via reddit.com
“Authors can’t use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We’ll see about that…”
–Terry Pratchett, probably
Try to implement anything but a conservative’s sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time.
There was a literaly fad in the 1890′s for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding–there’s LOTS of doctors’ writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast’s ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up because the Victorians were freaks, okay
Imagine trying to make a Victorian character with nipple rings. IMAGINE THE ACCUSATIONS OF GROSS HISTORICAL INACCURACYpeople just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like
tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar
tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up
tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts
ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high?
our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin
iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number 0 along with all ‘arabic’ numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.
romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat!
ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are you smoking?
Adding my personal favorite: people in medieval Europe took baths.
India had ways of processing iron for weatherproofing that we still can’t match 1600 years later.
Truth is stranger than fiction, and history is weirder than you think.
this post gets better every time it comes across my dash. To provide some more: those Romans also had vending machines, automated puppet plays, doors that opened to the sound of horns when you lit a fire in front of them, and working steam engines. All invented by one dude, Hero of Alexandria.
People generally want to think that the Dark Ages is the sum of the entire history of the world.
Charlemagne had a frigging PET ELEPHANT, sent as a present by the Caliph over in Bahgdad.
Emperor Frederick II. (around 1200) crossed the Alps with his own private zoo, including giraffes, in order to impress and dazzle his Germanic subjects, and it frigging worked. He also introduced legislation that a doctor was not allowed to also sell medicine (to prevent obvious charlatanery), but had to write a recipe for an apothecary to then redeem, which is a system STILL IN USE in Germany and other countries. He spoke several language, was tolerant towards his Muslim subjects in southern Italy (you read that correctly) and was opposed to trial by combat on reasons of it being unfair and irrational. Oh, and he wrote a book on ornithology.
Ancient Persians knew how to make frozen desserts even in summer, thus basically being the inventors of ice cream.
Medieval monks had an efficient way of testing for pregnacy (by pouring the urine of a woman on a toad, which, if the woman was pregnant, would change colour…).
History is NOT a linear progression!
Someone should staple that to people’s foreheads sometimes, I swear.
Tag: history
its so funny to me that european whites love to dance so much?
but american whites dont???
was there some type of religious resistance to dancing?
Those willing to poke gentle fun at American Baptists say: “No dancing, because it might lead to sex. And no sex, because it might lead to dancing.” So yes, there actually was religious resistance to dancing, which has persisted beyond all belief. Not to mention the suppression of various types of folk dancing as European immigrants were assimilated into bland whiteness and encouraged to do “non-ethnic” dances like square dancing.
I’m a Canadian white and it’s also my observation that the British colonists especially brought the notion that civility, culture, class, professionalism, and correct behaviour were all undergirded by the ability to sit still, stand straight, and maintain an unemotional facade no matter what. “Stiff upper lip” and all that. Acceptable forms of dance among Whiteness are often formal, complicated, and difficult to pick up without paid instruction. White people often make the mistake, even when writing about our own culture from a couple hundred years back, of thinking that dance is ONLY a mating ritual–you don’t dance for sadness, or joy, or anger, or fun. It’s not an accident that anti-colonial resistance by Indigenous groups, people of colour, and non-English white people, have in many cases used dance as an avenue of resistance and identity. Nor is it an accident that moral panics have often been over white people enjoying “ethnic” forms of dance and music like jazz, swing, hip-hop, or rap.
By denying people dance, rhythm, and movement, colonizers denied them a powerful kind of literal medicine, a form of resilience that could have allowed them to heal enough to defy colonial rule. But it’s no accident that the intrinsic motions of colonialism–dictating what people wear, where they live, who educates their children, what they eat, what language they speak, what music they can make, and how they can dance–are those that contribute most directly to PTSD and widespread mental health and addiction problems.
When mental health professionals work to heal trauma, there’s a growing understanding that rhythm, music, and dance are all deeply powerful tools of healing and resilience. Our bodies are primed to thrive on rhythm, beginning with the heartbeat of the person gestating with, moving to being rocked as a baby. It’s why the stereotypical shellshocked person rocks back and forth. It’s a primal self-soothing mechanism. And that’s why we’re increasingly doing not just breathing exercises, but encouraging drumming, clapping rhythms, and basic dance. It’s why I’m starting to ask my clients to share songs that are important with me. It’s something that white settlers have literally been trained for years to think of as not just unimportant, but dangerous and alien.
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it’s something that’s almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
An inspiring story that should be told every time anyone mentions Titanic
1. L’ange du mal by Joseph Geefs
2. Le genie du mal by Guillaume Geefs
Here’s the wiki article on them.
Pass Through Fire 