AChat Forum

Off-Topic => Quizz, Fav TV, Fav Music, Fav Films, Books... => Topic started by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:18:19 AM

Title: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:18:19 AM

In my country, we are having Black History Month which got me thinking.. Lets celebrate all history!  Good, Bad, the quirky, its how we learn and move on.

What a brilliant idea to post little interesting facts about history or country traditions or cultural followings.  Who said a sex game could not be educational and we could learn interesting things no matter what your colour, creed or religion.

Who knows.. we may end up being able to answer the hard questions in "Who wants to be a millionaire!"  on TV 

Here is some I found already :

(https://www.itv.com/win/files/800xAUTO/20201007/20201007112517.jpg)      (https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/483748094325030915/765875655925563392/unknown.png)
       
(https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/483748094325030915/765872277861433354/unknown.png)     (https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/483748094325030915/765875732995637268/unknown.png)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:21:08 AM

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0hDDzkWsAAOiJE.png)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:24:48 AM

(https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/483748094325030915/765882494418812948/unknown.png?width=442&height=421)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:27:39 AM

(https://image.slidesharecdn.com/historyofenglish-130311215440-phpapp02/95/history-of-the-english-language-4-638.jpg?cb=1363038954)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on October 14, 2020, 04:28:54 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/uLqxX8i.jpg?1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:30:07 AM

(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3a/28/9e/3a289e4e5a069d2befdcacd53bee2174.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:32:07 AM

(https://unbelievable-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Britain-facts.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:34:14 AM

During the First World War, the secret service agents used semen as invisible ink. They had a motto “Every man his own stylo”

(https://unbelievable-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1-6.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:36:30 AM

Margaret Thatcher, first female British prime minister, was part of the team that was improving soft serve ice creams.

(https://unbelievable-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2-1-1.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:38:29 AM

King Henry III of England had a polar bear in his Royal Menagerie. It went fishing in River Thames, London and attracted many viewers.

(https://unbelievable-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Polar-Bear-in-Tower-of-London.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on October 14, 2020, 04:48:05 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/KiLpBTl.jpg?1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 04:57:26 AM

King Henry VIII  of England introduced tax on beards in the 16th century. The tax varied on the social status of the man sporting the beard.

(https://unbelievable-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/4-4.jpg)


He also had 6 wives

Henry VIII is England’s most married monarch. He had six wives in total between 1509 and 1547. These were, in order:

1. Catherine of Aragon -  Divorced - gave birth to Queen Mary 1
2. Anne Boleyn  - Beheaded - gave birth to Elizabeth 1
3. Jane Seymour -  Died  in child birth with Edward 6th
4. Anne of Cleves - Divorced
5. Catherine Howard - Beheaded
6. Katherine Parr - Survived.

Henry would divorce two wives, and behead two – Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard – for adultery and treason. He no doubt would have remained married to his third wife, Jane Seymour, who gave him his son and heir - Edward 6th, but she died in childbirth.
In the end, only two wives – Anne of Cleves, who he divorced years prior, and his final wife, Katherine Parr – would outlive him. 

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 05:09:05 AM

Wales... Did you know

Having started as the Celtic nation of Cymru, throughout the centuries it was bullied by the larger powers of the time, including the Romans and the English.

Following revolt after revolt, including the Glyndŵr rising in 1400 and the Chartist uprising of 1839, Wales begrudgingly joined with the larger England.

Nevertheless, throughout these tumultuous times, Wales showed itself to be a proud, strong and determined nation, defending its land and its people until it became the principality that it is today.

Yes, it does rain a lot here and it is very hilly, but the landscape, culture and rugby make up for it.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wales-facts.jpg)

Wales has more castles per square mile than any other European country, with Caerphilly being the largest in Wales and the second largest in Europe behind Windsor. Unfortunately, many were built as a way of controlling the Welsh people.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 05:16:06 AM

The corgi dog (the Queen of England’s favorite!) originates from Wales; it means dwarf-dog or cor-ci.

(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a7/0d/99/a70d998eccb64df13b9ed2c3e6ae8c2b.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 05:18:27 AM

The first boundary between England and Wales came in 784AD with the creation of Offa’s Dyke by King Offa of Mercia.

(https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/visit/places-to-visit/offas-dyke/offas-dyke-hero.jpg?w=641&h=600&mode=crop&scale=both&quality=60&anchor=&WebsiteVersion=20201006110058)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 05:20:56 AM

Joseph ‘Job’ Daniels from Aberystwyth, West Wales, emigrated to the US in the 18th century. His grandson Jack went on to create the world renowned Jack Daniels whiskey – you’re welcome!

(https://www.costco.co.uk/medias/sys_master/images/h98/h93/16147926941726.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 05:29:12 AM

The Welsh love-spoon is an iconic symbol across the world, originally carved by men to their respective lover’s family as a sign he was capable and skilled with his hands. Each symbol is representative of something, from the knot representing love, to the twist meaning the couple’s bond.

(https://www.llangollen.org.uk/media/k2/items/cache/d9b208614500b6f80739755fd29fad52_XL.jpg)

(https://www.giftswithheart.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WELSH-DRAGON-LOVESPOON-FRIENDSHIP.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 05:37:13 AM

Mount Everest is named after Welshman Sir George Everest.

(https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2018/05/29/maps-everest/06-everest-summit-map.jpg)

Mount Everest is Earth's highest mountain above sea level, located in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas. The China (Tibet) – Nepal border runs across its summit point.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 05:44:05 AM

In 1997, the Welsh voted for the creation of the National Assembly for Wales. For the first time in 40 years, Wales was recognized legally as a distinct constitutional entity within the UK. In 2006, following this vote and the passing of the Government of Wales act, the Senedd was created, the home of the National Assembly.

The National Assembly for Wales is called Senedd Cymru - The Welsh Parliament.

(https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/15649/production/_112152678_gettyimages-1142880742.jpg)

(https://images.ctfassets.net/rdwvqctnt75b/1AJ8ZN8O52yEsOq88O8Qk4/db18a917f9883ca3aa8df3f38fc8a09e/Senedd_1.jpg?f=center)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Tift on October 14, 2020, 05:49:16 AM

As a girl born in Wales...


                                               CYMRU AM BYTH



the castles thing is correct, to keep the Welsh people in check
but it didn't really work ... Edward I chose the site for each castle
designs based on the walls of Constantinople which were
many-sided coloured stones in the Byzantine manner.

As for Windsor Castle it may be worth knowing that at the end
of the English Civil War royalist strongholds were chosen to be
destroyed to prevent further conflicts and the systematic
destruction was known as slighting .. Windsor Castle survived
destruction by one single vote in the Houes of Commons.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 14, 2020, 06:22:35 AM

Hadrian's Wall is located near the border between modern-day Scotland and England.
It runs in an east-west direction, from Wallsend and Newcastle on the River Tyne in the east, traveling about 73 miles west to Bowness-on-Solway on Solway Firth. The wall took at least six years to complete.

Antoninus Pius was the man who gave his name to the Antonine Wall of 142 AD, which runs between the the Rivers Clyde and Forth, extending Roman Britannia north from Hadrian's Wall. The wall was designed as a frontier for the empire, and a barrier to raiding Caledonian tribes.

The Anglo-Scottish border runs for 96 miles (154 km) between Marshall Meadows Bay on the east coast and the Solway Firth in the west.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hadrians_Wall_map.png)

(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/03/56/02/03560215e6c5980528dc507e57c8c5d8.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:04:57 AM

During Prohibition in the United States, the U.S. government literally poisoned alcohol.
When people continued to consume alcohol despite its banning, law officials got frustrated and decided to try a different kind of deterrent—death. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the U.S., which were products regularly stolen bootleggers.
By the end of Prohibition in 1933, the federal poisoning program is estimated to have killed at least 10,000 people.

(https://i0.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/prohibition-during-the-1920s.jpg?resize=1024%2C713&ssl=1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:06:49 AM

Yes, the face of the well-loved rum brand was a totally real guy. He was a Welsh privateer who fought alongside the English against the Spanish in the Caribbean in the 1660s and 1670s.
His first name was Henry and was knighted by King Charles II of England. His exact birth date is unknown, but it was sometime around 1635.
He died in Jamaica in 1688, apparently very rich.

(https://i2.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/captain-morgan.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:09:27 AM

The Titanic's Owners Never Said the Ship Was "Unsinkable"

(https://i1.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/titanic-sketch.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1)

Despite what James Cameron's iconic 1997 film may have you believe, the owners never said that it could never sink.
Historian Richard Howells said that "the population as a whole were unlikely to have thought of the Titanic as a unique, unsinkable ship before its maiden voyage."

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:12:34 AM

Pope Gregory IV Declared a War On Cats

(https://i0.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/pope-gregory-IV.jpg?resize=1024%2C1033&ssl=1)

Pope Gregory IV declared war on cats in the 13th Century. He said that black cats were instruments of Satan.
Because of this belief, he ordered the extermination of these felines throughout Europe. However, this plan backfired, as it resulted in an increase in the population of plague-carrying rats.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:17:52 AM

President Abraham Lincoln is in the Wrestling Hall of Fame

(https://i0.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/shutterstock_239400094.jpg?w=1023&ssl=1)

Before the 16th president took office, Abraham Lincoln was declared a wrestling champion.
The 6'4" president had only one loss among his around 300 contests.
He earned a reputation for this in New Salem, Illinois, as an elite fighter.
Eventually, he earned his county's wrestling championship.

Besides being a wrestling champ, Lincoln was also a licensed bartender.
In 1833, the 16th president opened up a bar called Berry and Lincoln with his friend William F. Berry in New Salem, Illinois.
The shop was eventually closed when Berry, an alcoholic, consumed most of the shop's supply.

(https://i1.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/berry-and-lincoln-saloon.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:22:16 AM

John Adams Was the First President to Live In the White House

(https://i2.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/John-Adams.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1)

While the White House was under construction during Washington's term, he never lived there.
It wasn't until John Adams took office that a president lived there.
Interestingly enough, George Washington is the only president to date who has not lived in the White House.

A mansion at 6th & Market Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania served as the executive mansion for the first two Presidents of the United States, while the permanent national capital was under construction in the District of Columbia.
Following a 16-month stay in New York City, George Washington occupied the President's House in Philadelphia from November 1790 to March 1797.
John Adams occupied it from March 1797 to June 1800, then became the first President to occupy The White House.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:27:29 AM

Columbus Didn't Actually Discover America

No, this European explorer did not discover America. Columbus was 500 years too late.
In fact, it was the Norse explorer Leif Erikson who landed on American shores during the 10th century.
Erikson could be considered the first European to discover America.

