World History - Tumblr Posts
Sometimes you gotta start posting and creating and an audience will come later, it can be hard at first, but don't give up!
Meanwhile, I gotta say I'm obsessed with your creatures, please tell me more about the story! Is it set in a different world, in the future/past, a different dimension?
Yea, thank you. Can't count my worth on reactions. Brrrrrrr
This is a really good question and it's horrible I never actually explained this. It should probably be a pinned post.
In a simple way - the world and story is based on classical fantasy but with the "logicalize" effect. There are dragons, wizards, gods, different races (most races taking places of classical fantasy races). You should recognize most of the concepts but they should feel well uuh- different. For one, (almost) every race is from a different taxonomical kingdom/phylum. The main story I have in mind would be of a guy visiting different regions, showing more of the world and dealing with some personal stuff. However I wont go into more story detail for now.
The world a complicated way - Well the world is a planet not related to Earth in any way and unlikely in the same universe as it has magic/unexplained phenomena.
It's thought that the planet started off like Earth - land and ocean creation. The difference being the appearance of Designers. Those would root on different spots of the planet and start affecting their portion of land, locking it from other designers. This created multiple locked ecosystems with extreme unsular biogeography.
The designers are thought to be organisms that would fight for territory and dominance like animals but since they are motionless they use their ability to control space and time, making the planet their body and universe their habitat. Their behavior being instinctive, not thought formed. (they are also the source of magic)
Some evidence also suggests that with the inteligence of the designer's controlled species the designer's abilities/awareness would grow, making it evolve with the ecosystem. Many historical events support the hypothesis.
This is likely the reason why all the designers were reaching or reached sentience in their respective regions.
Image only shows sentient species of two designers
Before the current time (current time being a difficult combination of medieval times and quick rise in technology and science) the regions got "open" and actual designer war began. However, to the people this was just the usual taking over countries, growing kingdoms and such (except the enemies were often "aliens"). It was a multithousand year process of course.
It got complicated and in the last few thousand years two designers are dead and now people experience big culture mixing, less wars (obviously those still happen), more progress, trading, science and mutual hate for designers.
It's not even 10 years since the biggest elven kingdom began with free public education, big deal.
A Uniima c engineer made a metal plane (it flies shorter than 50 meters and max 3 meters from the ground).
And magic awakening was greatly improved by sterilizing the needles!
(Magical abilities are an uncommon mutation that started appearing in around 6th century. To get it artificially, a god's blood is injected in a vein -or in the somatosensory cortex for better results.)
Talked a lot but probably missed all points, woosh
On This Day In History
March 23rd, 2021: A container ship runs aground and obstructs the Suez Canal for six days.
if you don't do anything else today,
Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.
have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.
and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.
black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.
if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.
This is Juneteenth.
white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.
I’m thankful for my 10th grade history teacher because:
“I have to teach the book.” He said. “You have to read it and I have to give a test on it to make sure you know what’s in it.”
“Okay,” we said. “This is what school is.”
He also said “but I don’t have any rules that say I can’t teach you more than one book.”
“But this isn’t English class,” we complained.
“No it’s not,” he replied as he handed out photocopies of a different book I do not have the name of. I would learn later that he paid for the photocopies himself, because he could not afford to buy a set of books for us, and the school wouldn’t help. We had to turn in the photocopies at the end of the lesson. He’d done this for years, and the packets of paper were sets of folders containing well read photocopies and some pages were crumbly and he’d replace whole packets or pages in a single packet at a time. He had a whole cabinet full of these folders, broke down by chapter, out of a different book. Some of the packets included photocopies from more than one book, some news articles, a couple academic papers. We were not always required to read those, but we were promised extra credit if we did.
“Write me an essay,” he’d say.
“Ugh,” we groaned. “What about?”
“The differences between what’s in the packet and what’s in your books.”
And we would. He’d accept full essays and he’d accept a simple list of differences, but that was always an assignment. Point out the differences.
“Which fact do you believe?” He would ask us.
