lyinginbedmon:
johannesviii:
prokopetz:
One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didn’t actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.
After the original pirate captain was killed, he was democratically elected captain of the pirate crew less than 6 weeks after being captured by them.
^^^ In case you were curious: model for Dread Pirate Roberts, right there.
(via skymurdock)
I’m still watching Liberty’s Kids because REASONS and I watched an episode with Baron von Steuben, and I get why they didn’t include this in a kid’s show, but this dude is THE BEST PART of the winter at Valley Forge.
LET ME TELL YOU WHY, WITH ABUSE OF CAPS LOCK AND BAD LANGUAGE AND IRREVERENCE.
Okay, some background. Baron von Steuben was a Prussian baron who shipped his ass over to America in 1777 in order to help Washington whip the bunch of random farmers, miners, tradesmen, etc who formed the Continental ‘Army’ at the time into shape. He reached Valley Forge in early 1778 (after almost getting his own soldiers ARRESTED IN BOSTON because he accidentally outfitted them in red coats, honestly this dude’s life is just PRIME HISTORICAL COMEDY MATERIAL, someone get the fuck on that) and immediately made a name for himself as a complete–but effective!–wackjob. He would go outside in the middle of winter in full military dress and have all the soldiers (many of whom were lacking a coat and boots at the time, because the goddess of efficiency Martha Washington had not yet made her presence known) run drills from sunup to sundown, whereas most military commanders of the day were Pointedly Uninvolved in the messy day-to-day shit. He also continued the trend of having commanders who were still learning English (Lafayette spoke almost no English upon his arrival, for example), because when von Steuben reached America he spoke zero English and had to write all his orders in French and give them to either HIS aide de camp to translate or the aide Washington periodically lent him (fun fact: Lt. Colonols Hamilton and Laurens were his usual lent-out aides because they both spoke French).
NOW YOU HAVE SOME BACKGROUND AND WE CAN GET TO THE GOOD STUFF.
Keep reading
sonneillonv:
mazarin221b:
wordsbetweenthelines:
pilferingapples:
mswyrr:
madamedevideoland:
pilferingapples:
thehighestpie:
the-siege-perilous:
wellblunttheknives:
pigffoot:
i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and
the narrator just said
“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”
fuck
#but wow let me tell you about how the american civil war changed the whole culture of grief and death #because before that people died at home mostly #where their family saw them die and held their body and had proof they were really dead and it was a process #but during the war people left and never came home their bodies never came back there was no proof #people died in new horrific ways on the battlefield literally vaporized by cannonballs or lost in swamps and eaten by wild animals #and there were NO BODIES to send home #and people simply couldn’t grasp that their son or father or husband was really gone #there are stories about people spending months searching for their loved ones #convinced they couldn’t be dead if there were no body they were simply lost or hurt and they needed to be saved and brought home #embalming also really started during the civil war as a way for bodies to be brought home as intact as possible #wow i just wowowow the culture of death and grief and stuff during this time period is fascinating and sad #history (via souryellows)
#quietly reblogs own tags #also the civil war was when dog tags and national cemetaries became a thing #and during the war there was n real system in place to notify families of the deaths #like they’d find out maybe from letters from soldiers who were there when their loved one died nd stuff #but there was no real system #and battlefield ambulances were basically invented because so many people died on the battlefield when they could have been saved if they co #…could have been moved frm the battlefield to a hospital #like there was this one really inlfuential dude whose son died that way and he became dedicated to getting an ambulance system in place
I’m not doing this in the correct tag-style, but.
IIRC, the Civil War also played a huge part in forming the modern American conception of heaven as this nice, domestic place where you’re reunited with your loved ones. People (particularly mothers) responded to the trauma of brother-killing-brother by imagining an afterlife in which families would once again be happy together.
(also not doing this in the correct tag-style, because I wanna KNOW— )What documentary is this? Or is there more than one? Any books on the subject? THIS IS FASCINATING.
cool (ghost) story, bro.
reblogging because, as a us history phd student, i want to say YAY for how much of this is totally on point. i also want to rec the book where a lot of this is covered very, very well, which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
a lot of books on the Civil War are deadly dull because they’re about battles and shit, but as a transformative moment in mindset and ideology, it becomes *fascinating*
the other book I’d even more highly rec is David W. Blight’s “Race and Reunion,” which is about how the “(white) brother against (white) brother” image of the war was invented and how throwing African Americans to the merciless viciousness of post-Reconstruction racist whites was part of constructing this “oh everybody was white men and everybody was noble let’s celebrate them all” approach to Civil War remembrance
very good stuff
Thank you! This looks like exactly the sort of reading I’m after! *adds to wish list*
Also, look for David Blights recordings of his Yale lecture series on The Civil War. 21 hours of class lectures, and its FASCINATING. He barely touches on the battles other than to use them as timestamps as to what was going on. Most of it focuses on what the mindset of everyone was going into the war, and what happened on the way out. It’s an amazing series that will change your entire perception of the war - how it happened, and how it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid it, because of the inherent evil of slavery and how it was destroying damn near *everyone* except rich white people.
Link
(Source: buttrockerbitches, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
littleredloki:
So, after listening to the Hamilton soundtrack for like the fifteenth time I decided to look up Hamilton’s last words. I’ve never realized how accurate the characterization was until I read, essentially, “He kept talking for hours after getting shot. Nobody knows his exact last words because he wouldn’t stop talking. The man with so much to say refused to go quietly.”
…I want to be surprised.
(Source: littleredlo, via academicfeminist)
nimblermortal:
azzandra:
gentileproblems:
During Victor Hugo’s funeral, most of the brothels in Paris closed down because all the prostitutes were in mourning for their best client #trufax
“No way that’s true,” I thought as I looked this up, thus starting the day by proving myself terribly wrong.
“A police source informed Edmond Goncourt that the brothels were shuttered and the city’s prostitutes had bedecked their crotches with black crepe in honor of the great man’s passing.” x
I’m sorry, but the OP thought that the fact that the brothels closed was the most impressive part, and not the fact that the prostitutes WORE BLACK CREPE ON THEIR CROTCHES IN HIS HONOR?
(Source: witch-of-habonim-dror, via enjolrarses)
Anonymous asked: Okay so your French History lessons are delightful, and I am an American with a terrible school system and an affection for historical factotum, please tell me something--anything--I don't know about the history of France. (Also your blog gives me life, you're fantastic, and have a lovely day.)
just-french-me-up:
OKAY SO HERE IS ONE OF MY FAVOURITES!
Louis XIV was known to have a lot of sex when he was young and later in adulthood. Like. A lot.
His brother, Phillipe d’Orléans, was known to be gay and quite publically so, and though he did obey his brother’s wishes to marry and have children, he kept lovers under his sleeves all his life
So when he was older, Louis XIV married one of his mistresses, Madame de Maintenon, who was a devote Jansenist. So the King had a sort of religious crisis and became SUPER CATHOLIC. So much so that he told his brother to “stop his indiscretions”, talking about his gay lovers. And Phillipe roasted him on a spike saying:
“Well let me remind you you fucked more girls than there are beads on your rosary, so STFU” (I believe he said something along the lines of “Vous avez enfilé plus de filles que de perles à votre chapelet” in French which is fucking SAVAGE)