(https://i0.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/leif-erikson.jpg?resize=1024%2C548&ssl=1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 15, 2020, 11:38:52 AM

(https://i1.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/stonehenge.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1)

If you're not already aware, Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in Wiltshire, England, with each stone standing approximately 13 feet high and seven feet wide.
Built between 3000 B.C. and 2000 B.C., there are a number of theories as to why this formation exists.
For one, some researchers believe, since the stones are aligned to the sunset of the winter solstice and the opposing sunrise of the summer solstice, that perhaps rituals were conducted here after its creation.
Further, since there are a number of burial mounds surrounding the stones, some believe that it may have been used to celebrate the dead. However, since there is no written record of Stonehenge, it leaves its purpose a mystery.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 16, 2020, 09:47:44 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/bAG7GkR.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 16, 2020, 09:48:40 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/2lMwXbP.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 16, 2020, 09:49:23 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/MFzBlcg.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 16, 2020, 09:50:05 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/e0t06SP.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 16, 2020, 09:51:00 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/QZNSZDX.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 16, 2020, 01:22:11 PM

(https://www.itv.com/win/files/800xAUTO/20201013/20201013114428.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 16, 2020, 02:16:38 PM

In the past 58 years, a total of 26 James Bond films has been made:

(https://evert.meulie.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/JBx6.jpg)

Title   Year   Actor Dr. No   1962                          Sean Connery From Russia with Love   1963 Goldfinger   1964 Thunderball   1965 Casino Royale   1967                  David Niven You Only Live Twice   1967         Sean Connery On Her Majesty's Secret Service   1969        George Lazenby Diamonds are Forever   1971         Sean Connery Live and Let Die   1973                 Roger Moore The Man with the Golden Gun   1974 The Spy Who Loved Me   1977 Moonraker   1979 For your eyes only   1981 Octopussy   1983 Never say never again   1983           Sean Connery A view to a kill   1985                   Roger Moore The living daylights   1987          Timothy Dalton License to kill   1989 GoldenEye   1995                          Pierce Brosnan Tomorrow never dies   1997 The world is not enough   1999 Die another day   2002 Casino Royale   2006                  Daniel Craig Quantum of solace   2008 Skyfall   2012 Spectre   2015 No time to die   2020

12 actors
And no less than 12 actors have portrayed James Bond in the media.
In chronological order: Barry Nelson, Bob Holness, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, David Niven, George Lazenby, Christopher Cazenove, Timothy Dalton, Michael Jayston, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig & Toby Stephens.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 17, 2020, 02:22:05 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/dIXFMuK.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 19, 2020, 09:27:37 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/aNEuAC8.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: zuzannah on October 20, 2020, 05:15:58 AM

On this day in 1720

John 'Calico Jack' Rackham protects the rum while Anne and Mary fight

(https://i.imgur.com/x0UcRwV.jpg)

  Crossed swords and a grinning skull distinguish Calico Jack Rackham's flag, and that's just what pirate hunters find while prowling Jamaican waters. When they attack Pirate Jack's ship, his female crew, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, return the fight while the men, drunk on rum, wait it out in the hold.

  Rackham and his pirates were swiftly tried and found guilty. Most of them were hanged. Bonny and Read were also sentenced to hang, but both of them declared they were pregnant. A judge ordered their claim checked out and it was found to be true, a fact which automatically commuted their death sentence. Read died in prison shortly thereafter, but Bonny survived. No one knows for sure what became of her and her child. Some say she reconciled with her rich father, some say she remarried and lived in Port Royal or Nassau.

  In a famous quote Bonny told Rackham in prison:

  "I'm sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a man, you need not have hanged like a dog."

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on October 20, 2020, 03:12:22 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/igyPnzf.jpg)


After her role as First Lady came to an end, Jackie Kennedy went into the publishing business. She became an associate editor at Doubleday and worked mostly on autobiographies. In fact, she was one of two original editors for Michael Jackson's 2009 autobiography Moonwalk, a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 25, 2020, 07:19:48 AM

UK

(https://www.itv.com/win/files/800xAUTO/20201022/20201022124613.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: zuzannah on October 28, 2020, 05:49:49 AM

  On this day in 1886 (28th October)

  Lady Liberty was opened.


(https://i.imgur.com/TU1qKGk.jpg)

  151 feet of copper neoclassical sculpture, is accepted as a gift from France and dedicated by US President Grover Cleveland after hundreds of thousands of revellers throw the world's first ticker-tape parade in honour of the new lady of Liberty Island.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 28, 2020, 12:14:21 PM

Did you know that Franklin Roosevelt okayed a plan to bomb the Imperial Japanese Army with bombs attached to bats?

The Marine Corps took over the program and conducted tests beginning in December 1943. After 30 demonstrations and $2 million spent, the project was cancelled. Most people believe it's because the U.S. realized that all resources should be concentrated on the development of a far more powerful weapon: the atomic bomb.

(https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/batshitcrazybomb.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: zuzannah on October 30, 2020, 05:30:46 AM

Did you know ? 

On this day in 1938 Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater Players scared the living S*** out of everyone with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

(https://i.imgur.com/4frFvRY.jpg)

Probably not scary now but have a listen if you want to.  (Just under an hour).

It really is rather good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q7tN7MhQ4I&ab&ab_channel=OrsonWelles-Topic

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Momma_andrea on October 30, 2020, 12:49:04 PM

Did you know?

Hoover dam continues curing even after 76 years

Concrete in the core portion of the gigantic Hoover dam in Nevada, USA is still continuing to cure according to engineers. That is in spite of the fact that the dam was built way back in 1935 and a huge network of 1 inch dia. pipes totalling to a length of almost a thousand kilometers was buried inside the concrete to circulate cold water in order to suck the enormous heat of hydration generated by the huge quantity of poured concrete.

So that was not good enough to stop it from curing even today and in fact, this is expected to continue for some more years.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on October 31, 2020, 12:15:31 PM

(https://www.itv.com/win/files/800xAUTO/20201027/20201027160913.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: zuzannah on November 09, 2020, 06:39:21 AM

Did you know that on this day in 1989 East Germany lets the Berlin Wall come down.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on November 12, 2020, 01:13:37 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/IoGILhR.jpg)

THE KISSING CASE

On this date, October 28, 1958, two Black boys, 7-year-old James Hanover Thompson, and 9-year-old David "Fuzzy" Simpson, were among a group of children in Monroe, North Carolina, none more than 10, none younger than 6, were playing as young children do without much pattern or apparent direction.  Most of the children were white.

 One of the girls, Sissy Sutton, kissed Hanover on the cheek.  When her mother overheard relaying the day’s events to her sister, she became livid. She called the other white parents, armed herself, gathered some friends, and went out looking for the boys.  She intended to kill them. 
Mrs. Sutton went to Hanover’s home with her posse, not only to kill the boys but to lynch the mothers.  They arrived almost at the same time as six carloads of police -- nearly the entire police force of Monroe.  Fortunately, no one was at home.
 
Later that afternoon, a squad car spotted the two boys pulling a little red wagon filled with pop bottles.  The police jumped from the car, guns drawn, snatched the boys, handcuffed them, and threw them into the car.  One of cops slapped Hanover, the first of many beatings he would endure. 

When they got to the jail, the boys were beaten unmercifully.  They were held without counsel and their mothers were not allowed to see them.
For several nights the mothers were so frightened that they didn’t sleep in their own house.  Gunmen in passing cars fired dozens of shots into the Thompson home.  They killed Hanover’s dog.  Both women were fired from their jobs as housekeepers.  Mrs. Thompson was evicted from her home.  The Klan held daily demonstrations outside of the jail.

On November 4, 1958, six days after taking the boys into custody, local authorities finally held a hearing.  The boys had still not seen their parents, friends, or legal counsel.  At the hearing, the judge found the boys guilty of three charges of assault (kissing) and molestation.  He ordered that the boys be incarcerated in an  adult facility for black prisoners, and told the boys that if they behaved, they might be released at age 21.

The state NAACP director didn’t want anything to do with the 'sex case' as he called it.  Roy Wilkins, of the national NAACP, also declined to get involved.  Eventually, it was the communists, the Socialist Workers’ Party, that came to the rescue.

Joyce Egginton, a reporter for the London News-Chronicle traveled to Monroe, she sneaked into the prison where the boys were held, under the pretense of being a social worker.  She also sneaked in a camera.  On December 15, 1958, a front page picture of Hanover and Fuzzy in the reformatory, along with an article, appeared all over Europe.
 
News organizations in England, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, all carried the story. The United States Information Agency received more than 12,000 letters expressing outrage at the events.

An international committee was formed in Europe to defend Thompson and Simpson. Huge demonstrations were held in Paris, Rome and Vienna and in Rotterdam against the United States.  The U.S. Embassy in Brussels was stoned. It was an international embarrassment for the U.S. government.

 In February, North Carolina officials asked the boys' mothers to sign a waiver with the assurance that their children would be released. The mothers refused to sign the waiver, which would have required the boys to admit to being guilty of the charges.

Two days later, after the boys had spent three months in detention, the governor pardoned Thompson and Simpson without conditions or explanation. The state and city never apologized to the boys or their families for their treatment.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on November 12, 2020, 01:20:30 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/nKyrVXh.jpg)

Paparazzi surrounds Governor Bill Clinton’s cat in Arkansas, 1992

Meet Socks the cat, the "first pet" of the White House back in the 1990s. This political animal adopted by Governor Bill Clinton was the most popular purry friend in the 1992 presidential race.

As the First Pet, Socks lived the grandeur life. He had his own video game, he was on the children’s version of the White House website, and he anwered mails. Of course, the Republicans were enraged. They questioned how much of the taxpayers' money was being allotted on the person answering letters to children under the guise of a cat.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on November 14, 2020, 10:43:20 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/XjtFVx8.jpg)

“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”
— 
Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).

Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on November 18, 2020, 08:39:52 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/WjJ1tJd.jpg)

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity .…They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Vice President Henry A. Wallace, April 9, 1944.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on November 20, 2020, 06:04:17 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/mcDPECs.jpg)

It is also said he ran out of toilet paper.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on November 25, 2020, 09:03:55 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/ZUZRoFV.jpg)

"Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.

But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said."

We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on November 25, 2020, 09:08:04 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/OMahH4d.jpg)


The original Gerber baby is 94!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on November 26, 2020, 12:34:51 PM

On this day  :  1476 – Vlad the Impaler defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Báthory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time.

Vlad III, most commonly known as Vlad the Impaler (Romanian: Vlad Țepeș) or Vlad Dracula (drækjələ; Romanian: Vlad Drăculea 1428/31 – 1476/77), was Voivode of Wallachia three times between 1448 and his death. He is often considered one of the most important rulers in Wallachian history and a national hero of Romania.

He was the second son of Vlad Dracul, who became the ruler of Wallachia in 1436. Vlad and his younger brother, Radu, were held as hostages in the Ottoman Empire in 1442 to secure their father's loyalty. Vlad's father and eldest brother, Mircea, were murdered after John Hunyadi, regent-governor of Hungary, invaded Wallachia in 1447. Hunyadi installed Vlad's second cousin, Vladislav II, as the new voivode. Hunyadi launched a military campaign against the Ottomans in the autumn of 1448, and Vladislav accompanied him. Vlad broke into Wallachia with Ottoman support in October, but Vladislav returned and Vlad sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire before the end of the year. Vlad went to Moldavia in 1449 or 1450, and later to Hungary.

Relations between Hungary and Vladislav later deteriorated, and in 1456 Vlad invaded Wallachia with Hungarian support. Vladislav died fighting against him. Vlad began a purge among the Wallachian boyars to strengthen his position. He came into conflict with the Transylvanian Saxons, who supported his opponents, Dan and Basarab Laiotă (who were Vladislav's brothers), and Vlad's illegitimate half-brother, Vlad the Monk. Vlad plundered the Saxon villages, taking the captured people to Wallachia where he had them impaled (which inspired his cognomen). Peace was restored in 1460.

The Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, ordered Vlad to pay homage to him personally, but Vlad had the Sultan's two envoys captured and impaled. In February 1462, he attacked Ottoman territory, massacring tens of thousands of Turks and Bulgarians. Mehmed launched a campaign against Wallachia to replace Vlad with Vlad's younger brother, Radu. Vlad attempted to capture the sultan at Târgoviște during the night of 16–17 June 1462. The sultan and the main Ottoman army left Wallachia, but more and more Wallachians deserted to Radu. Vlad went to Transylvania to seek assistance from Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, in late 1462, but Corvinus had him imprisoned.

