Veni Vedi Vici

"History is a lie, that has been honed like a weapon by the people who have suppressed the truth." A blog solely dedicated to the iconic people and events of the past and the beautiful period dramas inspired by them.

[juliacaesaris-deactivated202109]

PERIOD DRAMA APPRECIATION WEEK | Day 1: Fav Period Drama

Four hundred years after the last king was driven from the city, the Republic of Rome rules many nations, but cannot rule itself. The city is constantly roiled by conflict between the common people and the nobility. Power is shared, and order maintained by two soldiers, old friends Gnaeus Pompey Magnus and Gaius Julius Caesar. Once, Pompey was acknowledged by all to be the greater man, but for the last eight years, while Pompey has kept the peace in Rome, Caesar has waged a war of conquest in Gaul, that has made him even more rich and popular. The balance of power is shifting, and the nobility have grown fearful - Though of noble blood himself, Caesar stands with the common people. A man like that, an aristocrat with soldiers, money and the love of the people… Might make himself king.

[city-of-ladies]

Yamamoto Yaeko - Heroic defender of Aizu

If you want to read about another heroine of this battle, you can check out my article on Nakano Takeko.

In autumn 1868 the domain of Aizu, Japan, was under attack by the imperial troops. Women within the castle actively took part in the defense. 

They prepared ammunition, cooked meals, nursed the wounded, but also risked their lives in extinguishing the fires and rushed to cover the enemy canon balls with wet mats before they exploded. Young girls also collected the enemy ammunition for the defenders to reuse it. A 60 years old woman went out of the castle to retrieve food, but encountered an enemy soldier on the way. She stabbed him with her dagger and safely went back to the castle. A female bodyguard unit also protected Matsudaira Teruhime, the lord’s sister.

Some of them also fought. A contemporary witness depicts them as ready to don their white kimono and fight naginata  in hand. An observer also said that they shared all the men’s burden, took on watches and shouldered a rifle if needed.

Among them was Yamamoto Yaeko (1845-1932), who distinguished herself through her leadership and her skills with firearms, though she wasn’t the only woman to use  them in the defense. She was the daughter of an artillery instructor and her brother Kakuma had taught her to use firearms. She was particularly competent, being able to use recent models like the Spencer rifle and had also learned to fight with a naginata. 

On October 8, Yaeko began to take part in night sorties. She had asked another female defender, Takagi Tokio, to cut her hair short like a male samurai. Armed with her Spencer rifle, she was dressed like a man and had two swords at her belt. She also commanded the men in charge of one of the cannons and didn’t abandon her post, even as cannon balls rained on the castle.

In spite of this fierce resistance, Aizu surrender on November 5, 1868. In an ultimate gesture of defiance, Teruhime ordered the women to clean the whole castle in order to humiliate the enemy as soon as they would set a foot in it and to show that the Aizu spirit was still unbroken. 

When the castle fell, Yaeko was made prisoner with the men. After being freed, she divorced from her first husband went to Kyoto to find her brother Kakuma. There, she met and married Nijima Jô, converted to Christianity and helped him to found Doshisha university. She later became a nurse for the Red Cross and served as such during the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. Another woman who fought in Aizu’s defense, Yamakawa Futaba, also became a promoter of women’s education.

(Yamamoto Yaeko in her later years, c.1929)

Today, a statue of Yamamoto Yaeko can be seen in Aizu. There’s also a TV-show based on her life: Yae no Sakura. 

Here’s the link to my Ko-Fi if you want to support me.

Bibliography:

Shiba Gorô, Remembering Aizu: the testament of Shiba Gorô

“Samurai warrior queens” documentary

Wright Diana E., “Female combatants and Japan’s Meiji restauration: the case of Aizu”

[glorianas]

Anne hasn’t always been seen as the skanky schemer. For supporters of Katherine of Aragon she was worse: a cold hearted murderess. For Catholic propagandists such as Nicholas Sander, she was a six fingered, jaundiced looking erotomaniac who slept with butlers, chaplains and half of the French Court. For Elizabethan admirers, she was the unsung heroine of the Protestant Reformation. For the Romantics, particularly in painting, she was the hapless victim of a king’s tyranny-a view that gets taken up in earliest film versions of Anne, Ernst Lubitsch’s silent Anna Boleyna and Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. In post-war movies and on television, Anne has animated by the rebellious spirit of the sixties ( Anne of the Thousand Days), the “mean girl” and “power feminist” celebration of female aggression and competitiveness of the nineties ( The Other Boleyn Girl) and the third-wave feminism of a new generation of Anne worshipers, inspired by Natalie Dormer’s brainy seductress of The Tudors to see Anne a woman too smart, sexy and strong for her own time, unfairly vilified for her defiance of sixteenth century norms of wifely obedience and silence.

Henry may have tried to write his second wife out of history but Anne Boleyn has been too strong for him, in the many guises she has assumed over the centuries.

