#history in the news

[parhe1ion]

if you’re gonna introduce me to something new you have to defeat my 7 evil ex hyperfixations

[drsonnet]

Hind Rajab was a 5 year old girl in Gaza who was killed while she hid alone in a car, along with the paramedics who tried to rescue her. Yesterday students at Columbia seized the administration building and renamed it in her honor.

Gadzooks Bazooka Instagram: gadzooks_bazooka

Remembering #HindRajab & children in #Gaza: This is what the mother of the child, Hind Rajab . https://tmblr.co/ZTeZMyfB_GHeeu00

UPDATE FROM

@sunnydice: (and please don't forget Layan Hamadeh , her 15 yr old cousin who was trapped with her or Yusuf Zino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun who bravely volunteered to try to save hind and were murdered by the IOF )

DrSonnet — هذا ما قالته والدة الطفلة هند رجب عندما سمعت بخبر... (tumblr.com)

[that-bluesybitch]

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[exoflash]

a concerning amount of witchblr will be like "um actually new years was stolen by europeans from the ancient god scroobus mcdoobus" and then you actually try to research scroobus mcdoobus and it turns out he was invented in the 1940s by a conspiracy theorist who powdered every meal with ketamine and thinks that queer people are reincarnated fish

[sayruq]

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

zany to me how these um actually nihilists like to pretend that "um actually love/friendship/cooperation/kindness isn't real bc we evolved that way to benefit ourselves as a species..." um YES? that's also where tool use comes from? that's where cooking comes from? am i supposed to think social bonds & tool use & cooking aren't "real" because they evolved over time instead of appearing fully formed from the ether?

sorry u can't enjoy things. im a superior being twirling a fork in my bowl of delicious noodles whilst staring in adoration at the world

[ltwilliammowett]

Ship's Cat Chiclet - the Mascot of the Mary A. Whalen (1938) a retired oil tanker, Brooklyn, New York

[intersectionalpraxis]

I just posted a thread on the history of colonialism and ongoing oppressive Indonesian occupation of West Papua. If you have time, please read the educational slides. This is absolutely horrendous, and has been going on for decades. The Indonesian government and military must be held accountable. Free West Papua.

[starii-void]

going to chb must be crazy like imagine sharing a camp with

-one of the strongest demigods ever who's saved the world like at least 3 times, fought multiple gods & titans and WON (and is a tartarus survivor)

-the literal main architect of OLYMPUS who's also saved the world multiple times (also tartarus survivor)

-THE lord of the wild who's also close friends with the first two (and has helped save the world multiple times)

-an emo kid from the 1930s who again helped save the world and is also a tartarus survivor (TWICE)

-a son of apollo who survived tartarus with nothing but cargo shorts and sheer will (pun intended)

-the main designer and builder for the argo II, also the first hephaestus kid to have fire powers since hundreds of years ago (did i mention killed gaea? no? yeah he did that too)

-a girl who somehow charmspeak-ed gaea into falling back asleep (also side note daughter of super famous actor because why not)

-pretty much everybody is a two-time war veteran

-THE GOD APOLLO who just sometimes comes down to visit in the form of a teenage boy

-did i mention dionysus, god of wine madness and theatre

-also chiron, trainer of pretty much every greek hero ever

[ialwayswondered]

source

[humanoidhistory]

The first mobile phone call was made on this day in 1973. Martin Cooper, using a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC, placed a call from the streets of New York to Bell Labs in New Jersey. The device was 9 inches tall, had a talk-time of 35 minutes, and took 10 hours to recharge.

[bibyebae]

" Men in Gaza do cry.

When they lose their homes that they spend their

whole lives building, they cry

When they see their dreams and hopes getting destroyed, they cry.

When they realise how scary and uncertain their future is, they cry.

And because they are human beings, full of feelings and emotions, they cry."

This is an excerpt from a 35-year-old Palestinian's account of life in Gaza under siege.

Ziad has been writing for the Guardian about the realities of the Israeli bombardment, as he, his sister and their pets, flee their home in Gaza City in the hope of survival.

You can read his diary entries in full via the link:

[cleopatrachampagne]

shocked bystander at sydney, australia’s annual mardis gras pride parade (1994)

[hesbuckcompton-baby]

people who don't study history will simply never understand the joy of reading historian beef. there's nothing like it

[closetofcuriosities]

Videodrome - 1983 - Dir. David Cronenberg

First it controlled her mind, then it destroyed her body... LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!