History Bizarre

Strange, weird, wonderful history.

[historybizarre]

The Anti-Gay Lavender Scare, Explained

What you need to know about an infamous chapter of U.S. history.

An offshoot of the ongoing anti-communist “Red Scare” that seized the government and the country starting in the 1940s, the so-called “Lavender Scare” was driven by concerns that gay people working for the government were a national security threat because their lifestyles could be exploited by foreign agents eager for blackmail material — or they could be communists.

“[Homosexuality and communism are] both seen as subcultures with bonds of loyalty within that subculture that are stronger than nationalism or patriotism,” David K. Johnson, who literally wrote the book on the Lavender Scare, tells Teen Vogue. “The Cold War is being fought against atheistic communism, right? So both are seen as immoral and anti-religious.”

[historybizarre]

Queens and queers: The rise of drag ball culture in the 1920s

While watching a screening of Paris is Burning hosted by the Smithsonian Latino Center, I was entranced by the dazzling participants as they competed, fiercely owning the floor in their glamorous gowns. Twenty-five years ago, this famous cult documentary captured the lives and culture of African American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in New York City drag balls. The film captured a slice of the 1980s unknown to many, with roots in a fascinating culture.

In 1869, within Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge, drag balls began. As the secret of the balls spread within the gay community, they became a safe place for gay men to congregate. Despite their growing popularity, drag balls were deemed illegal and immoral by mainstream society. A moral reform organization known as the Committee of Fourteen periodically investigated the balls. In 1916, the committee released a report detailing the scandalous behavior they witnessed. The report described a scene filled with “phenomenal” “male perverts” in expensive frocks and wigs, looking like women. The committee later released 130 reports describing its visits, demanding that such perversion must desist.

[historybizarre]

Safer at Home: Safer at Home

an online exhibition of objects from the ONE Archives Collection at the USC Libraries organized by its curator, Alexis Bard Johnson

Safer at Home is an invitation to examine the many facets of home as well as what safety means and looks like for LGBTQ populations—both past and present. There are moments in queer history when homes or houses were far safer environments in which to congregate than bars and nightclubs. On the flip side, for many queer youth, homes can be the least safe place. In these weekly selections, we will interrogate these relationships to home and think about the everyday, the domestic, and illness. What is home? How do we make home? How do we exist at home? How is the home stifling? Constraining? Creative? Interactive? How do we have fun at home or mourn from home? How do we craft and care for our safer at home selves? What do we hold onto, what do we create anew, and what do we let go of?

About the image above:

This photograph, “Protest against the the lack of hospital space for AIDS patients,” documents a protest against Los Angeles County and USC Hospitals to highlight the dearth of hospital space for AIDS patients, circa 1989

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[vasyan-pupkinyan]

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

[directactionforhope]

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

[directactionforhope]

Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Why Fire Makes Us Human

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Fire and the Brain: How Cooking Shaped Humans | AMNH

It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.

[reasonsforhope]

Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live

[historybizarre]

The Hidden Queer History Behind "A League of Their Own"

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League did everything it could to keep lesbians off the diamond. Seventy-five years later, its gay stars are finally opening up.

Players had to attend charm school and wear lipstick on the field. Their uniforms had skirts instead of pants — not great for sliding, but deemed appropriately feminine by league owner Philip K. Wrigley. All of this was chronicled in “A League of Their Own.” But there was one thing the movie left out: the reason for these requirements.

Though it was never explicitly stated, historians and players alike say the rules were in place, in part, to prevent the women from being perceived as lesbians. Many of the women actually were gay, including D’Angelo, which is another part of the story the movie didn’t tell.

[jstor]

100 open access books on JSTOR

African American Studies

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Revised and Updated Edition

Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies: Theories and Transgressions

J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings

The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny

African Studies

Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa

Lagos Never Spoils: Nollywood and Nigerian City Life

American Indian Studies

Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History

The Urgency of Indigenous Values

Anthropology

Graceful Resistance: How Capoeiristas Use Their Art for Activism and Community Engagement

Lacandón Maya in the Twenty-First Century: Indigenous Knowledge and Conservation in Mexico's Tropical Rainforest

Maya-British Conflict at the Edge of the Yucatecan Caste War

Neobugarrón: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice

Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America

Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land

Voices of Indigenuity

Archaeology

Living Ceramics, Storied Ground: A History of African American Archaeology

New Deal Archaeology in the West

The Cretan Collection in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, volume III: Metal Objects from Gournia

Violence and Inequality: An Archaeological History

Architecture

Waterhouses: Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos

Asian Studies

Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Geopolitics and Informality, 1963–1985

Communication Studies

Covid and…: How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic

Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches: The Promises and Perils of Women's Rhetorical Adaptivity

Influential Machines: The Rhetoric of Computational Performance

Migrant World Making

Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting

Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907

Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives

Cultural Studies

Cultural History of British Alternative Cabaret (1979-1991)

Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect: Online Reading Communities of the New Nigerian Novel

Reconstructive Memory Work: Trauma, Witnessing and the Imagination in Writing by Female Descendants of Harkis

Toward a Gameic World

Development Studies

Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar

Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Education

Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland

The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education

Environmental Studies

Ecologies of Imperialism

Unsettling Agribusiness: Indigenous Protests and Land Conflict in Brazil

Feminist & Women's Studies

Reclaiming Time: The Transformative Politics of Feminist Temporalities

Recovering Women’s Past: New Epistemologies, New Ventures

Film Studies

Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors: Competing Masculinities in Chinese and Japanese War Cinema

Monsters on Maple Street: The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream

The Rise of Central American Film in the Twenty-First Century

Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity

Food Studies

The Visible Hands That Feed: Responsibility and Growth in the Food Sector

Gender Studies

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940

Women, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1918

History

Captivity's Collections: Natural History and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade

Our People Are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization

Reimagining the Educated Citizen: Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World: 1685-1896

Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi

Language & Literature

Abraham Lincoln and the Bible: A Complete Compendium

Blood and Ink: The Barbary Archive in Early American Literary History

Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism

Faking It: Victorian Documentary Novels

Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China

The Lost Texts of Confucius’ Grandson: Guodian, Zisi, and Beyond

Understanding Agatha Christie

Latin American Studies

Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution

Law

Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America

Linguistics

Cantonese Since the Nineteenth Century

Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field

Middle East Studies

Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces

Music

Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism

Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson

Lieder in America: On Stages and In Parlors

On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone

Peace & Conflict Studies

Remaking the World: Decolonization and the Cold War

The Coup and the Palm Trees: Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras

The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

Uniting Against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe

Unwilling to Quit: The Long Unwinding of American Involvement in Vietnam

Performing Arts

Sonic Strategies: Performing Mexico's War on Drugs, Mourning, and Feminicide

Staging Existence: Chekhov's Tetralogy

Philosophy

Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges

Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious: Vol. 2 The Affective Hypothesis

Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis

Political Science

Beyond Othering: A Gandhian Approach to Conflict Resolution in India and Pakistan

Local government and democracy in the United Kingdom

Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece

The Cost of Voting in the American States

The New Star Chamber and Other Essays: Annotated Edition

Population Studies

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century

Psychology

Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe

Public Health

Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1870

Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011

Religion

Christan Colleges and Universities: An Empirical Guide

From Jesus to J-Setting: Religious and Sexual Fluidity among Young Black People

The Hispanic Faculty Experience: Opportunities for Growth and Retention in Christian Colleges and Universities

Science & Technology Studies

Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City

Sociology

Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence

As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity

Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

Research as More Than Extraction: Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence in African Societies

The Souls of Jewish Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anti-Semitism, and the Color Line

Technology

Transnational Families in Africa: Migrants and the role of Information Communication Technologies

Urban Studies

Living Politics in the City: Architecture as Catalyst for Public Space

[jstor]

FYI, all of these books were made open access as part of our Path to Open program, where included books are set to become open access three years after their publication date.

Many of the above books can be downloaded as PDFs in full!

[historybizarre]

Inside the Newspapers of Iran’s Revolution - JSTOR Daily

An expansive digital archive captures how journalists, satirists, and tabloids documented revolutionary Iran in real time.

In the Nashriyah archives, one can see the 1979 revolution—the origins of which are still the subject of academic debate—and its aftermath unfold in real time on the front pages of Āyandigān and Kayhān, another newspaper of record for the country; in the sensational tabloid stories of ‌Ittiḥād-i javān (Youth Unity) and Javānān-i imrūz (Youth Today); in the cartoons of satirical publications like the left-wing Āhangar; and in the advertisements of Tihrān muṣavvar (Tehran Illustrated), which speak to everyday desires amid the upheaval—a world of color TVs, fashionable watches, long-hold hairspray and American sodas.

[rebuiltzine]

Maryland's 400: The Soldiers Who Saved America Before America Existed

On Memorial Day, the story of the First Maryland Regiment — and the rearguard charge that kept the Revolution alive By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews ANNAPOLIS — It was August 27, 1776 — six weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence — and the American experiment was already on the verge of extinction. The Continental Army, badly outmaneuvered by British General William Howe on…

[historybizarre]

Royal accounts from 1605, including expenses to host Shakespeare's plays

Explore the parties of James I and VI's court as told by the royal household's financial accounts.

