in addition to this great thread, i recommend reading “how the irish became white” by noel ignatiev. i do expect a lot of fighting against these facts because these lies and myth are so ingrained and now have become a part of the community and the sense of self and pride of irish people.
Anti-Blackness is such a thing amongst the Irish till this day Black people find it so difficult to get work here in Ireland and if they do get work they often get harassed for being Black. I had a feeling that the ‘Irish slave’ wasn’t a thing, I’m glad to know in fact it wasn’t.
This is why history is so important. People try to bury this because of shame and some still feel no guilt. The Irish are not the only ones who have done this. Everyone who landed on this rock was the new negro on the block and tried hard to exclude themselves. No matter how many times you check white on an application you will never be white. You are just a means to an end.
the funniest thing about the Irish slave myth is that it was started by non irish (norwegian) white supremacists as a trap for Irish people who really didnt know their own history but claimed whiteness. and it worked.
Three churches, a school, and dozens of homes were demolished
^^^^Prominent abolitionist Albro Lyons and Mary Joseph Lyons were residents of Seneca Village.
The community, called Seneca Village, began in 1825 and eventually spanned from 82nd Street to 89th Street along what is now the western edge of Central Park. By the time it was finally razed in 1857, it had become a refuge for African Americans. Though most were nominally free (the last slave wasn’t emancipated until 1827) life was far from pleasant. The population of African Americans living in New York City tripled between abolition and complete emancipation and the migrants were derided in the press. Mordecai Noah, founder of The New York Enquirer, was especially well-known for his attacks on African Americans, fuming at one point that “the free negroes of this city are a nuisance incomparably greater than a million slaves.”
More than three-fourths of the children who lived in Seneca Village attended Colored School №3 in the church basement. Half of the African Americans who lived there owned their own property, a rate five times higher than the city average. And while the village remained mostly black, immigrant whites had started to live in the area as well. They shared resources ranging from a church (All Angels Episcopal), to a midwife (an Irish immigrant who served the entire town).
But in 1857, it was all torn down.
Even as the church was being built on 86th street, then painstakingly painted white, the original settlers fought for their lands in court. Andrew Williams was paid nearly what his land was worth, after filing an affidavit with the state Supreme Court. Epiphany Davis was not as fortunate, losing hundred of dollars.
By 1871, Seneca Village had largely been forgotten. That year, The New York Herald reported that laborers creating a new entrance to the park at 85th Street and 8th Avenue had discovered a coffin, “enclosing the body of a Negro, decomposed beyond recognition.” The discovery was a mystery, the paper reported, because “these lands were dug up five years ago, when the trees were planted there, and no such coffins were there at the time.” That’s unlikely, as the site was the graveyard of the AME Zion church.
Researchers from Columbia, CUNY, and the New York Historical Society have been working on excavating the site of Seneca Village since the early 2000s. The work has been slow, with excavation starting in 2011.
The only official artifact that remains intact on the site is a commemorative plaque, dedicated in 2001 to the lost village.
People didn’t know about this? We learned about this in school bc the village welcomed and sheltered Irish immigrants during the Famine.
The authorities hated the place because the residents were highly politically active and had ties to the Underground Railroad.
A lot of people assume, because Manhattan was in The North[tm], that it must have been an abolitionist-friendly place (and that its residents then would have had as favorable view of Lincoln as residents today have of Obama).
But the truth is: much of the money flowing through Wall Street was profits from the cotton, sugar, rum and slave trade. The Power Brokers of NYC were solidly on the side of the slaveholders in the South.
The New York witch trials were worse than Salem’s, and guess who mainly died? Slaves. 😒guess whose bodies are the literal foundation of Wall Street, buried underground? Slaves. Who built New York only to be forgotten? Slaves. Why were our self-liberating -sufficient communities razed down? This.
Shobha Nehru, left, with President John F. Kennedy and Indira Gandhi in 1962. Mrs. Nehru’s husband was ambassador to Washington at the time.GEORGE TAMES / THE NEW YORK TIMES
By ELLEN BARRY
APRIL 28, 2017
NEW DELHI — Shobha Magdolna Friedmann Nehru, a Hungarian Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, married into India’s leading political family and witnessed religious and ethnic violence convulsing both her native and adopted countries, died on Tuesday at her home in the Himalayan foothills. She was 108.
