#south african railways

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Trains? >:3

TRAINS :D

[weirdowithaquill]

Random Trains I Found Part 1:

So, I've put off writing my myriad of WIPs for a bit to spend some time just... looking at trains. Reconnecting with them. Hunting out ideas for the future and being amazed by the past. And here's a few of my absolute favourite random, insane trains I've found so far:

NGR Class D1:

This right here was the first 4-8-2 ever built - and it's an absolutely massive tank engine from South Africa. It was built to the 3ft 6in Cape Gauge and it began running in 1888. Take a moment for that to settle in - 1888. The USA didn't run a 4-8-2 on it's network until 1911, a good 20+ years later!

Russian Class Kh:

It's a 2-8-0 class built in the USA for Russia that had examples sold to Japan with the last example preserved in China. I personally like these engines because they really do tell us so much about how much the world changed - they began life in 1895, and somehow (I would love to know how if anyone has any information) one ended up in a river in Jilin Province, China. It was probably WWII, but all the same, these engines went places!

Prussian P8 Class:

These engines started life in 1908 and weren't retired until 1981 in Poland at the latest - and if that isn't an opening to an epic class of locomotive, I don't know what is! Roughly 3900 of these machines were built, making it potentially the single largest class of passenger engine in the world and they ended up just about everywhere in Europe, from France to Norway to Romania, where a number (200) were built under license. And the reason they lived so long? They were simple, strong machines.

GWR 2600 'Aberdare' Class:

Honestly, I just like these because they look so odd. Like, these are GWR 2-6-0s that look like a City or a Bulldog class. They have the double frames and the coupling rods of a 4-4-0 - and that's because they were introduced in 1900. They did manage to make it to 1949 hauling coal trains, but the GWR had already been withdrawing them in the 1930s, as they did with their older stock. I wish one had been preserved, they'd be so cool to look at!

NGR Class C:

Last but certainly not least, these behemoths of South Africa once again prove that somehow, the former Cape Colony was at the forefront of wheel arrangement innovation. It's a 4-10-2T. It was built in 1899, alongside the GWR Bulldog class! These things were massive... and eventually rebuilt to 4-8-2T locomotives. But there were 137 of them built, making them the most numerous of the 4-10-2 type locomotive ever constructed.

I want all of these engines. I would love to know more about them, I would love to own one (in model form) and I am going to love continuing my journey through railway history to find more random, interesting locomotives to share.

And as usual, all images belong to their respective owners.

[ladychandraofthemoone]

In my au Stanley (narrow gauge) has a special interest in insects (I hc him as being into animals, they don’t judge you for your “jinx” and he’s got a soft spot for critters that are seen as “bad luck”) and tends to blurt out the most detailed information, he often info-dumps with and to Nia who encourages it cause it makes him happy once he’s freed from his “jinx” and she know every single insect name alphabetically along with their scientific names and nicknames Here we have Duke immediately regretting asking them if they can name every single species and ends up sleeping when they’re engrossed in their conversation before leaving when they were in the mid section of the e category (Nia gave him “the disappointment older sister look” awhile back so the poor guy can trapped there and wondered how did he got ever himself into this situation)

Basically it’s just Stanley to Duke in alphabetical order: Alderflies Angel Insects Anoplura (Sucking lice) Ants Antlions Aphids Archeognatha (Bristletails) Barklice Bees Beetles Bird lice Biting lice Blattodea (Cockroaches) Booklice Bristletails Bugs Butterflies Caddisflies Chewing lice Cicadas Cockroaches Coleoptera (Beetles) Collembola (Springtails) Crickets Damselflies Diplura Diptera (Flies) Dobsonflies Dragonflies-

Nia joining in cause she was mad at Duke: ah yes the alderfly which are megalopteran insects of the family Sialidae. They are closely related to the dobsonflies and fishflies as well as to the prehistoric Euchauliodidae. All living alderflies – about 66 species all together are part of the subfamily Sialinae, which contains nine extant genera. Sialinae have a body length of less than 25 mm (1 inch), long filamentous antennae, and four large dark wings of which the anterior pair is slightly longer than the posterior. They lack ocelli and their fourth tarsal segment is dilated and deeply bilobed. Dead alderfly larvae are used as bait in fishing-

duke:shooketh (Nia’s is basically the train version of a encyclopedia also her design is based off of MrTerrier673 on Twitter)

