1001 Histories

In English, So-So-Goi translates to The People Who Traveled On Foot. You might know them better as the Shoshone. This is the story of the last days of the Northwestern Band of Shoshones. They still have living descendants but most of their people were massacred on 29 January 1863. This is both the largest massacre of Native Americans on what would become the Contentinental US and also probably the least well known. It got little press in part because it occurred during the American Civil War. Their territory included parts of modern day Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho and Utah. Shoshone records of the incident call it Boa Ogoi. The year 1825 marked the insidious beginning of the end. They ran into White trappers in the area and likely thought not much of it. The trappers seemed to live much like they did and functioned much like they did. The So-So-Goi tolerated them and were happy to trade with them for valuable items, like Western knives. The So-So-Goi wintered in an area they called Boa Ogoi...

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. My maiden name is Irish in origin and he always said he was part Cherokee.  I once read part of a family history or genealogy for my father's family and the only thing I remember is that he was also part French, something he never told me. Around the same time, my husband and I also got a copy of his family genealogy. I learned that Traylor is Anglicized French and was originally something like treilleur and meant something like soldier. His French ancestors were Huguenots  who fled France for England because they were persecuted and anglicized it to try to fit in better. Hundreds of years later I continue to be routinely aggravated at trying to explain the name because people who see it routinely call me Taylor and people who hear it routinely spell it Trailer. Most surnames are real words, often derived from a place or profession. Taylor is such a surname. Traylor is gibberish to anyone adequately familiar with th...

Wikipedia: Never Again  Yeah, wow, that's not remotely what I learned. Which isn't to say ANY of that is wrong but I knew of it as a statement by politicians and I understood it to be the motive behind setting up things like the World Bank. Americans like to imagine I'm a pro Nazi Hitler apologist while Europeans apparently get taught what I eventually parsed out: The seeds of World War II were sewn by the War Reparations Germany was saddled with at the end of World War I (originally called The Great War) and so they decided two things: 1. In the tradition of what worked in the US to prevent our only Civil War from becoming the start of a cycle of civil wars (the USUAL outcome), they did not saddle the losing side with war reparations as had been the human tradition since time immemorial. Instead, the US went into Germany and Japan and helped them rebuild, just like The North went into The South and helped them rebuild per Grant's unprecedented policy set at the Surrend...

Sorry I can't watch this shit in full. The guy being interviewed is claiming there's no fraud  in the 2024 presidential election and not backing that up. You cannot confidently assert that as something we are certain about based on nebulous bullshit like "we are still counting votes". Your desire to assert that there absolutely is no fraud is suspicious.  You can say "Well, it's complicated and the process of counting votes isn't over, so those numbers are bound to change which makes it a moving target and muddies the waters " But things being unclear for valid reasons is absolutely not proof positive that there was NO fraud. My belief is that Biden won and both Clinton and Harris lost because Trump did MORE election tampering when running against women than when running against a man because he was counting on "sexism" providing plausible deniability and making people disinclined to examine it too closely. You have no actual proof that fr...

I saw a TV show once. I have no idea what show it was, but there was some neurotic woman that this guy hooked up with and she had amazingly tattered panties on and he was like "WHY????"  So she explained to him that she HAD to wear them because they were her "lucky panties" and every time she stopped wearing them, some major political or social drama happened and she was convinced there was a cause and effect relationship. She HAD to wear them because if she didn't, it was HER fault when shit happened in the world. I don't think I'm quite that crazy BUT I'm aware this post may look like that to other people. This post addresses the question of "Why write at all if I have no traction and make pathetic amounts of money?" It gives you MY subjective point of view which I cannot prove is factually accurate. If my inferences are actually correct, OTHER people theoretically COULD verify parts of my story but I have zero reason to believe they will...

I once read a well documented history of the minimum wage law. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the name of the book was because apparently this book tells a very different story than the general public impression of the law and the reason it was created. To my shock, people on Metafilter told me that minimum wage is essentially a racist policy of oppression which is the exact opposite of what I had read. In a nutshell, the book I read indicated that following the American Civil War, freed Blacks had it worse than slaves thanks to rampant racism and Jim Crow laws. One reason: Blacks were paid half what Whites got paid. So the federal minimum wage law was proposed to try to force the South to pay Blacks the same as Whites. And it initially failed spectacularly because racist southerners were flat out unwilling to "pay a Black man a White man's wage" and often simply fired Black employees. Along with segregation and a shortage of Black high schools in the South such that ...