Her death was confirmed by her son Ashok.
Mrs. Nehru was known by her Hungarian nickname, Fori, but did not often speak about her background. After marrying the Indian diplomat Braj Kumar Nehru in 1935, she took the name Shobha (which was selected by her in-laws), dressed in saris and was so thoroughly assimilated that acquaintances often took her for a pale-skinned Kashmiri Pandit, like the Nehrus themselves.
As a member of the Nehru household, she grieved beside the bodies of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, all of whom were assassinated. And at a key moment in the country’s history, she delivered a hard truth to an imperious leader who rarely heard it.
Mrs. Nehru typically stayed away from political matters, but she took the unusual step of confronting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her close friend and cousin by marriage, when she believed that the state of emergency Mrs. Gandhi declared in 1975 had too severely rolled back human rights in India.
She later recalled presenting Mrs. Gandhi with a list of men who said they had been forced to undergo vasectomies during a coercive mass sterilization campaign spearheaded by Mrs. Gandhi’s son, Sanjay. Expecting to encounter resistance from the prime minister, she had asked each man for his telephone number.
“I said, ‘Indu, you know I never talk to you about politics, never, no,’” Mrs. Nehru said in an interview with Indian state television. “‘Please look at this — these are all complaints about sterilization of young boys and old men. You know yourself that there is no need to sterilize. Why?’ She listened, looked at me. ‘But.’ What but?”
Mrs. Nehru’s husband, in his own memoir, reflected that virtually nobody — including himself — was willing to take the risk of alienating Mrs. Gandhi, who resented any criticism of her son. He said his wife was less cautious, and “certainly on more intimate terms with Indira Gandhi than I was.”
“I guess she was like that,” Ashok Nehru said. “She felt she had to get the truth across to her. It was a close family relationship, not a political relationship. She felt free enough to do that.”
Mrs. Nehru was 90 when she asked an Oxford classmate of her son’s, the British historian Martin Gilbert, to suggest some reading material on the history of the Jews. Mr. Gilbert wrote that he was perplexed by the inquiry, having always seen her as “an Indian woman,” until she recounted the story of her childhood in Budapest.
“Auntie Fori wanted to learn the history of the people to whom she belonged, but from whom, 67 years earlier, she had moved away, to the heat and dust and challenges of India,” Mr. Gilbert wrote in “Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000-Year History of the Jewish People and Their Faith,” published in 2002.
She was born on Dec. 5, 1908, into a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family that had changed its surname from Friedmann to the less Jewish-sounding Forbath. Her mother’s family, Mr. Gilbert wrote, was one of the few Jewish families licensed, under the Austro-Hungarian empire, to use the aristocratic prefix “von.” She rarely visited a synagogue except to collect her father after services.
“She used to say, ‘Both my sister and I didn’t believe in all this stuff,’” Ashok Nehru recalled. “She said they would stand outside the synagogue, stamping their feet in the cold.”
An anti-Semitic tide was rising in Hungary, and the family was forced by law to revert to the name Friedmann. In 1919, hoping to stave off a Communist revolution, right-wing mobs roamed the streets, killing Jews.
“Once a week my father would travel to the villages to get food,” she told Mr. Gilbert. “He had a house on Lake Balaton. One summer we went there — by train — and I saw people hanging from trees. It was terrible for us children to look at.”
By the time she was 20, strict quotas had been introduced for Jewish students in Hungarian universities, and her parents sent her to the London School of Economics. There she met B. K. Nehru, a member of a distinguished Kashmiri family, whose cousin Jawaharlal was already a leader of the Indian independence movement (and would later become India’s first prime minister).
Her parents were skeptical of the match, Mr. Nehru recalled in his memoir: “How could their beautiful and lovely daughter marry a black man in a distant country of which they know nothing, and who, by his own confession, belonged to a family of jailbirds?”
His parents were skeptical as well. But when the two sets of parents met in Budapest, there was a sudden thaw, Mrs. Nehru told Mr. Gilbert.
“They were sitting in the sitting room,” she said. “I was crying in my bedroom. My future mother-in-law had to go to the loo. She came by my room — saw me crying. She said, ‘We must let them do what they want to do.’”