“The packet,” we’d answer.
“Why?” He’d ask.
“Because they don’t want us to have them,” we’d answer.
“Good,” he’s smile. “With this chapter, I’m not going to give you a packet. I want you to make your own packet based on the information in this chapter in your government supplied textbook.”
“Ugh,” we groaned.
But we learned how to do some simple research, and we were told that Wikipedia could be edited by anyone, but everyone that edited had to present sources. We had to come up with twenty pages worth of extra information on the chapter in our textbook. The textbook’s chapter was something like ten pages long. We had to do our essay/lists on what was left out/added/changed. It was a good two week long project.
“Why am I making you do this?”
“Because it’s busy work,” someone answered.
He frowned. “Because one day you’ll be presented something as fact and you’ll have to decide if it is fact or not.”
“How do we know the difference?”
“Maybe one day one of you will grow up and be able to give a simple answer to that question because I don’t have that answer.”
“You just didn’t want to do the work to make a packet yourself, huh?”
He smiled. “That is an advantage to having minions.”
And then he laughed like an evil vampire and we watched a movie.
Why are they mining so much right now?
Cobalt has become the center of a major upsurge in mining in Congo, and the rapid acceleration of cobalt extraction in the region since 2013 has brought hundreds of thousands of people into intimate contact with a powerful melange of toxic metals. The frantic pace of cobalt extraction in Katanga bears close resemblance to another period of rapid exploitation of Congolese mineral resources: During the last few years of World War II, the U.S. government sourced the majority of the uranium necessary to develop the first atomic weapons from a single Congolese mine, named Shinkolobwe. The largely forgotten story of those miners, and the devastating health and ecological impacts uranium production had on Congo, looms over the country now as cobalt mining accelerates to feed the renewable energy boom—with little to no protections for workers involved in the trade.
The city of Kolwezi, which is 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Lubumbashi and 180 km from the now-abandoned Shinkolobwe mine, sits on top of nearly half of the available cobalt in the world. The scope of the contemporary scramble for that metal in Katanga has totally transformed the region. Enormous open-pit mines worked by tens of thousands of miners form vast craters in the landscape and are slowly erasing the city itself.
[...]Much of the cobalt in Congo is mined by hand: Workers scour the surface level seams with picks, shovels, and lengths of rebar, sometimes tunneling by hand 60 feet or more into the earth in pursuit of a vein of ore. This is referred to as artisanal mining, as opposed to the industrial mining carried out by large firms. The thousands of artisanal miners who work at the edges of the formal mines run by big industrial concerns make up 90 percent of the nation’s mining workforce and produce 30 percent of its metals. Artisanal mining is not as efficient as larger-scale industrial mining, but since the miners produce good-quality ore with zero investment in tools, infrastructure, or safety, the ore they sell to buyers is as cheap as it gets. Forced and child labor in the supply chain is not uncommon here, thanks in part to a significant lack of controls and regulations on artisanal mining from the government.
[...]When later atomic research found that uranium’s unstable nucleus could be used to make a powerful bomb, the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project began searching for a reliable source of uranium. They found it through Union Minière, which sold the United States the first 1,000 tons it needed to get the bomb effort off the ground.
The Manhattan Project sent agents of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, to Congo from 1943 to 1945 to supervise the reopening of the mine and the extraction of Shinkolobwe’s ore—and to make sure none of it fell into the hands of the Axis powers. Every piece of rock that emerged from the mine for almost two decades was purchased by the Manhattan Project and its successors in the Atomic Energy Commission, until the mine was closed by the Belgian authorities on the eve of Congolese independence in 1960. After that, the colonial mining enterprise Union Minière became the national minerals conglomerate Gécamines, which retained much of the original structure and staff.
[...]Dr. Lubaba showed me the small battery-operated Geiger counters that he uses in the field to measure radioactivity. He had begun the process of trying to find and interview the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners, but he explained that tracing the health consequences of working in that specific mine would be difficult: Many long-established villages in the area have been demolished and cast apart as cobalt extraction has torn through the landscape. His initial inquiries suggested that at least some of the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners had been drawn into the maelstrom of digging in the region around Kolwezi.
