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Forgotten History

Some places are at least making a point of highlighting that terrible things happened there. It's not much, but it's something.
What happened in central FL is that the Klan said "no, we're not letting any black people vote. You're on the rolls? No, you aren't", and poll-watched with guns. A black guy showed up armed to attempt to exercise said rights, and so they killed him and promptly massacred/burned down the houses of all the black people in the town.
The period newspaper article, however, said "we call that committing suicide in these parts". The town made a day recently to remember the massacre victims.
It bothers me how proud some Americans are about denying that there's anything wrong with this or that it has effects or is worth knowing. We're not at all based on actually representing the constituency.
 
Not sure if this fits here, feel free to relocate if there is s more suitable thread.

The repatriation of the remains (a single tooth) of Congoese independace hero Patrice Lumumba, has been delayed by covid.

"The return of the remains of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba has been delayed by a new wave of Covid-19.

Tributes had been planned from 21 June, starting with the return of what are believed to be his only remains - a tooth - from Belgium.

"We have to prioritise the health of our compatriots," President Félix Tshisekedi said.

He said the country's hospitals were full and both cases and deaths were rising "exponentially"."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57459055
 
I'm really feeling our impending departure. Saigon has been good to us, mostly, and it is breaking my heart as I run around on the final errands before we depart, knowing that it is going to be a long time before I get to ride or walk these streets again. Here's a picture that sums up the place for me - older, more decrepit architecture slap-bang alongside modern shopping malls. I didn't take this by accident, though. There's a particular resonance to me at the moment.

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It's not exactly forgotten history, although the paean to Capitalism right next door in a way suggests that it is. But you'll know it when you see it. Let's zoom in.

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It's impossible to get the same angle that it's famous from, given the redevelopment since*. I managed to get a slightly different view, here:

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I've always found the American War to be a very reductive prism through which to view this country. I got dragged off to the Cu Chi tunnels by my father-in-law, but it's a very sanitised experience these days: the tunnels are replicas, but upsized to fit Western frames. We never did go to the War Remnants museum, But these past few days, the idea of catching one of the last flights out of Saigon, under miserable circumstances, has set certain resonances in motion. Now do you recognise the building?
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*ETA: actually, you almost certainly can replicate the view from within the glossy shopping mall, provided there are windows facing out that way. But the resonance didn't hit before, so it never occurred to me to try, and now Saigon is under strict lockdown, so the malls are shut. You can tell by looking at the empty roads. This is downtown Saigon, and in normal times you can't get a fag paper between the motorbikes.
 
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In 82 BC, the dictator Sulla executed scholar-politician Quintus Valerius Soranus for publicly revealing the secret true name of Rome. Wait, there was a secret true name of Rome? Apparently yes, and it had to never be revealed, lest Rome’s enemies learn it and gain spiritual power over the city. The execution must have worked, because scholars today still don’t know what Rome’s secret true name was. Irresponsible speculation includes Maia (via astronomical correspondence), Amor (via wordplay), Valentia (via multilingual pun), and Hirpa (via a long chain of scholarly/historical speculation).

From astralcodexten.
 
An interesting tale, nazis in the U.S. Army.

Dale Maple helped two German POWs escape, plotted to fight against the U.S., and faced a grim reckoning.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS Dale H. Maple and his two companions completed the first leg of their audacious journey when they crossed the border into Mexico on February 18, 1944. Three days earlier, they had left an army base in Colorado and driven south on a 500-mile trip plagued by flat tires and mechanical breakdowns, but they still had a long way to go.

In Mexico, the trio encountered an inquisitive customs officer. When Maple’s answers didn’t satisfy the officer, he called in American officials, who determined that these were no ordinary travelers. Maple was a U.S. Army deserter, the other two were escaped German prisoners of war, and the three of them were on their way to Germany. The bizarre story of who they were, how they had reached Mexico, and what they ultimately planned to do led to a series of shocking revelations. Most shocking was that Maple was part of a vigorous Nazi insurgency inside the U.S. Army and the key plotter in a grand scheme to fight on behalf of Germany—an act that would come within a hair’s breadth of costing Maple his life.

