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The Cool Stuff From [History] Thread
Kana
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So many moons ago we had a pretty cool History thread that I enjoyed a bunch, but when it got to 100 pages we never made a new one. Well, I officially changed my major to history this week after realizing that maybe I should spend the next 4 years of my life learning something I actually enjoy, and so I thought I'd celebrate by starting a new history thread.
In this case "cool stuff" just means "really interesting", so it's cool if we talk about terrible stuff too, most of history is depressing for somebody after all.
As this thread goes along I'd like to add more resources to the OP, especially primary sources that through the modern wonders of technology are now available for free online. A couple to start us off with (I've been doing a lot of American women's history reading lately):
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839 by Frances Anne Kemble
A British actress meets the heir to an Antebellum Plantation, marries him and moves to America for the first time. Her collected letters to a friend back home struggle to comprehend the magnitude of the horrors of slavery, as well as the softer imprisonment of marriage. Well-intentioned but god damn do you want to reach through time and smack her in the face every few pages.
A Diary From Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut
Unlike Kemble, Chesnut was born and raised in the South and idealized the south far more, although she wasn't blind to its especial abuse of women. Her Diary goes from 1861 through the end of the Civil War, and her eyewitness accounts of many important episodes from the war have been a vital part of Civil War history (maybe even a bit too vital, at that).
The Collected Writings of Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly is just generally awesome, fun reading. There weren't a lot of young smartass writers around in the 1880's and '90s! One of the first ever investigative journalists, she got herself committed to a mental institution, went around the world in 80 days, fled Mexico ahead of an order for her arrest, and interviewed factory workers, Pullman strikers, homeless women, and prizefighters. I may or may not totally have a crush on her.
Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian by Edith Maude Eaton writing under the pen name of Sui Sin Far.
A personal essay from 1890 on the discrimination faced by those of Chinese and mixed ancestry in the US.
The Memoirs of Madison Hemmings 1805-1877
A black freedman, Madison Hemmings was the son of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemmings. He reminisces about his life at Monticello, his father, and his life since leaving.
History Matters is a resource for US History primary documents, as well as essays and activities designed to teach analysis skills of documents and images.
In this case "cool stuff" just means "really interesting", so it's cool if we talk about terrible stuff too, most of history is depressing for somebody after all.
As this thread goes along I'd like to add more resources to the OP, especially primary sources that through the modern wonders of technology are now available for free online. A couple to start us off with (I've been doing a lot of American women's history reading lately):
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839 by Frances Anne Kemble
A British actress meets the heir to an Antebellum Plantation, marries him and moves to America for the first time. Her collected letters to a friend back home struggle to comprehend the magnitude of the horrors of slavery, as well as the softer imprisonment of marriage. Well-intentioned but god damn do you want to reach through time and smack her in the face every few pages.
A Diary From Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut
Unlike Kemble, Chesnut was born and raised in the South and idealized the south far more, although she wasn't blind to its especial abuse of women. Her Diary goes from 1861 through the end of the Civil War, and her eyewitness accounts of many important episodes from the war have been a vital part of Civil War history (maybe even a bit too vital, at that).
The Collected Writings of Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly is just generally awesome, fun reading. There weren't a lot of young smartass writers around in the 1880's and '90s! One of the first ever investigative journalists, she got herself committed to a mental institution, went around the world in 80 days, fled Mexico ahead of an order for her arrest, and interviewed factory workers, Pullman strikers, homeless women, and prizefighters. I may or may not totally have a crush on her.
Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian by Edith Maude Eaton writing under the pen name of Sui Sin Far.
A personal essay from 1890 on the discrimination faced by those of Chinese and mixed ancestry in the US.
The Memoirs of Madison Hemmings 1805-1877
A black freedman, Madison Hemmings was the son of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemmings. He reminisces about his life at Monticello, his father, and his life since leaving.
History Matters is a resource for US History primary documents, as well as essays and activities designed to teach analysis skills of documents and images.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Kana on
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also, thanks for bringing back this thread it was highly educational last time and look forward to all the fun stuff in this iteration
Just for a 100-year sample:
French skirt from 1710, during the reign of Louis XIV
The girls in Italy 15 years later were dressing more like this. Classy, timeless!
But the girls in England 15 years after that were, uh... hmm. See us after class England.
Marie Antoinette period France was thankfully avoiding the SUV-chic fashion from up north and instead investing their technology points in HATS!
Also look at those glorious shoes ^
By 1790 England is desperately trying to catch up to their rivals in the hat race
But little does England realize that across the ocean, in the future hat superpower of America, a champion has been born:
AMURICA, FUCK YEAH
Did a race of extraterrestrial astronauts from Tau Ceti 5 build the pyramids using lasers and gravity beams (because God knows those savages in Egypt couldn't possibly have built such structure themselves)? Stayed tuned as we interview 5 expert UFOologists and 1 dentist from Okalama as they explore ANCIENT ASTRONAUT THEORY.
Oh, History. I remember when you were actually a half-decent channel.