In her book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, historian Gabrielle Hecht recounts the U.S. Public Health Service’s efforts to investigate the effects of uranium exposure on people who worked closely with the metal and the ore that bore it. In 1956, a team of medical researchers from the PHS paid a visit to Shinkolobwe while the mine was still producing more than half of the uranium used in America’s Cold War missile programs. Most of their questions went unanswered, however, as Shinkolobwe’s operators had few official records to share and stopped responding to communications as soon as the researchers left.
[...]“Don’t ever use that word in anybody’s presence. Not ever!” Williams quotes OSS agent Wilbur Hogue snapping at a subordinate who had said the mine’s name in a café in Congo’s capital. “There’s something in that mine that both the United States and Germany want more than anything else in the world. I don’t know what it’s for. We’re not supposed to know.”
the royal family of europe be like: sixty shades of habsburg
once upon a time satan invented a handful of habsburgs and said "spread the seed of evil in this whole continent! ....wait no why are yall fucking each other, not that seed, not like that!"
Okay okay okay.
Guys.
Hear me out.
We host something like the 1893 Chicago World's Fair--a showcase of technology and culture from all around the world--but this time, we preserve all the buildings and stuff after the festival is over. Maybe the site can serve as a sort of immersive museum for future generations.
And we don't celebrate Christopher Columbus this time because he was an awful person even by 15th century standards.
And we try to steer clear of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/what have you.
does anyone know some common essay topics for the world history 1 final? i have it tomorrow 😭😭
update on my finals (turns out i had 4 today):
science - don't even talk to me, i literally started crying because i ran out of time and i didn't remember half the questions (why is my teacher giving us an in-class final??? the regents is enough. also my teacher said that we'll have time to finish part 1 tomorrow and thursday so it made me feel better)
english - pretty good, only 10 multiple choice but tomorrow i have to do the essay 💔 i have a picture of the prompt though, so i'll try and start it at home.
spanish - easiest listening ever, even easier than last year's listening for the FLACS
social studies - today was essay day, it was pretty easy since i was prepared, but tomorrow is multiple choice 💔
i was reading my textbook for school and omg liudprand was NOT playing around 😭🙏
Something that I realised recently is people tend to be more concerned with tyrants and dictators who where born with a silver spoon, when in reality they don’t have the ability to withstand being toppled from power which can happen in any instant.
I not saying we should ignore the first kind but whom we should be more careful and concerned with are the people who rose to power clawing their way through the depths of hell, who appear patient, who tend to move in the shadows rather than in the limelight. They need to be called out more and kept in check too. Because often times I feel even if we have knowledge of such people we are distracted by the loud obnoxious people.
I don’t know if this makes sense to you guys but just take various characters from history and it might make a little sense.
I am slightly curious how much the hesitancy of the historical community to label the holodomor a genocide comes from the dissonance of knowing that if the Holodomor is a genocide then it follows that the Great Hunger was a genocide and the 1943 Bengal famine was a genocide and both of those are uncomfortable things for Anglosphere historians to admit.
I'm going to try to turn my anger and frustration into action. I've abstained from making a post like this for a long time because I really don't enjoy this topic, but, we've reached a moment of such intense anti-Semitism that I think it's my duty, as a Holocaust historian, to say something. I'm going to use bullet points.
- Jewish people in leftist and pro-Palestine spaces who inform others that their speech has anti-Semitic undertones aren't trying to silence you; they're asking you to please not make the space actively unsafe for them because they WANT to stay and do this work. Anti-Semitism is part of the intellectual heritage of the West, and all the places the West has colonized. It is part of the language, the speech, the literature, in ways it's hard for non-Jews to grasp. When Jews hear it and see it, they're trying to educate you so these spaces can stay safe and accessibly to them; please listen.