[ericpoptone]

Nobody Drives in LA -- The Ostrich Farm Railway

THE OSTRICH FARM RAILWAY Detail of Map of the City of Los Angeles, 1887, depicting the route of the Ostrich Farm Railway [Note: This essay was written for and originally appeared in the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council newsletter] Today Silver Lake is, by most accounts, moderately well served by mass transit. The website, Walk Score, assigns Silver Lake a transit score of 54 out of a possible…

[fatehbaz]

In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain [...]. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers [...]. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...]. The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...] [T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019.

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When the Haitian Revolution erupted [...], slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. [...] Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system. In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment [...] inaugurated [...] "a new system of [...] [indentured servitude]," which would endure for nearly a century. [...] Desperate to regain power and authority after the war [and abolition of chattel slavery in the US], Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. [...] Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. [...] When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.”

Text by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022.

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The durability and extensibility of plantations [...] have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas [...], [including] “skewed life chances, limited access to health [...], premature death, incarceration [...]”. [...] [In labor arrangements there exists] a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, [...] the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery [...]. [G]enealogies of labor management […] have been traced […] linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories […] or diamond mines […] [,] chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships [...].

Text by: Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (edited by Petitcrops, Macedo, and Peano). Published 2023.

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Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the [French] republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” [...] Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire [...]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor. During the period of the early penal colony we see this search for new slaves, not only in French Guiana, but also throughout [other European] colonies built on the plantation model.

Text by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000.

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To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment - or, indeed, transportation. […] [C]onvict transportation - a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline - replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. […] Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding […] [them] responsible for their own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals - and if they chose criminality, […] they brought their punishment on themselves. That was how Phillip [commander of the British First Fleet settlement in Australia] could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage. [Moseley was Black and had been a slave at a plantation in America before escaping to Britain, where he was charged with a crime and shipped to do convict labor in Australia.] […] The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales. […] For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. […] [T]hroughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. [...] In the context of that widespread enthusiasm [in Australia] for the [American] South (the welcome extended to the Confederate ship Shenandoah in Melbourne in 1865 led one of its officers to conclude “the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause”), Queenslanders dreamed of building a “second Louisiana”. [...] The men did not merely adopt a lifestyle associated with New World slavery. They also relied on its techniques and its personnel. [...] Hope, for instance, acquired his sugar plants from the old slaver Thomas Scott. He hired supervisors from Jamaica and Barbados, looking for those with experience driving plantation slaves. [...] The Royal Navy’s Commander George Palmer described Lewin’s vessels as “fitted up precisely like an African slaver [...]".

Text by: Jeff Sparrow. “Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism.” The Conversation. 4 August 2022.

[shelli-gator]

I unrealed myself. Cringe is dead here's my train sona! With a MONDO FUCKING LAMP BABY. 💡☀️

Shelli the Wynberg Tender, they're a new build version that's a combination of all the CGR/South African Railway Class 3s. Their Cape Gauge wheels were replaced with larger, standard gauge wheels to conform to the North Western Railway standard, because you bet your ass that's where I wanna be.

Refs below!

[myhauntedsalem]

Dingess Tunnel

Hidden deep within the coal filled Appalachian Mountains of Southern West Virginia rests a forgotten land that is older than time itself. Its valleys are deep, its waters polluted and its terrain is as rough as the rugged men and women who have occupied these centuries old plats for thousands of years.

The region is known as “Bloody Mingo” and for decades the area has been regarded as one of the most murderous areas in all of American history.

The haunted mountains of this territory have been the stage of blood baths too numerous to number, including those of the famed Hatfield’s and McCoy’s, Matewan Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain. Even the county’s sheriff was murdered this past spring, while eating lunch in his vehicle.

Tucked away in a dark corner of this remote area is an even greater anomaly – a town, whose primary entrance is a deserted one lane train tunnel nearly 4/5 of a mile long.

The story of this town’s unique entrance dates back nearly a century and a half ago, back to an era when coal mining in West Virginia was first becoming profitable.