Vlad was held in captivity in Visegrád from 1463 to 1475. During this period, anecdotes about his cruelty started to spread in Germany and Italy. He was released at the request of Stephen III of Moldavia in the summer of 1475. He fought in Corvinus's army against the Ottomans in Bosnia in early 1476. Hungarian and Moldavian troops helped him to force Basarab Laiotă (who had dethroned Vlad's brother, Radu) to flee from Wallachia in November. Basarab returned with Ottoman support before the end of the year. Vlad was killed in battle before 10 January 1477. Books describing Vlad's cruel acts were among the first bestsellers in the German-speaking territories. In Russia, popular stories suggested that Vlad was able to strengthen central government only through applying brutal punishments, and a similar view was adopted by most Romanian historians in the 19th century. Vlad's reputation for cruelty and his patronymic inspired the name of the vampire Count Dracula.

Source : Wikipedia

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on December 01, 2020, 09:59:43 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/Jm45t9j.jpg)

Newly discovered rock art in the Colombian Amazon. These elaborate paintings are 12,500 years old and stretch along eight miles of remote cliff face. There are tens of thousands of images. This picture shows an arrangement of images as an organized story, much like an Egyptian hieroglyph and very different from other ancient rock art. Researchers say it will take years, maybe decades to record, photograph, and study it all.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on January 18, 2021, 08:18:49 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/SPMhMbS.jpg?1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 02, 2021, 07:57:49 PM

It's that time of year again.

Simple question.... do you know who Frederick McKinley Jones was without Googling the name?

Probably not. Frederick McKinley Jones was an inventor who made major improvements to the refrigeration systems in trucks, that allowed them to haul meat and frozen foods long distances.

Without his nearly two dozen patents, you would not be able to shop at grocery stores today for perishable goods.
He was also a veteran, having served in World War 1 as a mechanic.

Why do I bring this up? Because he is one of hundreds of important black figures in American history, having been born to a white father and a black mother in a time in which it was not legal for them to be together.

His achievements and inventions are still, to this very day, impacting your every day life. And if you are being totally honest with yourself, you likely had zero idea who he was before reading this post.

And THAT is why February is Black History Month. Hundreds of black Americans helped build today's country, and their stories aren't taught in schools. You've never heard of most of them.

Do yourself a favor today, and Google "Important black figures in American history" and learn the stories of Hiram Revels (absolutely fascinating), or Thurgood Marshall Jr., or Collette Colvin, or Jane Bolin... amazing people who accomplished amazing things when the society they lived in had actual laws telling them they were not allowed.

And happy Black History Month.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 03, 2021, 05:41:20 PM

This post has had to be split into 2 parts because of its length

Part One


A little LGBTQ history - a few snippets

The Buggery Act of 1533, passed by Parliament during the reign of Henry VIII, is the first time in law that male homosexuality was targeted for persecution in the UK. Completely outlawing sodomy in Britain – and by extension what would become the entire British Empire – convictions were punishable by death.

(https://i.imgur.com/A2Y2qHW.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/JPa8mv5.jpg?1)

It was not until 1861 with the passing of the Offences Against the Person Act, that the death penalty was abolished for acts of sodomy – instead being made punishable by a minimum of 10 years imprisonment.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 however, went a step further once again, making any male homosexual act illegal – whether or not a witness was present – meaning that even acts committed in private could be prosecuted. Often a letter expressing terms of affection between two men was all that was required to bring a prosecution. The legislation was so ambiguously worded that it became known as the ‘Blackmailer's Charter’, and in 1895, Oscar Wilde fell victim.

(https://i.imgur.com/LpX6QYd.jpg?1)
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(https://i.imgur.com/JvBy7Ci.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/OykSZlV.jpg?1)

Female homosexuality was never explicitly targeted by any legislation. Although discussed for the first time in Parliament in 1921 with a view to introducing discriminatory legislation (to become the Criminal Law Amendment Bill 1921), this ultimately failed when both the House of Commons and House of Lords rejected it due to the fear a law would draw attention and encourage women to explore homosexuality. It was also assumed that lesbianism occurred in an extremely small pocket of the female population.

In the post-war period, transgender identities started to become visible. In 1946 Michael Dillon published Self: A Study in Endocrinology. The book, which in contemporary terms could be described as an autobiography of the first transgender man to undergo phalloplasty surgery, recounted Dillon’s journey from Laura to Michael, and the surgeries undertaken by pioneering surgeon Sir Harold Gillies. Dillon wrote: ‘Where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately at any rate, to the mind.’

In May 1951 Roberta Cowell, a former World War II Spitfire pilot, became the first transgender women to undergo vaginoplasty surgery in the UK. Cowell continued her career as a racing driver and published her autobiography in 1954.

Meanwhile, a significant rise in arrests and prosecutions of homosexual men were made after World War II. Many were from high rank and held positions within government and national institutions, such as Alan Turing, the cryptographer whose work played a decisive role in the breaking of the Enigma code. This increase in prosecutions called into question the legal system in place for dealing with homosexual acts.

The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report, was published in 1957, three years after the committee first met in September 1954. It was commissioned in response to evidence that homosexuality could not legitimately be regarded as a disease and aimed to bring about change in the current law by making recommendations to the Government. Central to the report findings was that the state should focus on protecting the public, rather than scrutinising people’s private lives.

(https://i.imgur.com/RAARimd.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/2iSQL99.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgur.com/F2nMtz3.jpg?1)

It took 10 years for the Government to implement the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Backed by the Church of England and the House of Lords, the Sexual Offences Act partially legalised same-sex acts in the UK between men over the age of 21 conducted in private.  Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit over a decade later, in 1980 and 1981 respectively. The Sexual Offences Act represented a stepping stone towards equality, but there was still a long way to go.

In 1966 The Beaumont Society was set up to provide information and education to the general public, medical and legal professions on ‘transvestism’ and encourage research aimed at a fuller understanding. The organistaion is now the UK’s largest and longest running support group for transgender people and their families.

In the wake of the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969 over the treatment of the LGBT community by the police the UK Gay Liberation Front was founded (GLF) in 1970. The GLF fought for the rights of LGBT people, urging them to question the mainstream institutions in UK society which led to their oppression. The GLF protested in solidarity with other oppressed groups and organised the very first Pride march in 1972 which is now an annual event

It took 10 years for the Government to implement the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Backed by the Church of England and the House of Lords, the Sexual Offences Act partially legalised same-sex acts in the UK between men over the age of 21 conducted in private.  Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit over a decade later, in 1980 and 1981 respectively. The Sexual Offences Act represented a stepping stone towards equality, but there was still a long way to go.

In 1966 The Beaumont Society was set up to provide information and education to the general public, medical and legal professions on ‘transvestism’ and encourage research aimed at a fuller understanding. The organistaion is now the UK’s largest and longest running support group for transgender people and their families.

In the wake of the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969 over the treatment of the LGBT community by the police the UK Gay Liberation Front was founded (GLF) in 1970. The GLF fought for the rights of LGBT people, urging them to question the mainstream institutions in UK society which led to their oppression. The GLF protested in solidarity with other oppressed groups and organised the very first Pride march in 1972 which is now an annual event..

(https://i.imgur.com/11qS4My.jpg?1)

When the GLF disbanded in late 1973 the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), based in Manchester, led the fight for equality by legal reform. Age of consent equality however, did not come until 2001 in England, Scotland and Wales, and 2009 in Northern Ireland.

The fight for sexual equality however, was far from over. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, introduced by the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher, banned local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’ or ‘pretended family relationships’, and prohibited councils from funding educational materials and projects perceived to 'promote homosexuality'. The legislation prevented the discussion of LGBT issues and stopped pupils getting the support they needed. Section 28 was repealed in 2003, and Prime Minister David Cameron apologised for the legislation in 2009.

In 2004 the Civil Partnership Act 2004 allowed same-sex couples to legally enter into binding partnerships, similar to marriage. The subsequent Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013 then went further, allowing same-sex couples in England and Wales to marry; Scotland followed suit with the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014. Northern Ireland enactment the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019, making same-sex marriage legal on 13 January 2020.

The Gender Recognition Act 2004, which came into effect on 4 April 2005, gave trans people full legal recognition of their gender, allowing them to acquire a new birth certificate – although gender options are limited to ‘male’ or ‘female’. Between July and October 2018 the UK Government consulted the public on reforming the Act. As of 1 September 2020 no report from the consultation has been published.

The Equality Act 2010 gave LGBT employees protections from discrimination, harassment and victimisation at work. The legislation brought together existing legislation and added protections for trans workers, solidifying rights granted by the Gender Recognition Act.

The LGBT community continues to fight for equality and social acceptance.


Many thanks for source materials to :
Rob Field, Steven Dryden and The British Library

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 03, 2021, 05:41:33 PM

This post has had to be split into 2 parts because of its length


Part Two


A little LGBTQ history - a few snippets



Arena Three: Britain’s first lesbian magazine
In 1958 the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) was founded in the wake of the Wolfenden Report, published on 4 September 1957. The society launched with a series of high profile advertisements in national newspapers and became a beacon for many socially isolated men and women, who were now able to make contact with each other and start to build communities.
In 1963 Antony Grey, the HLRS’ secretary from 1962 to 1970, was contacted by Esmé Langley, who sought advice about setting up a magazine for lesbians. Through the networks of HLRS, Langley made contact with future contributors Cynthia Reid, Julie Switsur and Patricia Dunckley. The Minorities Research Group (MRG) was formed later that year and its first task was to create the first periodical for lesbians published in Britain.

In spring 1964 the first issue of Arena Three was published, achieving just this. In it, the agenda of the MRG was set out:

"To conduct and to collaborate in research into the homosexual condition, especially as it concerns women; and to disseminate information and items of interest to universities, institutions, social and education workers, writers, poets, editors, employers and, in short, all those genuinely in quest of enlightenment about what has been called 'the misty, unmapped world of feminine homosexuality.'

(https://i.imgur.com/RpCkUi7.jpg?1)

The majority of subscribers were lesbians, although the periodical was also read by bisexuals, gay men and professionals with an interest in homosexuality. The readership was predominantly middle-class, due to it being advertised in periodicals like the New Statesman, and like many early periodicals for the LGBTQ community at the time, Arena Three was only available via mail order. In December 1964 however, News of the World published an article on Arena Three introducing it to a working-class readership.

Despite this, access to Arena Three was far from easy for many women. Prompted by warnings from the HLRS about the potential legal implications of married women reading the publication, the original founders of Arena Three set in place a requirement for married women to obtain written consent from their husbands as part of their subscription requests.

In the first year, the core members of the MRG wrote much of the content, but as the readership grew, so did its contributors. Clare Barringer led the book review section and Lorna Gulston contributed articles on lesbian history. The letters pages were by far the most popular section, providing a forum where women could make contact with each other around the country – as well as crucially, finding others in their own hometown.

The social function of Arena Three cannot be understated, with demand for meetings and events evident from the very earliest issues. The first meeting took place at the Shakespeare’s Head pub on Carnaby Street, London, in May 1964. These meetings were held monthly and usually began with a discussion or talk, before opening out into a more social affair.

The meetings themselves generated debate about lesbian identities and consensus was often hard to come by. On top of this, the presence of ‘butch’ lesbians at these meetings – who dressed in men’s suits and styled their hair with Brylcreem – made venue owners suspicious as spaces were usually booked for ‘women only’ meetings.

One of the early meetings addressed this issue head on by tabling a motion for discussion: ‘That this house considers the wearing of male attire at MRG meetings is inappropriate’. The vote went against the motion, by 28 to 25, with six abstentions – meaning full 'butch' attire continued to be allowed at MRG meetings. However, a tone was set that ‘butch’ lesbians were not welcome in the MRG community.

The ‘butch’ identity was also evident during this period at the lesbian club The Gateways in Chelsea, London. In its early years Arena Three was critical towards the lesbian bars and clubs of the time, despite many of its founding members being regulars on the scene. Some scholars have suggested that there was a class dimension to the hostility towards butch lesbian identities.

