#history nerd

[rosieandthemoon]

In the Garden of Monsters, Italy

[202crowqueen]

If you had to choose one president from history to be resurrected and take over the presidency who would you choose? Why? And what do you think he would do?

Only rules are that the president must be from before the 2000s election year and had held office for at least half a term (two years)

(So no William Henry Harrison)

The parties switched their positions in the mid 1900s so the party of chosen president would switch (republicans will become democratic and vice versa)

So who do you choose?

[norsesagas]

[infiniteglitterfall]

People talk about how the Jewish population of the world is still smaller today than it was in 1939.

The 1948-49 American Jewish Year Book says that there were an estimated 16,633,675 Jews on earth in 1939. (Yes, "estimated!")

And that a decade later -- three years after the Holocaust killed nearly 6,000,000 Jews -- there were 11,373,350.

Today, there are (an estimated) 15,736,800.

(It can be higher, depending on how you count it. But this is the number that seems consistent with how the American Jewish Year Book was counting it.)

But it occurred to me recently that that doesn't tell the whole story.

Because today, 0.02% of the world is Jewish. (Really, 0.019%.) But I bet it was different back then.

How different? And different how?

Turns out there are 8 billion people alive today. But there were a little more than 2 billion back then.

16,633,675 divided by 2,300,000,000 is freaking 0.72%.

0.72% of the world was Jewish in 1939. That's almost 300% more than 0.19%?

Even after the Holocaust, 0.49% of the world was Jewish.

Those are still tiny percentages.

But the effect of the Holocaust, the massive ethnic cleansing of Jews across the MENA region after it, and the massive pogroms killing up to 250,000 other Jews before it, has been that the actual proportion of the world that's Jewish plummeted by 75%.

We went from 0.72% of the world to 0.19% just during the last 80 years of all that.

And because it was literally over 50 years of genocides and ethnic cleansings all over the place, we also went from vibrant Jewish communities with thousands of years of history across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, to being almost entirely concentrated in the United States and Israel.

Little bit more in Canada and Australia, neither of whom seem to be handling that fact super-well. And smatterings in many other places.

It's just really fucking wild to me.

Not only that this is true. But that I had to put these pieces together myself, from everything I was learning by studying recent Jewish history.

It's very fucking weird, as an American, to live with the incredible contrast of knowledge and history, versus the overwhelming mainstream leftist message that Jews are a white European oppressor group.

[sculpturedepoet]

New book just came in and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy for months!

[beccawise7]

The world will be forever indebted to the brave men who fought and altered the course of History. May they never be forgotten. 🙏

~beccawise💜🖤

[snowiebunni2422]

Omg I can't even begin to explain the obsession i have with this man😭