|
In the 1690s Scotland attempted to get in on the colonialism business by trying to make a land route across Panama. This involved a huge chunk of Scotland's national wealth, because very few international backers were keen on the project, so the Scottish public contributed a lot of the funds in small donations. The plan was a complete failure, bankrupted large chunks of Scotland (it took away roughly 25% of Scotland's net wealth iirc) and was a significant factor in the country forming a union with England a few years later.
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2015 14:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 17:21 |
|
|
Considering history in terms of the human experience is something I find really enjoyable, so let's knock it back a little bit further to a couple of bits of archaeology that suggest some very human experiences: The sudden, frustrating realisation that you have left your spears back in that cave; My personal favourite, a ten year old boy walking through a cave, the walls lit by the burning torch in his hand as a large dog keeps pace beside him, twenty-six thousand years ago.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2015 13:33
|
|
|
 Fun fact, children have been drawing pictures of themselves doing cool things for time immemorial.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2015 14:27
|
|
|
cash crab posted:Canada initially didn't let First Nations people into WWI because, to quote Sam Hughes, "Germans may fail to extend to them the privileges of civilized warfare". Like, the idea was that sure, British people would LOVE to serve with you guys, both those nasty Germans. Some guys still got in during the beginning, though. First Nations Canadians like acclaimed sportsman and great guy Tom Longboat. Also if you've never heard of Kate Beaton for some reason, she's got loads of fun history comics. I'm kind of surprised nobody's linked any of her stuff in this thread already. Other good ones: That time Australians overthrew their elected governor, William Bligh (of the mutiny on the Bounty fame); famous romantic poets Byron and Shelley; Canada's beloved Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2015 18:49
|
|
|
iirc in Medieval Europe religion also just encompassed so much more of any person's daily culture and what they would see/hear/read. The bible might be one of the only books that you'd ever seen, apart from maybe a ledger. I think if you look at it like that it makes more sense that there'd be a lot more (both in volume and variety) entertainment within religious materials in those days. Modern American/European Christians look like they're treating their religion a lot more seriously, but that's only because they can get their dick jokes somewhere else, you know? Also to follow up whoever mentioned monkeys killing each other with knives, the english respond to discovering new and exciting animals by seeing how good they are at killing dogs. Featuring Jacco Maccacco, "a celebrated monkey" that got really good at it. Red Bones has a new favorite as of 16:53 on Dec 7, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2015 16:47
|
|
|
Some fun Japanese history facts: During the post-WWII American occupation, part of the 'democratisation process' was to create a new constitution for the country enshrining democratic values. In theory this was meant to have been created by the Japanese parliament (the Diet) itself, but it was so obvious to the public that the document had been written by the Americans and forced through the Diet that the news media started making fun of it. My favourite bit is someone being quoted about the constitution with "Oh, has it been translated into Japanese already?" The Emperor's significance has waxed and waned over the years, including some moments in the late 12th century AD where an emperor had to actually work for a living (as a poet), one could not afford his own funeral and another had to spend 20 years trying to scrape together the funds for a coronation. The First American minister to Japan took years to realise that the guy living in the old capital of Kyoto was the emperor, and not just "a sort of pope" of the Shinto religion. When the American occupation forces chose to rework the Emperor into more of a public figure in line with European monarchs, everyone found out that the Emperor was a little shy man who liked marine biology and was fussed over by his wife. He got trapped on a university campus for half an hour when his car was mobbed by students complaining about the new constitution, and on one occasion he was too embarrassed to shake hands with a coal miner and asked if they could just bow to one another instead (which the press then complained about). (Anyone interested in the American occupation should check out the book I got these anecdotes from, which is a really good and very readable look at the period from a Japanese journalist who was working during the occupation and later went on to lecture in America.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2015 16:46
|
|
|
