1001 Histories

5000 Years Ago She wasn't called Diana. She was Egyptian, a female pharaoh forced to marry her brother as was the practice of that time and place. Her brother was gay and she respected him enormously and thought the world would be a better place if he could be himself.  2000 Years Ago ... she's a big girl , she's standing six-foot three And she wrap herself around you like a well-worn tire She was 5'11" but people were shorter then, so relatively speaking it paints an accurate enough picture. She had blonde hair. Bangs in front and the rest was somewhere between chin length and shoulder length. Not quite straight, not really wavy. Vaguely reminiscent of Lady Diana Spencer. It was radically short for that time and place, in line with her radical ideas about women being people too and deserving human rights. She had a strong sense of justice and righteousness.  She was medically knowledgeable and the world didn't yet have germ theory. Average education of these p...

A couple of posts back, in a piece titled  Ancestry and Identity , I talked about the need for reparations for Black Americans that goes beyond mere money. The -- cough -- peace loving Swiss defacto aided and abetted Nazi Germany in gruesomely abusing the concentration camp victims -- predominantly Jews, but also gays and other "undesirables" -- because if the name of neutrality and similar high minded sounding words, they kept all the wealth from people who died in concentration camps.  This ugly act hinges on the technicality that their relatives couldn't produce a death certificate to claim their assets. Surely war memorial museums, like Auschwitz , have some records they can provide and the wealthy Swiss could live up to the spirit of their high-minded values rather than doing a devilish living up to the word and then arguing semantics for personal gain way. With, oh, seventy-five or eighty years of interest.

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...