Susan Bordo-The Creation of Anne Boleyn

[gifshistorical]

THE TUDORS (2007—2010) / VIKINGS (2013—2020) Casting by: Frank Moiselle and Nuala Moiselle

Donna Dent as the wife of Robert Aske | Rafarta Moe Dunford as Richard Leland | Aethelwulf of Wessex Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII | Bishop Heahmund Maude Hirst as Kat Ashley | Helga Lothaire Bluteau as Charles de Marillac | Charles II of Frankia

[aubrey-plaza]

PRIDE MONTH CELEBRATION WEEK 🌈 FREE CHOICE: FAVOURITE 20th CENTURY WLW AS PORTRAYED IN FILM

Billie Holiday in THE UNITED STATES vs BILLIE HOLIDAY (2021)

Billie Jean King in BATTLE OF THE SEXES (2017)

Bessie Smith in BESSIE (2015)

Lota de Macedo Soares in REACHING FOR THE MOON (2013)

Frida Kahlo in FRIDA (2002)

Virginia Woolf in VITA AND VIRGINIA (2018)

Colette in COLETTE (2018)

Josephine Baker in THE JOSEPHINE BAKER STORY (1991)

[rodgersteves]

THE CROWN S01E08 ’Pride & Joy’

[ray-marisha]

I’m willing to wait for it.

[sirgawin]

Tywysog Cymru

[elenafisher]

Black and white gifs of Josh O'Connor as Prince Charles in The Crown (2019). – Requested by Anonymous.

[me13in]

[prideandprejudice]

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[michonnegrimes]

For the fortunate among us, the danger is comfort, the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says “May he live in interesting times.” Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. And everyone here will ultimately be judged-will ultimately judge himself-on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort. – RFK, 1966

Happy birthday, Robert Francis Kennedy! {November 20, 1925}

[latristereina]

On this day in history: Juana I of Castile’s birth

Juana had been born at Toledo on November 6, 1479. Isabella had not contemplated suckling the infant herself because breastfeeding was commonly believed to delay a mother’s ability to conceive. Instead she had entrusted her baby to a wet nurse, Maria de Santistevan. Soon the child grew into a very lively, pretty, and graceful little girl who was to develop into a beautiful woman. She was, the Venetian ambassador would write, ‘very handsome.’

as soon as she was seven, her parents appointed Andres de Miranda her first tutor. It was his task to teach her Latin, a language in which she became proficient, and Catholic doctrine—essential skills that Deza also taught to Juan. Records of some of the little girl’s possessions have survived, so we know that she was given a special box in which to carry letters, a lavishly decorated book of hours, prayer books, and various Latin texts including poetry. She was taught to ride, she was taught music and dancing, she learned how to behave in public. And, just like her own mother, Juana learned housewifely tasks like baking, spinning, weaving, and sewing.

The children would have been left in no doubt that suffering was an inevitable part of life and should be borne with stoicism, even with willing acceptance. And yet their early lives were not unhappy or filled with care. There was music and dancing, and there were presents. For the Christmas of the year when Granada fell, Ferdinand had taken time off from the Reconquista to choose dolls to delight his daughters. The little girls were even given dolls’ clothes in which to dress them. A much-cherished gift for the Catholic Monarchs’ son, Juan, was the chess set that he kept in his bathroom. And the children were often allowed the sweetmeats they so clearly relished; they could gorge on rose-flavored syrup, on quince jelly, on aniseed balls, on lemon blossom candy. And their clothes were splendid too, for upon such matters were royal houses judged. Cloth from Flanders and from England was imported; there were velvets and silks; there were pretty ribbons; there was coral; there were hoops for farthingales; there were hats; there were fur-lined cloaks. Even the mules that they rode were equipped with silk and brocade to adorn saddles and girths. Every luxury that money could buy was lavished upon the children. An awareness of human tribulation and the importance of repentance and redemption did not preclude parental indulgence.

- Julia Fox, Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile

[godsavethefrenchqueen]

Tribulation, first makes you realise who you are.

Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola)

[annesnevilles]

Blanche of Lancaster was the oft-forgotten first wife of John of Gaunt and it was through their marriage that he became the Duke of Lancaster. Not much is known of Blanche’s life and history tends to favor Katherine Swynford, the governess of her children, John’s mistress and eventual third wife. The affair did not begin until after Blanche’s early death, possibly of plague but more likely of complications in childbirth, and evidence suggests that the union was a happy one as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess may have been commissioned by John to commemorate her passing. The poems central themes of devotion and grief along with John’s choice to be buried beside the late duchess, their effigy’s clasping hands, supports the theory of a harmonious union and lead me to imagine Blanche as a ghostly presence in John’s life, forever young and fair and extensively mourned. 

[thedaughtersofthetsar]

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia

[edwardslovelyelizabeth]

Rebecca Ferguson as Elizabeth Woodville in “The White Queen” (2013)