Bearing Witness- Marking 78 Years to the Events of Kristallnacht “the Night of Broken Glass”.
78 years ago today, the Nazi government led people to attack Jewish-owned businesses, buildings and synagogues throughout the country and in parts of Austria, at a time of intense discrimination of Jews, which included boycotting their businesses.
The attacks were called “Kristallnacht”: the “Night of Broken Glass” because of the shattered windows throughout the cities. Synagogues were burned, 91 Jews were murdered, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps simply because they were Jewish.
Let us never forget that the horrible crimes against humanity that occurred in WWII were not sudden, but a product of gradual and increasing persecution.
aight so I just like to imagine all the dead presidents come together every four years and set aside their differences to watch the elections. like FDR sitting next to Abe sitting next to Kennedy, everyone getting together and quietly pulling for their party’s nominee. Washington’s in a back corner just amazed that this system they set up two hundred-odd years ago is still in motion, Adams and Jefferson sitting with him just saying “holy shit, it’s still here” and the like to themselves the whole time. Tyler and Taylor and the rest all in another corner, shit-talking Nixon because hey, maybe nobody remembers them, but at least they didn’t fuck up bad enough to have to quit.
2008 was an interesting year because really, a black president? who saw that coming? and then 2016 comes along and they’re watching all throughout the primaries like aight, who’s it gonna be this time. and then as the shit show that we’ve become all too familiar with continues, there’s this slow creeping horror that spreads throughout the room, as finally the parties elect their nominees.
and then on the night of November 8, 2016, a hundred years after Wilson was elected and two hundred years after Monroe, they’re all sitting together with bated breath. we’ve already established that they don’t sit together along party lines, though Reagan and Nixon and Ike are in a cluster near the front because what the actual fuck has happened to their party. Washington’s still sitting in the back, though by now he’s muttering “I said, don’t do parties, and you know what? This is exactly what you fucking get,” and Buchanan shushes him because he just wants to hear the results. and every time a state is called for Hillary all the liberals cheer loudly, and every time a state is called for Trump there’s this uncomfortable silence that falls over the room for a few moments, because let’s be honest, absolutely none of the dead former presidents want him to join the club; the liberals hate every word that comes out of his mouth, and the Republicans still can’t believe that their party is supporting him (and the conservative non-Republicans, those from before the modern party system, quietly deny any party relation to that candidate).
and this doesn’t have an ending, not yet, because I’m writing this the night before the election hoping with all the other past presidents that by this time tomorrow they’re celebrating Hillary’s win instead of lamenting Trump’s. so go vote if you haven’t, and encourage others to go vote if you can’t or already have. go vote and do your part in making history, one way or another.
vikings made their woman handle the finances because they thought math is witchcraft
The idea that unicorns are only able tamed and captured by virgins originated as a medieval joke. The idea was that it took a mythical creature to catch a mythical creature.
There was once an English minstrel called Roland the Farter. He was awarded lands by the king on the condition that he turn up to the court every Christmas to perform his characteristic “whistle, leap and a fart”. His children could keep the lands after his death if they learnt and performed the same trick.
There is graffiti from the Norse invaders that reads (roughly) “ I slept with Ingiborg, the most beautiful woman in the world ”
A close friend of Alexander the Great named Dioxippus, once told one of his generals, named Coragus, to stop being so up himself, Coragus took offence and challenged him to a duel in front of all of his troops unaware that Dioxippus was a champion of Pankration, Ancient Greek Wrestling. Coragus turned up with all of his weapons and armour, Dioxippus turned up naked with a club, lathered in Olive Oil. The match was over in about 5 mins and Coragus got his arse well and truly kicked.
When an army of Swedes went off to war with the Norwegians, they left all the women to manage everything, however, in the village of Smaland, right on the Southern Border, they were attacked by an opposing force of Danes. The women, led by a woman named Blenda, responded to this by inviting the invaders in, feeding them, making them comfy and basically having a massive party to get them REALLY drunk. When all the invaders all passed out, the women slaughtered them all with anything they could find, and when the men came back, the King was so impressed that he basically granted them a bunch of new rights that were previously unavailable to them. From that point on, all daughters had the right to inherit property, money and land equally with their brothers, and were allowed to wear military-style garments around town and at their weddings. They were also given the prestigious right to wear the Royal Coat of Arms on their clothing – a tradition that has lasted to this day.
The term in Chess “Checkmate” is thought to have come from the Persian term “Shah Mat” which means “The King is dead”.
