kemetically-ankhtified:

WALL STREET WAS BUILT ON THE BACKS OF AFRICAN SLAVES:

“African American history in New York City began in the Dutch colonies. The first Africans arrived in New Amsterdam as enslaved men in 1625 and 1626; the first enslaved women in 1628. They worked as farmers and builders and in the fur trade of the Dutch West India Company. Some helped build the wall intended to keep settlers safe from the native population at the location of today’s Wall Street.”

…New York’s first slave market during the British period was established at Wall Street and the East River in 1709. In the early 1700’s there were 800 African men, women, and children in the city; about 15% of the total population. Local and state documents did not distinguish between free and enslaved Africans until 1756. Before then the term “slave” was used to describe all Africans and their decedents. They were all looked upon as valuable sources of labor.

…yet we got white folks crying oppression.

Please. know your history.

source»

(via sovereigntyordeath-deactivated2)

cuntymint:

For four hundred years—from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army’s massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s—the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.

Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus’s fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched—and in places continue to wage—against the New World’s original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.

(via dammitcaleb-deactivated20130328)

yarr-metis:

Yeah, as a woman, I wouldn’t be too comfortable going back very far, and certainly not if I were to travel to any “Old World” or Euro-American countries. However, Turtle Island prior to invasion might be alright. :)

(via binesi-manidoo)

lenins-little-potato:

stalinsprincess:

picturesofwar:

The man who saved the world:

Stanislav Petrov was manning surveillance equipment for the Soviet Air Defense Forces when he noticed something strange on the screen.  Soon after, warning signals started flashing with the report of an incoming nuclear missile from the USA.

Seeing only one missile, he figured it was a mistake.  He figured Americans wouldn’t send only one missile if they wanted a nuclear war.

Soon thereafter, many more started appearing on the screen. 

Nevertheless he trusted his instincts, and rather than contact his superiors he waited to see what would happen.  He waited past the perceived time on impact.  There was no damage - the warnings were due to a system malfunction.

Had Petrov not defied protocol and contacted his superiors, a real nuke may very well have been fired, igniting a nuclear war between the USA and Soviet Union.

September 26, 1983 - 28 years ago today.

I meant to do a post on him ages ago

Trooper

 I did a post on him last year. He is a true hero of the Soviet Union, and the world.

(via rematiration)

Disney consultant Shirley Custalow McGowan (Little Dove)

Ya’ll better read the most recent review I did of Pocahontas because IT TOOK A LOT OF TIME. :P

(via feministdisney)

(via mycultureisnotatrend)

liquornspice:diggingforroots:soydulcedeleche:zuky:

[ This is an excerpt from a post on my old blog from April 22, 2009 ]

Fake news bobbleheads and self-congratulatory liberals try to reduce racism to a matter of personal virtue on the one hand and unhinged hate on the…

fuckyeahhistorycrushes:

I definitely have a crush on the Le Chevalier de Saint-George, Joseph Boulogne (December 25, 1745 – June 10, 1799) .  He’s been called “the Black Mozart” which is a bit unfair, as he was already performing, conducting and composing in Paris when Mozart first visited.  They do have similar musical qualities, being contemporaries, but without a doubt, Saint-George’s life history is far more interesting.

The summary is that Joseph was born into slavery, the son of a French plantation owner in Guadaloupe.  His father protected both Nannon, the boy’s mother and Joseph and eventually sent the child to study in France. 

He was a violin prodigy, a gifted composer, a talented swordsman and equestrian.  However, Joseph was also mixed race and faced a lifetime of prejudice.  Even though it was the Enlightenment and the big thinkers were doing their big thinking, Voltaire, among others, subscribed to the belief that those of African descent were a lesser race of men and advocated segregation.  Lamesauce.

Anyway, if you’re interested in music history, racial history, love Mozart and his contemporaries, then you should definitely check out Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George, who is finally receiving his due after two-and-a-half centuries of neglect. 

Also, he’s made of sexy.

(via rematiration)

squashthebox:

Australia’s Genocide: The extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginals

For almost 40,000 years a large settlement of Aborigines lived on the island of Tasmania, a decent sized island located at the very bottom of Australia. With the invasion of Tasmania in 1803 the entire Tasmanian Aboriginal population was wiped out in the space of 100 years.

The rapid decimation of the population came about as a result of European disease and hastened by a government sponsored genocide. These 100 years represent a harrowing experience for the Aboriginal people who along with horrible diseases had to contend with private militias hunting them down in order to claim the five pound reward offered by the government for each Aborigine captured. Often large invasive measures were taken by the government to deal with the “Aborigine Problem” such as the black line where soldiers formed a line from one end of Tasmania to the other as they are combed the island for Aboriginal Tribes or the Parlevars as they called themselves.