Lately I've been reading up on the 20s and 30s in America. I'd have to recommend John Dillinger: The Life and Death of America's First Celebrity Criminal, as it's a fantastic read.
All blue eyed people are descended from a single common ancestor only 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. High five my blue eyed cousins! I wonder what the reaction was to the first ever blue eyed child? Mutant outcast or blessed by the gods? Whatever, it must have shaken the community into which she or he was born. I wonder what else chance mutation has in store for us?
Blue eyes, babys got blue eyes..
Of course, you hires Vikings & Brits to form your personal bodyguard. For several centuries the Varangian Guard were the elite unit of the Byzantine Empire, complete with cultivation of mystical barbarism to instill fear.
Some highlights from Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany 1944:
The gene for blue eyes is recessive, so by the time someone was born with two copies of the gene it was probably fairly dispersed.
This means that all of a sudden there were blue eyed babies popping up in random places with brown-eyed parents.
I do wonder what people thought.
Sound advice from start to finish!
Pretty.
It just fails to turn darker. At first, they'd just think it went more slowly than usual, then maybe start wondering how long it's going to take. Once they realise it's just not happening, though, you might get a stronger reaction.
I skimmed the whole thread to see if anyone had mentioned Carlins podcast. Blast your alacrity, good sir!
Another great (though far more specific) history related podcast:
http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/
For some reason I didn't know that people did this.
I did for cats though.
I am the worst human.
Instacast only lists 16 episodes, though... Weird.
Don't know how much it varies. Late and premature births and all that jazz has me expecting variance.
http://countrystudies.us/nicaragua/10.htm
US occupies Nicaragua for two decades, partly out of an interest in seeing a canal connecting Pacific with Atlantic completed under US control. US occupation gives rise to Sandinista rebellion. Handover by U.S. to Nicaraguan-led government. (Echoes of later "peace with honor" in Vietnam, and similar arrangements with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance and the fledgling Shi'ite Iraqi state.) Sandino murdered; coup displaces democratic leadership.
Decades later, the U.S. arms the rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista regime it had effectively created, although these "Contras" are implicated in the drug trade and human rights abuses. The reason? "Support for freedom fighters is self defense." The same reasoning applied to the Mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/
Henry Kissinger was granted half of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1973, effectively for this:
http://www.voanews.com/content/vietnam-remembers-nixons-christmas-bombing-40-years-later/1567089.html
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/cambodia/tl02.html
That is to say, he was given the award for "ending" the war in Vietnam, by escalating the carnage in Vietnam and Cambodia in order to pressure the North to negotiate a detente and withdrawal. Following which, US forces withdrew, and the North conquered the South with overwhelming force. Not to mention that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia only a couple years later.
http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/topten/hutu/history.html
For some time, Europeans colonized/occupied/subjugated central Africa. Part of their plan to maintain dominance was to cultivate friction between social classes; the Hutu and Tutsi, both Bantu-speaking groups which commonly intermarried, were distinguished from one another artificially based on the ownership of livestock. German (and later Belgian) colonial powers discriminated against the more numerous Hutu, considering the relatively more affluent Tutsi minority to be a superior race. Ultimately, after independence, the Rwanda-Urundi region split into two separate countries. From the early 1970s through the early 1990s, Tutsis and Hutus committed acts of genocide and reprisal against one another over their acrimonious shared history, destabilizing Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and Uganda politically and economically.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/feature2/
This one goes in the "kind of neat" category. Admiral Zheng He, a Chinese eunuch, was sent on a voyage of exploration and trade by the Emperor in the 1400s. Some scholars believe that he may have discovered the Americas, although I personally consider that a dubious proposition. He did, however, command a tremendous fleet, one which dwarfed Christopher Columbus's vessels in size. And his voyages took him as far west as Mecca.
It's still neat if they made it there, but they wouldn't be the first sailors to find the place.
Always seemed pretty headstrong to me, claiming to have discovered a place people are living in. It's like how the "first man to summit Everest" was absolutely the first man "other than a Sherpa" to do so.
In recorded history, this happened in the early 1800s to three Japanese fishermen whose broken-ruddered fishing boat drifted across the Pacific Ocean and end up on the coast of lands held by the Makah tribe. They became world travelers after that, but because of the Japanese closed ports at the time only one of them ever managed to go home (at least for a visit).
In the current day, this current is the path by which tsunami debris has traveled across the ocean to wash up on the beaches.
It's more like if the "first man to summit Everest" got there to find a large thriving mountaintop civilization but still held on to his claim of being the first one there.
While the Vikings weren't the first ones to reach the Americas, they were the first ones to do so by deliberately crossing the ocean. Those men and women crossed the North Atlantic in open boats. That's pretty damn hardcore.
It also says something about the natives in Newfoundland that the Vikings left shortly afterwards.
It is kind of a fun alternate history though. If the Native Americans had been meaningfully exposed to European diseases hundreds of years before Columbus arrived on the scene, the settlement of the Americas could have gone very, very differently. Epidemics of disease were by far the biggest killers of natives.
