Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

ham-for-ham:

talkless-sinmore:

ham-for-ham:

Abraham Lincoln was gay

oh my word he was the gayest and his most notable male lovers were 

• Joshua Fry Speed 
• a bed salesman/ inn keeper
• he and Lincoln met when he was 28 and Speed was around 22 b/c Abe was practicing law and he was poor so he had to rent out a room
• when Lincoln couldn’t afford a room and bed Joshua was just like “why don’t you share my bed with me 😘” 
• they lived together for four whole years 
• also when Speed had to go back to Kentucky (they were in Illinois together at this point) Lincoln actually suffered what historians consider a nervous breakdown, he wrote in his diaries a lot about how depressed he was during this time
• they still wrote each other letters though and remained friends until Lincoln died
• David Derickson 
• the commanding officer of his guards while he was President
• he even had his own special bed in the White House that they would share
• they had their own getaway cottage on the outskirts of the White House’s borders I kid you not
• ALSO
• HE ACTUALLY LEGITIMATELY WORE LINCOLN’S NIGHT SHIRT OKAY
• THEY WERE NOT SUBTLE
• THOMAS CHAMBERLAIN HAD THE TEA ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP, HE WROTE IT ALL DOWN

http://www.queersinhistory.com/was-abraham-lincoln-gay.htm

AHA I KNEW IT

(via patroclvss)

john-laurens:

Since Charles Lee is played as a pretty young guy in Hamilton, I’m not sure how many people are aware of the full context and hilarity of Laurens’s roast of Lee at Lee’s court-martial

Laurens was a 23-year-old aide-de-camp when he testified at the court-martial.  Charles Lee was 46 and a general.  Lee was twice Laurens’s age and outranked him, but Laurens had no reservations about completely dragging him.

Laurens and his sass were a gift to this world.

(via hamiltonandlaurensbothlikedguys)

Anonymous asked: Why is Thomas Jefferson getting a ton of heat lately? He's my problematic fav

kaylapocalypse:

falsedetective:

philtippett:

falsedetective:

falsedetective:

i mean, lately, it’s presumably because the hit broadway musical hamilton is out there reminding everyone that tjeff was The Worst. but i’m gonna take this opportunity to give you a run-down of every historic reason why tjeff was The Worst

1. i could end the list at “slave owner”
2. furthermore, he was even more racist than most 18th century racists. i don’t have the time or energy to list all the racists things he did, but there are a lot, just google it
   
3. like when his pal tadeusz kosciuszko died he stipulated that the money from his american estate should be used to free and educate jefferson’s slaves and in response he was like. “i can’t read suddenly. i don’t know”
   
4. he was a huge hypocrite who claimed to support the ~small independent farmers when the only interests he really cared about looking out for were - you guessed it - the interests of wealthy plantation owners, which is probably his biggest contribution to the legacy of american politics tbh
   
5. also, remember how he wrote the declaration of independence - including the original draft where he waxed philosophical about how slavery is an abomination - even though #1-3
6. sally hemings
7. he had no idea how the economy works. a good deal of his political career was spent arguing with the federalists about why taxes are bad and banks are scary. one time he tried to ban exports, like, entirely, because he just didn’t foresee any negative consequences to that brilliant idea, apparently
   
8. he was a generally obnoxious person who not only spewed baseless accusations against his enemies every time he was challenged on all his horrible ideology, but he didn’t even have the balls to do it himself, he usually employed a whole gang of followers to do his public shit-talking for him
   
9. he actually kept a burn book where he collected rumors about people he didn’t like. i wish i was making this up lmao this actually happened!!!
10. a big fan of indian removal and/or forced assimilation
11. there’s gotta be a lot else i’m forgetting right now, i’m just thinking off the top of my head

basically he sat around at monticello spinning around in his swivel chair while his slave-concubine brought him bowl after bowl of mac and cheese, meditating on liberty and equality with so much moral myopia he could’ve been the antihero protagonist of an amc prestige drama

i’m too tired to source any of this hate right now but i can and will elaborate if anyone deems it necessary

tj loved mac and cheese so much that he had a macaroni machine shipped over from naples. he often served mac and cheese to his dinner guests, some of whom called it “very strong and not agreeable“ because this man can’t even do mac and cheese right

i just want to add my personal favorite obnoxious jefferson story to this beautiful post (co-starring - surprise!! - alexander hamilton):

jefferson had alexander hamilton over at his house for dinner parties quite a bit (hamilton, for his part, often entertained at his own house but never invited jefferson, i can’t possibly imagine why). and on the wall in his house, jefferson had portraits - actual portraits, hanging, on the wall of his home - of isaac newton, john locke, and francis bacon, bc jefferson was the most pretentious fuck of his time. anyway, at one of these dinners, alexander asked tj who these men in the portraits were (altho no one can ever convince me that he didn’t already know) and jefferson was basically like “these are my personal holy trinity! the greatest men who ever lived!” and then went on about each of their great accomplishments and influences on the world and all. after he finally finishes his spiel, alexander is quiet for some time, looking pensive, and then he says, “well, no, julius caesar was the greatest man who ever lived.”

