#historical meta

[im-the-punk-who]

Can you explain how a slave revolt in the Bahamas could have changed the history of America?

HELLO ANON FROM LIKE FOUR MONTHS AGO! I kept meaning to go back to this and then uhhh forgetting to do that. (Also thank you for indulging me and sending this sort-of-directly-asked-for-question lmao)

So. Here’s a brief overview of how a successful slave revolt like in Black Sails could have changed the history of not just America, but the entire world. And quite, well - easily - had the circumstances in Black Sails presented themselves. 

First off, standard disclaimer that this is all conjecture based on my own research and knowledge of both history and Black Sails. It isn’t meant as a takedown of anyone else’s views, or the character’s actions. The strongest I would call this is a wishful critique of the choices the writers made to include the things they did in the way they were included, and the way those same writers chose to end the story they chose to tell. And maybe, a little bit, a frustration of how the inevitability of american history is used as a given in fandom to defend certain character’s actions - but it is not meant to invalidate the reasons behind those actions. Just to point out that those reasons were more emotionally than factually driven (Which is cool! And very real to the kinds of tragedies that play out in real life revolutions! Vive le realismé!)

Also quite obviously I’m not a professional in any way. I was eating soup from a can as I wrote this. I am now eating cookies for dinner. I am writing this because it’s fun for me. It’s fun!! If deep thought-experiment type analysis of media isn’t your cuppa, that’s fine - you can keep scrolling.

I’ve included major historical events from 1700-1740 since that is the general time period that Black Sails draws its history from. In particular, most of the later seasons’ historical references come from the 1730s. While I’ve tried to be as thorough as possible...there are so many ways history could have been changed by a tiny action that it would be impossible to cover them all. For brevity, I’m focusing on the history of the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Colonial America. I’ll touch on other places as is relevant but like......it’s world history for a reason.

Okay, here goes.

So first and foremost, to understand how it’s destruction could have changed America, you really need to understand just how much economic power chattel slavery gave colonial empires and England in particular. 

Slavery was the most important economic force in Colonial England, and not just in what the slaves produced. The slave trade itself was the most lucrative business in existence at the time. If you want to learn more about that, I highly recommend listening to this podcast, which does an excellent job of explaining how the economic buying and selling and bonding of slaves was of such value to colonial empires. This is important because the most powerful contemporary argument for the continuation of slavery was that it “could not be ended in the Americas until there was certainty that it wouldn’t create social or economic irritation.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1783.)

(Slavery in itself is not something that was unique to the british empire or even the Imperialist governments that created it. Most cultures have had some form of slavery. However, this was not the type of generational slavery that colonial empires employed. In most cases before the 1400s, slaves were not kept slaves solely based on the color of their skin - they were war prisoners, criminals, or debtors. In most cases, slaves could work to buy their freedom, and most importantly, slavery was not an inherited state that passed from parent to child. 

What we think of in terms of colonial slavery is chattel slavery - which is the kind of slavery Europeans imposed on Africans starting in the fifteenth century. These slaves could not buy their freedom. They were viewed as property instead of human beings based on their race and their children were automatically enslaved in the same way they were. They were mistreated, and viewed as subhuman, without any chance of escaping the bonds which had been forced upon them.

Because of this new type of slavery that started in the colonial era, Europeans needed to justify why they were entitled to own other people as slaves. They needed to convince themselves and other people that there was some moral justification for chattel slavery. This is what led to all the myths of ‘happy’ servitude, racial inferiority, and any ‘benefits’ slavery imparted to slaves. These were all lies created by philosophical thinkers and plantation owners and politicians that let settlers convince themselves they were not committing crimes of immense magnitude against other human beings. For much of the colonial era, these were the norm in thinking and their vestiges still linger today. But these were used to justify slavery because of how important it was economically.

And of course there were always dissenters. Since slavery was first introduced to the colonies there were people who knew that this sort of treatment was just not very gucci. These people argued that slavery went against the very nature of a ‘just’ society. That benefitting off the mistreatment of other human beings was akin to spiritual robbery, and that “European colonies should be destroyed rather than create so many unfortunates!” (Louis Jaucourt, 1754). With your goddamn motherfucking chest Jaucourt. The Quakers of Pennsylvania were strong proponents of abolition since the 1670’s! James Oglethorpe(yes, that Oglethorpe) himself was a staunch abolitionist who went as far as to make slavery illegal in Georgia when he formed the colony in 1733.