By 1835 the Aboriginal population had shrunk to only 150 natives. The remaining population was relocated to Bass Islands by the Tasmanian government. By 1905 the last known surviving full blooded Aboriginal had died. Not only did a proud and noble people die as a result of this senseless destruction but along with them died a rich culture and history that had been fostered over 40,000 years.

(via starkdisassembled)

velocicrafter:

strugglingtobeheard: howtobenoladarling:

“In Slave Life in Georgia, John Brown, in his as-told-to narrative, illumines this chasm between truth and the body by elaborating the role of violence and ventriloquy in enchaining slave value. In order to penetrate the simulated revelry of the trade, he painstakingly described the New Orleans slave pen in which he was held(39):

from Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman (a rare look inside the slave pens of America)  

It’s quite eerie and scary how much those pens look like prison cells and how to a less extreme version whites expect the same of blacks especially, to smile and please them and not complain about the state of their race or people or loved ones or self. 

(via dammitcaleb-deactivated20130328)

(via mia-the-wonder-slut)

lols08:

itwonlast:

Alex Mayo (Mohawk, Kahnawake) on a column at Second Avenue between 47th and 48th streets, 1971.

A 21st-century Mohawk ironworker might easily be called a real “man of steel.” For more than 100 years, Mohawk people have taken part in the seemingly superhuman task of building skyscrapers and bridges throughout the United States, Canada, and abroad. Working in New York City since the 1920s, these brave and skilled ironworkers built the city’s most prominent landmarks, including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the George Washington Bridge, and the World Trade Center.

The Mohawk tradition of ironworking began in the mid-1880s when they were hired as unskilled laborers to build a bridge over the St. Lawrence River onto Mohawk land. They quickly earned a reputation for being top-notch workers on high steel, and “booming out” from their Native communities in search of the next big job became a fact of life.

Joseph Mitchell, A Reporter at Large, The Mohawks in High Steel, The New Yorker, September 17, 1949, p. 38

In 1886, the life at Caughnawaga changed abruptly. In the spring of that year, the Dominion Bridge Company began the construction of a cantilever railroad bridge across the St. Lawrence for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, crossing from the French-Canadian village of Lachine on the north shore to a point just below Caughnawaga village on the south shore. The D.B.C. is the biggest erector of iron and steel structures in Canada; it corresponds to the Bethlehem Steel Company in the- United States. In obtaining the right to use reservation land for the bridge abutment, the Canadian Pacific and the D.B.C. promised the Caughnawagas would be employed on the job wherever possible.

“The records of the company for this bridge show that it was our understanding that we would employ these Indians as ordinary day laborers unloading materials,” an official of the D.B.C. Wrote recently in a letter. “They were dissatisfied with this arrangement and would come out on the bridge itself every chance they got. It was quite impossible to keep them off. As the work progressed, it became apparent to all concerned that these Indians were very odd in that they did not have any fear of heights. If not watched, they would climb up into the spans and walk around there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters, most of whom at that period were old sailing-ship men especially picked for their experience in working aloft. These Indians were as agile as goats. They would walk a narrow beam high up in the air with nothing below them but the river, which is rough there and ugly to look down on, and it wouldn’t mean any more to them than walking on solid ground. They seemed immune to the noise of the riveting, which goes right through you and is often enough in itself to make newcomers to construction feel sick and dizzy. They were inquisitive about the riveting and were continually bothering our foremen by requesting that they be allowed to take a crack at it. This happens to be the most dangerous work in all construction, and the highest-paid. Men who want to do it are rare and men who can do it are even rarer, and in good construction years there are sometimes not enough of them to go around. We decided it would be mutually advantageous to see what these Indians could do, so we picked out some and gave them a little training, and it turned out that putting riveting tools in their hands was like putting ham with eggs. In other words, they were natural-born bridgemen. Our records do not show how many we trained on this bridge. There is a tradition in the company that we trained twelve, or enough to form three riveting gangs.”