The Hungarian bride stepped off the ship in a sari and never looked back.
As part of a countrywide tour, she was taken by her future mother-in-law to the prison where Jawaharlal Nehru was being held by the British. Seeing that she was in tears, he later sent her a gently chastening letter, informing her: “Nehrus don’t cry in public. They keep a stiff upper lip.”
Meanwhile, her relatives and friends in Hungary were scattering. Her father was saved by his German housekeeper; her brother, an officer in the Hungarian Army, swam across the Danube to Czechoslovakia; her best friend drove across the border with her son hidden in the trunk of her car.
She was busy with her own crises in India. As partition approached, Delhi was flooded with refugees: Hindus who had been pushed out of Pakistan, Muslims who were boarding trains for Pakistan, mobs pumped with murderous rage on both sides. She learned, after she had helped families crowd onto one such train, that everyone aboard had been dragged off and killed while crossing Punjab.
“Can you imagine the horror?” she told Mr. Gilbert. “For several days we sent no train.”
For the newly arrived refugees, she began an employment campaign, opening a shop to sell the handicrafts of refugee women that grew into a vast network, the Central Cottage Industries Emporium.
She would not return to Hungary until 1949, along with three sons who had never seen her in anything but a sari.
“She used to go out every day, to meet her friends,” her son Ashok, who accompanied her on that trip, recalled. “Many of them had disappeared. Many had been raped by the Russians or killed by the Germans. They were harrowing tales. I remember her coming back crying.”
B. K. Nehru died in 2001. In addition to her son Ashok, Mrs. Nehru is survived by two other sons, Aditya and Anil; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
As the wife of a high-level dignitary, Mrs. Nehru moved from Washington, to the northeastern state of Assam, to London, but thoughts of Hungary’s Jews never entirely left her. She told Mr. Gilbert that at official receptions, she could not bring herself to shake hands with the German ambassador.
“I have a feeling of guilt,” she said. “I wasn’t there. I was safe. The guilt feeling is still with me. Why should I not have suffered?”
“Woke”: Russia’s mud season destroys logistics which is why invasions of Russia always fail
WOKE: Attributing the very real successes of Russian troops in WWII who were, until 1943, outnumbered across the front line and facing shortages of equipment which were technologically less advanced than the ones they were fighting to the weather is a narrative meant to emphasize the American and especially British impact in the European Theater in WWII, and as a narrative it needs to be discarded. As well, the Russian victory over Napoleon was due to a scorched earth campaign by General-Prince Bagration, Prince Barclay de Tolly, and General Kutuzov, and not solely due to the weather, as well as a series of costly holding actions which culminated in the Battle of Borodino.
it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.
which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.
it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.
Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison.
That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.
…and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like that’s the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight.
do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then
I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed – thank GOD – and it’s been erased – not so cool.
pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was awful.
my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and twice he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her.
I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).
I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.
recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote
“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”
And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was THERE for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is our history and we need to learn it.
we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.
if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am absolutely willing to do a living memory.
they’re the only history books we have.
THEY ARE THE ONLY HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last.
Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about.
okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right!
but you guys gotta know… they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books. just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!
i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are mostly history, and it is, at this moment, 239 books long. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.
obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!
so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, read a book.
p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense.
I agree with the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now:
Here are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project
Here’s the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts
Here’s a list of a bunch of known oral history projects
And this is the podcast Making Gay History, which is taped interviews done for the book of the same name (with a bit of context added beforehand)
There’s another story that I like about a Chinese general who had to defend a city with only a handful of soldiers from a huge enemy horde that was in all likelihood going to steamroll the place flat within hours of showing up.
So when said horde did arrive, they saw the general sitting outside the city’s open gates, drinking tea. The horde sent a couple of emissaries over to see what was what, and the general greeted them cheerfully and invited them all to come and take tea with him.
The horde decided that this was a scenario that had “MASSIVE FUCKING TRAP” written all over it in beautiful calligraphy and promptly fucked off.
Whoever that general was, he was clearly the Ancient Chinese equivalent of Sam Vimes.
did he just invite us over for tea nah man i’m out
This just keeps getting better
I fucking love history.
ok but tbh that story misses a lot of the subtlety of the situation like ok
so this story is the Romance of Three Kingdoms, and essentially takes place between Zhuge Liang, resident tactician extraordinaire, and Sima Yi… OTHER resident tactician extraordinaire.