The economic power of slavery was used as a justification to keep it intact for hundreds of years and many colonists were happy with this, but it’s important to remember that not everyone was. England and the colonists were far from unanimously in support of the practice. This becomes important later! Like, this is the basis for the whole argument of how a drawn out war in the Bahamas could have ended slavery and changed colonial imperialism.)

OKAY NOW THAT WE’VE GOT THAT COVERED. 

Now let’s go to the people it affected. Enslaved black people have been fighting against their enslavement since they were taken from their homes and brought across the Atlantic in the 15th century. Starting in the 1700s, slave revolts started to see more and more success in these efforts, until in the late 1700s and early 1800s public opinion of slavery finally dropped enough that it was outlawed in the colonial empires of England and France. In the years of 1700-1740, there were several rebellions in the North American area including:

1712 New York Slave Revolt (British Province of New York)

1730 Chesapeake rebellion (British Chesapeake Colonies)

1733 St. John Slave Revolt (Danish Saint John)

1739 Stono Rebellion ((British Province of South Carolina)

1741 New York Conspiracy (British Province of New York)

And of course, 

1728-1739 First Maroon War (British Jamaica)

This is the war which the war in Black Sails is based on. The treaty that was offered by Woodes Rogers in Black Sails is almost word for word(minus the pirates bit) the treaty offered to the Leeward Maroons in this war. There are references to the factions in this war and even some of the historical people involved in it. The major difference? The Maroon war was successful. The Maroons were so good at warfare on their turf that the British were unable to sustain any major victories against them. After ten years they offered the Maroons a treaty granting them governmental agency(although not independence). In return, the Maroons agreed to return any escaped slaves back to the British, and to help the British fight off “invaders”. The Leeward maroons led by Cudjoe(Julius, in Black Sails) took this offer to avoid more fighting because he believed in an honorable peace with the enemy. Queen Nanny and her Windward Maroons(The Maroon Queen and Madi in Black Sails) refused because like....bruh those terms suck. After a year she was pressured into relenting by Cudjoe, but within thirty years the Maroons had started another war, dissatisfied with how the treaty was being carried out. 

(This is Queen Nanny. And yes, she is better than you.)

I also need to mention that Africans were not the only ones in North America hurt by British Colonialism, nor the only ones for whom abolition and an end to colonial empire was attractive. The Native Americans were also a constant frustration to the colonies, and, because it’s relevant to later things, I want to mention one incident in particular: 

The Yamasee War (1715-1717)

The Yamasee were a Lower Creek tribe that lived in what is today Georgia/Florida. The war was fought over a bunch of different things, including trading systems and colonists depleting the game in the area, but also because of the colonists’ nasty habit of trying to enslave Native American people. Bummer. So a bunch of tribes(and I mean a bunch - there were Shawnee and Cherokee factions, as well as about half a dozen other distinct nations that joined in the fight in sort of that loose ‘hey you hate these guys? we hate these guys!’ way.)

 Long story short, this war was a pretty significant factor in the colonists in the South not enslaving(outright) Native Americans anymore, and instead increasing the import of African slaves to the south. After this war the Yamasee split into two factions, one anti-colonist and one pro-colonist. The pro-colonist people called themselves the Yamacraw, and it was these people who granted Oglethorpe(yes, that Oglethorpe) the land which he used to found Georgia. Moral of the story, alliances between abolitionists and indigenous tribes were already in place in the colonies. Just waiting for a chance to be used.

(Tomochichi, the leader of the Yamacraw and very cool accessorizor)

(Yet ANOTHER thing to keep in mind is that before the end of the 18th century, both Haiti and Grenada would see major revolutions against their colonial empires. Slaves in all provinces and colonies were continually fighting for their freedom. What they lacked was a unifying force that supplied them enough power and cohesion to fight the empire man-to-man, so to speak.)

SO. INTO THIS SCENE, ENTER JAMES FLINT - ANGRIEST OF MLM SCALLYWAGS AND TACTICIAN EXTRAORDINAIRE.

(So cute.)

Anyway, the Golden Age of Piracy was largely over by the early 1720 - most of the pirates of Nassau took Rogers’ pardon and reintegrated as citizens of society. That or they like....died. A lot of them died. Gruesomely. Nasty business, piratry. So, if we assume that in Black Sails’ history that Flint and Silver managed to convince the Maroons to rebel ten years earlier, join with the pirates who did not want to assimilate, and start a revolution; now instead of two separate wars Britain is now fighting one much bigger, nastier, more expensive one. 

