your periodic reminder that a good chunk of Europe basically shat the bed for a few centuries while everyone else kinda did their thing.
I am sorry I’m going to be that person.
This map is extremely inaccurate.
1) China was not going through business as usual China was going through the TANG DYNASTY i.e. the Golden Age of Chinese culture, which would lay down legal and social and poetic norms for the rest of Chinese history. The Tang is so influential that a lot of languages call Chinese people 唐人 (People from Tang.) (We call Chinese people “people from Qin” so.)
2) Japan is _first becoming literate_ during this time period (due to the influence of the Tang they adopt Chinese script), which is a BFD for poetry, religion, politics, society. Japanese court culture develops, which near the end of this period (11th century, around the time Europe enters “high middle ages”) will produce The Tale of Genji (by a totally awesome woman named Murasaki),widely regarded as the world’s first novel because of it’s deft use of irony and social commentary.
3) The southern part of Korea is experiencing the emergence of Unified Silla, a state that will last the entire period and will see the importation of Chinese and Indian buddhism, the construction of the first Confucian college in Korea, and so on.
4) In Mesoamerica, the Mayans are inventing astronomy, writing (the third and final independent invention of writing in human history), and a whole crapload of other stuff. This is the triumph of their culture.
5) The Umayyads in Spain are a massive center of technology, learning, and (comparative) religious toleration.
6) The Eastern Roman Empire, which spans both the green and yellow portions of your map, isn’t doing too badly either, bouncing back after losing territory to the Caliphate.
7) The Polynesians are colonizing the ENTIRE PACIFIC using amazing advanced navigation technology not rivaled until the INVENTION OF GPS.
8) I am not equipped to talk about Sub-Saharan Africa in detail (cue rant about how we never learn about subsaharan africa in the western educational system) but you can bet there are some major, amazing developments going on there too. I’d be shocked if there weren’t.
11) THEY WEREN’T BURNING WITCHES IN EUROPE DURING THE MIGRATION PERIOD (dark ages). Witch burning took off in the EARLY MODERN PERIOD, nearly 1000 years after this. Europe was going through some tough shit, which would leave them backwards compared to the rest of the world for 1000 years, but also there were some amazing things happening there, at least have the decency to be like “angry dudes with swords stabbing people” not WITCH BURNINGS FFS.
12) And ABSOLUTELY Islamic Caliphate was a totally amazing flowering of intellectual, artistic, and spiritual culture, a mixing pot between a thousand cultures and languages, and totally amazing. Don’t in any way want to diminish that in any way.
I find that hard to reconcile with how 18th century dresses had boobs practically hanging out of them. Maybe the chest wasn’t as sexualized as the ankles were back then…
I have a dim memory from back in high school… I think someone once told me that breasts were no big deal back in corsetry-and-necklines-down-to-there days, they were considered a food source for children and that’s it.
But ANKLES. Oh, GOD. ANKLES. The ANKLE was connected to the LEG, which connected to THIGHS, which hid a woman’s SECRET FLOWER. The ankle was the gateway to the secret flower, so it was considered quite a stirring sight!
this is not a man you should idolise as a great leader. this is a violent racist who we like to brush under the carpet because that’s what britain does best.
Don’t forget he also advocated for euthanasia for people with learning disabilities: “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feebleminded and
insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the
thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race
danger which it is impossible to exaggerate… I feel that the source
from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up
before another year has passed.“
Also, he didn’t want women to have the right to vote.
Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.
Why can’t we have a movie about him?
He was often called “Sempo”, an alternative reading of the characters of his first name, as that was easier for Westerners to pronounce.
His wife, Yukiko, was also a part of this; she is often credited with suggesting the plan. The Sugihara family was held in a Soviet POW camp for 18 months until the end of the war; within a year of returning home, Sugihara was asked to resign – officially due to downsizing, but most likely because the government disagreed with his actions.
He didn’t simply grant visas – he granted visas against direct orders, after attempting three times to receive permission from the Japanese Foreign Ministry and being turned down each time. He did not “misread” orders; he was in direct violation of them, with the encouragement and support of his wife.
He was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, a year before he died in Kamakura; he and his descendants have also been granted permanent Israeli citizenship. He was also posthumously awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania (1993); Commander’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1996); and the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2007). Though not canonized, some Eastern Orthodox Christians recognize him as a saint.
Sugihara was born in Gifu on the first day of 1900, January 1. He achieved top marks in his schooling; his father wanted him to become a physician, but Sugihara wished to pursue learning English. He deliberately failed the exam by writing only his name and then entered Waseda, where he majored in English. He joined the Foreign Ministry after graduation and worked in the Manchurian Foreign Office in Harbin (where he learned Russian and German; he also converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church during this time). He resigned his post in protest over how the Japanese government treated the local Chinese citizens. He eventually married Yukiko Kikuchi, who would suggest and encourage his acts in Lithuania; they had four sons together. Chiune Sugihara passed away July 31, 1986, at the age of 86. Until her own passing in 2008, Yukiko continued as an ambassador of his legacy.
It is estimated that the Sugiharas saved between 6,000-10,000 Lithuanian and Polish Jewish people.
It’s a tragedy that the Sugiharas aren’t household names. They are among the greatest heroes of WWII. Is it because they were from an Axis Power? Is it because they aren’t European? I don’t know. But I’ve decided to always reblog them when they come across my dash. If I had the money, I would finance a movie about them.