For generations, the people of what is now Mingo County, West Virginia, had lived quiet and peaceable lives, enjoying the fruits of the land, living secluded within the tall and unforgiving mountains surrounding them.

All of this changed, however, with the industrial revolution, as the demand for coal soared to record highs.

Soon outside capital began flowing into “Bloody Mingo” and within a decade railroads had linked the previously isolated communities of southern West Virginia to the outside world.

The most notorious of these new railways was Norfolk & Western’s line between Lenore and Wayne County – a railroad that split through the hazardous and lawless region known as “Twelve Pole Creek.”

At the heart of Twelve Pole Creek, railroad workers forged a 3,300 foot long railroad tunnel just south of the community of Dingess.

As new mines began to open, destitute families poured into Mingo County in search of labor in the coal mines. Among the population of workers were large numbers of both African-Americans and Chinese emigrants.

Despising outsiders, and particularly the thought of dark skinned people moving into what had long been viewed as a region exclusively all their own, residents of Dingess, West Virginia, are said to have hid along the hillsides just outside of the tunnel’s entrance, shooting any dark skinned travelers riding aboard the train.

Though no official numbers were ever kept, it has been estimated that hundreds of black and Chinese workers were killed at the entrance and exits of this tunnel.

Norfolk & Western soon afterward abandonment the Twelve Pole line. Within months two forces of workmen began removing the tracks, ties, and accessory facilities.

[stephensmithuk]

The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Problem

Yew hedges are pruned lots of European yew (Taxus baccata), a highly dense tree that can cope with heat, cold and pollution.

A wicket gate is a small narrow door built into a fence, wall or larger gate. You would often find them in city gates as they could be opened to admit pedestrians without incurring the time and security risk of opening the main gate.

Padlocks have been around since ancient civilisation, but the Industrial Revolution made them much easier to make and available to the masses.

Clogs were very popular in Britain at this point as they were cheap, strong footwear for industrial and agricultural workers. People danced in them and it is still a thing in Wales. One British expression for dying is "popped his clogs".

Waterloo was the main railway arrival point in London for ocean liner passengers disembarking at Southampton (a major port of arrival for them), with special trains being put on to meet the various liners. An express train in 1888 could do the journey from the Southampton Docks station in 2 hours and 10 minutes. The electrification of the line from London to Southampton by British Rail led to the closure of this station and nearby Northam in 1966 to passengers, freight services running a year longer. Passenger services were diverted to Southampton Central. The station's platform area is now a car park under the old glass canopy and the station building is now a casino, part of the Gentings Casino chain.

Yellow fever is a viral disease spread by mosquitoes. Most people get over it in five days or so, but 15% will get a second phase including jaundice (hence the name) with a 20%-50% fatality rate at that point. Africans were mistakenly thought to be immune to this when they had in fact merely acquired immunity via burying their dead close to their habitations with resultant mild cases among children. When these traditions were stopped by imperalists, they got it just as bad as everyone else. It is thought it came to South and Central America via the Spanish conquerors.

A successful, easily manufacturable vaccine was developed in 1937. A lot of countries now require some form of yellow fever vaccination, although precise regulations vary.

Shag tobacco is fine-cut tobacco used for self-made cigarettes i.e. roll-ups.

The Ordnance here refers to the Ordnance Survey, which I have discussed in the past.

Princetown prison is HMP Dartmoor, originally opened in 1809 for prisoners of war from the Napoleonic Wars and then the War of 1812. Closed in 1815, it was rebuilt in 1850-1851 to become a civilian prison; today it is a Category C (general population) men's prison.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 12 January 1904, a rebellion began by the Herero people in Namibia against oppression by German occupiers of their country. The rebellion had begun in January 1904 in response to rising tensions within the German colony and was initiated by an order from Samuel Maharero, leader of the Herero. In 1884 the German state had declared South-West Africa a German colonial territory. The Germans took land from local African inhabitants and instituted laws and policies that served to oppress the local population. The Herero remained more economically powerful until a plague in 1897 killed up to 90% of their herds, weakening the Herero. German policies became more brutal in response and the Herero people’s freedom and culture became heavily restricted. The rebellion began with the invasion of Okahandja, a city in central Namibia, by mounted Herero, who killed 123 people, mostly Germans, and set buildings alight. The uprising spread across the region with Herero occupying a military station and killing soldiers, besieging another city and ambushing a German military company. Eventually, however, the Herero were overwhelmed by German forces. Many died of starvation and thirst as they fled through the Omaheke desert. 12,000 were forced to surrender and were placed in concentration camps where medical experiments and daily executions occurred. Many people from the camps were enslaved and forced to build railways, docks and buildings throughout the country. 80% of the Herero population of Namibia were wiped out during the revolt. General Lothar von Trotha, who was sent to crush the resistance, ordered that, “Within the German borders every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without cattle will be shot.” A report published in London in 1918 stated that German soldiers had killed unarmed women and children. The war and the extermination order by general Lothar von Trotha, are considered by most historians to be the first genocide of the 20th century. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2184461488405656/?type=3