While we're on the topic of somewhat dubious tales of rural British people killing animals for dumb reasons, the last known Great Auk (an extinct flightless bird that resembled, but was unrelated to, penguins) in the British Isles was (reportedly) killed on the archipelago of St. Kilda, Scotland, in 1844. When a storm kicked up, the people who had caught the bird thought it was a witch in disguise and that it was responsible for the storm, and beat the animal to death with a stick. The last ones in the world died a little later, when the knowledge that they were going extinct made museums and collectors pay a lot of money to obtain dead specimens whilst they were still around, which led to the last of the animals being killed on a little rock off the coast of Iceland. The word penguin was originally another name for the Great Auk, and when Europeans discovered similar-looking species of birds in the southern hemisphere they called them penguins too. The name has outlasted the Great Auk itself, which went extinct in the 1850's after centuries of hunting, mostly for its feathers. ~ R.I.P. Great Auk, approx. 5.000.000 B.C - approx. 1855 A.D ~ May the stubby little wings of angels carry thee to thy rest 
Red Bones has a new favorite as of 16:58 on Dec 20, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2015 16:54
|
|
|
Canemacar posted:Anyone care to post about the Welsh now? I don't know much about them besides sheep jokes. I had a conversation about the Welsh language with one of my Welsh lecturers and what he told me (although I'm sure there's more accurate sources) is that Welsh was the main language spoken in Wales, especially in rural wales, until the industrial revolution brought more movement of people within the country and between the Welsh and English populations. Wales was where a large amount of the coal enabling the industrial revolution was mined, and as the mining industry grew bigger in South Wales, migrant workers from England slowly grew to become the majority of the workforce and the language spoken in the work environment and in the surrounding regions shifted to English. It's now being taught in schools again and there's been a lot of measures in the last few decades to reintroduce it into stuff like signage and government documents. There's a generational divide where very old people might speak it, middle aged people probably can't speak it and young people (because it's now part of the school curriculum) can speak or read and write it. I'm not sure how recent changing all the signage was, I don't remember how it was when I visited Wales as a kid in the 90s, but now all the signage is in both English and Welsh. EDIT: (according to wikipedia) another big reason the language switched over to English was because the English government were racist and made all the schools in Wales teach exclusively in English 
Red Bones has a new favorite as of 19:51 on Mar 2, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2016 19:46
|
|
|
zedprime posted:While it gets bonus points for being more interesting, being old and sick in general was the bigger contributor. Dude was probably going to croak to pneumonia whether he gave a speech or not. "Not surprisingly he caught a cold" is some old wives tale poo poo. I listened to a podcast episode about his campaign, which I know isn't the most reputable source of information, but there's some fun facts I remember from it: Harrison's campaign marked the first presidential campaign in the US in which the presidential candidate actually appeared on the campaign trail in person. Until that point, it was seen as beneath a presidential candidate to campaign for the job - being nominated for, and taking on the role of, U.S. President was supposed to be kind of a moral responsibility you took upon yourself if other people nominated you for the position, and campaigning for it (or putting your own name forward) made you look power-hungry. Harrison started giving speeches on the campaign trail to disprove accusations from the opposing Democratic Party that he was too old and infirm to be president. This is perhaps why he chose to give such a long inauguration speech. The democrats also asserted that since he was so old, he should probably retire to a log cabin with some hard cider instead of running for president, which kind of backfired on them because it made him a candidate for all the working-class Americans who did live in log cabins and drank hard cider. This was despite the fact that Harrison was from a family of wealthy plantation owners. There were even parades with actual log cabins being pulled down the street by horses, with cider being served out of them. What an exciting election.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2016 16:51
|
|
|
A pair of ethnically Han Chinese skeletons also showed up in a grave from Roman London recently. The ancient world was more interconnected than we sometimes think.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2016 13:53
|
|
|
Nine of Eight posted:According to genetic markers, they would either be *east asian* or *north african*. There hasn't been any bone structure confirmation yet, but we would have little way if knowing if they were ethnically han. Oh, the news report I listened to said that they were pegged as East Asian based on their bone structure, but maybe that got mixed up somewhere in the chinese whispers that is science/history reporting.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2016 18:33
|
|
|