The two were both regarded as tactical geniuses and recognized the other as their rival. Zhuge Liang had a reputation for ambushing the SHIT out of his opponents and using the environment to his advantage, thus destroying large armies with a small number of men. Sima Yi (who kind of entered the picture later) was a cautious person whose speciality was unravelling his opponent’s plans before they began. So it was natural that the two would butt heads; however, since Sima Yi tended to have more men and resources, he started winning battles against the former. Which, y’know, kinda sucked.
On to the actual story: Zhuge Liang is all like “shit i gotta defend this city with like 10 men.” Literally if he fights ANY kind of battle here, he WILL lose; his only option for survival is not to fight. And that’s looking more and more impossible until he hears that his rival is leading the opposing army. And then he gets this brilliant idea. He basically opens all the gates, sends his men out in civilian clothes to sweep the streets, and sits on top of the gate drinking tea and chilling out and basically makes the whole thing out to be a trap
When Sima Yi comes he’s all like “yo come on in bro”
and Sima Yi is like “yeah he’s never been that obvious about his traps before. this is definitely a bluff” and he’s about to head in when he realizes
wait. he knows that i think he’s bluffing.
and so he gets it in his head that maybe, just MAYBE, Zhuge Liang has this cunning plan that will wipe out his army – recall that he has a pretty good handle on what his rival is capable of. And after a long period of deliberation (which is just like “he know that I know that he knows that etc.”), being the cautious man he is, SIma Yi eventually decides to turn his entire army around and leave.
Zhuge Liang later points out that the plan was based specifically on the fact that he was facing his rival; if it had been anyone else, there’s no way it would have worked. A dumber or less cautious person would have simply charged in and won without breaking a sweat.
and that’s the real genius here: it was a plan formed entirely just to deceive one man, and it worked.
Zhuge Liang is the most brilliant, sneaky-ass bastard in history. One time his side’s army was out of arrows, which pretty much meant they were screwed. So Zhuge Liang goes and does the logical thing, which is build a fuck ton of scarecrows and put them all on boats. Then he makes the men hide in the boats and sail them out on the river.
Well, that day was super foggy (which Zhuge Liang had predicted. Did I mention he was also a freakishly accurate meteorologist?). So the enemy across the river sees a fleet of boats armed to the teeth with what appears to be half an army of men. They panic! and start firing arrows like crazy.
Zhuge Liang lets this play out for a while, then he’s like, ”Ok guys that’s enough.” They calmly turn the boats around and go back to base, where they dismantle the scarecrows and pull out all the enemy’s arrows.
Zhuge Liang is legend.
I love this post. It just keeps getting better. Like seriously, I would have adored learning about this in World History.
If you want to see this in cinematic glory, watch Red Cliff.
Especially since it makes Zhuge Liang look like this:
Red Cliff is 50% bloody battles and 50% eye candy and about half of that eye-candy is due to Zhuge Liang
I’ve actually thought about this a lot and my leaning is toward the second.
John was characteristically more blunt about things when he was sure of what he was saying. His actions on the battlefield, his statements during Lee’s court-martial, his behavior as a minister in France and his persistence on the black battalion- pretty much everything he does during the revolution is very straightforward, especially when his feelings or his resolve are called into question. John also wrote considerably less in quantity than Alex did- which Alexander complained about (though he did that with everyone). But, Alex never implied that John’s letters failed to convey his feelings, and besides feeling neglected in quantity, Alex- characteristically a guarded person who did not trust (much less love) easily, was satisfied with the message John got across.
Alex was comparatively self-preserving. Even when he extended vulnerability as he did with Kitty Livingston, he was logical about the timing and his objectives. In accounts from his friends, describing him before he met Laurens, he never comes across as vain-glorious or belligerent (wouldn’t help him to be). Laurens comes across as the louder personality in that regard, and could afford to be. Hamilton was, by necessity, more diplomatic. Alex was also very talented with conveying meaning with innuendo. It’s one thing to use words well, but another to use them in a way that specific people will understand. This was part of his usefulness to Washington.