Backed by people with a good deal of money at their disposal. Cha-ching.

Keep in mind that Britain had already been at war for almost thirty years with first the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite risings(1688-forever) and the War of Spanish Succession(1701-1714). Their resources had already been depleted. And this was why the American colonies(and India) had become so important to them. Remember what I said about the economic importance of slavery? It’s because Brtitain was using the slave trade to refill its coffers after an extensive and costly military campaign. 

So now, this new war is not only putting an additional drain on the empire’s resources before Britain has had a chance to replenish itself but it is also taking away the very source of income needed to replenish itself. (Since the war would target places heavy with slave trading.) In addition, the pirates handed a significant defeat to the British Navy that ended with the Navy retreating - turning tail and running from the island. This was actually a huge victory and one that was sort of downplayed in the show but would be incredibly significant in the event of a long campaign.

Rogers is not taking Nassau with the full support of Britain. He is only fighting with the traitors who did not return when the Navy withdrew. That is why he has to go to Spain in the first place. 

The show has also told us that this rebellion is already starting to be widely known - pirates and slaves from Barbados, the Bahamas, as far as Massachusetts are coming to aid the rebellion in the hopes of freedom. This is not a small thing. 

Even with the loss of the Walrus and most of the Walrus crew, there are still thousands of fighters on the Maroon Island. Slaves, mainland pirates - the defeat of the Walrus was a personal defeat but in the grand scheme of a larger war it was a small loss in what was ultimately a huge victory. 

Rogers has been squarely defeated. Because of that, they now have Nassau as a base. The war now has two strongholds - one protected by the forest and one protected by a fort - into which they can store supplies, retreat, and organize attacks from. If they can free the rest of the slaves on the island of Nassau and either oust or convert the puritans, all the better. 

The war at the point Rogers is defeated was far from a never-ending thing. In fact I would say that Flint is absolutely right - they are incredibly close to a decisive victory. England cannot afford to muster a large enough force to defeat two entrenched enemies working together - especially ones as well financed as we’re led to believe the chest would make the Maroons and Pirates. Even if Britain could somehow convince Spain and/or France to join them, both of those nations have also been severely depleted by wars of their own. And again, the more nations that Britain brings in, the more potentially disaffected people could be brought in to join the pirates(see, Haiti and Grenada specifically, both of which were French colonies at the time, and the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc). 

So from here, the smartest thing for the rebellion to do would be to hit large plantations: to both free the slaves and cripple Britain’s economy. Make slavery more costly to enforce than it is profitable to sustain, and build their numbers for the war as well, as well as like, you know, freeing slaves. Make it so that Britain could not sustain the cost of trying to fight it - as James said all the way back in 1705. Force a surrender on economic grounds.

So now, the power behind the empire has been broken. Even assuming a modest victory, the course of the entire world - not just the Americas - has changed. In victory, let’s say the Bahama/Caribbean islands are freed from British rule. Slavery in the americas will also never be able to get the foothold it does, historically. 

With a free nation actively willing to target slave plantations and ships sitting between it and Africa, the colonial slave trade is finished. Now sure, they could use the existing slaves, but it would be oh-so-easy for the Pirates and Maroons, alongside their hopeful new Native and abolitionist allies, to target large plantations and cripple them. 

If slavery never gets a foothold in the south, northern colonies never build the banks and mills and economic powerhouses that profit from the cheap produce, and most find another way to survive. Perhaps, if we’re going really all out, they start working with the native americans - learning ways to cultivate and grow crops with the land and in balance, rather than clearing thousands of acres for damaging cash crops. 

I want to be really, really clear about this because it is incredibly important. Without slavery, the British empire would not have bee able to sustain itself. It would not have the power. And the more it tried to tax the colonists to recoup its losses, the angrier those people were likely to get, and perhaps join the Maroons and Pirates, or perhaps evens start the american revolution early - maybe even with the help of the newly independent Jamaican/Bahaman island nations. 

This break in the power of colonial empires would shift world history into something unrecognizable as we know it. The empires would still exist, of course, but they would be set on their heels - France and Spain would see what happened to Britain and be less inclined to keep slavery legal in their own colonies. Power is split more evenly among the world, and indigenous and black/African nations are not wiped out in genocidal bids for power. 

Which brings me to India. If the Indian rebellions learned of what happened in America and the Bahamas, or if america had drained enough of britain’s resources that the British East India Trading Company was not able to be as controlling of the area, this could have meant independence centuries earlier, as well as a much easier path to independence. Think about what could have been if the Indian people had been able to oust a struggling empire from its shores an entire century before it historically did. 