hogmartin posted:This part isn't really accurate. See if you can find a copy of Japan's American Interlude. Japan was under occupation, there were war crimes trials and sentences, and loads of people from military to civil servants were barred from any job they were really qualified for. Sounds broadly like what was done with Germany, aside from the Soviet partition thing. I can vouch for Japan's American Interlude being a really good book, unlike most English-language stuff on Japan it was written by a Japanese man who was a journalist during the occupation and went on to become a lecturer at universities in the US, so the English version (I'm not sure if there's a Japanese one) is all his own writing, rather than being a translation. It's very comprehensive in going through the different aspects of Japanese civil society and the country and how the Americans changed different things, and he also puts in some really nice humanising anecdotes that he (presumably) picked up during his work as a journalist. At one point someone jokes that they don't have an opinion on the new Japanese constitution because it hasn't been translated into Japanese yet.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2016 21:27
|
|
|
System Metternich posted:Make that 12-14 million, the scale of the expulsion (which in many cases was carefully organised and executed by Czechoslovak/Polish/whatever authorities and not just driven by a spontaneous desire for vengeance, see the “Benes decrees“ for instance, which had been drafted as early as the years 1940-45 by Czechoslovakia's government-in-exile) really was massive. It wasn't just Germans, too; other ethnic groups who were forced to leave their homes after WW2 were e.g. Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, Italians from Istria or Poles from today's Ukraine and Belarus. I once was at a lecture given in my hometown about local reception and assimilation of the refugees (mostly Sudeten Germans) after the war. At one point, the lecturer asked for everybody who was a refugee themselves or is descended from one to raise their hand. Out of an audience of maybe 200 people I'd say that a good half did so, if not more (me included, my grandpa was from northern Bohemia). At such a lecture the audience is self-selecting to a certain degree, of course, but nevertheless I wouldn't be surprised if at least a third or so of Germany's population nowadays is descended from refugees If you've ever wondered why every other part of the world seems to have those awkward situations where an ethnic group straddles the border between two nation states, or where you have a large minority X group in country Y, and why Europe seems to not have that? You can put an awful lot of it down to the mass resettlements of people post-WWII. Unrelated historical fun fact: if you got in a time machine and went to an ancient Greek city-state and gave some guy the finger, he'd know exactly what you were trying to say. Obscene hand gestures truly are an unbroken string of belligerence, reaching back across the millennia.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2016 08:23
|
|
|
HisMajestyBOB posted:In Chinese, "the day after tomorrow" (houtian) uses the same character as "behind" (houmian). The "day before yesterday" (qiantian) uses "in front" (qianmian). This is really confusing for native English speakers. I can't remember where (maybe it was this thread?) I heard that some south American languages have this same reversed conception of how time is perceived on a horizontal axis: the future is behind you because you can't see it, and the past is in front of you because you can see it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2016 15:58
|
|
|
Bertrand Hustle posted:More Chinese fun: "next" is "down" and "previous" is "up". Next week is xia ge xingqi/xia zhou/xia ge libai (three words for week, yes) and last week is shang... etc instead of xia. Xia and shang also mean under and on top of, respectively. next being down makes perfect sense in a language that's written in columns going downward, honestly. Is this Mandarin you're talking about, by the way?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2016 21:15
|
|
|
A White Guy posted:Oh Classical Chinese Yeah, written Japanese is hilarious. Two sets of syllable characters, one huge pile of non syllable characters, and they are all essential because words in Japanese come from combining the characters and the different syllable sets are needed to show where one word ends and the next begins,and other fun context sensitive things. No wonder the Koreans just said gently caress it and invented hangul instead.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2016 08:08
|
|
. What a horrible writing system, even for actual Chinese people. It's a good thing they never tried to pass their linguistic system onto other cultures.....Oh. Oh my god. Vietnamese, what the gently caress is this? This isn't a loving....oh my god. Japanese,
|