At the end of October 1605, Edmund Tilney submitted his annual accounts to the Exchequer to be audited for the year 1604–1605. Tilney was James VI and I’s Master of the Revels, originally appointed to this role in 1578 for Elizabeth I. This meant he had been leading the Revels Office, which was part of the Royal Household, for over 25 years when producing these accounts. Revels were festive occasions and formed part of the generous extravagance expected from the Royal Household. This included hosting masques (choreographed dances performed by masked members of the court), banquets, music performances, plays, and other forms of lavish entertainment for the King’s court. From 1560, the Master of the Revels received his funding in advance (known as an imprest). The following year, he was required to submit for audit.

[synnthamonsugar]

Embrace your divine feminine energy by taking part in traditional women's hobbies & interests like experimenting with radioactive materials, developing mathematics, programming computers, piloting aircraft and practicing marksmanship.

[moniquill]

Marie Curie - Wikipedia

Ada Lovelace - Wikipedia

Joan Clarke - Wikipedia

Hedy Lamarr - Wikipedia

Amelia Earhart - Wikipedia

Annie Oakley - Wikipedia

The Women Behind ENIAC

A new book tells the story of how they broke a computer-science glass ceiling

[nethilia]

In addition:

Marie Maynard Daly

A biochemist who made lasting contributions to medicine, Daly was the first Black woman to receive a PhD in chemistry.

Katherine Johnson - Wikipedia

Bessie Coleman - Wikipedia

Mary Fields - Wikipedia

Celebrate black women too!

[moniquill]

Fuck yeah!

[historybizarre]

On Memorial Day, Reflecting on African-American History | National Trust for Historic Preservation

A preservationist reflects on the significant role African-American soldiers played in the Civil War and in their communities long after.

My personal introduction to Decoration Day began with oral histories provided by my family’s elders. In rural Tidewater, Virginia, they told stories of Decoration Day commemorations stretching back to the 1880s. Parades began in African-American communities and ended at local black cemeteries. Families and friends honored their ancestors through song and praise, while their graves were cleaned and re-decorated.

[historybizarre]

The Evolution of Memorial Day | JSTOR Daily

What started as a solemn commemoration of dead Civil War soldiers has become a celebration of summer. Here's why that makes total sense.

According to historian Mabel Thompson Rauch, the first Memorial Day was on April 5, 1867, when the townspeople of Carbondale, Illinois, came to hear marching bands and speeches about the sacrifices made by the solders of the Civil War, which had concluded just two years before. The region had been torn apart by the conflict. While Illinois was a strong Union state, its southern part, which included Carbondale, also comprised settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee who fought on the side of the Confederacy.

….

According to religious studies scholar Catherine Albanese, however, there is some disagreement as to what the first Memorial Day celebration was. She writes that in the late 1860s, the gravesites of both Union and Confederate soldiers were decorated and memorialized by the townspeople of Columbus, Mississippi, which was a part of the Confederacy. Albanese noted that these informal Memorial Day celebrations provided “a ritual cult of death” for Americans, “organized from those sentiments about death which almost everyone in the community shared.”

[makingqueerhistory]

Herculine Barbin — Making Queer History

Herculine Barbin’s life is often introduced as a “case” — a nineteenth-century medico-legal puzzle that forced doctors and judges to decide

Herculine Barbin’s life is often introduced as a “case” — a nineteenth-century medico-legal puzzle that forced doctors and judges to decide what, exactly, made a person male or female. Born in 1838 in France and raised as a girl within Catholic schools and convents, Barbin would soon become the subject of medical examinations, legal judgments, and public scandals aimed at determining her “true sex.” The historical significance of her life, however, is not just tied to the ambiguity of her physical body but also to the extraordinary paper trail she managed to leave behind. Indeed, much of what we know about Barbin comes from her autobiographical memoir, written near the end of her life and after her legal sex reclassification–a groundbreaking text shaped by both hindsight and a need to justify a life that had been made publicly scandalous. This written work survived alongside a dense archive of medical, legal, and journalistic records, offering a rare first-person account of how sex was defined, enforced, and punished in the nineteenth century. Collectively, these materials reveal how Barbin’s personal experience was subordinated to institutional authority, as well as how the modern demand for a single, fixed sex could transform an individual’s life into a problem that needed to be corrected. 

[creatingblackcharacters]

as a non north american, this blog is enthralling to me. potato salad? raisins in a salad? wild things happening here i never even considered the possibility of existing

Who Made the Potato Salad?

"For many Black people, it’s about keeping the recipe alive because of the story that it tells."

“In order to understand the importance of potato salad, you really have to understand the history and why Black people hold it to such high regards,” explained soul food historian Adrian Miller. Just like macaroni and cheese (another thing that Black people are EXTREMELY serious about), the making of potato salad is rooted in both history and politics. After talking with Miller for almost an hour, I quickly learned that while it’s just a side for some, for others it’s a retelling of a family’s antiquity.

