History

Should have doubled tapped Scalise

Hexbears. I need your help. I have a term paper that I need a topic for. Here's the rub: It's for US history, and the topic has to be US history before 1893. I wanted to write about labor unions, which took off in the US around the 1870s, but the real "history" of organized labor in the US takes place well past 1893. So the professor will very likely reject that.

I'm not a history person. I know, I know "those who don't learn from the past..." I don't want to write about the American civil war and all that shit though. It's been done to death. Any ideas on a topic I could pick that would be more interesting and more left-leaning?

Not asking for any help writing it. I just need some help picking a topic that would be interesting to research.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/29784465

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/29784311

The Theatre Museum is a small museum located in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. I have had the pleasure to work with them on organizing their collection of tent theatre records and artifacts, as well as create a few videos for them. Super neat musuem with an incredibly unique collection.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1686601

Chipko movement (literally "hugging movement")

Bishnoi environmentalism

I was prompted to ask this question by listening to Season 3 of the Blowback podcast (fantastic podcast btw, I can’t believe I started listening to it until now), which is focused on the Korean War. One thing that stuck out to me was how reluctant Stalin was to give the DPRK Soviet support; he was possibly even willing to let the American occupiers be neighbors with the USSR if it meant he didn’t have to fight the US. He seemed to genuinely think he could engage in compromise with America.

This Western-friendly behavior from Stalin’s government wasn’t particularly new either. Prior to WWII, he reached out to the Brits/French/US to form a pact against Hitler, was rejected, and of course the Munich agreement followed and the Soviets settled with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

It is said Stalin greatly admired Roosevelt, and apparently even Churchill. After WWII, he and the US were able to agree on Austria being a neutral state, and Stalin really wanted a similarly neutral, unified Germany as well (this of course, the US would reject).

So that’s Stalin—genuinely seemed to think the West would act in good faith, but continuously got burned.

Fast-forward to the ‘90s, when much of the Russian/Soviet populace (especially Gorbachev) thought they too would get a liberalized, social-democracy with strong welfare and cheap commodities like Western Europe. Instead, Western financiers gutted their country and basically started the apocalypse until Putin comes along and stabilizes things.

But then Putin asks Bill Clinton if they can join NATO, gets burned again. Even several years ago, the Russians seemed to think the West would uphold their end of the Minsk 2 agreement, and now we have Merkel on tape saying that was never going to be the case. Only with the invasion of Ukraine does it seem like Russia has finally gotten the memo that the West will never act towards them in good faith (and even then, I’m not sure if that sentiment is resolute).

Compare this with other independent non-Western nations, such as China, the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Burkina Faso under Traoré, etc. These nations exist on a spectrum, with the DPRK or Yemen being openly hostile towards NATO while China is eager to do business (but doesn’t seem to be under any illusion that it will get to join The Big Club).

So TLDR: it seems to me the Soviets/Russians have constantly engaged with the West in good faith, but always get burned. This stands in contrast to other independent countries which have always seemed much more cynical. Is it due to their relative proximity to whiteness? A lack of direct colonization? Why have the Russians constantly thought they would ever be considered equal partners with the West?

It's really hard to find non Western sources about the Berlin Wall

I wonder how that shit plays out.

tooze is arguing with someone (?), that holocaust was not perfected death machine where money is not an issue and full strength of state is absorbed by it, but rather the opposite - afterthought in monetary sense for nazi germany, functional for its purpose and no more.

The term says it all: human zoos.

Strange as it may seem, human beings — largely Indigenous people from across the globe — were recruited to perform in ethnographic displays, also called human zoos, from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, mostly in Europe and the United States.

It's estimated that 60,000 people were trafficked in this global trade — including three documented Aboriginal groups: three Badtjala people from K'gari in south-eastern Queensland in 1882, and eight Bwgcolman or Manbarra-speaking people from Palm and Hinchinbrook Islands in north Queensland in 1883, who were followed by nine of their compatriots in 1894.

There was an appetite to see Indigenous people in their "natural state" and, as popular demand surged, the staging of human zoos grew into more exaggerated displays.

Some featured reconstructions of housing, enclosures and other encampments with domesticated animals tended by familial groups of Indigenous people in "traditional" clothing.

At the peak of these degrading spectacles, entire "villages" were constructed in some of Europe's biggest zoological gardens — including the Tierpark in Hamburg owned by exotic animal trader Carl Hagenbeck, as well as zoos in Dresden, Berlin, and Basel in Switzerland.

The phenomenon is often attributed to Hagenbeck, who, according to the records kept by Dresden Zoo, was the impresario behind the first documented exhibition of Aboriginal people in Germany in 1882 — that of the three people from K'gari.

Full Article

another interview, think this time more detailed, with author of "Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade"

this is interesting tidbit:

But also, the Solidarity Center has been implicated in trying to aid the US government’s attempts to overthrow Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as recently as 2014, for example, and it stepped up involvement in the Middle East after George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. So sometimes the Solidarity Center’s priorities have seemed to mirror or follow the US government’s foreign policy priorities. And again, Solidarity Center is not funded or controlled by workers. It’s funded by the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. Right now, Trump and Elon Musk have been dismembering USAID and also putting a stop on the funds that go through NED.