- The "Zionists" aren't getting celebrities who speak out against the IDF's war crimes in Gaza fired from projects because "they" control Hollywood and the media. Those celebrities were spewing anti-Semitism veiled as criticism of Israel, and it's absolutely just that they face consequences. I wish all public figures faced consequences like these. Susan Sarandon, for example, said the following at a rally in New York: “There are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.” This isn't courageous pro-Palestinian speech. This is very very blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric, in which Jews are viewed as an internal enemy; a hive-mind inherently more loyal to each other than the state; and who must suffer collectively for any act perpetrated by any Jew. Hitler talked like this. Henry Ford talked like this. The White Russians talked like this. Just because Susan Sarandon is too willfully ignorant to understand why what she said was deeply violent and anti-Semitic, doesn't mean that it wasn't anti-Semitic. To the contrary, these words not simply condone violence against Jews, but incite it. That doesn't help Palestinians. To the contrary, it creates situations where Jews may feel that they have no other option but to....flee to Israel. As happened to much of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Jewry during the second half of the twentieth century.
- Jews talking about the Holocaust, their historical experiences, and their intergenerational trauma is not political speech. It is not about Palestine, or Israel, until someone else decides to make it about Palestine, or Israel. Further, the realness of that trauma does not exist in counter towards the trauma experience by Palestinians. It does not cancel out the traumatic experiences of Palestinians, and vice versa. Both traumatic experiences simply exist. The Jew who barely survived Auschwitz and the death marches and made their way--sobbing and broken, with no living family to turn to and no home to return to--to the Promised Land when they had nowhere else to go; and the Palestinian Arab, who spent centuries living on and cultivating that land, only to be violently expelled from their property and forced to live as a landless refugee within a State built on their ancestral land, but not created for them, who now exist in silently damning photographs of Palestinian elders holding keys to properties which no longer exist...they are both real. These experiences exist, and not in contradiction to each other. As educated, informed people, our place is not to fight over which trauma mattered more or was worse, or happened in the first place, G-d forbid, but simply to accept that both experiences happened and were real. Are real. Very few things in this Conflict are easy or simple, and the only option is to learn to hold those contradictions in your head.
- All Israelis are as much a Netanyahu-loving Arab-hating group of nationals, as all US Americans are a Trump-loving POC-hating group of nationals. A lot of Israelis are DEEPLY unhappy with the war, Netanyahu, and his handling of Palestinians, and have been for a VERY long time. Netanyahu has been engaging openly in criminal acts, and working to undermine Israel's democracy for YEARS now. Further, Israel has a HUGE number of active political parties; at least 13 active right now, for a country with the population of ~9,813,920. It is a Parliamentary system, meaning that the party in charge is not the party which wins the majority of votes, but which wins the largest PROPORTION of votes. A majority of Israelis don't need to have voted for Netanyahu's party (Likud) for his party to have won the majority of seats in the Knesset. Moreover, if all Israelis WERE just like that first line of this bullet point's first sentence, why should American Jews have to be punished for that? Why is this belief in Jews as a collective hive-mind still so prevalent?