[scotianostra]

Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, fur trader and railroad financier was born in Forres, August 6th 1820.

Donald Smith was the son of a saddler, a commoner, he was educated at Anderson’s Free School, he left school at 16 and was started his adult life apprenticed to become a lawyer at the town clerks office in Forres, so he was smart and was not going to toil as a crofter like his family had before him. At 18 he chose to leave Forres and follow his Uncle who had been successful in the fledgling Companies in 19th century Canada, so it was he set sail for Montreal to become a junior clerk in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in what was then Lower Canada.

Smith’s achievements are numerous. For a record 75 years he worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He became Governor of that company, a substantial investor in the Canadian Pacific Railway, a benefactor of McGill University, where he founded Royal Victoria College for women in 1896, and founder of Victoria Hospital in Montreal, the list goes on and on in industry, politics, and philanthropy.

Lord Strathcona went on to use his incredible wealth and status to help build Canada into a nation, he helped establish the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canada’s independent military. He contributed large donations to medical science and women’s education, among many others. His estate was valued at $5.5 million. During his lifetime, (remember this was a self made man),and including the bequests left after his death, he gave away just over $7.5 million plus a further £1 million (not including private gifts and allowances) to a huge variety of charitable causes.

If I was to compare what Smith achieved during his life with anyone else the only person I can think of is Andrew Carnegie. The pics show the man himself, the second posing to hit the ceremonial last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway, behind him to his left is the subject of a post last month, Sandford Fleming, thegroup pic is a memorial plaque in Forres that states

“Donald Alexander Smith Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal Pioneer, Statesman and Philanthropist in Forres on 6th August 1820 in the family home on a site close to this wall near the banks of the Mosset. He emigrated to Canada in 1838 and eventually became governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Concerned with the development of the dominion he became co-founder of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1896 he was appointed to the United Kingdom As a High Commissioner for Canada and received a peerage the following year. He raised and equipped Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians) for service during the South African War. Many local including Leanchoil Hospital and St. Laurence Church benefited greatly through his renowned generosity. Lord Strathcona died in Canada on the 21st January 1914 Erected by the Community Council for The Royal Burgh of Forres 1988”

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

whats the weirdest train you know?

Oh there are so e really fucking weird ones a lot of weird ones were very niche and were designed for something very specific but some were actually rather popular like the better garratt which were very popular in South Africa but weren't that common anywhere else although some were used in Australia and because South Africa only ceased Steam Traction in 1991 many of the Locomotives were sold off and sent overseas mainly to the UK, New Zealand, and Australia

But that's just the better garratt which weren't that weird and about 1200 were built from about 1908 to 1968 to about 100 different designs

The next few Locomotives were much less common starting with an Ancestor of the Garratt; The Double Fairlie

These were an type of strange Double ended Locomotive in the 1860s but really only the Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland Railway used them and they still have a few like the one above (they also purchased a few Garratts from South Africa seen above)

Next on to the Steam turbines which were largely experimental and never really panned out but several different designs were built mostly one-offs

Most of them didn't work very well

Next is a retrofit of an regular steam Locomotive to be able to use a different fuel source during a coal shortage that being the Bizarre Swiss Steam-Electric Locomotive

Switzerland has almost no Coal and thus during world war 2 had no coal but they did have cheap Hydroelectricity and their railways were mostly Electrified so they just made the abombonations

[cartermagazine]

Today We Celebrate Labor Day

The Pullman neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side is a small community that changed the country.

