buried deep between the dark and the dawn...

Niru | she/her | California | Dragon Age, Fire Emblem, The Locked Tomb, Socialism, general historical fuckery. I write overly complicated fics and complain a lot in my tags!

[fictionadventurer]

One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

There's no middle ground--either you're getting to know each other, or you're committed to marrying each other. This idea of a period where you kind of commit to each other until you decide you definitely want to get married is a modern one, and it occurs in eras where they use the word "dating" to describe it. The closest equivalent I can think of are times and places where they'd talk about a couple "stepping out together", but they're still not calling it "courting". Words have meaning, and the word "courting" has never meant that, so stop using it that way!

[starfieldcanvas]

the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.

[crimson-and-lavender]

I would argue that the blame for the bastardization of the word "courting" falls squarely on the shoulders of the American Evangelical Purity Culture of the 90's/early aughts. I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a seminal text of this movement, came out in the late 90s and removes the word "courting" from its historical context (ie "(usually) a man attempting to woo (usually) a woman") and makes up this strange revisionist history version of courting where young men ask fathers to court their daughters with the intent of pursing marriage and then, if the father consents, the suitor and daughter have a couple of exclusive and highly supervised dates before the father decides that the suitor is allowed to propose marriage. This is all framed as the father "protecting" the daughter from the devious wiles of worldly men by preventing her heart from being broken through "casual dating," but it's really about control. While there are a limited number of fathers in this sphere who value their daughter's opinions and autonomy and will only allow suitors their daughter is actually interested in to "court" her, most of the time the daughter's opinions in the entire situation are kind of irrelevant. This is what purity rings stem from, too--a promise from a child (usually daughter) to their father that they will "stay pure" and not engage in sexual activity until marriage, when control of the daughter is handed over from her father to her husband.

Unfortunately the Evangelical "culture war" has been going on under most people's noses for 40+ years and we've reached a point where many people don't even question weird cultural shifts that are the direct result of this invisible battle.

[nyantara]

Other distinctive features of the subcontinent included the vast abundance of fertile arable land even in the nineteenth century and a relatively slow population growth between 1600 and 1850. That entire villages set off on vast migrations without any state supervision to escape war or an oppressive zamindar was therefore possible and quite common. [...] This happened even in the heartland of the empire; After the famine of 1783-84, some 600 villages in Delhi Territory were depopulated; in 1820, at least 200 of them still stood empty, Pre-colonial Indian society was therefore unusually mobile for a peasant economy, a feature, I suggest, that combined with the availability of arable land and low demographic pressure to shape the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century responses to American food crops. The subsistence sector did not require an intensification of agriculture, but cash crops were typically grown by the bigger peasants or small zammdars. In the colonial period, in contrast, peasant migrations were sharply curtailed.

The state sought to promote stability by reconfiguring land rights, establishing permanent settled communities, indeed trying to "fix" people in their place by every measure possible. Colonialism set in motion a new agrarian and demographic regime that included a rapid commercialization of the agricultural economy and an increase in the number of smallholders.

It was also in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the food crops of the Americas started making major inroads into the food cultures of India.

As we have seen, the potato and the sweet potato were well-known; but neither became a miracle food that provided daily subsistence or even insurance against famines as in China. Then, in the nineteenth century, the colonial government took an active role in the propagation of the potato. [...] As George Watt, reporter on economic products to the Government of India noted at the end of the nineteenth century, "As an article of food potatoes are now valued by all classes, especially the Hindus on days when forbidden the use of grain. At first potatoes were eaten by the Moharamadans and Europeans only, but for some years past they have got into universal usage, and it is now not uncommon circumstance to find cooked potatoes offered for sale at refreshment stalls, in various cold preparations, to be eaten along with so-called sweetmeats that form the midday meal of the city communities."

Of all the American food crops, only maize had a wide distribution in India prior to the nineteenth century. Called makkai or makkhi (Mecca corn) in the north Indian languages, the vernacular term for maize suggests a connection with the Mughal court. The Portuguese were the probable avenue of its introduction. Soon cultivated in western India in the hinterlands of Bombay, maize is listed among the crops assessed for revenue in 1664 in eastern Rajasthan. Despite its supposed connection with the court, maize was not a food of the aristocracy. Instead, as in China, maize became a food for people living in the poorer highlands of the Himalayas reaching into Nepal and for the aboriginal tribes living in the hilly tracts throughout the country well before British colonial agricultural surveys were started in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Mazumdar, Sucheta. 1999. The impact of New World food crops on the diet and economy of China and India, 1600-1900. In Grew, R.(Ed.) Food in global history. Boulder, Colorado. Westview Press pp. 58–78

[barschter000]

Another Marriage of Figaro watchparty shitpost inspired by our decision that all women in this opera should get a gun

[alisonzai]

[sivavakkiyar]

personally I will not be satisfied until viktor tsoi discourse becomes commonplace on tumblr

[tetrafelino]

I personally can't wait to see someone try to adopt him for anticommunist messaging and just reply with this

[sivavakkiyar]

Strike the enemy!