(This bad boy is Mangal Pandey, who led the first major Indian revolution in the mid 1800s. In the movie adaptation his boyfriend best friend is played by Toby Stephens so I’m connecting the dots.)

Once the colonies of America and India are gone, Britain loses almost the entirety of its colonial power. (And this isn’t even including all the smaller colonies which could cloak their own independence in these big revolutions and the lack of (as much) of an indigenous genocide in many of these places. The economic disparity that defines Black experience in places that the British colonial system touched never gets a hold, and they are able to build their own economies in ways that benefit them and the places they live. 

Think about the wealth of culture in ALL nations that would not have been destroyed, had Britain not been allowed to swallow whole swaths of land whole. 

And, look. I know this is fiction. I know that of course, none of this happened, and that Black Sails is a fictional landscape. I know that so many things could go differently than I imagine them. I know that to extrapolate like this relies heavily on actually caring about a world that is completely different from ours and envisioning how that could come about. 

I also know, that it is just as important to tell these sorts of stories as telling stories about how small acts could have changed things immensely, as it is to tell them about how society must stay the same. It is just as important to tell stories about ‘what if colonialism were able to be stopped’ as it is to tell dystopian stories about the end of the world. It may not be as much fun, but it is important to remember that our power doesn’t lie an indiscernible amount of time in the future, after the world has already gone to shit. It lies with us, right now. And that even if it is hard to see, our actions have the power to shape history.

[justadram]

As someone with a knowledge of the middle ages, how do you feel about “King Bran”? GRRM has said that he wants his characters to have a “medieval mindset”. Would a bunch of medieval lords really elect a cripple as their king - Someone who can’t lead them in battle? And someone who does magic as well? It seems to me like a recipe for mistrust and wars to come. What do you think?

magic was important for kingship

military prowess was important but not everything

elected kingship ended as the Christian concept of kingship won the day

Except in the HRE and that worked well (no it didn’t)

Kings were not only battle tested, they were also magical. The Merovingian kings of what would become France had these long ass beards and hair they never cut. It was a sign of their potent manliness of magical proportions. Snip the hair, leave the man powerless and impotent. When the Carolingians got rid of the last Merovingian, they gave him a haircut. The idea of the king wielding magic survived the death of paganism and the Christian medieval period. In France and England, the kings had this thing called the Royal Touch. He touched you and you were healed. Now, it’s ‘a miracle,’ but well, you get me. It’s magical thinking. They were still doing this in France in the 19th c.

Electing a magical guy king wasn’t bad practice.

But one who couldn’t fight? Early Germanic kings were warlords. And yet! We do have the Viking Ivar the Boneless, who might have been disabled? And was carried into battle on a shield? Charles the Fat probably suffered from epilepsy, was constantly ill, and is described as lethargic. Béla the Blind was blinded before being crowned. John of Bohemia died in battle after being blind for like a decade. Magnus IV of Norway was blinded, castrated, and had one leg amputated before he was made co-king. Mstislav the Eyeless was blinded and then crowned again. Then after you get hereditary, Christian kingship, physical ability is a plus, but not 100% necessary. You’ve got feudal armies that are doing that for you if they’re well-behaved. I mean, even severe mental illness didn’t trump that sweet hereditary power–ie Charles the Mad.

Not being able to lead an army wasn’t a non-starter.

Christian kingship slowly spread throughout Europe, largely doing away with the concept of selecting kings. The Witenaġemot–think kingsmoot–probably never happened with great regularity in Anglo-Saxon England, but it was certainly done away with as a result of the Norman Conquest (1066). Other early examples are Scandinavia and Visigothic Spain. When the Carolingian kings got the boot in France, the Capetian line started with an election (987), but they immediately switched to hereditary rule by crowning the prince before dad died.

Electing kings wasn’t en vogue in medieval Europe after the early period.

At the same time, however, when the Carolingians were put out to pasture in what would become Germany, the practice of electing a replacement stuck. The kings in the Holy Roman Empire got stuck with this practice of electing the emperor, which gave the princes a lot of power. Very similar to all these houses picking Bran. Good? Score one for progress? Nope! It led to almost constant civil war, as competing candidates would war with the nobles and popes and each other, destroying Germany and parts of Italy over and over. The HRE lacked centralized power–a fact that the region didn’t fully recover from until the 19th c. with the unification of Germany.