After the D.B.C. completed the Canadian Pacific Bridge, it began work on a jackknife bridge now known as the Soo Bridge, which crosses two canals and a river and connects the twin cities of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. This job took two years. Old Mr. Jacobs, the patriarch of the band, says that the Caughnawaga riveting gangs went straight from the Canadian Pacific job to the Soo job and that each gang took along an apprentice. Mr. Jacobs is in his eighties. In his youth, he was a member of a riveting gang; in his middle age, he was, successively, a commercial traveler for a wholesale grocer in Montreal, a schoolteacher on the reservation, and a campaigner for compulsory education for Indians. “The Indian boys turned the Soo Bridge into a college for themselves,” he says. “The way they worked it, as soon as one apprentice was trained, they’d send back to the reservation for another one. By and by, there’d be enough men for a new Indian gang. When the new gang was organized, there’d be a shuffle-up — a couple of men from the old gangs would go into the new gang and a couple of the new men would go into the old gangs; the old would balance the new.” This proliferation continued on subsequent jobs, and by 1907 there were over seventy skilled bridgemen in the Caughnawaga band. On August 29, 1907 during the erection of the Quebec Bridge, which crosses the St. Lawrence nine miles above Quebec City, a span collapsed, killing ninety-six men, of whom thirty-five were Caughnawagas. In the band, this is always spoken of as “the disaster.” “People thought the disaster would scare the Indians away from high steel for good,” Mr. Jacobs says. “Instead of which, the general effect it had, it made high steel much more interesting to them. It made them take pride in themselves that they could do such dangerous work. Up to then, the majority of them, they didn’t consider it any more dangerous than timberrafting. Also it made them the most looked-up-to men on the reservation. The little boys in Caughnawaga used to look up to the men that went out with circuses in the summer and danced and war-whooped all over the States and came back to the reservation in the winter and holed up and sat by the stove and drank whiskey and bragged. That¹s what they wanted to do. Either that, or work on the timber rafts. After the disaster, they changed their minds — they all wanted to go into high steel. The disaster was a terrible blow to the women. The first thing they did, they got together a sum of money for a life-size crucifix to hang over the main altar in St. Francis Xavier’s. They did that to show their Christian resignation. The next thing they did, they got in behind the men and made them split up and scatter out. That is, they wouldn’t allow all the gangs to work together on one bridge any more, which, if something went wrong, it might widow half the young women on the reservation. A few gangs would go to this bridge and a few would go to that. Pretty soon, there weren¹t enough bridge jobs, and the gangs began working on all types of high steel — factories, office buildings, department stores, hospitals, hotels, apartment houses, schools, breweries, distilleries, powerhouses, piers, railroad stations, grain elevators, anything and everything. In a few years, every steel structure of any size that went up in Canada, there were Indians on it. Then Canada got too small and they began crossing the border. They began going down to Buffalo and Cleveland and Detroit.”

During the 1940s and 1950s, many Mohawk ironworking families moved to the New York City area—as many as 700 families into Brooklyn—to aid in the city’s vertical expansion. In the 1960s, when New York City announced plans for the World Trade Center, Mohawk ironworkers eagerly accepted the challenge of erecting the then tallest buildings in the world. In September 2001, after the collapse of the twin towers, Mohawk ironworkers returned to dismantle what their elders had contributed to the Manhattan skyline decades earlier.

(via Smithsonian Institution)

700 families does seem a bit exaggerated for me, but it is a good post to reblog.

(via dammitcaleb-deactivated20130328)

adailyriot:

In 1893 a group of indigenous Aymara Bolivian men traveled to the United States so that they could be put on display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. While researching their story, Nancy Egan, a doctoral student in Latin American history at the University of California, San Diego, delved into the history of indigenous people brought to the United States and Europe and put on display in what she calls “human zoos.”

Buffalo Bill standing with one of the big draws for his traveling show: Sitting Bull, circa 1890.

ICTMN: Indigenous people from all over the world were brought to the United States and Europe and displayed at fairs and circuses during the 1800s and 1900s. Why were these displays so popular?
Egan: Most historians who study these exhibitions agree they were a way of reinforcing or illustrating the racist notions of white supremacy that seemed to be built into the logic of empire and colonialism. Most nations took great care to try and mold the people they put on display into images that justified their own colonial power. In some cases this meant trying to create “savages.” In other cases, they tried to use these displays of human beings to illustrate how the colonial presence was “civilizing” people. These exhibits also played into other forms of popular entertainment. They were a mix of imperial ambition and circus.

You studied a group of indigenous Aymara Bolivians who were brought to New York destined for the Chicago fair, but got stranded in New York. What happened?
These men were brought to the U.S. to be displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, but they never made it to Chicago. They attempted to make a living putting on their own musical shows in New York and Philadelphia, but everywhere they went they were basically told that they weren’t exotic enough. After an unsuccessful tour with a circus through Philadelphia, the group was abandoned by their managers and José Santos Mamani, the member of the group dubbed the “giant” by the press, died shortly after they walked back to New York City. The rest of the group eventually found work in fairs and on Coney Island, but could only find work making feather headdresses and performing supposed North American Native American dances for a New York audience. They struggled to make it back to Bolivia, and I’ve only been able to trace them as far as Panama on their return journey.