hackbunny posted:Pretty sure they literally killed for pigments (and spices, and textiles) The Dutch approach to controlling the spice trade in the West Indies/southeast Asia was that they'd arrive at an island and force whoever the local ruler was to become a client state of the Dutch so they could secure favourable export rates and prevent them trading with other people. If they arrived at an island that didn't have a local ruler but ruled by committee instead, as in the case with the Banda Islands where nutmeg was grown, they decided a better approach would be to kill everyone on the island, import a bunch of slave labour and grow the nutmeg that way instead. The population of Bandanese on the islands went from around 14,000 to zero, and then to 500-odd when Dutch quickly returned some enslaved individuals to the island when they realised that they needed some people around to show them how to actually grow the nutmeg.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2016 08:07
|
|
|
Mycroft Holmes posted:I think he's talking about the time before writing. The theory he's talking about specifically mentions the actions of characters in the Illiad and the Odyssey, which is decidedly not pre-writing.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2016 12:24
|
|
|
Besesoth posted:What? No. The oral tradition from Collapse-era Greece wasn't pre-writing any more than, as System Metternich mentioned, the oral tradition of illiterate peasants in medieval France. Mycenaean Greece had writing - Linear B - which is even recognizably the ancestor of Homeric and Attic Greek. That literacy was largely lost in Greece in the Bronze Age Collapse doesn't make their oral tradition "pre-writing". One of the things I find really interesting about historical scripts is how much textual information has been lost, or is available to us but completely indecipherable. There's stuff like the Phaistos Disk which contains a very developed writing system and archeologists can figure out if a script is an alphabet (symbol=sound) a syllabary (symbol=syllable) or a logogram (symbol=word/phrase/concept) or an exciting mixture of the three! Like it's been sorta concluded that the script on the disk is at least partially a syllabary based on the number of distinct symbols in the entire enscription (45 unique symbols making up a text of 241), and they know what direction you should read the text (from the outside going in a spiral to the centre) because the kerning gets closer together near the centre as the writer realised that they were running out of space; but nobody knows what the text actually says, and they can't know unless someone finds a Rosetta Stone for the Cretan hieroglyphic script. The stone is also printed! Just imagine, if history had gone differently we might be writing in a script that includes a tiny head with a mohawk in it, instead of our crappy latin alphabet. Here's the stone!  And here is the text:  The wikipedia article on the Cretan hieroglyphs is kinda vague as to whether the entire body of texts is just these three artifacts or if it also includes a bunch of other printed material. Whatever the truth is, we may never know it, but it will always be interesting. Other cool scripts include Maya, which has a really beautiful typography to it where each "word" is a mixture of syllablic and logographic signs combined together in a square. There's a lot of interesting reading you can do on Wikipedia on this subject, if you want to spend a few hours learning about lost languages. I like the example of the Phaistos Disk because the fact that it has an (apparently) unique Cretan script that was established enough on the island to make the necessary tools to print it, which is pretty amazing; I also like it because the text getting smushed the closer it gets to the centre is one of those moments where you can really feel the humanity of history by seeing them do poo poo that we still do today. The city I used to live in has a museum with some stone wall carvings from Akkad or Babylon, I think, and there is script carefully carved onto them, covering the clothes of the figures on the carvings but avoiding the finely detailed wings on these twelve foot tall bird-dudes. There's one carving where the mason wasn't paying attention and carved that text straight through the wings. Truly, it is our mistakes that make us human.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2016 23:18
|
|
|
Not entirely about the 60s/70s counterculture, but If anyone wants to read about protest movements, there's short(ish) documents which pretty much serve as an exploration of the beliefs of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. that are good to read up on. I haven't read it, but Henry David Thoreau is the granddaddy of civil resistance and his seminal essay is "resistance to civil government", also titled "civil resistance", and he was pretty cool. Leo Tolstoy's "Letter to a Hindu" is also good to read.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2016 08:04
|
|
|
learnincurve posted:Don't kid yourself, the Royals and the aristocrats are not our "leaders" just because of some divine birth right, they are our leaders because they legally own most of the land in our country. You take them and throw them in prison, confiscate their lands, then that's a revolution and there are no laws left to stop your neighbour from deciding he wants an extension and that your house looks ideal for that purpose. It's worth noting that the legal system is ultimately at the behest of popular will, though. I agree with you in the sense that if you pushed it so far as to try and justify executing all the rich people and redistributing their property to the poor or something it would probably break down, but if there was enough popular support for simply abolishing a monarchy and turning over a lot of their property to state hands, it'd happen without the entire legal system breaking down.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2016 11:32