Look, I know GRRM isn’t a fan of feudalism, but with the current set-up, there’s definitely going to be civil war. If not during Bran’s lifetime, in the future. Dorne, the Iron Islands, competing claimants: people are going to fight.

Parliaments are good replacements for kings; elected kingship is a recipe for further war.

[annachum]

The Persians overall had a begrudging respect on Julius Caesar - after all he married Cleopatra VII, who is also related to the Parthians

Caesar was smart enough to use trade and diplomacy to connect with Persia and Egypt, instead of the old stomping conquer style with the Gallic Wars

Cleopatra VII definitely helped teach that

Come Emperor Augustus, and his line infamously nearly destroyed Egypt in its wake, terrorized Palestinians, got Jesus crucified, put the ' Roman supremacy ' concept to ridiculous heights and becomes a plight to Persia

Caesar at least becomes smart enough to know when to use brute force and when to use tactics

The Persians wanted nothing to do with the Romans since they heard how the Romans were terrorizing Palestinians in Jesus' time

This shows how deep the Persia - Palestine ties go

Crazy how Palestine had been ruled by the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans...

And its still there

And now Israeli colonial ' rule ' of Palestine is in shambles

Israelites are now fleeing back to Europe or America, the ' government ' there is in shambles, and the rest of the world shuns ' Israel '

The fake country never stood a chance

Cleopatra VII's lineage is wild

On one side she got Alexander the Great's DNA

On the other she got the Parthian side, and I hear Parthians have some Achaemenid blood in them

Hoo boy

Egyptians feared yet had begrudging respect on Julius Caesar

Yet they LOATHED and feared Augustus

Even the Palestinians have some begrudging respect on Caesar

Caesar mostly told his legions to leave the Palestinian citizens alone - he knows its smart enough to not fight ordinary citizens

Come Augustus' line, hoo boy, they started to terrorize Palestine just because baby Jesus EXISTED

DAMN

THATS CRAZY

Egyptians loved Cleopatra VII

Persians and Palestinians loved Hadassah

And the Persians regard Xerxes I with fear and respect

[megsamforever]

I’m like 1/4th into my big bang and it’s going Awesome so this is not an idea I’m gonna use yet but I was thinking the other day, what about an au where 3-way marriages are considered the best form of a marriage because it’d be more stable to have 3 people supporting each other and then if one partner dies the two still have each other for financial and emotional support. 

It’s just kind of fascinating to think about the implications of a universe where triple instead of double marriages were the norm because it would make everything different. Even looking at aus people have written where poly marriages are a thing, there’s always the underlying sense that a marriage of two is still the default and everything’s based off of that.

So what happens if you change that underlying assumption?

Like throwing it into a heterosexual historic context you’d have one person who stays home and has/raises the children, and the other two who work to support them because that would make the most sense for allocating resources. Having two people out working would keep the family more financially stable because if someone lost their job the other could keep them afloat until the other one found something again. 

You could end up with convenience marriages where it’s really a couple and then their platonic partner and it works pretty okay for everyone involved. Like in a historical context, maybe there’s a young woman who doesn’t really want to settle down and have kids but she meets a straight couple who like her and she could be a part of the family and provide for them. 

 But then too it’d mean that even if queer relationships weren’t out and out okay’d, there’d be a lot more room for them because nobody cares that these two women are married because hey, they’ve got a husband too so it’s all legit. And then on the flipside you’d end with queer married couples because their partner died and they didn’t remarry, and it wouldn’t really be a big deal. 

Which would mean probably that lgbt rights and marriage would come a lot quicker in a roundabout way, because even if the idea of three people of the same gender in a marriage would be weird to people, the idea of two people of the same gender in a relationship would be pretty much normal. 

Anyway it’s kind of an interesting concept and something I’d like to play with more in the future, maybe after I’ve finished my big bang. 

[hansbekhart]

How to Brooklyn pt 6, or

What did they do for fun?  

@mademoisellemigraine​ said: I haven't had a chance to tell you how utterly awesome your How To Brooklyn series is. I am knocked out! So, one of my parents was a kid in the Bronx during the 40s and he used to speak at length about the things he did for fun, mostly playing stickball in the street, getting into fights, and playing in the fire hydrants in the summer. I would love it if you did an entry about the things that Steve and Bucky might have done for fun other than going dancing.