How was what Mamani and his companions went through similar to the experience of other “imported” indigenous people who came to the United States?
Their story definitely sounds exceptional, but what’s really shocking about the history of these “human zoos” is that it isn’t. One study I read estimated that more than 25,000 indigenous people were brought to fairs around the world between 1880 and 1930. These people struggled under harsh and changing conditions. Many of them had to change their hair, their clothes, their entire appearance to fit the expectations of the organizers and the audiences they were supposed to perform for. Some people were the targets of racist violence while they were on display, while others experienced more subtle forms of violence and were used as subjects of scientific study on racial differences during the exhibition. And, like Mamani, many people died during these exhibitions.

American Indians from the United States were often exhibited alongside indigenous people from other continents. Was the logic behind

Seminoles in a staged “domestic setting” at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

exhibiting Indigenous Peoples from the United States similar to the logic behind exhibiting Indigenous Peoples from other countries?
The U.S. government resisted allowing official exhibits of North American Indigenous Peoples until after Wounded Knee in 1890, and viewed shows like Buffalo Bill’s [Wild West Show] as either a semi-threatening glorification of Native Americans or a crass, unscientific form of entertainment. The U.S. preferred exhibits that showed Native Americans as passive peoples. For example, in Chicago, the organizers worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to craft exhibits that would supposedly show how beneficial and “civilizing” reservation life and boarding schools were for Native Americans. After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. created exhibits of Filipinos that included a “civilizing” school that the people on display had to attend. Shows of people from regions the U.S. had not colonized, such as African peoples at the Chicago fair, played up rumors of cannibalism and their threatening nature. The logic behind these exhibits in different countries was directly tied to their imperial and colonial ambitions, and they tried to craft shows that would show people who had been, or would be able to be, colonized, and sell lots of tickets.

Didn’t some Native American leaders fight against exhibits of indigenous people during the 1800s? 
One of the most incredible things I found in the archives while researching this work was a series of petitions and letters written from reservations in the U.S. challenging the exhibition of Indigenous Peoples and cultures at the fair. This is a section from a petition from the Creek Territories in 1891 that was signed by more than 100 people expressing the group’s wish to represent themselves through a Native American–directed exhibit at the fair:

“We are almost despairing and it is inevitable that our people trace the cause of that despairing and consequently desperate condition to the very event which with such large expenditures of wealth you are about to celebrate. It is not fitting nor wise that you so celebrate a great event without considering what it meant and still means to a people once great in numbers.… With a Native American or Indian exhibit in the hands of capable men of our own blood, such as are willing and anxious to undertake it, a most interesting and instructive and surely successful feature will be added.”

Another leader, Simon Pokagon, published his Red Man’s Rebuke during the Chicago fair and distributed it to the press and the public-at-large outside of the fairgrounds in Chicago. At every turn, Native American and African American leaders took aim at the racist ideology of the fair, fought these portrayals and argued for the right to self-representation.

Apaches on their first day at the Carlisle Indian School (above)—and here, four months later, circa 1886.

Traveling to a different country and sharing time and space with a diverse group of people really changed some of the people who were on exhibit. What did you learn about their experiences?

In the security records of the fair in Chicago I found all these frustrated notes from security guards who were trying to prevent the people from different exhibits from socializing with one another. Apparently people from the different exhibits were hanging out and drinking beer with one another after the fair shut down. In another study, one where historians were actually able to interview indigenous women who had been part of the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, those women spoke about the relationships they developed with other exhibited women and how they overcame language barriers to share their experiences. I think these stories captivated me because they show the importance of looking at the people who were brought to be exhibited as complete human beings and asking: What did they think about what they saw and experienced? What did they feel about the other people they met? It’s easier to think about these ‘human zoos’ as spaces you look into. Thinking about these men and women socializing and struggling makes me wonder what they thought of these spaces and events as they looked out.

When did “importing” indigenous people to put on display begin to end, and why?
Because the rationale behind these exhibits was so closely tied to the logics of empire, or the exhibition of empire, many of these exhibits began to disappear when the European empires began to decline, but they also began to change form before then. In a historical study of these events, titled Human Zoos, several historians propose that these exhibitions began to emphasize showing cultural differences instead of racial ones by the 1920s. However, some forms of these exhibits continued well into the 20th century, and certainly, using the logic of cultural difference to justify political, economic and military domination has not disappeared.

(via dammitcaleb-deactivated20130328)

fuckyeahdollsofcolor:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, sideshow carnivals known as misemono were a popular form of entertainment for the sophisticated residents of Edo (present-day Tokyo). The sideshows featured a myriad of educational and entertaining attractions designed to evoke a sense of wonder and satisfy a deep curiosity for the mysteries of life. One popular attraction was the pregnant doll.

Although it is commonly believed that these dolls were created primarily to teach midwives how to deliver babies, evidence suggests they were also used for entertainment purposes.

more about these dolls on pinktentacle.

lamazmorradelandroide:

Alternative Histories

(via fuckyeahparanormalphenomena)

(via starkdisassembled)