And Syphilis in Europe in the late 15th, early 16th century has all the symptoms of a disease spreading through a new, non-resistant population. The early European outbreaks could kill within a few months or a year, it killed several million people, and the name syphilis itself wasn't termed until 1530. You can even see how it spread eastward in how Europeans called it before its naming (going off my memory here): The french called it the Spanish disease, the italians and Germans called it the French disease, the Russians called it the Polish disease, the Turks called it the Christian disease. It seems an odd coincidence for a disease that had already been present in Europe.
Which is why it's interesting that up until really recently this was a pretty controversial issue. Not so much in the scientific community, but there had been pretty stiff resistance among historians of two different camps. The first is the Spread of Civilization crowd, who implicitly viewed Europe as obviously far more advanced, and the Columbian exchange naturally resulting in a lot of savages dying from diseases they had never been advanced enough to be exposed to, unlike the naturally hardy Europeans who could resist them. Obviously the farther back you go the more explicitly this argument is made, but it's pretty much what it boils down to. The savages could never have their own diseases that Europeans were vulnerable to, psh!
The other camp essentially viewed the settlement of the Americas by Europeans as the rape of the new world, an inherently aggressive exploitation of a purer culture. Which I mean, obviously they have a point, but the spread of disease in that argument is often treated as a conscious action - traders using "smallpox infected blankets" as if they had a national plan based on germ theory. In reality the spread of European diseases through native populations were so virulent that purposefully spreading the disease was kind of pointless, like throwing a lit match into an already burning wildfire (alcohol on the other hand, really was used as a tool of suppression as a trade good, but not until later). But in this view, the spread of disease to an uninfected population takes on a moral implication, the Noble Savage destroyed by modern man's uncleanliness. So for one of the defining diseases of the 18th and 19th centuries to be a new world disease, and a sexually spread disease at that... They didn't much care for that, as it turns their Noble Savages in The State of Nature into just another population.
That's the 'discovery' of Machu Picchu. The 'discoverer' was lead there by a boy who lived in the area. All the locals knew about it. Kinda hard for them to miss the giant ruined city in the place where they resided.
Jared Diamond covered this in some detail
lack of trade had a lot to do with it, as did the small initial population with little influx of new settlers
I mean technically no, no you didn't. But it's sorta like re-inventing the wheel. Just because someone's already done it doesn't mean you shouldn't get a little credit. I mean holy shit you still invented the wheel.
(machu pichu on the other hand is just pathetic)
The natives don't count because I was talking specifically about sailors. Obviously the people who crossed by the bridge back in prehistory were the first, but they didn't exactly sail there.
It's of interest to me personally due to the sheer disparity in the navigation abilities between Vikings and anyone else for a long time after. They figured out ways to navigate reliably without a compass, and cross incredible distances in fairly small ships. Another similarly skilled maritime culture are the polynesian navigators, who made stick and rope maps that could be used to navigate by sea currents, and crossed similarly impressive distances. These two cultures have others beat as far as I'm concerned when it comes to exploration.
While I think there probably was Sherpas that climbed Everest before Hillary. It couldn't have been many, and it could certainly not have been often.
K2 I doubt anybody climbed, because its fucking hard even by Himalaya standards.
I'd argue that you can discover them if they've been forgotten or lost. So, for example, Pompeii was discovered when it was unearthed.
I see the crazy hip dress. And I get the idea, because wide hips meant something at the time(easier childbirth). However I find it hard to believe this was actually worn by any number of people, and was anymore than the garbage we see at fashion shows today (or concept cars if you will. the real version is nothing like the high concept).
I can't wait to dive into this thread for some crazy stories of history. Them wacky romans at war building gigantic ramps up to cities so they didnt have to wait to starve them out, and building country long defensive fortifications by their army in short periods of time.
Edit: I am reading that plantation wife's diary now, and she burns the shit out of the guy she is arguing with in the very first letter. Paraphrased "If they are incapable of learning, why is it illegal to try and teach them? What difference does it make"
Are you implying that hips mean nothing now
Because if so allow me to retort: Hips don't lie
When Did Humans Come to the Americas? - Smithsonian Magazine
Currently the strongest theory as I understand it is a coast migration theory not dissimilar to the one that settled Australia. Its possible the Clovis people were an offshoot of those populations but the tool working techniques were very distinct. And its possible modern American populations are descendents completely from Clovis or Clovis-like migrations that won out over thousands of years, or separate.
There's even a semi-legitimate theory that says a culture called the Solutrean culture from Spain/France may have migrated in an Inuit style to the US/Canadian east coast and become the Clovis culture gradually during the last Ice Age. That's much less accepted than the Pacific coast migration theories though, especially the "kelp highway" hypothesis.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
We do have written & signed letters from military commanders acknowledging that they gave native communities blankets & clothing infected with smallpox. The germ theory wasn't formalized, but it was well enough understood on some rudimentary level that militaries were actively engaged in biological warfare.
...Do you have versions of those links that are legible? I can't make out anything from them