Hah, I’m a terrible person; my first instinct is to say, they got drunk.  Am I projecting?  Maybe.  Drinking’s a competitive sport here.  Anyway, I really like this question, this is a good question.  So, are we talking what they did as kids, or what they did as grownups?  Let’s do both!  I like both.

Star-struck Interviewer: “You must miss the good old days.”

Steve Rogers: “I grew up in a tenement slum. Rats, lice, bedbugs, one shared bathroom per floor with a bucket of water to flush, cast iron coal-burning stove for cooking and heat. Oh, and coal deliveries - and milk deliveries, if you could get it - were by horse-drawn cart. One summer I saw a workhorse collapse in the heat, and the driver started beating it with a stick to make it get up. We threw bricks at the guy until he ran away. Me and Bucky and our friends used to steal potatoes or apples from the shops. We’d stick them in tin cans with some hot ashes, tie the cans to some twine, and then swing ‘em around as long as we could to get the ashes really hot. Then we'd eat the potato. And there were the block fights. You don't know what a block fight was? That’s when the Irish or German kids who lived on one block and the Jewish or Russian kids who lived on the next block would all get together into one big mob of ethnic violence and beat the crap out of each other. One time I tore a post out of a fence and used it on a Dutch kid who’d called Bucky a Mick. Smacked him in the head with the nails.”

(From here.)

So that’s a good place to start.  

New Yorkers are territorial.  A kid growing up in not-New York may have a “wider” world, because you have to leave your house or block to find it, but not so much here.  Remember that at any point, you might be living in a building with a hundred other people in it, surrounded by buildings that also have a hundred people in them, so you don’t have to go very far to find shit to do.  The world is your apartment (or your baby cage!), then your stoop, then your neighbors’ stoops, then your block - and the block was the kingdom, measured in manhole covers.

So yeah, stickball, touch football, jump rope, hopscotch (maybe referred to as potsy back in the day), hide and go seek (say that three times fast in a Brooklyn accent).  Some people had a strip of land behind their building where a rear tenement used to be, or a courtyard built into the middle of your new law tenement building, or just a scraggly little scrap of grass built in between of the sidewalk and the street (probably stinking of dog piss, but still useful to play marbles or jacks on).  If there was a fire hydrant around to fuck with, you can be damn sure it was broken open on the hot days.

There were horse drawn push carts in Brooklyn up into the 1950s.  Kids would follow the ice cart around, begging or stealing shards of ice off the back.  Even in New York no one worried about kids getting snatched until the 70s (rest in peace, Etan Patz), so you could roam with your gang of hoodlums pretty freely around the neighborhood (and it would be your neighborhood, you weren’t gonna be taking a 45 minute train over to Hell’s Kitchen to start shit there, you were probably gonna ethnic violence with the kids on the next block over).

So what happened after you got too old to play stickball?  Well, New York, then as now, isn’t really geared towards children.  We prefer them neither seen nor heard (side note, most New York children are fucking great at this, they are aggressively trained from a very young age to stand stoically silent on the train, sneezing and coughing into their elbows instead into the goddamn air and all over my subway pole, unlike the little bastards that get dragged here by their tourist parents.  If I’ve been on a train for 30 minutes with a gaggle of kids and I didn’t notice, they were probably born here).  So what then?   

Well, you kinda get folded into the adult world early.  Steve and Bucky would’ve been expected to work at a young age, especially if we assume Bucky only had an 8th grade education, like most Brooklynites of the time.  But even before that we could get our mob!Bucky headcanon on by giving him a little side job as a runner after school for some shady elements that hung out at the local pool hall, public house or club.  

Dances were, absolutely, very popular at the time (I had some actual photos of dances to use but the above image - which was taken in Union Square during a Navy recruitment drive - was too fucking cute not to use.  Why is there a goat on that fake battleship in the middle of Manhattan).  In Brooklyn they might’ve been less about nightclubbing and living the glamorous life, and more about keeping ethnic, religious and racial communities intact as the children of immigrant parents grew up and became more New Yorkers than anything else.  Benevolent societies were a big deal (these are like, entry points for immigrants, and serve as job placement, housing boards, language/translation services, etc.  Still a big deal today for communities that continue to have large waves of immigration), and often sponsored dances for their own particular group.