now, nobody knows exactly why hamilton said this. in general tho there are two theories. for one thing, it’s possible that he just genuinely admired julius caesar as a statesman. that wouldn’t particularly surprise me, knowing what we know about hamilton’s political beliefs (which is a lot). however, even if that is true, i’m more inclined to believe the other prevailing thought, which is that alexander hamilton was a little shit who just liked to say things that he knew would upset thomas jefferson.

and it worked! (it often worked. teej took the bait all the time, so it never lost its appeal.) jefferson, in all his ~enlightened~ capital-r Reasoning and nominal love of small government and rule by “the people,” was shocked into sputtering speechlessness. he could not believe that someone would say such a thing!! to the point where he told this story to other people for decades, like “hey can you believe this? a real person actually said that!!!!” dude was so bothered.

(fwiw, jefferson also used this story as evidence that hamilton was a dangerous man who should never be given political power bc clearly he would take over the country as emperor, and it became yet another thing that came back to bite hamilton in the ass. but based on jefferson’s response, tbh it sounds like it was worth it.)

Thank You for contributing this wonderful story. i’d just like to add: hamilton hated julius caesar, and he frequently insulted people and policies he disliked by comparing them to caesar, so he was 100% definitely trolling tjeffies for his own personal amusement. the fact that his dumb joke was used against him for decades is, from every angle, the funniest part of this whole story

Mac and cheese. I’m weak

elodieunderglass:

downtroddendeity:

bobthemole:

hemipelagicdredger:

bobthemole:

sinesalvatorem:

sigmaleph:

open-sketchbook:

inoue-takehiko:

evilscum:

deenoverdami:

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

his name is Ibn Khaldun

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

yo, the two people you’re talking about are both really cool dudes and yes they should be more widely known but stop spreading misinformation. do not use lies to spread the word about cool people and things.

the concept that things evolved from other things was already an idea floating around for basically ever in any scientific circle not completely dominated by creationism. like, darwin didn’t come up with it and he never claimed to. you can find dozens of natural philosophers throughout history like “yo i’m pretty sure that there’s some evolution going on here.”

it was not like the scientists in the 1850s were finding fossils of transitional forms and being like “LOL well dragons i guess!” it was already getting pretty obvious to academics in the 19th century that the earth was really old, life had gone through some serious changes, and there were common ancestors and related species. once maps got good enough for people to go “fuck dude africa and south america fit together” young earth creationism was fucked.

the problem was that there was no mechanism they could devise that would explain how creatures changed from one form into another, which was really kind of the vital piece of the whole thing. they had evidence that there was an evolution of life, but no way to build a theory because they had no way of showing how it might happen. some people were playing with the idea that creatures picked up traits from the environment and passed those to their kids.. somehow, but they had no evidence. they had a chain with no links.

then darwin comes along with some sketches of birds and he’s like “hey so here’s what going on. gregor mendel has shown that traits can be passed along, i’m gonna propose that what’s happening is, creatures that are best suited for an environment to flourish, so this preserves and eventually exaggerates certain traits over time to cause divergences. you go back far enough, like billions of years, all life coulda started from just a few basic types, or maybe even just one ancestor.”

darwin didn’t discover evolution. he proposed evolution by natural selection and he was right.

i mean, mostly. we had to correct his theory a whole bunch as we learned more about things like genetics and dna. he was actually kinda wrong about a ton of shit but that’s to be expected.

secondly, what’s important about newton wasn’t his observations, it was his math. ibn al haytham made a lot of important discoveries and advanced a lot of ideas about physics, especially optics, the big science of the middle ages, but the principles he talked about weren’t quite there yet.

like, he did this whole essay talking about planetary motion which, while more accurate than his contemporaries, was fundamentally inaccurate clockwork universe stuff because he actually hadn’t discovered gravity as a useful theory and he wasn’t able to use it to make predictions about motion.

that doesn’t make him stupid or worthy of being forgotten or nothin’. thats not how science works. he made advances, he didn’t quite have the shape of things yet, his work was important.