|
|
|
Another fun historical English land law fact: a lot of the modern counties of England were independent kingdoms in the first millenium AD, and so the counties have flags and mottos and all that poo poo that date from that period. The county of Kent's motto is "Invicta", with the explanation being that of all the former kingdoms of England Kent was alone in being "undefeated" during the Norman conquest, which makes for a nice motto but is a little misleading as the reason Kent was undefeated was that there wasn't any fighting: the king of Kent just let the Normans roll on through in return for securing more favourable terms under Norman rule. I read about it last year sometime so take my half-remembered sources with a big grain of salt, but the historical documents actually back up this story, which is largely folk history: Kent was indeed ruled under different terms than a lot of the other former kingdoms in England, and it was legally property of the crown by right of gavel rather than sword; that is to say, it was given legally rather than taken through force.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2016 19:46
|
|
|
Khazar-khum posted:No one knows just what the various 'Venus' figures were for. I would guess a variety of things, from porn to childbirth aids to kids' toys. I know some were found in the grain stores in one of the oldest neolithic settlements ever found (Çatalhöyük), which suggests perhaps some sort of religious "don't let the grain go bad" talisman sorta thing, at least in that instance. That settlement is also interesting because of the architecture- all the houses are clustered together, and are accessed by climbing through a hole in the roof of the building.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2016 13:14
|
|
|
learnincurve posted:Would a big hole in the roof not be for letting out the smoke from a fire? It's true, but the hole in the roof was also the only point of entry. The website goes into detail about it, but they were living in dense clusters of buildings with communal roof spaces from which you could enter individual rooms. Maybe it was a defensive measure against other people, or to protect the houses from being entered by wild animals.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2016 16:29
|
|
|
Pick posted:Even in the book I scanned the passage from above, the author was very "of course this isn't 'gay' as we understand it today" and I was like, I think sometimes when authors say "it's not 'gay' in the modern sense" even when it's like, a dude in love with a dude and they are both totally boning, they mean that we should take care not to map our modern conceptions of social mores concerning homosexual relationships 1/1 onto the past because sometimes it'd be the case that dudes being in love with each other was pretty accepted but them boning was taboo, or that dudes boning was fine and being in love was seen as "weird" but not necessarily an absolute sin, etc etc. Sometimes they are just being weird and homophobic though.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2016 22:14
|
|
|
I watched the Gandhi biopic a few months ago and what really struck me about it is how it makes the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Al Jinnah, look like an unrepentant rear end in a top hat with zero redeeming qualities. Imo a good rule of thumb in biopics is if anyone is depicted as a villain in them you should probably do some reading about them because they are probably just as interesting and complex as the person the biopic is about.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2016 13:12
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:"Another genre I have no respect for is the biopic. They are just big excuses for actors to win Oscars. It’s a corrupted cinema. [...] I like Selma quite a lot for taking this approach.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2016 09:08
|
|
|
El Estrago Bonito posted:There's a really solid book called The Men Who United the States that was written by a British author that is a pretty good look at a lot of the process of discovering just exactly what was in America. One of my favorite bits in it is when it explains that during the Mormon Exodus they came to a decision where they had to choose between two passes that were both fairly untraveled and remote, they decided to choose the southern pass because it was more well known and had less snow on it at the time. That pass is what would bring them into what is now Utah, but had they chosen differently they would have walked into what is now Yellowstone National Park. I saw a neat documentary last night about John Rae, a British/Canadian explorer who mapped the last part of the northwest passage in the mid-1800s. He was pretty distinctive at the time for relying on a lot of skills and knowledge he'd learnt from the native First Nations people to do his exploring, and his reputation was forever tarred when he was asked to go and find out what happened to John Franklin's expedition to find the northwest passage. When his report finally came through and relayed the information that the expedition had all died after resorting to cannibalism to survive, and he told the British Navy that he'd learnt this information from local Inuit, everybody back in England pretty much hated him for it, especially Franklin's widow. This is why in the UK Franklin's failed expedition is kinda bizarrely more well remembered than the successful expedition of cool explorer dude John Rae, who only lost a single man in his three expeditions to map the northern parts of Canada and never ate anybody.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2016 09:32