What I’ve heard recently is that Solidarity Center is laying off lots of its staff, furloughing people — basically all but shutting down and maintaining a skeleton crew in its DC headquarters. So what does this mean for the AFL-CIO? The AFL-CIO has been speaking out against a lot of what Musk has been doing to the federal workforce. But it hasn’t been protesting about how this is affecting the Solidarity Center. The fact that Solidarity Center has to basically shut down because of Musk’s attacks on the federal government shows that the Solidarity Center is an arm of the federal government, more so than of the labor movement.

Archive

In researching Cummings’ life for my book about gun culture and capitalism in Cold War America, I often encountered a rumor: Interarms, the business that Cummings founded in 1954 and built into the world’s largest private arms dealer in just a few short years, began as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. People interested in the who and why of the JFK assassination might have found the March release underwhelming, but for me, one document seems to offer confirmation of decades of historical hearsay: The CIA created and owned America’s largest gun distributor.

. . .

Summarizing Cummings’ file, the previously released redacted version of the document states that “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the [redacted] International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco.” In the newly released, unredacted version, it reads: “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the CIA-owned companies known as International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco” (emphasis mine).

In other words, the CIA “owned” the country’s largest importer and distributor of guns, the company that would spearhead a remarkable boom in gun ownership in the United States in the decade and a half before the Gun Control Act iced war-surplus imports.

. . .

Speak about destruction:

Scholars have long written of a phenomenon called “blowback” to describe what happens when the CIA’s international meddling leads to unexpected, and often disastrous, long-term consequences—think of U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for instance, eventually giving rise to al-Qaida. What would it mean to add “founded the country’s largest gun distributor” to the Blowback Hall of Fame?

Damn this is a good video! It's amazing how clear and cogent materialist history is compared to liberal, idealist history. This video lays out the way the transition to capitalism was disastrous for the peasantry, who resisted proletarianization at every step of the way. It also gives a lot of attention to capitalism's invention of modern gender roles as means of economic warfare against women. It's class conflict all the way down.

I really strongly recommend you take the time to give this a watch, it's good shit.

As the Temperature Dropped: A Cold War Prelude in Poetic Dissent

This is a poetic deep-dive into the final breath of FDR and the quiet ignition of the Cold War. Written like a eulogy, a reckoning, and a cinematic spiral—because that’s how history really felt.

“The country was exhausted—but it wasn’t done.

And then, just past noon on April 12, 1945, the center of it all collapsed.”

This piece traces propaganda, power, fear, and fire—from Warm Springs to the Soviet clapback.

Printable & shareable PDF available because I believe in free education.

Check out my Ko-Fi shop for the full ebook and other works if you’d like to support what I’m doing:

https://ko-fi.com/post/As-The-Temperature-Dropped-The-Prelude-to-the-Col-O5O51F32QL

Subject Index: FDR’s death, Cold War origins, U.S.–Soviet relations, Truman’s presidency, wartime propaganda, the Manhattan Project, American exceptionalism, post-war power shifts, historical erasure, narrative dissent, poetic political commentary.

Germany has been defeated, but not yet occupied. While the Red Army is already on the Oder, the Allies in the West are making slow progress. Only when Cologne is conquered and the bridge at Remagen falls into the hands of the Americans does the Wehrmacht’s will to defend itself weaken. Now American camera teams are also allowed into the areas liberated by the Nazis. The first destination is the bridge at Remagen, which has already become a legend. The evacuated inhabitants of Cologne return to their destroyed city. Impressive colour photographs show the faces of the defeated. Other teams of the “Special Film Project 186” and the Hollywood director George Stevens follow the US troops on their way through the Westerwald towards Thuringia.

Some really neat footage I don't think I've seen before.

edit: (CW: The Holocaust) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFjgzYuWgFk This channel also has a documentary from the same director which follows the liberation of Dachau in colour.

Nuremberg, Hitler’s “city of the Reich Party Rallies” has capitulated after a bloody house battle. At the end of April, the city and its surroundings are a preferred operational area for the camera teams of the “Special Film Project 186”. Meanwhile, Hollywood director George Stevens is heading south. In Dachau concentration camp, his team documents the horrors of National Socialist extermination policies. They also film one of the evacuation transports from the death camps in the East. Stevens: “It was as if we were walking through Dante’s visions of hell”. At the beginning of May the photojournalists reach Obersalzberg, Hitler’s private refuge in the Alps.

The End of the War in Colour: Episode IV - Visions of Hell / Directed by Michael Kloft

On 24 January 1556, Humayun, with his arms full of books, was descending the staircase from his library Sher Mandal when the muezzin announced the Azaan (the call to prayer). It was his habit, wherever and whenever he heard the summons, to bow his knee in holy reverence. Trying to kneel, he caught his foot in his robe, slipped down several steps and hit his temple on a rugged stone edge. He died three days later.[51] His body was laid to rest in Purana Quila initially, but, because of an attack by Hemu on Delhi and the capture of Purana Qila, Humayun's body was exhumed by the fleeing army and transferred to Kalanaur in Punjab where Akbar was crowned. After young Mughal emperor Akbar defeated and killed Hemu in the Second Battle of Panipat. Humayun's body was buried in Humayun's Tomb in Delhi the first very grand garden tomb in Mughal architecture, setting the precedent later followed by the Taj Mahal and many other Indian monuments. It was commissioned by his favorite and devoted chief wife, Bega Begum.