“There is a German origin connected to the side dish, but also some connections to slavery,” Miller noted, explaining that it was German immigrants who brought the recipe over to the United States. Miller’s explanation for how potato salad became a popular staple in the Black community made sense considering the German migration that took place in the South during the 1860s. In a 2008 article, Jeffery Strickland examined how German immigrants were a “middleman minority community” in most Southern states between 1860 to 1880. Specifically, he noted that German people had a “relatively positive” relationship with Black Charlestonians (many who were slaves), so much so that the relations between German and African American people shaped the social relations in all of the South. As a result the sharing of recipes, including cold-slaw (what we now call potato salad) became a popular Southern dish in many Black families. "

What's crazy is that I once had a mashed potato salad at a Korean restaurant that SMACKED! it had fruit in it! I have no idea why it was so sweet but the textures were just 🤌🏾I was sick when I ordered it somewhere else and it didn't taste like that 😭

[historybizarre]

The House of Burgesses met for the last time on May 6, 1776, as recorded on this final page of the official journal. The three items show that a majority of eligible members did not attend the sessions of October 1775 and March 1776, which meant that the seated members adjourned and set a future meeting date as according to parliamentary law. On May 6, the burgesses met and "determined not to adjourn, but let that body die," as recorded by one of the members. The assistant clerk of the House of Burgesses recorded these last entries. His concluding Latin word, Finis, means finished, or the end. The decorative flourish is similar to a paraph, which was a distinctive element added to a signature to prevent forgery (John Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence includes a paraph). The assistant clerk may have intended to dramatically illustrate the conclusion of royal government in Virginia and filled the page so nothing else could be written there.

Source: Library of Virignia, “Final Meeting of the House of Burgesses, 1776,” Document Bank of Virginia, accessed May 7, 2026

[digitalnewberry]

A Shipwreck Story, Hidden in a Love Letter

What can you find in a century-old love letter? The usual things: longing, gossip, travel plans, family news. And, sometimes, a shipwreck mystery.

In April 1910, Chicago native Muriel Bent was writing to Stanley Gale Harris from a ship in the Red Sea. She had so much to tell him that she split the letter into several envelopes, numbered in the corners so he’d know which to read first. Muriel told Stanley about the heat, her reading, her costume for that evening’s shipboard fancy-dress party — “improvised and mostly perishable” — and how happy she was to be getting closer to him.

Then, almost in passing, she shared a story she’d heard from another passenger:

In a shipwreck near the Aroe Islands off Northern Australia, nearly everyone was drowned. The Captain and pilot escaped in a boat, and thirty hours later picked up two young girls who had been floating all that time. One of the girls had found and saved a baby that drifted near her. They were all taken to Thursday Island where every effort was made to identify the child. But none was entered on the passenger list of the steamer and nothing about her was found. She was adopted by the wife of the head of one of the big companies, and brought up as their daughter. She is about my age now, and went to school with Mr. Williams’ older daughter. Fancy knowing nothing about yourself like that.  — View letter

The story Muriel heard was almost certainly a retelling of the wreck of the RMS Quetta, which sank in the Torres Strait near Thursday Island in 1890. Contemporary reports preserve the same haunting central detail: among the few women and children who survived was a baby girl whose identity was uncertain. She was adopted and raised in Queensland, becoming known as Cecil “Quetta” Brown.

Muriel’s version gets the geography a little wrong — the Aru, or Aroe, Islands are northwest of Australia, while the Quetta sank near Thursday Island — but that only makes the letter more revealing. This is how stories traveled: by ship, by rumor, by memory, and eventually by mail. A disaster from 1890 could still be circulating twenty years later, transformed into a shipboard anecdote and tucked into a love letter.

We just added 1,200 pages from the Harris-MacLean family papers to Newberry Transcribe — including the letters between Muriel and Stanley, written during their courtship and early married life. Volunteers have now worked through more than 95,000 pages of handwritten material across all our collections, making them searchable and available to researchers, teachers, family historians, and anyone who’s ever wanted to eavesdrop on the past.

Start transcribing: nt.newberry.org

Muriel Bent Harris, early 1910s. Harris-MacLean family papers

[historybizarre]

How Star Wars Revolutionized Entertainment

Three ways Star Wars changed the entertainment business.

Second, in addition to reviving the genre, Star Wars fundamentally changed how licensed toys and memorabilia were created and marketed. After Star Wars creator George Lucas initially had trouble finding a manufacturer for toys associated with the movie, the Kenner Products toy company signed on. Their 3 ¾-inch action figures, created to be small and affordable, became a runaway success. In fact, Kenner became overwhelmed by the demand. In a true story that has become legend in toy marketing, Kenner actually dealt with a Christmastime shortage of action figures in 1977 by selling “Early Bird Certificate Packages” through toy stores. The mail-in raincheck entitled the bearer to action figures that would not be available until the spring of 1978. The package also included a cardboard display for all twelve characters—encouraging buyers to order complete sets.