|
|
|
Aesop Poprock posted:Was it specifically the cannibalism part of his report? Why would they hate a dude just for telling them what happened? Did the public think he was lying? If it was that big of a stain on England's image or w/e couldn't the navy have just censored the more lurid details? I think it was the suggestion that the upstanding members of the Royal Navy ended up resorting to cannibalism that the navy and the public really didn't like, and the fact that he got this information from native people was used to discredit him. Rae never found the Franklin expedition, but multiple groups of Inuit told him that they'd seen a bunch of white people starve to death and had resorted to cannibalism, and the Inuit had also taken a bunch of things from the ship, which Rae took as pretty solid evidence of what had happened. The Navy officially accepted the findings, and several members of the public and the navy, most prominently Franklin's widow and Charles Dickens, refused to accept the report and started a big public poo poo-talking campaign against Rae after his letter reporting on his findings was released to the press and was published. Chalk it up to a mixture of refusing to accept that your beloved navy would end up eating each other and the ingrained racism that Rae heard this from a bunch of 'natives' and we were supposed to believe them (even though Rae had purchased a bunch of stuff that was definitely from the ship from the Natives and had sent it to London as evidence supporting his report). I think it was a real shooting the messenger situation, honestly. Rae was just doing his job and everyone hated him for reporting the bad news. The other, later expeditions involved in trying to find the Franklin expedition got a lot more positive press and several knighthoods amongst the members; Rae just got a financial reward. Franklin's widow was so adamant that what Rae had reported wasn't true that she financed another expedition after the Navy's second one (after Rae's) corroborated his findings.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2016 11:31
|
|
|
Aesop Poprock posted:So did Tintin have time travelling abilities or is this one of those central/northern European things where it's cool to portray the rest of the world as stereotypical savages in the 20th century It's from Prisoners of the Sun, where he meets a 'lost Incan civiliastion'. Tintin's not perfect by any means but from the Blue Lotus onward Herge is generally pretty realistic in his depiction of the contemporary 20th century world, with occasional digressions into 'lost magical tribe' territory. It's also something that crops up far and wide, not just in European work (although it's rooted in colonialism so Europe is certainly a huge influence on depicting other cultures in this way).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2017 12:32
|
|
|
Solice Kirsk posted:Wasn't there a captured US airmen that basically lied and said "Yeah we have a ton of those new bombs" even though he had no idea what the gently caress the Japanese were asking him? And then like the next day (or maybe the day before) the US sent a message saying to surrender or be annihilated, so the two lies lined up? I seem to recall that story from my History of WWI and II class. It's still contentious as to why exactly the Japanese government chose to surrender, honestly, and it was probably driven by a multitude of factors. The bombings definitively causing the surrender is a useful narrative for Americans because it justifies the bombings, but in reality other things like the threat of a Russian invasion (as Russia was no longer fighting Germany and had warred with Japan in the recent past) probably played a significant role.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2017 15:32
|
|
|
I had to read a lot of Republican speeches about how Iran hates the US because of religious fundamentalism last week for an essay I was writing. So I'm not sure how widely known it is, but a large chunk of Iranian enmity toward the US is because the US and the UK instigated a coup in Iran in the 1950s because the democratically elected government there wanted to nationalise the oil industry, which was controlled by a UK company. In retaliation the two western countries had the president of Iran replaced with a monarch, who was then himself over throne in the 1970s for being a lovely dictator.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2017 08:42
|
|
|
