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The Even Cooler Stuff From [History] Thread
Richy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Seven scores and two days ago, our fathers brought forth on this subforum a new thread, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that cool stuff has happened in history. Long story short, it got locked after 100 pages so I decided to make a new one.
"Cool" here encompasses both meanings of awe, namely awesome and awful. So feel free to talk about stuff that is absolutely amazing and stuff that is absolutely horrifying.
I'll save the rest of this post in case I decide to post a more intelligent OP later (or more likely, if someone makes such a post for me) and post the actual article I came here to post in the next post. Can I get my trophy for the most instances of the word "post" in one sentence yet?
"Cool" here encompasses both meanings of awe, namely awesome and awful. So feel free to talk about stuff that is absolutely amazing and stuff that is absolutely horrifying.
I'll save the rest of this post in case I decide to post a more intelligent OP later (or more likely, if someone makes such a post for me) and post the actual article I came here to post in the next post. Can I get my trophy for the most instances of the word "post" in one sentence yet?
+2
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While verbal stories get changed constantly and are a poor way to record history, it seems Aboriginal Australians are an exception. One scientist believes it is because "there are aspects of storytelling in Australia that involved kin-based responsibilities to tell the stories accurately". Whatever the reason, these stories talk about life on lands where today only sea exists. Australian Atlantises, except for the fact that modern computer reconstruction of Australia at the last ice age indicates there actually was land in those places some 8000 to 12000 years ago. So Australian Atlantises that actually existed at the beginning of the Neolithic, and the stories describing there have survived since then all the way to the modern age.
This also leads to an important realization. To quote one of the authors, "This paper makes the case that endangered Indigenous languages can be repositories for factual knowledge across time depths far greater than previously imagined." This is important, as more than half of the world's currently-existing 6000 languages are on the verge of extinction. Most of these are indigenous languages spoken by ancient but small and isolated tribes, and the languages are spoken only by the elderly (in some cases even by only one last person) while the younger generations learn and use more international languages spoken by millions of people. If the results of this Australian study hold true for other languages, then we are about to lose part of recorded Human history stretching back to the dawn of agriculture and civilization, a loss that can never be compensated for again.
So in anticipation of that record being broken this week, I give to you two photos and a short movie from the winter of 1945.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/11/25/snow-porn-boston-blanketed-through-the-years/sApfHiRBCtf7NPUmcA4o6H/story.html
A pretty cool looking deer
In the 1860s a French missionary and zoologist named Armand David (aka Père David) was sent to China to proselytize and begin a natural history collection. No idea how he did in the former, but in the latter he was highly successful, recording for western science over a hundred species, including the giant panda and the milu. While the milu apparently ranged far further in ancient history, with fossils found all over China and into Korea and ancient legends about them, by the 1860s they were reduced to one location: a walled imperial hunting garden of the Chinese Emperor himself, as it had been extinct in the wild for many, many years (some say a thousand, having been kept as special pets of the emperors through entire dynasties).
A few were somehow smuggled out of the garden and China to Europe, which was fortuitous, as in 1895 there was a flood that destroyed the wall, causing most of the milu to escape and get eaten by starving peasants, and in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion the few remaining milu were eaten by occupying troops. The species was kept alive by the Dukes of Bedford during the world wars and now they live in zoos around the world. In 1985, the milu were reintroduced to parks in China, where their populations are now increasing and they may, one day, be brought back to the wild to be free-ranging for the first time in centuries.
One of you guys should throw up a write up on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Sejm and the whole wacky political system they had.
gem from wikipedia
It is estimated that between 1493 and 1793, a Sejm was held 240 times, the total debate-time sum of which was 44 years
During World War I, due largely to the British naval blockade, Germany faced major shortages in most supplies, but especially food. Poor harvests made conditions even worse - the winter of 1916-1917 was known as the Turnip Winter because the potato harvest had mostly failed, when most people were subsiding on potatoes at that point, meaning people were having to survive on low-grade turnips that had mostly been used for animal feed before. It's estimated that hundreds of thousands of civilians died of effects of malnutrition during the war. Meat was especially scarce in the Land of 1200 Sausages - in 1915 five million pigs were killed during the Schweinemord ("pig murder") to reserve more food for humans.