The nature of lesbian identities was regularly discussed in Arena Three. Married lesbians and lesbian mothers were a minority within the readership, but they existed. Their experiences and the issues they faced were explored in several articles which ultimately revolved around questioning the societal and family pressure for women to marry and have children. These articles often generated discussion that would later be magnified by the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the early 1970s.

Researchers also contacted Arena Three in order to interview and collect information from its readership. These relationships were often problematic however, especially if researchers’ findings conflicted with the views of the MRG.

The rocky relationships also extended to media interactions with the MRG and Arena Three. In 1967 several members of the MRG appeared in the BBC-produced Man Alive series in a programme exploring female homosexuality in light of the Sexual Offences Act passing into law, partially decriminalising homosexuality. However, the MRG was critical of the programme owing to its focus upon participants with a ‘butch’ identity. So while the MRG welcomed discussion in the media, it was often contingent on representations conforming to its own notion of lesbian identity.

The final issue of Arena Three was published in July 1971, owing largely to factions and conflict over administration and finances within the main organising body of the MRG. From the ashes though, a new publication called Sappho was born, with the first issue being published in April 1972. Sappho had a progressive feminist voice which was in keeping with the convergence of the ideas of gay liberation and women’s liberation in the early 1970s.

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(https://i.imgur.com/Hod6AOf.jpg?1)

Sappho would be the dominant means by which a lesbian feminist voice was developed in the UK until its final issue was published in 1981.

The HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s put gay sex under the full spotlight of public debate, inflaming longstanding prejudices and birthing new myths and misconceptions about gay men in particular. For a time, it was reported as a ‘gay plague’.

The public policy response to HIV/AIDS is widely held to be a success. Then-Health Secretary Norman Fowler succeeded in convincing Thatcher’s government to go ahead with an unprecedented health information campaign. In 1986/87, a leaflet drop to every household in the UK along with a remarkably stark TV campaign (featuring the famous John Hurt narrated ‘Tombstone’ ad) formed the world’s first major government-sponsored AIDS awareness drive. The strategy risked stoking fears in its attempt to raise understanding, but ultimately new diagnoses fell by a third and plateaued for the remainder of the century.

Local Government Act 1986 – Section 28

In 1988, Parliament amended the Local Government Act 1986. Section 28 prohibited local authorities from ‘intentionally promoting homosexuality’ or the ‘teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. It stayed on the statute books for 15 years and became another rallying point for the LGBTQ movement, with key moments including:

Sir Ian McKellen coming out in a Radio 3 debate on the issue
Three lesbians abseiling into the House of Lords during debate on the ruling
four campaigners invading the BBC studios the day before the section became law, while Sue Lawley read the news.
Clause 28 was eventually repealed in 2003. In 2009, then-Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron, despite having opposed the 2003 repeal, issued a historic apology for the policy.

The acceleration of legislative changes since the turn of the century makes it tempting to believe in a linear story of irreversible social progress. For the current generation, the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013 might appear as a definitive closing act, without the context of the battle to get there.

And this is why it still matters; why the 2017 year of commemoration – marking 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality – was so essential not just for the LGBTQ community but for anyone concerned for the state of civil rights today. It is why the Pride movement is as important and relevant as it ever has been – offering a reminder, not just of the battles waged and ultimately won, but of the ever-shifting nature of the battleground itself.

The ‘big-ticket’ legislative changes (same-sex adoption, marriage, gender recognition) might have been won, but policy debates are still being fought on inequalities that remain. Regrettably, Northern Ireland still does not have equal marriage.

In July 2017, the UK Supreme Court ruled in favour of John Walker, who sought equal spousal pension rights for his same-sex partner. Walker challenged an exemption in the Equality Act 2010 that allowed firms to exclude same-sex partners from providing pensions prior to the introduction of Civil Partnerships in 2005. Earlier in that same year, the Policing and Crime Act pardoned historic offences of gross indecency (known as the ‘Alan Turing law’) for consensual sexual activity between gay men.

And there remain continuing points of contention in how broader public policy is implemented. For example, guidelines on blood donation have been changed to enable gay men to donate three months after having last had sex, compared with 12 months previously. The Government has also signalled its intention to consult on proposals that would make it easier for transgender people to choose their sex legally, removing the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and making the transitioning process less bureaucratic. This follows 2017’s first ever national LGBT survey carried out by the Government.

Prime Minister Theresa May acknowledged that ‘when it comes to rights and protections for trans identifying people, there is still a long way to go.’ In areas such as the rights of transgender prisoners, this is literally a matter of life and death, starkly illustrated by two high profile suicide cases in 2015.

John Walker’s successful legal challenge to the UK Government was ultimately made possible by EU equal employment rights. The UK’s decision to leave the EU (and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice) therefore raises the need for vigilance over the ongoing protection of hard-won LGBTQ protections. The newfound influence of the Democratic Unionist Party in determining the balance of UK Parliament is an early indicator of the risks. Many in the LGBTQ community have been appalled by the UK Government’s willingness to enter into a formal agreement with a party that has repeatedly blocked equal marriage in Northern Ireland and which is notorious for expressing anti-LGBTQ sentiment.

The sudden volatility in the United States’ political landscape is a cautionary example. After one of the most remarkable shifts in public opinion in US history – from a 68/27 split against equal marriage in 1994 to a 60/37 split in favour of equal marriage by 2015 – the LGBTQ community suddenly faces a Vice President with links to ‘gay cure’ therapy, a President attempting to ban transgender service in the military, and an Attorney General whose stated position is that anti-LGBTQ discrimination on the grounds of religious freedom is legal under federal law.

Furthermore, the lifetime appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court vacancy tilts the balance of the seven Supreme Court judges in favour of social conservatism. The current experience of the US is a timely reminder for the UK that the victories won over the past 50 years are far from immutable.

Access to public services (and the social impact of growing up LGBTQ)

There is also a very live challenge in ensuring that LGBTQ are able to access the public services they need and are entitled to. That’s often not about addressing active or intended discrimination, but more about ensuring that the lived experiences of LGBTQ people are understood by service providers. According to LGBT Foundation statistics, LGBTQ people are:

- twice as likely to experience suicidal thoughts or attempt suicide
- two to three times more likely to experience depression
- seven times more likely to engage in some form of substance abuse and far more likely to have an eating disorder.

In addition, over half of young gay people have self-harmed (compared to somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 15 for young people generally).

Former Attitude editor Matthew Todd has written eloquently on this:

What’s wrong is not our sexuality, but our experience of growing up in a society that still does not fully accept that people can be anything other than heterosexual and cisgendered (i.e. born into the physical gender you feel you are). It is the damage done to us by growing up strapped inside a cultural straitjacket – a tight-fitting, one-size restraint imposed on us at birth – that leaves no room to grow. It makes no allowances for the fact that, yes, indeed, some people are different and we deserve – and need – to be supported and loved for who we are, too.

Despite the extraordinary advances made since 1967, it is clear the experience of growing up LGBTQ in the UK can still be traumatic and create long-term health and behavioural issues. It is to be hoped that the long-term impact of recent advances will be an improvement in the shocking figures currently reported. But there remains an immediate and pressing set of issues for LGBTQ people in the UK and every aspect of public service provision needs to be sensitive to these.


Many thanks for source materials to :
Rob Field, Steven Dryden and The British Library

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 03, 2021, 06:44:29 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/CyK11r1.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 03, 2021, 06:45:23 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/Zyz7OPE.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 03, 2021, 07:03:11 PM

Previously posted Oct. 14 2020

Quote from: JessiCapri on February 03, 2021, 06:44:29 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/CyK11r1.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 03, 2021, 09:01:25 PM

ooops....let me find another one then....grins...It was a good one though and well worth reposting so I won't remove it.

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Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 03, 2021, 09:05:07 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/2MQXG6N.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 03, 2021, 09:17:06 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/1t2FMz4.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 04, 2021, 07:17:40 AM

                                        (https://i.imgur.com/3BNHs6D.jpg?1)

Before “spam” was a word that represented unwanted emails, it was a word that represented the successful repackaging of unwanted meats.

Spam — the square can of pork, salt, water, sugar, potato starch and sodium nitrite that first rolled off the assembly lines more than 80 years ago during the Great Depression — was invented “as a way to peddle the then-unprofitable pork shoulder,” according to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. It was the invention of Jay Hormel, son of George Hormel who founded the Hormel company, which pioneered canned pork products in Austin, Minn., in the late 1920s.

According to the company’s Spam Museum, Ken Digneau, the brother of a Hormel executive, came up with the name — a portmanteau word for “spiced ham” — in a naming contest and got $100 as a reward. The new product was introduced on July 5, 1937.

Despite the plethora of early Spam ads aimed at housewives who wanted cheap, quick meals requiring almost no prep, some of the members of that target demographic were hesitant to eat meat that didn’t need to be refrigerated. But it didn’t take long for the U.S. military to find a use for the food innovation. Spam went global during World War II, when America shipped out over 100 million cans to the Pacific, where it made an inexpensive yet filling meal for U.S. troops. As TIME later noted, “Among fed-up fighting men from Attu to Anzio, Spam became one of the most celebrated four-letter words in World War II, gave birth to a flavorsome literature of tales, odes, jokes, limericks.” It remains popular in areas where soldiers were stationed, especially in Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines. Spam also became part of aid packages to devastated Europe and Russia. As the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoir Khrushchev Remembers: “There were many jokes going around in the army, some of them off-color, about American Spam; it tasted good, nonetheless. Without Spam, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands.”

To keep up Spam sales postwar, the company hired singers to tout the product, and even had a radio show Music With the Hormel Girls. Whatever the reason, it worked: Hormel produced its billionth can in 1959, amid rising sales. And yet the Spam-eating Vikings in the 1970s Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit is the pop culture Spam reference most people will remember.

                                         (https://i.imgur.com/8SgWpzT.jpg?1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 04, 2021, 09:43:56 AM

Only a handful of details are known about the life of Sappho. She was born around 615 B.C. to an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos. Evidence suggests that she had several brothers, married a wealthy man named Cercylas, and had a daughter named Cleis. She spent most of her adult life in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos where she ran an academy for unmarried young women. Sappho's school devoted itself to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, and Sappho earned great prominence as a dedicated teacher and poet. A legend from Ovid suggests that she threw herself from a cliff when her heart was broken by Phaon, a young sailor, and died at an early age.

The history of her poems is as speculative as that of her biography. She was known in antiquity as a great poet: Plato called her "the tenth Muse" and her likeness appeared on coins. It is unclear whether she invented or simply refined the meter of her day, but today it is known as "Sapphic" meter. Her poems were first collected into nine volumes around the third century B.C., but her work was lost almost entirely for many years. Merely one twenty-eight-line poem of hers has survived intact, and she was known principally through quotations found in the works of other authors until the nineteenth century. In 1898 scholars unearthed papyri that contained fragments of her poems. In 1914 in Egypt, archeologists discovered papier-mâché coffins made from scraps of paper that contained more verse fragments attributed to Sappho.

Three centuries after her death the writers of the New Comedy parodied Sappho as both overly promiscuous and lesbian. This characterization held fast, so much so that the very term "lesbian" is derived from the name of her home island. Her reputation for licentiousness would cause Pope Gregory to burn her work in 1073. Because social norms in ancient Greece differed from those of today and because so little is actually known of her life, it is difficult to unequivocally answer such claims. Her poems about Eros, however, speak with equal force to men as well as to women.

Sappho is not only one of the few women poets we know of from antiquity, but also is one of the greatest lyric poets from any age. Most of her poems were meant to be sung by one person to the accompaniment of the lyre (hence the name, "lyric" poetry). Rather than addressing the gods or recounting epic narratives such as those of Homer, Sappho's verses speak from one individual to another. They speak simply and directly to the "bittersweet" difficulties of love. Many critics and readers alike have responded to the personal tone and urgency of her verses, and an abundance of translations of her fragments are available today.