[ginkovskij]

i would trust takashi miike to adapt the odyssey better than nolan. he can make it about a yakuza patriarch returning to his family after ten years of moving around and lying low to evade the police for his involvement in a decade long war between clans. triads can be involved too. the overall tone of this insanity is gore and porn. gojira may as well be show up for all i care. and i promise it would still be more enjoyable, insightful and accurate.

[sivavakkiyar]

[hadesisqueer]

Two World Cup finalists from opposing teams in this fucking picture, this sport isn't real

[hadesisqueer]

Context for anyone who is wondering: Lamine Yamal's parents won an UNICEF raffle for a charity photoshoot in which Barça players posed with kids, and 5 month old Lamine happened to get 20yo Messi. Which is like. Literally insane

[joyflameball]

[thirdity]

“There are many things that I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it.”

— Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis

[wifegideonnav]

gonna be honest i don’t know how many more ‘enter the 6 digit code we sent to your phone’s i got left in me

[cryptic-forge]

after i made my wooden doll, i was musing about what other unusual materials i might use for a bjd. my partner suggested paper, and also gave me access to their craft paper collection -> i made this.

she is almost entirely made of paper & cardboard. the joints are wooden beads & worbla, because i did figure out a way to make ball joints out of paper, but it really was not worth the effort. all her limbs have tubes of rolled-up cardboard in them to keep the structure sturdy, and the origami flowers are glued around those.

this is extremely different from any doll i've made before, and i had so much fun working with pretty papers & figuring out how to turn them into a poseable 3d object.

[ooppo]

Your heart is not true enough to enter the gates of Margaritaville

[youremysunshine8]

My heart was heavier than the feather; I am sentenced to Rainforest Cafe

[theadhdgoblin]

[stillnaomi]

under the dictatorship of alberto fujimori, USAID funded peru's "family planning" program, which was used to sterilize 300,000 indigenous women, often through deception or in exchange for basic necessities such as food or medical care

A system of incentives and sanctions reinforced the policy: healthcare providers received cash or in-kind payments for each sterilized woman, while promotions, demotions, and the allocation of medical equipment were tied to the fulfillment of sterilization targets and quotas. The program was also implemented through mass campaigns. DEMUS reported large-scale operations aimed at recruiting women for tubal ligation, including so-called “ligation festivals,” which promoted sterilization as a path to happiness and often offered food or money as incentives.

Deceptive practices were widespread. Many women were misinformed about the nature of the procedure or told it was minor. In other cases, they were offered debt forgiveness related to childbirth or abortion in exchange for agreeing to be sterilized. Within a broader context of poverty and exclusion, sterilization often became a transactional means of accessing healthcare or food, services the state was already obligated to provide.

source

not coincidentally, US president george h.w. bush's administration was very pleased with the mass privatization fujimori's regime was implementing

[vulturevanity]

I think we need to kill the sentiment that people lose their right to personhood once they do something bad enough

[vulturevanity]

I don't know who needs to hear this but you need to stop dehumanising people even if those people are "abusers" or "creeps" because you need to understand that you are not immune to doing something equally as bad

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

By emotionally classifying people who have done heinous things as subhuman filth incapable of thinking and feeling and acting just like you and me, and by using that emotional dehumanization as a reason to deny those people any compassion or support on a systemic level, you risk becoming blind to abuse/violence perpetrated by someone close to you or even yourself. Because if "abusers don't deserve rights", then you won't ever want to admit or accept that you or a loved one is perpetrating abuse, and that makes stopping the abuse or preventing further abuse much harder. This is how you end up excuaing abusive behaviour on the grounds that, since you don't see someone as a disgusting subhuman pile of garbage therefore they can't possibly be An Abuser, Trademark

[vulturevanity]

And here'a the even harder pill to swallow: since the world isn't split into "abusers" and "good people", in the same way you or someone you love can inflict abuse/violence on others, the people who HAVE inflicted abuse/violence on others can, in fact, change and become better people

There is no bottomless chasm of moral uncleanliness that someone can run off and fall into and get stuck in forever. People can do better. Yes, even those people. You HAVE to accept this. Otherwise not only is there no motivation for anyone to try and do better (which is when people become stuck in a cycle of violence and abuse they don't want to escape), but your idea of a perfect justice system doesn't look any different from Literal Christian Hell. And I HOPE you understand that Literal Christian Hell is, to put it very lightly, not a good justice system.

[telumendils]

hello, average tumblr user. your challenge is to name a canonically lesbian female character in the tags of this post. if you name a male character for any reason, you will be shot in the head. good luck.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 14 September 1960, a US-backed coup took place in Congo against the first democratically elected prime minister in the country, socialist independence leader Patrice Lumumba. The CIA initially planned to assassinate him – one plot involved poisoning his toothpaste – but instead he was arrested, beaten, tortured and then shot. Soldiers from the former ruling Belgian authorities then dug up his body, dismembered it and dissolved it in sulphuric acid, grinding what was left to powder and scattering it. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2082300321955107/?type=3

[afloweroutofstone]

A Belgian police officer kept Lumumba’s gold tooth after it survived the acid, and the Belgian government returned it to the Democratic Republic of the Congo earlier this year