newton, building on his successes, was like, yo dawg, orbital mechanics. its like falling, but you miss. here’s a form of math i fucking invented to show some proof. lets check that against the universe.

and we did. and when it turned out his predictions were slightly wrong, some other motherfucker named einstein fixed it. and when he was wrong, etc.

its almost like science is totally built in increments on people who came before and trying discrediting the people who made some of those increments for political reasons is basically just as fucked as forgetting the folks who did the foundation work.

spreading misinformation to try to lionize historical figures so they are acknowledged has the opposite effect. it makes people who know shit roll their eyes and ignore similar posts later on. it makes the people who do read them look like dumbasses when they try to spread the word. it makes you look like one of those liberal stereotypes who disregards reality when it is politically convenient and that is not a good thing to look like.

minor point:

then darwin comes along with some sketches of birds and he’s like “hey so here’s what going on. gregor mendel has shown that traits can be passed along, i’m gonna propose that what’s happening is, creatures that are best suited for an environment to flourish, so this preserves and eventually exaggerates certain traits over time to cause divergences. you go back far enough, like billions of years, all life coulda started from just a few basic types, or maybe even just one ancestor.”

Darwin’s work preceded Mendel’s, actually. On The Origin Of Species came out in 1859, Mendel’s paper on inheritance in 1865. That traits could be passed along was known to everybody, though not how; Mendel discovered some particular rules that inheritance follows.

+1

Darwin spent a good chunk of his life wondering what the mechanism of natural selection could be, while ignoring Mendel completely.

To be fair, Mendel was publishing in some obscure-ass local Moravian natural history society journal. I’m not sure how much of that made it into Darwin’s circles.

(And on the original topic: Ibn Khaldun did pretty much legit invent historiography though, as far as we can tell, so there’s that)

This is anecdotal but I’ve heard that in one of the journals in Darwin’s collection, he had scribbled notes on an article across the page from an article by Mendel, which he had ignored entirely.

Probably apocryphal but I love the irony.

@ohnofixit

 As I am both a Person Who Loves Promoting Obscure Historical Figures (Especially Non-Western and PoC Figures Who Have Been Shamefully Overlooked) AND a scientist, the original posts made me pretty damn tired and I didn’t have the energy to post corrections about Ibn Khaldun’s work on evolutionary biology. thanks to everyone who did have the energy. It’s a great topic for discussion and those who are interested in the history of science will always appreciate sharing their knowledge with the public, so I’m glad we had this talk.

one of the most famous quotes by Isaac Newton is “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” 

(Source: kingdamiyr, via lupinatic)

sennkestra:

mswyrr:

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.

I didn’t know about the free Blight lectures. You can listen to them here:

http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119

They look awesome!

There’s also this PBS documentary, which I’m guessing is based on the book mentioned above (I’m watching it now): http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/death/

(Source: buttrockerbitches, via windbladess)

thefederalistfreestyle:

raindropsonroses123:

So apparently at one point during the American Revolution Alexander Hamilton, Lee and a bunch of troops were all across the Hudson River from the rest of the army, and Hamilton and a few other men were destroying bags of flour so the British wouldn’t get to them (since the British were supposed to arrive soon) and anyway the troops saw the British coming and began to retreat by marching off, but Hamilton and the other few men were left by the shore of the river with a heck of a lot of redcoats approaching. Luckily they had a boat and fled back across the river (under British gunfire), but one man died, another was wounded, and they all bailed and began to swim but made it out ok. However, Lee assumed Hamilton was dead and reported thus to Washington and his aides, and they were apparently all mourning him and drinking to his memory when he appeared in the doorway, dripping wet.

SURPRISE, BITCH

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

standbyyourmantis:

marypsue:

The thing about emo (as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon) is, I think, that it was a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the Bush administration’s painful mishandling thereof.

No, I’m serious. My Chemical Romance was formed as a direct result of Gerard Way witnessing the towers fall. Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ (an album that, at least as far as I can tell from having been a teenager in Canada at the time, was seminal in influencing the look and sound of emo) is all about the Bush administration - all the lyrics are about life under a democratic dystopia and many reference current events from the time - and it came out in 2004, halfway through the Bush presidency. A bunch of Linkin Park’s stuff makes reference to it also, especially their album ‘Minutes to Midnight’, where they first started moving out of the nu-metal/rap sound they’d been working with before and into a more mainstream emo-rock sound. That album came out in 2007. All of the really big bands with that kind of sound - and most of the smaller ones with more of a punk/hardcore sound but similar themes - were active in the mainstream from around 2001-2010. Many of them didn’t survive past 2009, and those that did either totally reinvented themselves (Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, MCR for the five minutes it took to produce Danger Days, Linkin Park) or became near-totally irrelevant (Paramore dropped an album sometime in the last two years; did any of you know that? And Green Day haven’t mattered since 21st Century Breakdown, which was released in 2009).

