If you're interested in native plants or gardening, Homegrown National Park, a very cool organization, is currently running an auction to raise money. Lots of awesome offerings!
secure.qgiv.com/event/hnpauc...
Extremely cool article about Indian tourists in Egypt almost 2,000 years ago!
www.thehindu.com/news/nationa...
Tomorrow! In Brooklyn in person! Come for the end of Black history month!
brooklynbrainery.com/courses/the-...
Johannesburg’s Nyamakop Studios turns African artifact repatriation into a bold heist game.
Protagonist Nomali and a crew of ordinary citizens reclaim 70 real-life artifacts taken during the colonial era.
The 30-person dev team includes people from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania.
I am only from the Modern region, which is much less exciting, but I can promise to send lots of gifts.
Anybody else still playing Pokemon Go? There's a new friending event, and my code is 123456789101!
I want the complete Vivillion set, so I'm especially desperate for people from Tundra (Scandinavia, Japan), Meadow (France, Italy), Sandstorm (Middle East), Savanna (Brazil, Australia) or Ocean!
A list of incredible gifts for archaeologists and historians.
(I desperately want the garum pencil bag, but what would I do with a pencil bag?)
pasts-imperfect.ghost.io/pasts-imperf...
Just want to point out that both the Guardian and the BBC used "man" in their coverage of this research today.
If you want science news that doesn't employ anachronistically gendered language, be sure to read us at @livescience.com. 😘
SAME.
14/
I still have 50+ pages to go before finishing, so future updates may be coming!
Screenshot of text. It reads "...expansion of the empire remained under the leadership and governance of individuals who shared a common vision of colonialism, British maritime supremacy, and military administration. Both father and son Elgin also happened to be Freemasons. Thomas Bruce was initiated into the Freemasons in 1819 and was exalted into the Royal Arch and held the rank of Grand Zerubbabel from 1827 until 1835. And both served as Earl of Elgin, a title in the peerage created....". The line about Freemasons is highlighted.
14/
Man, what was going on in that family?
Pezzullo has the answer. Can you guess it?
13/
To say one good thing for this book, I learned that James Bruce, leader of British forces during the Opium Wars and the man who actually ordered the destruction/looting of the Summer Palace, was the 8th Earl of Elgin, aka the son of the guy who stole the Parthenon marbles from Greece.
12/
Instead, Pezzullo goes for the astonishing "Certainly, there was plenty of arrogance and cultural insensitivity on both sides".
11/
Not that I mean to defend Imperial Japan's extremely abundant racism! But compare that screenshot to the section on British and French looting during the Opium Wars, during which the word 'racism' or what Victorian schools taught about Chinese people, somehow manages not to come up.
![Screenshot of text. It reads "Some historians have posited that the Japanese belief in their own racial and cultural superiority allowed the invaders to justify their treatment of Chinese people. Iris Chang has written that, 'Teachers [in the 1930s] instilled in boys hatred and contempt for the Chinese people, preparing them psychologically for a future invasion of the Chinese mainland'."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:o67ha6myyqnx4ndwx2yeoe6w/bafkreidtzgux4snxzw4ohff2vgdl73glbfw7dq4t6cyrimsktk2z7t3oky@jpeg)
Screenshot of text. It reads "Some historians have posited that the Japanese belief in their own racial and cultural superiority allowed the invaders to justify their treatment of Chinese people. Iris Chang has written that, 'Teachers [in the 1930s] instilled in boys hatred and contempt for the Chinese people, preparing them psychologically for a future invasion of the Chinese mainland'."
10/
This one is maybe petty to complain about, given some of the previous wild statements from this book, but Pezzullo's description of the Japanese attitude during the Nanking Massacre struck me as odd.
Yes! I love that story. I mean, maybe 'love' isn't the right word, but it so perfectly captures everything about the Opium Wars that if it was fiction I'd say the author was being over-the-top
Screenshot of text that reads "If the British club was, in the words of George Orwell, the 'real seat of British power', the Masonic Hall was its dark hidden center, where the ideals of power, money, and control were enshrined and promoted. And its members pledged loyalty to one another over any other authority, including the British government, Anglican Church,"
9/
Anyway, you know how the British and other Western trading powers took over Shanghai in the early 1900s? That was also the fault of Freemasonry.
A larger screenshot that continues the text from the previous photo. The next paragraphs read "Crime journalist Eamon Dillon describes the Travellers in his book Gypsy Empire, as 'willing to do business on any continent, moving quickly from one deal to the next, following the trail of euros, dollars, or pounds sterling.' Detective Superintendent Adrian Green and his team of detectives learned that Lee Wildman and Adrian Stanton – the two thieves they had taken into custody for the Durham University's Oriental Museum heist – were not only Travellers, they were also members of a Traveller criminal gang named the Rathkeale Rovers."
8/
And here's the rest of the page.
My thoughts: "Oh ....he's just going for straight-up racism, huh. Let me reread this page to check – nope, that's actually happening. Wow."
A screenshot that continues the text from the previous photo. The newly revealed sentence reads "Like the Romani and other groups that live on the margins of society, they have a history of involvement in scams, grifts, crime, and shady business deals."
7/
This is the next sentence.
My thoughts: "Okay, he's going to talk about how groups pushed out of mainstream society and refused access to legal avenues of success often turn to illegal means, right, right."
Screenshot of text in a book. It reads ".... While they account for 0.7 percent of the country's population, they make up 10 percent of the general prison population."
6/
A chapter later, when discussing two Irish Travellers who were arrested after stealing Chinese artifacts from a museum in England in 2012, I got to this sentence.
My thoughts: "All right, he's going to talk about the role of racism in Ireland and how it affects the Traveller population."
I know, right?
5/
...yup, Freemasonry. Definitely the most likely cause of the Opium Wars.
There's so many possibal answers: capitalism? racism? the specific form of mercantilism that supported early multinational corporations like the EIC, VOC, Royal African Company? a wave of new forms of evangelical Christianity?
Readers, Pezzullo came up with an answer I had never before considered.
3/ 20 pages (only 20 pages!!) in, I hit this line. An interesting question, to be sure! What DID cause the East India Company to be so indifferent to the moral horror of deliberately addicting millions of Chinese people to opium?
2/ Sounded interesting! I teach about the Opium Wars, so I'm always interested in reading more about it.
1/? I picked up this book at the library a few weeks ago, because it claimed that a recent spate of burglaries of Chinese artifacts might be connected to attempts to recover objects looted during the Opium Wars.
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gr...
In two weeks! It'll be the 252nd anniversary, a very important and significant number. Also, hey, our country is falling apart; it's a good time to remember some of the stuff happenign when it began.
brooklynbrainery.com/courses/the-...
My wife bought me a hat that says Aspiring Rat King and today someone asked me if that was a metal band.
Friends, if you know me you know I love a chance to make up some shit.
Anyway, they were big in Slovakia around 93, 94, right as the post-communist split was happening.
I am so sorry.
As someone who once did stand-up about elephant vaginas, I feel obliged to reblog this amazing thread.
Also: hippos are crazy, y'all.