Pullman is central to understanding industry, labor and civil rights in America and the tense conflicts that led to the creation of Labor Day and the first African American union.

When George Pullman, the industrial titan, who created an empire building and servicing train cars that felt like hotels on wheels, dismissed the requests for arbitration, Jennie Curtis, president of The Girls Local Union 269 & seamstress in the repair shops, along with the exasperated workers decided to walk off the job. Their strike was relatively small, but it came shortly before a national American Railway Union (ARU) convention hosted in Chicago. At the ARU convention, members considered whether to throw their national weight behind the Pullman workers.

The ARU did come along, though. Eight days later, with Pullman’s heels still firmly planted, 125,000 workers on 29 railways refused to move trains that included Pullman cars. Train travel throughout much of the country ground to a halt.

The strike came at a heavy price. Despite the best efforts of ARU President Eugene Debs to maintain calm, workers, law enforcement and rail management went toe-to-toe over who controlled the railways around the country, leading to significant violence. When angry strike supporters set fire to a railcar full of U.S. mail, President Grover Cleveland and his attorney general, who had previously worked for railway owners, used the incident to criminalize efforts by the union leaders and sent federal troops to Chicago to crush the strike.

Crushing the strike deeply undercut Pullman’s reputation as a visionary and threatened political support for Cleveland. The president was the leader of the Democratic party, which had strong labor support. Just as Cleveland was coming down hard on the side of management, he signed legislation that would make Labor Day a national holiday.

CARTER™️ Magazine carter-mag.com #wherehistoryandhiphopmeet #historyandhiphop365 #cartermagazine #laborday #blackhistorymonth #staywoke #blackhistory #carter #history

[ladychandraofthemoone]

Narrow Gauge Nia

Was chatting with some folks on discord about aus and engines basis and saw some takes on Nia so it got me thinking about if she was built in the Nairobi Central Workshops around the 1910s cause she’s still a British exported locomotive and maybe other railways take inspiration from others and bulit their own also some folks on Twitter and discord make her another basis like a NG6 from South Africa so I was wondering on others folks thoughts on this if that’s cool

[osrphotography]

The last (unrefurbished) "Ganz" EMU at Thorndon. (2021)

A very lucky spot from my last trip to Wellington. New to New Zealand Railways Corporation in 1982, the EM/ET EMUs were introduced to replace the aging English Electric DM/D Class multiple units on suburban services in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.

Owing to the name of their builder, Ganz-MÁVAG, the EM/ET EMUs were often referred to as "Ganz units."

From 1996-2002, the entire fleet was refurbished by TranzRail, and in 2010, Te Pane Matua Taiao/GWRC refurbished EM 1373/ET 3373 again as part of a proposal to further modernise the Ganz units. This fell through and colloquially EM 1373/ET 3373 is known as the "Super Ganz"

In 2016, the FP/FT "Matangi" EMUs were introduced to replace the aging EM/ET EMUs, and most of the fleet was sold to a South African buyer for conversion to un-powered trailer cars. As of 2024, nothing has been done with them, and they are slowly rusting away in South Africa.

The "Super Ganz" was sold to the Cantebury Railway Society, who have been on/off working to restore it. EM 1505/ET 3505 was sold for $1 to the Wellington Multiple Unit Hertiage Trust (WMUHT). Unfortunately, 1505 was never taken to Maymorn, where the group has a DM/D unit, and it is now at Hutt Workshops with an uncertain future.

[daywalkers-fic]

12. why the 1880s?

something about this decade really sings to me. I find in particular, nearing the end of the nineteenth century, so much was happening on around the world in terms of arts, politics, technology, colonization. world events and global news don’t personally reach the day-to-day lives of the everyday folk, but they are an important part in gauging what life, thought, and society was about—what things were important then and now?

basically for myself, reminding me of notable things that occured during the 1880s—some thematic, some of relevance to context and characters, and the rest just ?? interesting and/or wild?

cocaine is a hot new cure for everything and anything. perscribed, sold in foods and more. heroine introduced as a lesser-addictive substitute for morphine…

lots of developments in fields of psychology; many experiments and happenings; Freud starts his work 1886.