This of course meant there was lots of opportunity for war profiteering. Although the term gullaschbaron applies to all the profiteers, including those who made money from stock speculation, it derives from the food sellers. There was a lot of money in food smuggling into Germany, and especially with the shortage of meat the Germans weren't able to be picky. Maybe the meat was rat. Maybe it was actually cartilage. Maybe it was rotten. Maybe it was rotten rat cartilage. If cooked up in a goulash and canned, no one would notice at first and massive profits were had by the Danes.
There's a Danish Wikipedia page on them, listing particular gullaschbarons.
In other food history, the Irish Lumper, which was the primary variety that fed the Irish before the famine, was apparently kinda mediocre or okay at best though with a waxy texture but during wet years were utterly awful. The Irish lived off and then died from lack of pretty crappy potatoes.
Having to stomach turnips doesn't sound too bad, even if they're worse quality than you're used to. Then again, I'm one of those weirdos who's cooked reindeer moss and other uncommon things. It's surprising how many things are edible, if not necessarily palatable.
Really?
Fucking really?
Thinking that eating sub-par turnips is not the worst possible outcome of a famine counts as Internet Tough Guy talk now?
Except that eating sub-par turnips also killed a couple hundred thousand people, so yes.
Edit: What I'm really trying to say is that having to eat sub-par turnips was not the worst outcome of that famine.
Pretty sure it wasn't the turnips that killed the people, but malnutrition, since the turnips couldn't supply everything you need to stay alive.
Yes because the sub-par turnips were all they had to eat.
for me the answer is easy
Byzantium/Byzantine Empire/ERE whatever you call it.
Imagine if a part of the Roman Empire survived into the modern age. Imagine the changes it may have over that section of the world (for good or bad)
I've also always wished that China never went Communist. That they still had an emperor and Mandate of Heaven and stuff.
I had this conversation with my dad a long time ago. We agreed it would have been brilliant if the new world natives had been allowed to continue without Europeans pushing them around the land.
And now that you've brought it up, it would have been pretty rad to see the monument building cultures existing into today. Pyramids, temples, Easter island weirdness, etc. be pretty cool to see those types of things still being built with modern materials and such.
There would've been some massive differences to the global geopolitics, and it would make a hella-interesting alternate history setting.
But I'll just say that Secrets of the Castle is a FANTASTIC documentary.
Like it is AMAZINGLY interesting. Watch it. Watch it right now. You'll be so happy you did.
It's a 5 part series all about Guedelon Castle in France:
The series follows construction projects throughout the castle, from lumber, quarrying, masonry, smithing, making clothes and weapons... It's just super cool, goes in-depth on the kinds of daily life stuff that most documentaries don't trust their audiences to be interested in.
When you're a country coming to a negotiation like this, you have a couple of numbers in mind. You've got a never gonna happen number. You've got a we did great number. A we did alright number and most importantly the lowest number we'll accept. Japan got exactly the lowest number they would accept. There were a lot of arguments about who deserved what kind of tonnage to patrol their territories. The Japanese argued that they had the Pacific to cover along with other associated seas and thus deserved the same tonnage as the US and British. The US and British wanted to check the power of Tokyo. So in the end you get the 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 ratio. The US, British, Japanese, France and Italian navies would be allowed the tonnage in that order. The Japanese wanted the ratio to be 10:7 which would have given them 21 battleships instead of 18 compared to the US and UK getting 30.
The man above is Herbert O. Yardley and he's the primary reason that Japan got the tonnage numbers he had. At the time of the Washington Naval Treaty he was operating MI-8, which is more commonly known as The Black Chamber. The Black Chamber was based out of New York City and it's primary job was to decrypt diplomatic communications coming into the US via telegraph. And they were reading the Japanese diplomatic communications. They knew exactly what the Japanese would settle for. So thus the Washington Naval Treaty ends up with the numbers they did. But The Black Chamber was a joint State Department and US Army project.
"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." was Sec of State Henry Stimson's response when he found out about the organization and funding was pulled. Yardley would write a book about his experiences and it was published in 1931. Surprisingly it didn't seem to raise much of an issue in American and Japanese relations.
You might be interested to know that these same historians have done several series on different time period farms. Edwardian Farm, Victorian Farm, Tales From The Green Valley (it was a medieval or a renaissance one, I think), one about life in a manor house etc.