Dutchy posted:That's true but I only ever learned there was a monarchy to be overthrown because I'm an auto-didactic message board dumbass. That's also the only reason I ever learned what the Renaissance was. Except for an ancient history class in 7th grade, Europe never really came up as a real place where stuff happened until we'd reach WWI History in school is as much about indoctrinating a population to believe they all belong to one shared national identity group as it is about informing people on what happened in the past, so it's not really surprising that school history lessons focus on bits of history that make the 'nation' feel like a single united protagonist rather than something more complicated or uncomfortable. I grew up in the UK and the most we got on the British Empire was like, a two page spread in a history textbook with that map of all the pink countries, and that's despite the long, long shadow the Empire casts over contemporary British society. Japanese history textbooks, similarly, barely mention the Second World War in anything but the most oblique terms. The Swedish education system doesn't really cover the treatment of the Sami people. We got a semester on the Aztecs one time though, that was really fun.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2017 09:21
|
|
|
Leaf Insects are a family of insects that can be found throughout south Asia and Australasia:   They are pretty amazing examples of animal camouflage, and when I was reading about them I thought (what is probably) the first European account of them was really charming. It's from Antonio Pigafetta, one of the eighteen men who survived Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe in the 1500's: Antonio Pigafetta posted:In this island are also found certain trees, the leaves of which, when they fall, are animated, and walk. They are like the leaves of the mulberry tree, but not so long; they have the leaf stalk short and pointed, and near the leaf stalk they have on each side two feet. If they are touched they escape, but if crushed they do not give out blood. I kept one for nine days in a box. When I opened it the leaf went round the box. I believe they live upon air.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 18, 2017 07:44
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:While the pyramids were being built in Egypt, some woolly mammoths were still alive on Wrangel Island. The population on the island was also so small they ended up with a bunch of genetic problems, including blonde fur. A lot of giant/interesting species lasted for a long way into recorded history. Giant (although more like pig-sized than elephant-sized) ground sloths remained in the Caribbean until around 2700 BC, New Zealand's giant bird based ecosystem was around until the Maori showed up around 1250 AD, and Madagascar had a lot more big animals (including gorilla-sized lemurs) until humans arrived 350 BC-500 AD, and elephant birds possibly survived on the island into the 17th century AD. One of the things I find interesting about historical biodiversity is that it kind of confuses one of the arguments about the limitations on developing societies in the Americas, that they were limited by a lack of large, domesticatable animal species, where Africa and Eurasia had horses, cattle, pigs, camels, etc. Horses and camels actually come from north America and were present when humans first arrived on the continent, but for whatever reason(s), they went extinct there rather than sticking around and being domesticated.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2017 20:41
|
|
|
Aesop Poprock posted:Do you know of any interesting links detailing these? I've never heard of them before and I'd like to I mostly read about this stuff on wikipedia. With Madagascar, there's a nice article on the extinct lemur species, including Archaeoindris, the gorilla-esque lemur. There's also an article on ground sloths that covers the Caribbean species. If you're interested in reading about extinct animals more generally, I'd really recommend a site called Earth Archives, which publishes a lot of good natural science and natural history articles and always commissions nice illustrations to go along with them.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2017 23:48
|
|
|
cptn_dr posted:I would pay good money to eat a Moa. I think some scientists did try to eat mammoth once, but it tasted about as good as you'd expect defrosted ten thousand year old meat to. Maybe when they finish cloning a new one they can put some sort of restaurant chain together.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2017 08:05
|
|
|
I can't believe people spoke about cutting off dicks for three pages without mentioning the time when it happens in the Bible:1 Samuel 18:25-27 posted:Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2017 10:03
|
|
|
One of my favourite history burns is someone joking that the Puckle gun (a primitive and unreliable revolving rifle) was only a danger to its investors.quote:A rare invention to destroy the crowd, It's apparently from a deck of satirical playing cards making fun of lovely 18th Century investment 'opportunities'.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2018 23:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 17:21 |
|
|
Alhazred posted:In the 18th century pineapples were the ultimate status symbol and if you couldn't afford to buy one you could rent one for the night. Which explains why you'd make the cupola of your elaborate 18th century hothouse look like one. 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2018 20:56
|
|