                                                    (https://i.imgur.com/1IK4JlM.jpg?1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Stone on February 04, 2021, 10:29:51 AM

(https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/weird-ridiculous-history-facts-fb16-png__700.jpg)

(https://rttlme.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/soviet-pepsi-navy.jpg?w=400)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 04, 2021, 10:45:13 AM

Quote from: Stone on February 04, 2021, 10:29:51 AM

(https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/weird-ridiculous-history-facts-fb16-png__700.jpg)

(https://rttlme.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/soviet-pepsi-navy.jpg?w=400)

I worked with a woman who left to take a job at Pepsi in Russia.  The precautions she needed to take just to work there were intense but she looked forward to the opportunity of running the plant that was based there.  She was provided a car and driver at her disposal at all times...long story short...her love of vodka endeared her to the people and she stayed long after her job required her to.  She loves it there.  I love to tell this story because it is one you seldom hear.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 04, 2021, 10:48:58 AM

How Many American Idiots Are There? 73 Million.
This Wasn’t Just an Election. It was a Census of American Idiots.
by Umair Haque





This was no ordinary election. By now, you know that. But I mean it in a slightly different way. Not just that Trump’s still trying to steal it, and the GOP’s in cahoots. No, I mean that this election was something like a census of American Idiots.
If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ve been hearing stories like this. A nurse talks, bewildered, desperate, about people in the Covid ICU. Who are gasping for breath. Plenty of whom go on to die. And as they’re oxygenated and ventilated and intubated, in rage, in fury, they lash out…going right on…denying Covid exists.
What the? How do…deny the existence of Covid…while you’re on your possible deathbed…in the Covid ICU?
And yet you know and I know. This is, unfortunately, tragically, grimly, the phenomenon that I call the American Idiot. The entire world knows by now. Sane Americans shake their heads at such people. But the rest of the world is genuinely staggered, jaw-dropped, banging their heads against the table. How do people even end up like this? So amazingly, well, idiotic? Why does America seem to breed this special kind of person, the American Idiot?
I don’t mean idiot in the way of an insult, by the way. To the Greeks, “idiot” was the ultimate term of scorn. Idiots were the most contemptible people in classical society. Why? The term really means, in the classical context, “people who are consumed only with self-interest.” And to the Greeks, the progenitors of democracy, nobody — nobody was more dangerous than an idiot.
Their reasoning went like this. Should enough of a society be consumed solely with self-interest, a society would soon enough cease to be a democracy. People only concerned with themselves can’t look out for any kind of common wealth or shared interest. They can’t exercise any of the following virtues: courage, compassion, truth, beauty, grace, generosity, kindness, humility, all of which are allocentric, meaning “other-focused,” not egocentric.
So what will happen to such a society? They reasoned that when a society hit a threshold of idiots, it would soon enough lapse into poverty, and then into tyranny. Idiots can’t build a society with any kind of public goods — for the Greeks, that meant things like trust and self-governance. Today it means all those plus healthcare and retirement. Because people wouldn’t be able to provide those things for themselves, as a society, they’d soon enough try to exploit each for them. Society would degenerate into a kind of snake eating its own tail — each person trying to exploit the next. Such a society would lapse into cruelty, hostility, anger, stupidity, ignorance, and folly — barbarism.
And soon enough, a demagogue would come along, who would prey on all those fears — conjuring up imaginary enemies, twisting rage into hatred — and democracy would flash out of existence.
It’s a good theory, when you think about it. What’s remarkable about it is how much more sophisticated and nuanced and intelligent it still is, all these thousands of years later, than what passes for modern economics and political science, which is all too often superficial nonsense. But does the theory hold up?
You only have to look at America, the Land of the Idiots. This election does something remarkable — it gives us a comically exact headcount of American Idiots. There are 73 million of them. That’s how many people voted for Trump.
Am I saying Trump voters are idiots? Of course I am, duh. Again, not as an insult, but as an observation. In the classical sense: people consumed with the narrowest definition of self-interest possible.
Think about the Covidiots for a moment. There they are, in the ICU, gasping for breath…raging at a poor nurse…screaming at her that Covid doesn’t exist. That’s an idiot. It’s someone whose self-interest is so extreme they can’t even admit the possibility that a lethal pandemic exists, because the whole world centres around them.
There are so, so many kinds of American Idiots. The ones who proudly carry guns to…Starbucks…and make their kids do “active shooter drills,” which, for the rest of the world, means that masked armed men burst into schools, pretend to shoot kids and teachers, and they have to pretend to die. The ones who voted against healthcare…again…in the middle of a literal pandemic. The working class heroes who’ve denied themselves retirement for fifty years now…while Wall St laughs. There are the ones who try to pray the gay away and think women should be relegated to child-rearing and domestic chores.
There are so, so many kinds of American Idiots that I’ve barely scratched the surface yet. The truth is that the above kind are the relatively benign ones. Then there are the Proud Boys, literal white supremacists…whom the President put on “stand by.” All those “militia-men,” meaning pudgy dudes with guns playing Rambo. You might think all that’s just a joke, but it’s not — this group is something very much like America’s ISIS. It recently planned to kidnap politicians and assassinate them on live television. They’re domestic terrorists, every bit as extreme as militant Islamic fundamentalists.
What’s remarkable about Trumpism is that it’s the Death Star of the American Idiots. Trumpism unites all the various kinds of American Idiots. In a kind of epic, colossal suicide pact.
What are the American Idiots really fighting for — whether they’re religious fanatics, Covidiots, gun nuts, or bigots? Free-dumb. In the rest of the rich world, freedom now has a modern meaning — it means something like “the set of rights that enable one to enjoy a decent life, from healthcare to retirement to income to childcare to dignity.” But in America, freedom means something so different it’s diametrically opposed: the right to do whatever you damn well please, no matter how harmful it is to anyone else, yourself, your city, town, country, or your loved ones.
Free-dumb is individualism gone thermonuclear, taken to its most absurd outer limits. It means that your right to carry a gun to Walmart is more important than kids getting educations. That you can teach your kids whatever kind of nonsense you want, instead of educating them to be proper members of a civilized society. It means that Justice Amy Coney Barrett can belong to a religious cult with no separation between private and public life — and that’s perfectly OK, nobody should question it. That you can go on “believing” Covid doesn’t exist, while you’re dying of it.
Free-dumb, this fanatical ideology of toxic individualism, is what unites the American Idiots. They’re all pursuing some flavour of it. And what Trump did was give all the various kinds of American Idiots the license to be as extreme in their pursuit of free-dumb as they ever wanted, and then some. Don’t want to wear a mask? Great! That’s your choice. Don’t want to believe in science? No problemo! Don’t think minorities are human beings? Excellent! Are women just there to bleach their hair and serve men? Well done!
Trump, being the ultimate American Idiot, gave every lesser kind of American Idiot a licence to light little fires of idiocy across the land. And now they’re burning out of control. America can’t get a grip on Covid, because the Covidiots keep right on spreading it…since they don’t believe it exists in the first place. Politics is burning down, since the vast majority of Republicans apparently believe the election was rigged. Society can’t make any progress, because the idiots block even the smallest iota of it, crying like big slobbering babies that their free-dumb is under attack. The smallest kind of cultural progress — gay rights, womens’ rights — are at constant risk of reversal, because the idiots can’t abide anyone else being a true equal, since the world has to spin around them, and their ignorance, stupidity, rage, and superstition.
How did all this come to be? Trump printed a licence for every American Idiot to go out and set fire to their own neighborhoods, sure — but why did they think that was a good thing to do? Because America’s a country so backwards it’s hard to explain just how the American Idiot ends up thinking the bizarre things they do. Certainly, the internet reinforces it. Visit an American bookshop, and most of the best-sellers are fanatical right-wing screeds. And American education is something you can opt out of.
So American idiocy is a kind of complex cultural problem right about now. The American Idiot is, we know, three things. One, less educated, as in, often, not very educated. Two, white. And three, downwardly mobile. Those give us standard explanations — the downwardly mobile lash out at even more powerless groups in society, in resentment and rage at their fall. That explains Trumpism’s virulent hate and bigotry.
But what explain Covid patients…on their deathbeds…denying Covid exists?
I think that in the end, all this goes right back to slavery. It set up a kind of Nietzschean-Darwinist dichotomy, which America has never overcome. The strong survive, and the weak perish — deservedly so. Either you’re strong or you’re weak. The weak are subhuman — they deserve their exploitation, abuse, and suffering, because they are liabilities and burdens the rest of us must carry.
If you believe that moral logic — even if you don’t really know you believe it, if it’s something you’ve just imbibed from your parents and elders and towns and cities, like breathing in the air — where do you end up? You end up with five super, super toxic qualities. One, you’re toxically indifferent: you’re unable to care about anyone else very much, because for you, suffering is a form of weakness. Two, you’re toxically fatalistic: you believe everyone deserves what they get. Three, you’re toxically individualistic: you believe that nobody deserves anyone else’s support. Four, you’re toxically reductive: you believe life is black and white. And five, you’re nihilistic: you believe that nobody has any intrinsic worth or value, not even yourself.
You become a kind of twisted, absurd moral caricature, in other words. You think kindness is denying people healthcare — because it teaches them a lesson. You think compassion is making kids pay lunch debt — because it teaches them “fiscal responsibility” (and no, that’s not even what fiscal means.) You think that to show caring, concern, empathy, thoughtfulness or curiosity is weakness. And you think, as you get a lethal disease, and you gasp for breath, that this can’t be happening to you, that it doesn’t exist, because you’re not one of the weak, the hated subhumans — that’s what being intelligent is.
This is the kind of person the world laughs at. Not in glee, even, anymore — but in horror. The world laughs because to most of the rest of it, people so twisted are genuinely almost impossible to believe in. Such people don’t seem to exist — at least in large social blocs — anywhere else in the world.
I’m not kidding. In Pakistan, for example, I can literally buy machine guns or even grenade launchers at the market. But nobody’s shooting up schools and carrying them to Starbucks. Nobody’s suggesting that they’re more important than education, healthcare, or jobs — no, not even the conservatives.
The only real analogue the world has to the American Idiot, really, is movements like the Taliban, or ISIS. Movements who are so fanatical that they develop what Americans call “alternate belief systems.” They believe 72 virgins await them in heaven. The American Idiot believes Covid doesn’t exist, and they can’t get it. That a gun, not healthcare, will protect them from frailty. What’s the difference, really? Not a whole lot. Both of these social groups have developed something like mass, collective delusions, which they cling to inextricably, which nobody can prise away from them, superstitions they believe have the power to save them, which just means make them supreme. It always comes back to supremacy, this problem of human stupidity.
So were the Greeks right? Take a hard look at America, the Land of the Idiots. This election was a census of them, which gave us a precise headcount. America has 72 million American Idiots. What do you about that many idiots? People who vote, ardently, cheer on, applaud, crave, their own self-destruction? Because — just as for ISIS or the Taliban — it’s the one thing that proves their own supremacy, the ultimate test of strength and manhood and all the rest of it? What do you about people so foolish they don’t “believe” in the virus that’s putting them in the ICU?
I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The bad news is that nobody knows. Extremists and fanatics like this destroyed the Islamic world in record time — no, it wasn’t always the backwards place it is now. The good news is they tend to self-destruct. Idiots are martyrs. ISIS and the Taliban are happy blowing themselves up. American idiots are happy denying themselves healthcare and retirement and getting Covid. But also spreading it. The question is, then, how many of us go down with the idiots, as they self-destruct?
The Greeks were right. There is no greater curse for a society than a surplus of idiots, and no greater danger to it than it crossing a threshold of enough idiots. They do lead a nation to ruin, by way of indifference, fatalism, nihilism, selfishness, stupidity, brutality, and violence. They are unable to exercise the basic virtues of goodness, truth, compassion, wisdom, kindness, and concern. This most ancient of political theories — how strange that it’s turned out to be the most accurate one of all. After all, you only have to take a look at America to see it, laughing and shaking its head, down the millennia.
Umair
November 2020

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 04, 2021, 09:06:24 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/prqlzTb.jpg)

One of the strangest incidents during the Second World War took place in the French town of Sainte-Mère-Église. During the Invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, paratroopers of the Allied forces parachuted into the town in the middle of the night.