- "None of this matters all Jews should know better based on their historical experiences and any Jew who supports Israel is basically a Nazi." Yeah. A lot to unpack. First of all, no one is born having been educated and and encouraged to engage in critical thought about their past(s). That's a choice. Jews are before anything else, people, and they, like all people, must choose to grow, learn, and change. They, like you, can choose to learn from the past, or just sprint forward without critical thought. Like you. Like anyone. Now, for the next part....non-Jews really like using Hitler/Third Reich/Holocaust comparisons in relation to Israel and Palestine. Let's break this down to what it actually is. Israel and Nazi Germany are both examples of the nation-state. They are also VERY FAR from the only examples of a nation-state. Indonesia in a nation-state. China is/wants to be a nation state. Poland, Norway, Croatia, Bhutan, Myanmar, Rwanda, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey; Thailand, Mongolia; these are ALL nation-states. A nation-state--a type of polity which exists for a singular ethno-national group based on the understanding that that ethno-national group has long term historical roots in that particular geographic area--are an inherently exclusive type of political organization, and a product of modernity. Because they are inherently exclusive in their conception of statehood and citizenship, all nation-states will contain minority populations which exist as an existential threat to the State's ideological roots and agreed upon mythology. Under the best of circumstances, the majority will handle this minority with condescending interest and concern; under the worst, shit will go to ethnic cleaning and/or genocide places very fucking fast. This is not something exclusive to the Third Reich, or Myanmar, or Turkey, or Indonesia, or Bhutan, or China etc; this is a problem at the very heart of the construct of the nation-state. The fact that a certain portion of critics of Israel choose specifically Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as comparisons for Israeli policy towards Palestine again and again and again says, to me, that this is a person who is 1) sick of "whiny Jews;" 2) sick of having to pretend to care about the Holocaust; 3) is thrilled that "The Jews" (not Israel, the Jews) are "just as bad" as Hitler so now they can stop pretending to care about the Holocaust; and 4) knows that invoking that comparison will deeply disturb all Jews around, and will use their distress as "proof" that "all Jews" are Zionists who hate Palestine and use Holocaust memory as a tool of ideological violence. It's transparent, ignorant, and offensive.
If you are angry or defensive or wanting to unfollow me or respond with righteous indignation after reading this, it may be because you are an anti-Semite, and are suffering from cognitive dissonance based on the fact that you believe that you are a good person with no bigoted beliefs. The good news, is that you can use your negative emotions to learn, and grow a more complex understanding of all the truths and lies and parallel, contradictory truths at the heart of all this. This blog is a space I hope is open and welcome for everyone, Jewish, Palestinian, and otherwise, because deserves access to history, and an understanding of how history works. This is not a space, however, which will ever strive to make anti-Semites feel good about themselves.
August 8, 1916 The very first cable car that crossed over Niagara Falls, New York. From The Jazz Age Vehicle Archive, FB.
let’s never forget about what happened on this day…..
Africa drawn by ethnic, rather than Imperial, borders
The World - A Brief Introduction, Richard Haass (Non-fiction / History, 400 Pages, Hardcover, Penguin Press)
when my name was keoko
ahhhh hello hello (not me coming back from the dead to talk about a novel of all things) but i just wanted to get this post out first before giving myself time to breath and enter the social media world again haha.
i think i spent the last few months researching about korea, its history, and just the folklore surrounding the culture. and there's just one book i stumbled on that i thought i had to talk about: when my name was keoko.
set in Korea during Japanese colonization and WWII, this book alternates the POV between a young boy and girl, both siblings, who have not only lost their names but identities as Koreans. it's the most heartwrenching and heartwarming book you'll ever read.
and it's hard, finding a book about Korea colonized. i'm just grateful that this book exists, and I had the opportunity to read it.
so if anyone wants to check it out [and read my long ass grateful/sappy review] go right ahead!
i'm just grateful for this book for existing.
if you don't know, Korea has been colonized by Japan for years, decades even. as a Korean American, there's barely any readings (much less teachings unless you search for them) on this topic; it's also even more difficult to find a novel based on the context of this era.
this era is so, so, important. it is the cause of the strained relationship between the two countries, a consequence that continues to this day. it is an era that all, and I truly mean all koreans remember. colonization has shaped us, but haunted us as well.
I come to Korea, and my grandmother remembers like it was yesterday. my mother lived through the park chung-hee era, under a dictatorship and through the march revolution. so many historical events and issues in Korea that I was never taught as an American, that I could never follow, that i was ashamed to learn.
it just shows the strength that we had. we lived through this. we found ways to fight back. we found ways to preserve our culture - our names, our language, our national symbols.
it's insightful, horrific, intriguing, heartwarming, and tear-jerking. but I'm just so grateful that somewhere out there, this book is piecing together another part of Korean history that is unheard and untold of.
There be some mummies trending in the news today.