So, I don’t think it would make sense for John’s letters not to be just as- if not more- overtly affectionate. John wouldn’t have liked to write without feeling, and Alex would have felt worried or insecure if John’s writings came across cold. Even if John wasn’t as talented with words, I’m sure he was using his own bawdy innuendo to get across his own feelings- probably in a characteristically blunt way. And, keep in mind we’re missing many of their letters- I think it’s telling which ones remain. I think Alex definitely destroyed most of John’s letters and I think John gave him very good reason to.
tldr;between the two of them- as far as recklessness goes- Alex might’ve dared to write the April ‘79 letter, but John dared to keep it. He would probably do a lot worse himself.
I also have a post here that discusses some of the problems with directly comparing the volume of letters written by Hamilton or Laurens or comparing the language contained within those surviving letters. We don’t have all the letters that existed between those two, so we shouldn’t assume that lack of evidence is evidence of a lack (of affection, of love, of commitment, etc.). @ciceroprofacto raises a good point in stating that we don’t have many of the letters that Laurens sent to Hamilton – and it certainly seems possible (if not likely) that those lost letters contained some of Laurens’s more sexual or bawdy writings.
Omg this made me giggle and smile!!! Eliza is the true hero, I 1000000% agree!!! I have one person I want to tell you about! I’m an expert on her life, but I never get to talk about her. I’ll start out by saying that nobody is certain she was gay, but there is evidence that she was gay or bi….. I’ll tell you the facts and let you decide 😉
Deborah Sampson is one of the most badass people to ever live!
I’m focusing only on her love life here, but this girl seriously survived a lot of turmoil and hardship
She disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Continental Army in 1782
She served for 17 months before being found out
This episode finds us in what is now Westchester County, New York, then known as “neutral ground”
It was a lawless land, where raiders by both sides terrorized the citizens
Deborah, and the sick soldier she was caring for, was staying at the home of a man who’d said he was a patriot
Surprise: he was a loyalist raider!!!
He treated Deborah and the other soldier horribly
He stuffed them in the attic and left Deborah to watch her friend die
But his daughter, Mary Van Tassel, cared about them
She was sneaky and brought Deborah and the sick soldier food and water
Sadly the sick soldier died 😦
Deborah then had to go rejoin her light infantry troops, but first she had to say goodbye to Mary
According to Deborah and her biographer, Herman Mann, Deborah and Mary were alone in a room at the Van Tassel house, sipping some wine, when they kissed
Now did Mary know about Deborah??? Probably not…
But, by kissing her, Deborah clearly felt something for Mary……
She also asked Mary to help her take down her father but that’s a whole other story
This isn’t Deborah’s only sapphic encounter
There’s this pretty unbelievable story that she dated some girl while she was in Philadelphia
And then there’s the more believable fact that, when she returned to civilian life, she didn’t stop chasing girls
Deborah returned to her uncle’s property and took on her brother’s name for some time
Her uncle supposedly reprimanded her for being too “free” with the girls in the village
Deborah eventually married a man, but the engagement period was super long, and she may have done it because she got pregnant
It was not a loving marriage
Here’s the thing: we know about Deborah’s sapphic encounters because she told these stories
If she didn’t want them to be known, they would have died with her
Now there is always a chance that these encounters were embellished by her biographer, Herman Mann
But I believe they are based in truth
I believe Deborah Sampson liked girls, and that she acted on that feeling while she could
Either way, she’s badass and amazing and I love her so I hope you enjoyed this!!!
I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower this seems relevant, with vital information being lost when the cultural oral history goes.
I truly adore that EVERYONE is on board with the FUCK YES, ROMAN CONCRETE is BACK! because we all know on some level or another that that shit is IMPORTANT.
Its a bit like straw used on floors in the middle ages. For a while we used to think that they just used loose straw and spread it on floors, because it all of the medieval housekeeping manuals or the diaries where people documented their everyday life, it would just say “oh you should change the straw a couple of times per year” or “we changed the straw today.”
Turns out they braided the straw to make some sort of carpet (which i imagine to be close to those i buy for my rabbit cage) and no one ever specified it in writings because OF COURSE you don’t just throw loose straw around what are you, an animal? And they didn’t think that their stuff would ever be read by anyone other than their contemporaries, even less people thousands of year in the future. Their audience would know what “the straw” would refer to.
teakepp 