Some buildings were on fire, so the light from them made the parachutists easy targets for the German forces occupying the town. Some parachutists were sucked into the fire. Many hung from trees and utility poles and were shot before they could cut themselves loose.

The parachute of John Steele of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment got caught on the spire of the church. For two hours, he hung there, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. Steele later escaped and rejoined his division when U.S. troops attacked the village, capturing 30 Germans and killing another 11. The incident was enacted in the movie “The Longest Day,” with actor Red Buttons playing Steele.

The above picture was taken when I visited Normandie. 

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Bear on February 05, 2021, 07:56:23 AM

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/9f5af1015a3b9a7ba68d864aa3b6cedd/tumblr_nt4vr3OKgK1szqwnwo1_640.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 05, 2021, 08:41:17 AM

February is LGBTQIA month

What you need to know and how to take part

With a grey and dismal January behind us, it’s time to celebrate the colourful history of the nation’s LGBT+ community.

(https://i.imgur.com/S0mWzlx.jpg?1)

Every February the UK comes together to celebrate the history of its LGBT+ citizens, and this year’s schedule is jam-packed with fun and informative online events.

What does LGBTQIA mean?

LGBTQIA stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex and Asexual.

Outright International defines Questioning as a term for “someone who is not sure how they identify. Someone can be questioning their sexual orientation and/or their gender identity.”
It defines Intersex as “people who naturally have biological traits which do not match what is typically identified as male or female”.
Asexual is defined “an umbrella term used for individuals who do not experience, or experience a low level, of sexual desire”.

What is LGBT+ history month?

Launched by the Schools Out charity in 2005, the event is credited with increasing the prominence of LGBT+ matters and figures in the curriculum of UK pupils.
The event was created in the wake of the abolition of Section 28 which stated that local authorities "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”. The act was repealed in Scotland in 2000, and repealed three years later in England and Wales.

The month-long celebration aims to increase the visibility of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, with schools encouraged to teach pupils about the history of related civil rights movements and current matters affecting the community.

The celebration has three taglines 'Claiming our past. Celebrating our present. Creating our future.’

Since 2014 the celebration has introduced the Faces For the Year celebrate the life of a famous lesbian, gay man, bisexual and trans person.

This year Lily Parr, Mark Ashton, Maya Angelou, Michael Dillon and Mark Weston are all being recognised as the 2021 Faces For The Year.

The theme of this year’s event is “Body, Mind, Spirit”. Resources relating to this year’s theme can be found here :                                     
                                  https: //lgbtplushistorymonth.co.uk/resources/lgbt-history-month/

A full list of events can be found at :  lgbthistorymonth.co.uk.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 05, 2021, 03:40:03 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/hRJi4VS.jpg)

In 1856, twenty-three-year-old widow Kate Warne walked into the office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago, announcing that she had seen the company’s ad and wanted to apply for the job. “Sorry,” Alan Pinkerton told her, “but we don’t have any clerical staff openings. We’re looking to hire a new detective.” Pinkerton would later describe Warne as having a “commanding” presence that morning. “I’m here to apply for the detective position,” she replied. Taken aback, Pinkerton explained to Kate that women aren’t suited to be detectives, and then Kate forcefully and eloquently made her case. Women have access to places male detectives can’t go, she noted, and women can befriend the wives and girlfriends of suspects and gain information from them. Finally, she observed, men tend to become braggards around women who encourage boasting, and women have keen eyes for detail. Pinkerton was convinced. He hired her.

Shortly after Warne was hired, she proved her value as a detective by befriending the wife of a suspect in a major embezzlement case. Warne not only gained the information necessary to arrest and convict the thief, but she discovered where the embezzled funds were hidden and was able to recover nearly all of them. On another case she extracted a confession from a suspect while posing as a fortune teller. Pinkerton was so impressed that he created a Women’s Detective Bureau within his agency and made Kate Warne the leader of it.

In her most famous case, Kate Warne may have changed the history of the world. In February 1861 the president of the Wilmington and Baltimore railroad hired Pinkerton to investigate rumors of threats against the railroad. Looking into it, Pinkerton soon found evidence of something much more dangerous—a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration. Pinkerton assigned Kate Warne to the case. Taking the persona of “Mrs. Cherry,” a Southern woman visiting Baltimore, she managed to infiltrate the secessionist movement there and learn the specific details of the scheme—a plan to kill the president-elect as he passed through Baltimore on the way to Washington.

Pinkerton relayed the threat to Lincoln and urged him to travel to Washington from a different direction. But Lincoln was unwilling to cancel the speaking engagements he had agreed to along the way, so Pinkerton resorted to a Plan B. For the trip through Baltimore Lincoln was secretly transferred to a different train and disguised as an invalid. Posing as his caregiver was Kate Warne. When she afterwards described her sleepless night with the President, Pinkerton was inspired to adopt the motto that became famously associated with his agency: “We never sleep.” The details Kate Warne had uncovered had enabled the “Baltimore Plot” to be thwarted.

During the Civil War, Warne and the female detectives under her supervision conducted numerous risky espionage missions, with Warne’s charm and her skill at impersonating a Confederate sympathizer giving her access to valuable intelligence. After the war she continued to handle dangerous undercover assignments on high-profile cases, while at the same time overseeing the agency’s growing staff of female detectives.

Kate Warne, America’s first female detective, died of pneumonia at age 34, on January 28, 1868, one hundred fifty-three years ago today. “She never let me down,” Pinkerton said of one of his most trusted and valuable agents. She was buried in the Pinkerton family plot in Chicago.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 06, 2021, 05:03:34 AM

In Ancient Greece the word "Idiot" had a very different meaning than it does today. And the word has undergone several variations in meaning over time.
A little potted history of "idiot"...

The word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun idiōtēs, 'a private person, individual', 'a private citizen' (as opposed to an official), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill or layman'.
It was adopted into Latin by the Romans and "idiota" then took on the meaning of  'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common', and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'.
In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', but  'stupid' was added as a defenition in the 13th century.
In English, the inference to 'mentally deficient' was attached in the 14th century.

Many political commentators, starting as early as 1856, have interpreted the word "idiot" as reflecting the Ancient Athenians' attitudes to civic participation and private life, combining the ancient meaning of 'private citizen' with the modern meaning 'fool' to conclude that the Greeks used the word to say that it is selfish and foolish not to participate in public life. But this is not how the Greeks used the word though it is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation.

Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying :
"We regard him who takes no part in these public duties not as unambitious but as useless".

But neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe anyone that failed to participate in public life.
In fact not in any derogatory sense at all. Its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert.
The derogatory meaning  came centuries later, and was completely unrelated to it's original political meaning.

Several authors have used "idiot" characters in novels, plays and poetry.
Very often these characters are used as an allegory to highlight something else.
A few examples of this can be found in William Faulkner's  'The Sound and the Fury', Daphne du Maurier's  'Rebecca' and William Wordsworth's 'The Idiot Boy'.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel  'The Idiot'.  the title refers to the central character Prince Myshkin, a man whose innocence, kindness and humility, combined with his occasional epileptic symptoms, cause many in the corrupt, egoistic culture around him to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence.
In 'The Antichrist',  Friedrich Nietzsche applies the word 'idiot' to Jesus in a comparable fashion, almost certainly in an allusion to Dostoevsky's use of the word : "One has to regret that no Dostoevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent; I mean someone who could feel the thrilling fascination of such a combination of the sublime, the sick and the childish".

According to 19th and early 20th century medicine and psychology, an "idiot" was a person with a very profound intellectual disability.
In the early 1900s, Dr. Henry H. Goddard proposed a classification system for intellectual disability based on the Binet-Simon concept of mental age. Whereby individuals with the lowest mental age level (less than three years) were identified as idiots; imbeciles had a mental age of three to seven years, and morons had a mental age of seven to ten years.
The term "idiot" was used to refer to people having an IQ below 30.
IQ, or intelligence quotient, was originally determined by dividing a person's mental age, as determined by standardized tests, by their actual age.
This concept of mental age has fallen into disfavor  in modern times and IQ is now determined on the basis of statistical distributions.

Currently, when defining the word idiot, The Oxford English Dictionary lists that an idiot is:
-most commonly “a person without learning; an ignorant, uneducated; a simple or ordinary person”
-less commonly “a person without professional training or skill”
-in psychiatry “A person so profoundly disabled in mental function or intellect as to be incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning or rational conduct”.
The dictionary also notes that sometimes idiots are people that maintain low intelligence to amuse others by speaking in a stupid way like jesters or fools.

So, as you can see, the word "idiot" has undergone an almost complete reversal in meaning over time.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Stone on February 06, 2021, 08:15:52 AM

A best-seller was written by a nine-year-old

In 1890, nine-year-old Daisy Ashford wrote a novel and forgot all about it. She gave up writing fiction for good at the age of 13. Some 28 years later, upon going through her mother’s house after she had died, Daisy and her sisters found the pencilled manuscript in a drawer.
They showed it to a friend, who passed it on to an acquaintance who worked in publishing, and so the book – The Young Visiters – came out in 1919 with a preface by Peter Pan author JM Barrie, who many people wrongly believed was the book’s author.

The novel was praised for its clever plotting and keen observation of Victorian manners, and went into several editions.
The author, by now Mrs James Devlin, bought a farm with her earnings, commenting, “I like fresh air and royalty cheques”.

(https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9781/7847/9781784743215.jpg)

The Young Visiters is a comic masterpiece that has delighted generations of readers since it was first published in 1919. A classic story of life and love in later Victorian England as seen from the nursery window.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Stone on February 06, 2021, 08:21:07 AM

A Parisian was given a small fine for ‘getting medieval’ on his wife

In the 1930s, Paris baker Henri Littière had a major marital problem: his wife was desperate to be faithful, but just couldn’t help herself. She had three affairs in as many months before he decided that something must be done.
He visited a museum and came out with sketches of medieval chastity belts.

(https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Chastity-belt-15th-century-2-f7b5a8f.jpg?webp=true&quality=90&resize=620%2C413)

These he gave to a man who made false arms and legs for veterans of the First World War, asking him to knock him up a secure means of keeping Mme Littière from consummating her infidelities.

He brought his wife to the final fitting, and she pronounced herself satisfied with the comfort of the velvet-covered steel contraption and joked with her husband that he mustn’t lose the key.

Some time later, however, one of her former lovers came to visit. One thing led to another and he saw the apparatus she was wearing.
He went straight to the police, and Mr Littière appeared in court on 21 January 1934 on charges of cruelty.
Although Mrs Littière testified that she found it impossible to be faithful, the judge gave the hapless baker a three-month suspended sentence and a 50-franc fine.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Soniaslut on February 06, 2021, 09:00:28 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/77xP8pP.jpg?1)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on February 07, 2021, 04:25:54 PM

Polish Catholic midwife Stanisława Leszczyńska delivered 3,000 babies at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland.

(https://i.insider.com/55c6227f371d22dc0b8bd48d?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on February 07, 2021, 04:26:59 PM

In World War II, British soldiers got a ration of three sheets of toilet paper a day. Americans got 22.