He told an interviewer:
You want to know about my motivation, don’t you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. Some Japanese military leaders were just scared because of the pressure from the Nazis; while other officials in the Home Ministry were simply ambivalent.
People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people’s lives….The spirit of humanity, philanthropy…neighborly friendship…with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation—and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.
He died in nearly complete obscurity in Japan. His neighbors were shocked when people from all over, including Israeli diplomatic personnel, showed up at quiet little Mr. Sugihara’s funeral.
I’m really glad he was still alive when the world started to hear about him, thanks to Israel.
A very furry story from the history of the space race! Khrushchev’s move strikes me as brilliant: half, “we may be engaged in a cold war, but we’re still human!” and half, “the dogs we sent to space are already having babies. How’s NASA coming along?”
Apparently, Pushinka (which means “fluffy" in Russian) was examined before arriving at the White House to check for listening devices.
There is SO MUCH MORE INFORMATION at the main site entry – 28 footnotes worth! Before you start going off about “why doesn’t she have a movie” (she does), or “this detail isn’t right!” please go there and read up.
The Panthers used to ride around and follow the police.
So the cops would pull over some sorry black person, and get ready to rough him up, but then there were the Panthers right behind them. Watching, armed to the teeth, and citing legal statutes. It’s inspirational.
Bring it back.
Bring this back.
For real.
That’s why the FBI broke them up, isn’t it ?
That among other community initiatives. They had weapons training, self defense, their free breakfast program and ran a newspaper. They raised money to pay for bail and legal funding for people. And they used to notify the community of their rights and encourage people to know the laws and protest the one which were unjust. That type of shit irked the local police and damned sure struck a nerve with the FBI. They were taking back the streets and providing the protection the police were never interested in bringing to their neighborhoods from the very start. So it’s always fuck the FBI for me.
Also let’s be starkly clear about this: under COINTELPRO the FBI raided the homes of Black Panthers and outright murdered them. They conspired with local police forces to harass, assault, and concoct false evidence against anybody affiliated with the BPP. And they didn’t keep their operations confined to the black community directly. When a white woman working in civil rights was killed by the KKK (they were aiming at her black passenger) the FBI excused the KKK by claiming that she was a communist and slept with black men. They refused to accept the reports of white agents who said that the BPP were no threat and demanded that the agents falsify information to paint the BPP as violent domestic terrorists. The FBI was determined to quash revolutionary black movements that were chiefly devoted to community protection and development and they stopped at nothing in their attempts to reach this goal.
One thing we don’t talk about even in our own retellings and reclaimings of BPP history is that a large part of the reason the government worked to break them up wasn’t because of armed action, but because they provided so many necessary social services and programs: free breakfast for children, walking the elderly to and from banks safely to cash their social security checks, free medical centers, door-to-door sickle cell testing, blood drives, raising money for bail, clothing donations, legal aide, busing people to and from prisons to visit, commissary for prisoners. Not only did they fight back against state violence in their confrontations with police, but also by resisting the forced conditions of poverty, criminality and scarcity created by the state to further destroy their communities. J. Edgar Hoover genuinely wrote in an FBI memo that:
“The Breakfast for Children Program B represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities B to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
When I need a good example of the antiblackness that is fundamental to this country’s history and how it persists even now, I remember that the BPP were viewed as a threat to national security, not because they were armed, but because they wouldn’t allow black children to die from starvation and malnutrition.
Desperate, hungry people are easier to control and keep subjugated.
Desperate, hungry people are more likely, in their desperation and hunger, to lash out at those closest to themselves rather than the more distant, often unseen causes of their misery.
Desperate, hungry people are easier to keep turned against each other.
Comedy Central’s “Drunk History” tackled an important topic in LGBTQ history this week: the Stonewall Riots.
Narrated by a drunk Crissle West, the story of that night in June unfolds with transgender actresses Alexandra Grey and Trace Lysette playing activist icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
West’s hilarious commentary adds an adept comedic touch to the emotional story of the Stonewall riots, during which patrons at New York City’s Stonewall Inn ― primarily queer and trans people of color ― fought back against police, who were constantly raiding the bar, on June 28, 1969.
“There’s all this controversy about casting cisgender actors in trans roles, so it’s nice that [Comedy Central] wanted to be authentic and give that role to a trans person,” actress Alexandra Grey told Out Magazine. “I really wanted to challenge myself to comedy.”
The segment focuses primarily on Johnson, who famously threw the first shot glass that set off the riots. West also paints a picture of how the event led to a greater awareness about the power of queer community and coming together against oppressive forces.
It is great and you must watch it. Watch the video here!
103 year old Ruline Steininger casts a vote for Hillary Clinton in Iowa, as early voting began in the state.
She was born in 1913 when women were banned from voting, and born even before the First World War began.
She has voted in every election since 1936, when she first cast her vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and earlier this year has sent a letter to Hillary saying:
“In my first century of life, I’ve seen many incredible things” “A pandemic, two worldwide depressions, a cure for polio, the
first Catholic president, a man on the moon, the end of smallpox, an
attack on American soil, and a black president. In my second century, I
look forward to seeing a woman president.”
Kind of really sobering when you really think about the fact that there are people in this country who are alive at this moment and lived at a time when universal suffrage hadn’t existed yet.
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