1880-1914 had +twenty million immigrants to the United States: Germany, Ireland, England, China had the most arrivals.

William Dorsey Swann, the first self-proclaimed drag queen, organizes a series of drag balls in Washington, D.C. 1880-1890s.

Jack the Ripper claims his “first” victim in 1888 White Chapel, London. big scare.

Sherlock Holmes first appears in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study In Scarlet as part of the British magazine’s Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is published in 1886. Gothic fiction, drawing from emerging fields of science and psychology. & Treasure Island was published earlier in 1883 by him too!

Mark Twain drops The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant’s second novel is published in 1885. about a man who seduces and manipulates high society French women in the French colonies for power and wealth. MOVIE WAS ADAPTED IN 2012 STARTING ROBERT PATTINSON LOL

western European art movements very romantic and swirly and pretty: Monet, Debussy xoxo.

meanwhile, African American ragtime music becomes the “pop” music across the pond here.

North Dakota (1889), South Dakota (1889), Montana (1889), Washington (1889) become states.

train segregation laws flag beginning of Jim Crow; Civil Rights Movement of 1875 voided, making discrimination in private is not illegal, and prohibiting state intervention to personal or commercial segregation. l*nching continues throughout the south. slavery may be over on paper, but indentured labour is legal.

1882 infamous O.K Corral gunfight.

Gold Rush continues, all over the world—South Africa, to British Columbia, to California, to Argentina, to Russia-China borders.

centuries of American “Indian” wars continue.

American Dawes Act of 1887 granted American government authorization to regulate indigenous lands, including creating and assigning and enforcing reservations.

Sitting Bull’s 1883 speech of the atrocities experienced at the hands of white American settler colonists.

Canadian Pacific Railway 1881-1885. foreign labourers were hired to do a lot of heavy, dangerous, unwanted work. in America, more than 100,000km of tracks were laid by majority Chinese, Irish, Scandinavian workers.

America’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 was officiated, enforcing law of a Head Tax to be paid for every Chinese person entering North America. over the course of the next couple of decades, the fee of $1,500 was doubled to $5,000 was increased 500% to $25,000 in today’s currency—per person. this had devastating and lasting impacts on generations and societies of Chinese living both overseas and already in North America. propaganda at this time created many racist myths that persist today: there are too many Asians, they are taking our jobs, (the men) are gross and effeminate and a threat to (white) women, they shady and scheming people. these were the first and only major federal legislation to explicitly suspend immigration for a specific nationality in American and Canadian history. (I study Asian Canadian history, I can go on about this all day)

Tong Wars (1883-1913) had Chinatown gangs and factions in violent street wars across America, San Fransisco to New York.

large, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting (pogorm) and antisemitism rampant throughout Imperial Russia, 1881-1882 had more than two hundred anti-Jewish events alone. Jews continue to be racialized and othered.

fuck ton of colonization happening in Africa and the Middle East, Southeast Asia. Berlin conference 1884-1885 literally chopped up Africa to distribute to European powers.

Irish nationalist efforts to push forth Home Rule bill of sovereignty is defeated in British Parliament. Irish are not “white”, they are “othered” in Europe and in Americas.

use of photographic film pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing film. his first camera (Kodak) was ready for sale in 1888.

Thomas Edison gets lit in New York 1883 with first electrical power station. next several year sees major cities being lit up with street lamps and public lighting with the science and works of a Nikolas Tesla (1886-1893).

hell of a lot more inventions in the works and patents being claimed. Hertz and radiowaves, Bell for telephone services.

“Between the years of 1850–1900, women were placed in mental institutions for behaving in ways the male society did not agree with”

way too much history to cram, obviously. here are some keywords for further research oki

prison industry / spiritualism / opium epidemic / irregular and uneven “modernizations” in rural vs. urban areas / class and poverty gaps / morality scares, checks, comparisons, gaps / new businesses and gadgets, products, tech to help with anything / fascination of the (colonial) Other; side shows, “freak shows” and other human zoos

[guerrerense]

Ex-South African Railways Class 24 Steam Locomotive No.3620 heads a train up to Kuranda in Queensland, Australia por Roger