(https://i.insider.com/55c622fb371d22a10e8be103?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Stone on February 13, 2021, 08:55:35 AM

(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3f/0e/b6/3f0eb6fdc99da67bbadd37d28c0de8a3.jpg)

(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b5/69/1a/b5691a7b825dde799c5120f772447751.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on February 15, 2021, 03:21:03 PM

(https://historydaily.org/content/53354/246683ee9f190c83bed053476dc69516.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 16, 2021, 09:27:15 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/KDpCYow.jpg)

He was both a freedom fighting abolitionist AND a best selling writer, speaker, and journalist. ⁣
⁣
Three years ago when we decided to relaunch his newspaper, The North Star, with the blessing of his family, his great great great grandson @kbmorrisjr told me something that I’ve held with me. It’s painful. ⁣
⁣
He told me that some of the most consistent and fierce opposition of Douglass didn’t come from evil white people, but of Black folk, who hated and opposed him and his work at damn near every step of his life. ⁣
⁣
That stung. But it also helped me understand the patterns of history. ⁣
⁣
Fighting oppression - I mean really fighting it - will always be complex - but at least we have models like Frederick Douglass to follow. ⁣

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Stone on February 17, 2021, 10:35:09 AM

The shortest war in history was the Anglo-Zanzibar War. It lasted just 38 minutes.

(https://images.boredomfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/weird-history-facts-11.png)

The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history.
End date: 27 August 1896
Combatants: United Kingdom

The immediate cause of the war was the death of the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini on 25 August 1896 and the subsequent succession of Sultan Khalid bin Barghash. The British authorities preferred Hamud bin Muhammed, who was more favourable to British interests, as sultan. In accordance with a treaty signed in 1886, a condition for accession to the sultanate was that the candidate obtain the permission of the British consul, and Khalid had not fulfilled this requirement. The British considered this a casus belli and sent an ultimatum to Khalid demanding that he order his forces to stand down and leave the palace. In response, Khalid called up his palace guard and barricaded himself inside the palace.
A bombardment, opened at 09:02, set the palace on fire and disabled the defending artillery. A small naval action took place, with the British sinking the Zanzibari royal yacht HHS Glasgow and two smaller vessels. Some shots were also fired ineffectually at the pro-British Zanzibari troops as they approached the palace. The flag at the palace was shot down and fire ceased at 09:46.

The sultan's forces sustained roughly 500 casualties, while only one British sailor was injured. Sultan Khalid received asylum in the German consulate before escaping to German East Africa (in the mainland part of present Tanzania). The British quickly placed Sultan Hamud in power at the head of a puppet government. The war marked the end of the Zanzibar Sultanate as a sovereign state and the start of a period of heavy British influence.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Stone on February 17, 2021, 10:40:25 AM

Before there were alarm clocks, there were "knockers-up", who were hired to shoot dried peas from a blow gun at people's windows in order to wake them up in the morning.

(https://images.boredomfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/weird-history-facts-18.png)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 20, 2021, 03:35:17 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/44QN3k3.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Stone on February 21, 2021, 07:27:43 AM

In 1820 an entire town held a trial against tomatoes.

(https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2020-04/21/8/asset/278b4587a7fb/sub-buzz-472-1587458716-1.png?crop=1120%3A1414%3B0%2C0&downsize=400:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto)  (https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2020-04/21/8/asset/c80fa3ad0857/sub-buzz-4171-1587458724-1.jpg?crop=858%3A1198%3B0%2C0&downsize=300:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto)

The tangy red fruit was once considered ~evil~ (and poisonous) by much of the world! To dispel the rumours that tomatoes were lethal, Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a basket full of them in front of a crowd in Salem, New Jersey, who were astonished to see that he hadn’t keeled over from one bite.

And while we're on the subject of tomatoes, ketchup was once actually sold as medicine.

(https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2020-04/22/11/asset/f2e2204af9db/sub-buzz-83-1587553832-7.jpg?downsize=700%3A%2A&output-quality=auto&output-format=auto)

In the 1830s, a physician called Dr. John Cooke Bennett claimed that tomatoes could be used to treat diarrhoea and indigestion – his tomato ketchup recipe was even concentrated into pill form and sold as medicine!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on February 26, 2021, 03:03:01 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/BWsrNOA.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on March 12, 2021, 08:24:15 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/h966Osf.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on March 16, 2021, 03:44:39 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/C1Eg7em.jpg)


The man who saved the world... 50 years ago, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, second-in-command Vasilli Arkhipov of the Soviet submarine B-59 refused to agree with his Captain's order to launch nuclear torpedos against US warships and setting off what might well have been a terminal superpower nuclear war.

The US had been dropping depth charges near the submarine in an attempt to force it to surface, unaware it was carrying nuclear arms. The Soviet officers, who had lost radio contact with Moscow, concluded that World War 3 had begun, and two of the officers agreed to 'blast the warships out of the water'. Arkhipov refused to agree - unanimous consent of three officers was required - and thanks to him, we are here to talk about it.

His story is finally being told - the BBC is airing a documentary on it.

Raise a glass to Vasilli Arkhipov - the Man Who Saved the World.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on March 17, 2021, 06:30:19 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/UDd8Yxy.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on March 28, 2021, 01:06:46 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/jeXBETZ.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on March 28, 2021, 01:11:30 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/hACMz3f.png)


When he walked into a San Francisco barbershop after the war, he was told by the owner, “We don’t serve Japs here.”

The owner of the barbershop obviously didn't know who the one-armed Japanese-American was - his name was Daniel Inouye. And, according to one website that honors heroes, he was one tough "badass".

This is the man who led a one-man assault against a German machine-gun nest, got shot in the stomach, had his arm torn off by a 30mm Schiessbecher antipersonnel rifle grenade, and still kept going. When his fellow soldiers tried to help him, he gruffly commanded them to get back to their positions, saying, "Nobody called off the war!"

He was born on September 7, 1924. A Nisei Japanese American, Inouye was the son of a Japanese immigrant father and a mother whose parents had migrated from Japan.

Inouye would become a war hero, who lost his arm fighting for his country, the United States. He would become a U.S. Senator from 1963 to his death, Dec. 17, 2012, when he was the second longest serving U.S. Senator in history and the highest-ranking Asian American politician in U.S. history. At the time of his death, at the age of 88, Inouye was third in line to the presidency.

Inouye, who was studying to be a doctor in Hawaii, was a medical volunteer at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked in 1941. He immediately tried to enlist in the U.S. Army at age 17, but he was classified 4-C, meaning "Enemy Alien", undraftable, unable to serve.
He volunteered in whatever capacity he could to help the war effort until the United States Army lifted its ban on Japanese-Americans, allowing Inouye to join the new 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the first all-Nisei volunteer unit.

It would become one of the most decorated units in American military history.

"The 442nd, including the 100th Battalion, was honored with seven Distinguished Unit Citations, more than 4,000 Purple Hearts, and a large number of individual decorations for bravery, including 21 Medals of Honor, 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, and more than 4,000 Bronze Stars," according to the National Veteran Network.

Inouye's heroism is legendary (see the Wikipedia account of his heroics), but because of his race he only received a Distinguished Service Cross. He finally received the Medal of Honor (albeit belatedly) in 2000.

After the war, while in his uniform "with three rows of ribbons and a captains bars on my shoulder," he still had to face racism in his home country. When he went to get a haircut, one barber asked him, "Are you a Jap?" Inouye responded, "I'm an American." The barber responded, "We don't cut Jap hair."

Inouye would later say, "I thought to myself, here I am in uniform. It should be obvious to him that I'm an American soldier, a captain at that. And that fellow very likely never went to war. And he's telling me we don't cut Jap hair. I was so tempted to strike him. But then I thought if I had done that, all the work that we had done would be for nil. So I just looked at him and I said, 'Well, I'm sorry you feel that way.' And I walked out."

One of the senators he served with recalled a story about Inouye's son asking him why he had volunteered to fight in War World II, even though the U.S. had declared Japanese Americans "enemy aliens" and had placed them in internment camps. Inouye's response was that he "did it for the children."

That integrity would follow him through his career. Because of the loss of his arm, he was unable to become the doctor he dreamed of, but he found another way to help others, representing his home state of Hawaii in the House and the Senate.

He was so admired as a senator that he would be selected as a member of the Senate Watergate committee, which investigated illegal activities in President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. He won wide admiration for patient but persistent questioning of the former attorney general John N. Mitchell and the White House aides H. R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and John Dean to the point when one of the attorneys defending Nixon's advisers would call him a “little Jap.”

In a poll, Americans rated Inouye first among the members of the Senate Watergate committee. Inouye was also involved in the Iran-Contra investigations of the 1980s.

According to writer John Nichols, Inouye "never stopped confronting power on behalf of the rights of people of color, people with disabilities, women, lesbians and gays and political dissenters to equal justice and equal opportunity."

The American Civil Liberties Union hailed Inouye as “a champion of civil rights and civil liberties”.

"The last sitting senator who joined the epic struggles to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, he led the fight for the Americans with Disabilities Act and was a key sponsor of the constitutional amendment to extend voting rights to 18-to-20-year-olds," wrote Nichols.
Inouye also battled for reparations for Japanese-Americans who were interned in government compounds during World War II.

When he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and discussions of Vietnam were brought up, he made it clear that he objected to the terminology, "“Oriental human beings.”

According to Nichols, "Inouye was one of the handful of senators who rejected the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s and he emerged as one of the earliest and most determined backers of marriage equality in the Senate, asking: 'How can we call ourselves the land of the free, if we do not permit people who love one another to get married?'

"When the debate over whether gays and lesbians serving in the military arose, Inouye declared as a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient: “In every war we have had men and women of different sexual orientation who have stood in harm’s way and given their lives for their country. I fought alongside gay men during World War II, many of them were killed in combat. Are we to suggest that because of their sexual orientation they are not heroes?”

Inouye continued to represent all Americans, fighting for their rights. When he saw that the loyalties of Arab Americans were being questioned, he would say:
"I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon Japanese-Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab-Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question. History is an excellent teacher, provided we heed its lessons, otherwise, we are likely to repeat them."

A fellow Hawaiian senator would say of Inouye:
“He served as a defender of the people of this country, championing historic changes for civil rights, including the equal rights of women, Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Native Hawaiians."

Among his many awards and honors, Inouye received the Medal of Honor in 2000. He was inducted as an honorary member of the Navajo Nation and titled "The Leader Who Has Returned With a Plan." In 2013, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2017, Honolulu International Airport was officially renamed Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in his honor. And, in June of this year, 2019, a naval destroyer was named the USS Daniel Inouye.

According to The Nation, "No senator fought longer and harder for the rights of people of color, people with disabilities, women and the LGBT community."

And, he was one tough badass.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on March 29, 2021, 02:27:10 PM

The world’s most successful pirate in history was a lady.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/lady-pirates.webp)

Named Ching Shih, she was a prostitute in China. This was until the Commander of the Red Flag Fleet bought and married her.

But rather than just viewing her as a wife, her husband considered her his equal and she became an active pirate commander in the fleet.

Ching Shih soon earned the respect of her fellow pirates. So much so that after her husband’s death she became the captain of the fleet.

Under Shih’s leadership, the Red Flag Fleet consisted of over 300 warships, with a possible 1,200 more support ships. She even had a possible 40,000 – 80,000 men, women, and children.

They terrorized the waters around China. The Red Flag Fleet was such a fearsome band of raiders, that the Chinese government eventually pardoned Ching Shih and her entire fleet – just to get them off the high seas!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on March 30, 2021, 11:50:42 AM

In the Ancient Olympics, athletes performed naked.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ancient-olympics-fact.jpg)

The athletes did this to imitate the Gods, but also to help them easily clear toxins from their skin through sweating after each attempt at a sport.

In fact, the word “gymnastics” comes from the Ancient Greek words “gumnasía” (“athletic training, exercise”) and “gumnós” (“naked”).