Captain Benjamin Hornigold, the mentor to Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, once captured a ship just so he could steal all of the crew’s hats, because his crew had gotten drunk the night before and thrown all of theirs overboard.
Napoléon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier who eventually became the Emperor of France following the French Revolution and Maximilien de Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror”, was terrified of cats.
It is always different and also always amazing
Anthropologists now think that the primary reason human beings first settled down en masse and took up agriculture may have been to facilitate beer-making. So basically, civilization exists because a bunch of our ancestors wanted to get their drink on.
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
Meet the Mona Lisa of the Prado, the earliest known copy of Da Vinci’s best portrait. Similarity in the undersketch of the painting indicates that this was very likely painted concurrently with the original Mona Lisa, by a student of Da Vinci.
There is much controversy in the art world over the question of whether or not to clean the fragile Mona Lisa, but her sister has been restored and some fairly odd later alterations removed to show the original vibrant colors and lighting. Some details, such as the sheerness of her shawl and the pattern on the neckline of her dress, have become utterly obscured in the original, but in the restored copy they’re perfectly clear.
It blows my mind a little bit to look at these two sisters side-by-side and imagine how much vivid detail could be hiding in the Mona Lisa under 500 years of rotten varnish.
THE COPY HAS EYEBROWS
Your response to a beautiful piece of artwork done by Leonardo Da Vinci himself is “SHES GOT EYEBROWS”. Alright. All intelligent life has been lost.
Yo Snooty McSnotwhine, the Mona Lisa’s vanished eyebrows have been the subject of debate and analysis in the art expert community for hundreds of years, long before your parents squirted water at each other from across the clown car and then honked their bicycle horns to indicate they really wanted to make a smug, insufferable little clown baby together.
this continues to be the best reply to a criticizing comment on this site
Since US history is all the rage now, I thought I’d share some of my favorite stories about the founding fathers.
-John Adams and Thomas Jefferson once visited the home of Shakespeare together… and both broke off pieces of one of the writer’s chairs so that they could take home souvenirs.
-When he was given an official surrender document during the French-Indian War, George Washington blindly signed the thing because he didn’t want to admit he couldn’t read French. In doing so, he basically solely accepted the blame of multiple war crimes. Somehow he wormed his way out of this… one of his methods was to blame his translator.
-Ben Franklin was forbidden from writing the Declaration of Independence because the founding fathers thought he would try to slip in puns and jokes.
-John Hancock was a convicted smuggler. Charges were dropped against him after he hired John Adams for a lawyer.
-Aaron Burr was a firm believer in the intellectual equality of men and women and lobbied for women’s suffrage.
-John Adams named his dog Satan.
-James Madison was our smallest president, at 5’4" and roughly 100 pounds.
-When he was 26, Washington bribed voters into electing him into office with alcohol… he gave certain voters about a half gallon for choosing him.
-Ben Franklin once wrote an essay urging scientists to “improve the odor of flatulence.”
-Jefferson warned Lewis & Clark to beware of giant sloths during their expedition.
-Adams and Jefferson were the original bros; after a lifetime of friendship, bitterness, and more friendship, they died hours apart on the same day- July 4th. Adams’ last words were, “Jefferson survives.” Well, not quite.
-Washington crossed enemy lines during the Battle of Germantown to return a lost dog to General Howe.
-The Star Spangled Banner was based off of a rowdy English drinking song.
-Alexander Hamilton’s descendants heavily edited and even hid some of his letters to his totally hetero bro, John Laurens, claiming “the content was embarrassing and indecent.”
-Ben Franklin opted for the turkey to be the U.S. national bird, claiming that bald eagles were cold and volatile.
-A few days before signing the Declaration, the Constitutional Convention got LIT. It’s rumored that the founding fathers drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 7 bottles of Claret, 7 bowls of spiked punch, 22 bottles of porter, 8 bottles of whiskey and 8 bottles of hard cider in this one night.
I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were. Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together. And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.
On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.
They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.
The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.
Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.
(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)
There’s a lot of bigoted historian dragging on my dash these days and it makes me happy.
Once again, more proof that we queers have ALWAYS been here, and it’s a CHOSEN narrative to erase them.
I am reblogging this for the lols as well as a very accessible and engaging reminder that every historical narrative is created by human beings interpreting existing evidence and will necessarily reflect their biases, experiences, cultural norms and taboos.
Human objectivity is a myth, and until we have diversity present and speaking out in and across all disciplines, the truth will remain obscured.
ruby-dear archive 