Might want to wiki the historians' names. All of it is good stuff. They usually spend a year living and working on the farm in an authentic fashion(although health and safety sometimes prohibits them actually living in the buildings in question due to reasons).
but huzzah! it's on youtube! Victoire!
edit the second
Holy cow this is amazing and I'm going to binge watch until I can't watch anymore. I love things like this. thanks @Kana
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...). At the trial of the 11 naval officers who had stormed the PM's residence and shot PM Inukai, the court received a petition for leniency with 350,000 signatures signed in blood. 11 youths in Niigata pleaded to be executed in their stead, and to prove their sincerity, each of them cut off a finger and mailed it to the court. Which was kind of wasted, since the assassins got 5-15 year sentences. For gunning down the Prime Minister of their nation in his own home.
Please check their various series on different period farms too. They're really interesting to watch.
They've done:
Victorian Farm
Victorian Pharmacy
Edwardian Farm
Tudor Monastery Farm
Wartime Farm
Tales from the Green Valley (renaissence farming thing)
I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.
American ship building really was amazing.
And here's an illustration of a lot of hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds are often described as looking like flying jewels or the like. They are (mostly) so tiny and fragile-looking, and visiting pretty flowers all the time, that you'd think they were delicate and harmless. You may be surprised to learn that hummingbirds can be quite aggressive actually. It's actually common among really small birds to be aggressive, because when you live in a world where nearly everything else is bigger than you and wants to eat you, the only way to survive is to be meaner and tougher than them. Birds don't get smaller than hummingbirds, and there are even insects large enough to eat them (and maybe don't click that link if you'll be horrified by pictures of dead hummers) so they have to be tough. Anyone who's watched hummingbirds for any length of time has seen their fights and chases, I've even read a report of an angry hummingbird driving off an eagle, though I wasn't able to find a link.
Anyway, I mention all of this to explain a historical anecdote that might otherwise seem completely nonsensical: Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, the sun, and human sacrifice, the god that needed thousands of still-beating heart sacrifices, the scariest member of their rather scary and bloodthirsty pantheon, was often depicted as a hummingbird.
I'm not entirely sure how you get Death Hummingbird out of that, but I'm also not sure how you get a feathered serpent out of most of the depictions of Quetzalcoatl either, but that's how they stylized things. The name is even derived from hummingbird, as their name for them was 'huītzilin' (which you notice is kinda onomatopoeia). It was also believed that warriors who fell in battle would be reincarnated as hummingbirds. They could sparkle in the light of their patron god while fighting each other.
tl;dr To reduce your chances of being a blood sacrifice to a Mesoamerican god, put out a hummingbird feeder.
My favorite Aztec god was Xochipilli. Among the things in his domain were music, dancing, and flowers.
Of course, flowers to the Aztecs weren't merely decorative. They also included in that concept medicinal and psychotropic plants. Xochipilli's brother, Ixtlilton, was the god of health and was ascribed responsibility for the medicinal part, leaving Xochipilli with all the delicious hallucinogens.
Many cultures have associated music and dance with intoxication (Bacchus, anyone?) but the Aztecs weren't just satisfied with their pleasure god being drunk, he had to be tripping, too.
In later accounts, he was also the patron figure of gay men.
TLDR: the Aztecs worshipped a raver god.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I mean, sure, having your heart cut out while you're alive is bad, but I imagine shock and blood loss would kill you fairly quickly. Xipe Totec favored sacrificial combat, where you were tied to a rock and given a traditional obsidian-blade sword, only the obsidian blades were replaced with feathers. Then you had to fight real warriors armed with real weapons, which seems like a much slower way to go, paired with the horrible illusion that you might be able to survive if you can somehow fight off your attackers. Also, at least Huitzilopochtli's priests didn't prance around in suits made of your skin afterward like Xipe Totec's did, to symbolize their god shedding his skin as maize sheds its husk.
Those agricultural gods are a rough bunch.
Nope. What has been made up is the white-washed peace-and-love history of European civilizations. They were every bit as savage as Aztecs and other civilizations, they just covered it up to pretend they weren't and look down on other civilizations.
Tone change!
This is Horatio Nelson (left) and Bud (right). Together with Sewall K. Crocker they were the first cross-America road trip, in 1903.