This translates as “to train naked”.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on March 31, 2021, 10:42:52 AM

Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/julius-caesar-stabbed.webp)

Julius Caesar is probably the most iconic name associated with the Romans. Likewise, his assassination and death are also highly notorious.

Due to his coup d’état of the Roman Republic and his proclamation of himself as Dictator for Life, along with his radical political views, a group of his fellow Roman senators led by his best friend Brutus assassinated him on March 15, 44 BC.

During the assassination, Caesar was stabbed at least 23 times, before finally succumbing to his wounds.

He passed away with fabled words to his former best friend Brutus, allegedly being “you too, sweet child?”

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 01, 2021, 11:06:34 AM

The Colosseum, is an oval amphitheatre in the centre of the city of Rome, Italy.

The Colosseum was originally clad entirely in marble.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/colosseum-originally-marble.webp)

When you visit or see the Colosseum these days you’ll notice how the stone exterior appears to be covered in pockmarks all across its surface.

Whilst you might assume this is just degradation of the material due to its age, it is actually because it was originally clad almost entirely in marble.

The reason for the pockmarks is, after the fall of Rome, the city was looted and pillaged by the Goths. Yes, that’s right, the Goths!

They took all of the marble from the Colosseum and stripped it (mostly) down to its bare stone setting.

The holes in the stone are from where the iron clamps and poles attaching the marble cladding to it have been ripped out.

It was named the Colosseum because it was next to a statue called the Colossus.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/colossus-statue.webp)

It was originally known as the Amphitheatrum Flavium, or Flavian Amphitheatre, as it was constructed during the Flavian dynasty.

Residents of Rome nicknamed it the Colosseo.

This was due to the fact that it was built next to a 164-foot statue of Emperor Nero known as “the colossus of Nero”.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 02, 2021, 07:17:28 AM

There were female Gladiators.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/female-gladiators.webp)

A female gladiator was called a Gladiatrix, or Gladiatrices (plural). They were rarer than their male counterparts.

Gladiatrices served the same purpose of executing criminals, fighting each other, and fighting animals in Rome’s various fighting pits.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 06, 2021, 12:37:24 PM

The Vikings were the first people to discover America.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/vikings-discovered-america.webp)

Half a millennium before Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, Viking chief Leif Eriksson of Greenland landed on the Island of Newfoundland in the year 1,000 AD.

The Vikings under Leif Eriksson settled Newfoundland as well as discovering and settling Labrador further north in Canada.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 06, 2021, 12:40:49 PM

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/facts-about-vikings.jpg)

Vikings – even though they called Scandinavia their home, these Ancient Norse sea experts did everything from exploring, trading, colonizing, and looting.

During their time, they instilled fear in most of Europe, and even parts of the middle east.

Vikings never wore horned helmets! It’s possible that painters made up the horned helmets during the 19th Century.

The word “Viking” means “a pirate raid” in the old Norse language.

The age of the Vikings lasted for just under 300 years between 900 A.D. and 1066.

Vikings have been known to have fantastic hygiene. Archaeologists have found tweezers, razors, combs, and even ear cleaners at excavations sits. Vikings bathed at least once a week which is more frequent that other Europeans of their time.

Due to the Norse religion, it was believed that warriors went to incredible realms after their death, therefore burying their dead in boats was common to help reach the afterlife. In the boats, the dead were often sent off with their weapons, jewelry, and sometimes even sacrificed slaves.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 16, 2021, 06:19:02 AM

In Ancient Asia, death by elephant was a popular form of execution.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/death-by-elephant.webp)

As elephants are very intelligent and easy to train, it proved easy enough to train them as executioners and torturers.

They could be taught to slowly break bones, crush skulls, twist off limbs, or even execute people using large blades fitted to their tusks.

In some parts of Asia, this method of execution was still popular up to the late 19th Century.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 17, 2021, 10:23:22 AM

The Luftwaffe had a master interrogator whose tactic was being as nice as possible.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/luftwaffe-fact.webp)

Hanns Scharff was a master interrogator who was very much against physical torture and brutality.

His techniques were so successful that the US military later incorporated his methods into their own interrogation schools.

Scharff’s best tactics for squeezing information out of prisoners included: nature walks without guards present, baking them homemade food, cracking jokes, drinking beers, and afternoon tea with German fighter aces.

He even took trips to visit fellow POWs and swimming pool parties. And on some rare occasions even test flights of German fighter aircraft.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 18, 2021, 09:01:00 AM

In 1386, a pig was executed in France.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/pig-execution-france.webp)

There wasn’t a great detail of civil rights in the Middle Ages, and as it turns out there weren’t a great of animal rights either. So much so that they were even subject to human justice.

One such case happened in Falaise, France, where a pig attacked a child’s face who went on to later die from their wounds.

The pig was arrested, kept in prison, and then sent to court where it stood trial for murder, was found guilty and then executed by hanging!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 21, 2021, 11:01:40 AM

Shrapnel is named after its inventor.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/shrapnel-name.webp)

British Army Officer Henry Shrapnel was the first person to invent an anti-personnel shell that could transport a large number of bullets to its target before releasing them.

This was all at a far greater distance than the current rifle fire at the time.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 21, 2021, 11:12:11 AM

Since 1945, all British tanks are equipped with tea-making facilities.

(https://militaryhumor.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/military-humor-uk-tanks-tea-making-facility-bv-kettle-1.jpg)   (https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200/escwwrxipzc1mc3xec7v.png)

Before this time, British tank crews had to exit their armored vehicles when they wanted to make a quick coffee.

On the road to Caen in 1944, a German Tiger tanked ambushed and destroyed a parked column of almost thirty armored British vehicles in 15 minutes whilst the crew was having an impromptu tea break.

This made the British high command realize if tank crews could make a brew on the go, then they wouldn’t be susceptible to being caught with their pants down and their kettles out by the enemy.

So after this, the next British-designed battle tank, the Centurion, came with a boiler fitted to the interior powered by the tank’s electric circuits so the crew would never be short of a lovely warm cup of tea!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 22, 2021, 04:15:59 PM

During World War I, the French built a “fake Paris”.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/wwii-fake-paris.webp)

Complete with a replica Champs-Elysées and Gard Du Nord, this “fake Paris” was built by the French towards the end of WWI. It was built as a means of throwing off German bombers and fighter pilots flying over French skies.

It also even had a fake railway that lit up at certain points to provide the illusion from above of a train moving along the tracks!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 26, 2021, 06:01:56 AM

An ancient text called the Voynich Manuscript still baffles scientists.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/voynich-manuscript.webp)

Hand-written in an unknown language, the Voynich Manuscript has been carbon-dated to roughly 1404 – 1438.

Some of the pages are missing, and some of them are foldable pull-out pages, while most pages have illustrations.

Hundreds of cryptographers and master codebreakers have tried to decipher it over the years with none succeeding to grasp its meaning or origin.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on April 29, 2021, 11:56:46 AM

Roman Emperor Caligula made one of his favourite horses a senator.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/caligula-fact.webp)

If you didn’t know anything about Caligula, then this is a pretty good way to get the impression.

He was infamous for his brutality and madness. Caligula fed criminals to animals and had conversations with the moon.

He loved his horse – called Incitatus – so much that he gave him a marble stall, an ivory manger, a jeweled collar, and even a house!

Caligula made his horse a senator and allegedly planned to make him Consul before his assassination.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 03, 2021, 12:38:13 PM

Einstein's brain was stolen when he died.

(https://i1.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/albert-einstein.jpg?resize=500%2C375&ssl=1)

When Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein passed away on April 18, 1955, he left behind specific instructions when it came to the disposal of his body, according to one National Geographic investigation. Einstein didn't want his corpse to be worshiped or his brain to be studied, so he instructed those who were responsible for his remains to "cremate them, and scatter the ashes secretly in order to discourage idolaters."

However, Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on call when Einstein died at New Jersey's Princeton Hospital, didn't quite follow those instructions. Instead, he stole Einstein's brain. From there, things got even weirder. When Einstein's family found out, his son apparently didn't object to the theft and Harvey was able to keep the brain in two jars in his basement before moving it to "a cider box stashed under a beer cooler."

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on May 03, 2021, 01:09:00 PM

V...Gotta watch those people from Jersey. LOL

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 04, 2021, 10:40:35 AM

@ Jess   LOL  so true!

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was never straight.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/leaning-tower-of-pisa-fact.webp)

Known worldwide for its four degrees lean, this freestanding bell tower was constructed in the 12th Century.

When construction on the second story started, due to the unstable ground it was built on, the tower started to lean.

After this, the lean only increased as the construction process went on, and it went on to become more iconic than the tower itself!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 07, 2021, 08:52:26 AM

Lady Liberty wears a size 879 shoe.

(https://i1.wp.com/bestlifeonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/statue-of-liberty-at-sunset.jpg?resize=500%2C334&ssl=1)

It's no secret that the Statue of Liberty is a mighty monument. The copper section alone is 151 feet and one inch tall. But if Lady Liberty needed a new pair of sandals, it would take size 879 shoes to cover her massive feet.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 08, 2021, 10:09:06 AM

Iceland has the world’s oldest parliament in history.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/iceland-oldest-parliament.jpg)

Called the Althing, it was established in 930 and has stayed as the acting parliament of Iceland since then.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 09, 2021, 11:31:06 AM

46 BC was 445 days long and is the longest year in human history.

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Nicknamed the annus confusionis, or “year of confusion”, this year had two extra leap months inserted by Julius Caesar.

This was in order to make his newly-formed Julian Calendar match up with the seasonal year.

This calendar is a variation of which is still used in most places across the world today

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 13, 2021, 12:25:28 PM

There's a toilet museum.

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The Sulabh International Museum Of Toilets in New Delhi, India, features a rare collection of objects "detailing the historic evolution of toilets" from 2500 BCE to right up until today. Learn about the toilet systems of ancient societies, the elaborately decorated toilets of 18th- and 19th-century Europe, and even a toilet from Austria that's shaped like a lion so that you can feel like you're riding the wild beast while doing your business.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 15, 2021, 09:42:54 AM

100 million years ago, the Sahara Desert was inhabited by galloping crocodiles.

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Back then, the Sahara Desert was a lush plain full of life – and also full of predators.

In 2009, fossil hunters found the remains of crocodiles.

These remains had large land-going legs that were capable of galloping across the land at breakneck speeds.

They could easily snap up unlucky dinosaurs in their jaws!

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: JessiCapri on May 16, 2021, 08:19:22 PM

(https://i.imgur.com/z9uDCUN.jpg)

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 17, 2021, 12:24:35 PM

People in Medieval England had rap battles.

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Before rap battles, there was "flyting," a trading of insults that was popular from the 5th to the 16th centuries in England and Scotland. As Atlas Obscura describes it, "Participants employed the timeless tools of provocation and perversion as well as satire, rhetoric, and early bathroom humor to publicly trounce opponents." Even society's elite would join in these battles of wits.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 17, 2021, 01:07:42 PM

Before the 19th Century, dentures were made from dead soldiers’ teeth.

(https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/dentures-fact.jpg)

Dentistry in 1815 wasn’t exactly as… “intricate” as it is today. In fact, it was downright savage!

After the Battle of Waterloo, dentists flocked to the battlefield to scavenge teeth from the tens of thousands of dead soldiers.

They then took their bounty to their dental workshops are crafted them into dentures for toothless rich people.

Title: Re: Interesting History... Did you Know...
Post by: Vaughan on May 23, 2021, 08:12:58 PM

Marilyn Monroe's dress sold for millions.

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In 2016, the iconic sparkly dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to serenade President John F. Kennedy on his birthday sold for a staggering $4.8 million at auction. This remains the world record for the most expensive article of clothing ever sold, beating out the record previously held by… another one of Monroe's dresses, her costume from The Seven Year Itch.