Why? Well, many of you are probably too young to remember this, but the 2001 terror attacks were what really made ‘Islamic terrorism’ a real threat in the minds of most Westerners. We’d never experienced an attack of that scale on American soil, and it was just as the internet was really becoming a mainstay in every house and my generation was getting online. As a result, it was not only a major political event, but it was hugely personal - the coverage was everywhere, in everybody’s home, all the time, and there were a lot of kids being exposed to the coverage in such a way that they often had no good way to process it. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed the way we live. I’m Canadian and I felt this shit. Before, we could fly to America domestic, without a passport. Now? Half the draconian, ridiculous rules that hold you up at the TSA today were initiated in September and October of 2001. It was the only thing anyone could think of to do - lock down, protect your own. People were scared, on a continental scale.

And to make matters worse, George W. Bush’s government, which had to somehow respond to and take point in the response to this unprecedented event, didn’t seem to have the first foggiest clue what they were doing. This was a government that not only didn’t seem to listen to its people, not only lied blatantly to its people, but did it badly. They made hugely unpopular decisions, including starting a war in the Middle East that dragged in multiple countries and completely failed to achieve its stated goal of catching Osama bin Laden or proving that he had in his control weapons of mass destruction (the whole war was predicated on the fact that these so-called weapons of mass destruction existed, that the Bush administration had good reason to believe that they existed, were under the control of the Taliban, and were going to be used against Western targets, none of which was ever proven to be true).

So, from 2001-2009, the two (TWO) full terms of the Bush presidency, there were a whole lot of people who couldn’t vote (be they under the age of majority, like most of the emo kids I knew, or Canadians unhappily dragged along with the US’ boneheaded foreign policy decisions because we’re allies, also like most of the emo kids I knew) and therefore felt, not only scared of basically the impending end of their world in a way that they hadn’t previously had to feel, and not only angry about being clearly lied to and clumsily manipulated when the truth was obvious to anyone with eyes, but also powerless to do anything to change anything about that. And meanwhile, people kept dying in this pointless war and the president kept trying to hold together the illusion that everything was hunky-dory.

And what was popular with teenagers from about 2001-2009? Yep. Emo.

Emo as a genre was very personal, very focused on the individual (with the exception of the albums I noted above), but lyrically and musically, it fit right with the cultural atmosphere of the time. People were scared of the impending end of their world/their lives? Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade. People were angry about things they felt powerless to change? From Under The Cork Tree and Decemberunderground. Emo captured what kids were feeling about trying to fit into a world that was so clearly fucked up and broken and pretending to be okay, putting on a strong face to Show The Terrorists They Didn’t Win. Emo was about stripping away the mask, exposing the messy, angry, frightened, sad, true underbelly of American society at the time, and exposing hypocrisy - in individuals as much as in politicians. The hatred of ‘preps’ and ‘posers’? Totally not just a My Immortal thing. Emo was about wearing your heart on your sleeve, about it being okay to mourn, to rage, to be afraid for your life beyond this - and to keep moving forward regardless, step by slow step.

So what changed in 2009 that made the phenomenon fade without so much as a whimper? Simple. Hope. The Audacity of Hope, to be exact.

Barack Obama won his presidency largely because young people supported him. Those were the young people who suffered through feeling helpless and powerless under Bush, who wanted things to change but felt they had no chance of making it so. Barack Obama was a chance. One of his first campaign promises was to end the Iraq war, a promise he followed through on. And even if his presidency hasn’t been perfect, it has never been the Bush administration, with the feeling that the will of the people was being entirely and quietly ignored by those in power to further their own agendas.

What I am saying, then, I guess, is that it’s time to buy stocks in Hot Topic, because whatever happens in the upcoming US presidential election, there are a lot of young people who may soon be needing black, white, and red graphic band tees and Manic Panic hair dye.

From someone who was in American high school in 2001, we were also incredibly terrified for at least the early Bush years. We were all pretty sure that the draft could possibly be reinstated and we could get sucked into the war. Some of my friends and I had plans on how best to get Don’t Ask, Don’t Telled out of the draft. We were all absolutely terrified of the prospect.

(via windbladess)