) the romantic (not just sexual) writings of actual cowboys, 2) the acknowledgement of cowboys’ potential homosexual activity by writers at the time, and 3) the possibility that some men would deliberately become cowboys with the intent to seek out homosexual encounters.
no one wants to admit it, but cowboy culture was just. so inherently gay.
at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents
Actually, Americans still have the original British accent. We kept it over time and Britain didn’t. What we currently coin as a British accent developed in England during the 19th century among the upper class as a symbol of status. Historians often claim that Shakespeare sounds better in an American accent.
whAT THE FUCK
I’m too tired for this
Always add in the video that according to linguists, Native southern drawl is a slowed down British.
T’ be or not t’be, y’all.
Fun fact: Same thing happened with the French accent. French Canadians still have the original French accent from the 15th century.
Êt’e ou n’pô zêt’e, vous z’auts.
I’ve been trying to find this post for months. I’m freakishly obsessed with this and want the truth of what early colonists sounded like.
The Pythagorean cup was designed
around 500 BCE to make sure dinner
guests weren’t drinking too much of
your wine. If you pour too much liquid
into the cup, it overflows a tiny pipe in
the middle column and then spills out
the bottom– all over your lap. Source
myblog 