A lot of amusement in New York is structured around coping with the weather.  It’s incredibly hot in the summer, which is made worse by the stink and grease of the city and the person-high piles of garbage on the sidewalk and the humidity of the people crammed in next to you on the subway.  We escape to the beach whenever we can: mostly to Coney Island (back in Steve and Bucky’s day it was a real wonderland), but also the Far Rockaways, Jersey, and Long Island.  People swam in the East River (shudder), although I should note that the stereotype that New Yorkers can’t swim is a very longstanding one.  We go to Central Park and Prospect Park.  We sit out on stoops and watch the city drift by.  And you can be damn sure we went to a lot of baseball games. 

In the winter there’s ice skating, and - well, mostly we’re inside drinking.  New York was always a city of vice, and even back in the 30s our bars didn’t close until 4am. (Side note: if you don’t read many of the articles linked, read that last one.  It’s hilarious).  Especially for queer New Yorkers, bars were a pillar of the community, and often the only escape people had from their “straight” lives (which is mostly true about the LGBT community today as well).

Like we see in TFA, people also went to a ton of movies back in the day - small wonder considering it was cheap and temperature regulated, but we also had some crazy nice theaters.

So yeah, probably pretty similar to what New Yorkers do today - work, bitch about the weather, and drink.  (I am super not kidding about the drinking, too.  Outdoor activities are limited; bars are endless.  Write more stories about Steve and Bucky getting falling down drunk because they absolutely did.)

Comments, questions, requests?  Let me know!  

Check out my How to Brooklyn tag for more posts like this.

[hansbekhart]

How to Brooklyn (Guide for Cap Writers)

So I read this really awesome How To Hell’s Kitchen (for Daredevil writers) the other day, and I thought, goddamn, what a great idea, especially when I’ve been howling at the cruel sky for absolute ages in hopes of getting more accurately written Captain America fic!

So, like the post I linked to, I’ll start with the basics.  I have a few posts planned in the theme of How To Brooklyn for Cap Writers, and I’ll preface with the following:

I like context!  You like context too, right?  So these will be a series of posts on various topics, centered around living in New York City during the 1930s/1940s, and present day (for modern AU or post Avengers fics).  They’ll be broad in nature, because I’m writing them explicitly to give people who live elsewhere a better understanding of what it’s like to live here, and how to portray that in their stories.

As a caveat to that mission statement, let me add that there is no be-all-end-all of New York experiences.  The place is just too big and fast moving and varied for anyone not to sound like a total asshole in saying that there is, and I try to avoid sounding like an asshole if at all possible.  So this is not meant to represent all of New York, just a subsection of it that may be useful to this particular fandom.

I am more than happy to take requests!  If you would like more detail about anything, have any questions about tropes you’ve seen, logistics issues for a fic you’re writing that you haven’t been able to solve, or are just confused as to why New York seems so damn complicated, my ask box is open.  Otherwise here I am, shouting into the void, about whatever the hell I feel like writing about.

So, let’s start with:

The Basics of New York City, or What the Hell are Boroughs, Anyway?

This one is confusing, so I’ll start here.  New York City is composed of five boroughs.  Think of these boroughs as five distinct cities, which were all merged together into one massive city during the early parts of the last century.  Manhattan is an island, as is Staten Island.  Brooklyn and Queens are geographically situated on Long Island (but are culturally considered distinct).  The Bronx is the only borough that actually lives on the US mainland.  Neat!

When people talk about “New York City,” they generally mean about Manhattan.  The boroughs that are not Manhattan are called the outer boroughs, and if we’re talking about a specific area we generally just say whatever borough or neighborhood we’re talking about.  If you’re in the outer boroughs and you’re gonna go into Manhattan to work or hang out or whatever, you’re probably gonna say you gotta go into the “the city.”  You work “in the city.”  But @pluckyredhead​ already covered Manhattan (or at least the portion of it that Daredevil micromanages the shit out of), so let’s talk about Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is a large city!  It covers about 97 square miles, and makes up about 30% of New York City as a whole.  In the 2010 census we had 2,504,700 people.  If the boroughs of New York were each considered separate cities, Brooklyn would be the third most populous city in the US (following Los Angeles and Chicago).  Back in the 1930’s …. yeah, there was still a fuckton of people who lived here.  Hilariously, 60,000 more people lived here than do today, as per the last census - and a whopping 2,698,285 people lived here in 1940.  So yeah, it’s a big city, with a lot of neighborhoods.  Have a map!

Neighborhoods are entities of their own, which is why sometimes you’ll hear people talking about their neighborhood instead of Brooklyn as a whole.  They may be more or less distinct from each other depending on history, size or recent gentrification.  Pro-tip when looking at current maps: if a neighborhood in Brooklyn is tiny, it’s probably aggressively gentrified, as real estate flippers like to try and divorce the brand new condos they’ve built from a “less than glamorous” past by declaring that a brand new neighborhood has ~just sprung up~.  

Now, going by movie as well as comics canon, the neighborhood we’re mostly concerned with is Brooklyn Heights.  This was a larger neighborhood back in Steve’s day, due to decades of development chopping up neighborhoods bit by bit.  Let me guide you over to 1940s New York, which will give you a good breakdown of what the areas were like back in the day, and what they would have been called vs what they’re called now.

In the 1930s, this was an industrial neighborhood on the waterfront, and a business district further inland.  There are a few blocks with lovely brownstones, and our courthouses are in this area, but this was primarily a working class neighborhood.  Back around the turn of the century, it had been Irish working class specifically, which is an easy explanation for how Sarah Rogers ended up there.

Yes, there were docks.  Brooklyn is not 99% docks, but there were a significant number of docks in Brooklyn Heights (sigh).  The area was home to what used to be the second largest market in the world, Wallabout Market, and thus a whole host of secondary businesses to support the people that worked there: push carts, food stalls (oysters were one of the most plentiful and cheap foods available in NYC before the 1930s, when pollution and overfishing in the East River killed them off), and obviously bars, since drinking has always been our main pastime in New York.  There was also major transit hubs close by, one of which was the Sands Street Terminal, servicing the BMT Myrtle Avenue elevated line, which was demolished in 1944.  Many of the elevated lines branched out from this area.

So this was a bustling neighborhood for Steve to grow up in.  More detail on that for another time – the marvelous @a-social-construct​ is helping me put together some demographic detail for the time period, so we’ll have a lot more information for you soon regarding what sort of people lived there, whether they rented or owned, what sort of jobs they held, and about how much money you could expect to make.

Brooklyn Heights was also a queer neighborhood!  You can read more about it here (post includes some photos of doooooooocks).  Since a good chunk of the neighborhood became the Navy Yard, huge industrial buildings or was razed to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, it’s not really known as such these days.  But the tropes do rest in historical fact.

Don’t feel limited to Brooklyn Heights, however!  We have lots of neighborhoods to play with.  Canonically we see Steve living in a shitty rear tenement, and living situations like that were often short term – he would’ve moved around a lot growing up, and we have very little information on Bucky’s family, so you can basically stick them anywhere.  Consider Bucky’s father having a little trucking business in Wallabout Market, and being so successful during the boom years leading up to the Depression that he’s able to move the family out to a better neighborhood - allowing for them to meet Steve and Sarah in a tenement when Steve and Bucky were young, and then later on own a car and have the space to move Steve in with them, after his mother’s death.

Or Bucky’s family staying in Brooklyn Heights, but Steve being forced by circumstance to move frequently, from Fort Greene to Stuyvesant and back - out of the new hygenic tenements that were being built in the 1930s (more on that later), and into the shitty back tenement houses we see him living in when his mother died.  It’s a big city, live your headcanon bliss.

One last treat for this post: the New York Public Library digitized some 40,000 images of New York City, and then geotagged them on a map.  Go.  Live that bliss.

Next up, For the love’a Pete, Include the Subway In Your Fic and The Ubiquitous Tenement, or Types of Houses they Might Live In.

Comments, questions, requests?  Let me know!

[barricadeur]

I was interested in going a different route, with a young, idealist Enjolras letting himself get swept up in the first battle of the Marne. He survives and war is glorious until he's seriously injured, sometime during the 1916 flu epidemic. But damn, bisexual painter Cosette and bright-eyed American Marius sounds like something I want to read.

oh, i can definitely see young, idealistic enjolras being part of the crowds who cheered the advent of war in 1914 and leaving for the front with a song on his lips:

in fact, doesn’t the guy in the second train window from the right look sort of like tveit?

i just can’t imagine him seeing the war as “glorious” after those initial battles. despite his capacity for being terrible, there’s a deep current of love and humanism in him that would recoil from the horror of industrialized total war. we see it in his speech after he kills le cabuc: he accepts violence as a necessary tool for the cause, but he doesn’t relish it and indeed condemns himself for using it. the moral clarity he has in canon about the justness of his cause, however, would almost certainly be sorely tested by wwi. i can imagine him being grimly committed to seeing the war through (which, indeed, is basically the prevailing sentiment after the autumn of 1914), but i really don’t think he’d be that same idealist we all know and love.