BORN IN SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, in 1920, Maple had a knack for drawing attention. After his parents bought him a piano when he was 5, he became a musical prodigy, performing works by Beethoven and Chopin at public recitals. With an IQ of 152, he was the top student at San Diego High School, graduating first in a class of 585 in June 1937 and winning a scholarship to Harvard. In college, Maple excelled in foreign languages, easily learning to speak most European languages and majoring in German—his favorite. He showed a keen interest in Germany, a curious fixation as his family was of Irish and English stock. He was also a member of Harvard’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Standing 5 foot 10 and weighing 160 pounds, he was described as a “quick-witted young man with a ruddy face and ready grin.” ...

https://www.historynet.com/nazi-sympathizer-in-the-u-s-army.htm
 
7-up used to contain a good amount of lithium and was marketed as a patent medicine. It had limited impact before lithiated drinks were banned.
 
7-up used to contain a good amount of lithium and was marketed as a patent medicine. It had limited impact before lithiated drinks were banned.
Is that why it had 'up' in the name?
It was originally called 'Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda'.
 
Largely forgotten by anyone under 40 but discussed in the WW2 Podcast episode 146, the Stop Lines of Britain during WW2. Stop Lines were the physical defenses built into the landscape to fight the Germans should they have invaded.

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ww2-podcast-angus-wallace-SXCEVT7KGrg/

Always wondered what that weird wall was for inside a pillbox when I was a kid. The Anti-ricochet wall in the type 22 pillbox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_hardened_field_defences_of_World_War_II


A really good episode on a consistently good podcast.
 
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Now her memories will be preserved.

A mystery 19th-Century botanist has been found, thanks to sleuthing work by the public.

Isabella Anne Allen had been known only by the secrets she left behind, tucked between the pages of an old book. But following an appeal for information, on the BBC News website, she has now been traced to the village of Madresfield, Worcestershire.

Her story came to light when clues such as pressed flowers, poems and doodles were found inside The English Flora. Donated to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) decades ago, the botanical text was rediscovered by staff sorting through boxes ahead of a move to a new library.
And libraries and exhibitions head Fiona Davison said the clues within revealed its original owner "would have been a figure in the local society and in public".

"She is a gardener as well as a botanist - it has become part and parcel of being an intelligent, well-to-do, well respected pillar of the community," she said. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57847727
 
An interesting discussion on the economic downfall of Portugal. From the comments:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/07/why-did-portugal-decline.html

Minoa was a limited civilization on a small island. When a near by island had a massive eruption, the tsunami etc affected the entire islands.

Portugal had an earthquake that damaged the capital. Very sad for them. Portugal was massively bigger. The disaster was localized. The Portuguese Empire stretched all around the world - virtually none of it outside Portugal itself was affected.

By all means let's talking about the earthquake. London's fire gave Penn a chance to put up some nice buildings. It did not derail the British Empire.
 
An interesting discussion on the economic downfall of Portugal. From the comments:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/07/why-did-portugal-decline.html

Minoa was a limited civilization on a small island. When a near by island had a massive eruption, the tsunami etc affected the entire islands.

Portugal had an earthquake that damaged the capital. Very sad for them. Portugal was massively bigger. The disaster was localized. The Portuguese Empire stretched all around the world - virtually none of it outside Portugal itself was affected.

By all means let's talking about the earthquake. London's fire gave Penn a chance to put up some nice buildings. It did not derail the British Empire.
An earthquake definitely does have longer-lasting consequences.
 
https://nos.nl/artikel/2392881-nazi-attributen-gevonden-in-ondergelopen-duits-huis
https://www.bild.de/regional/ruhrge...borgene-nazi-sammlung-frei-77274416.bild.html

A large quantity of Nazi attributes has been found in a house in the German city of Hagen, which was flooded during last month's floods. They were hidden behind a wall that had become soaked, Bild newspaper reports.

The occupant of the house wanted to clean up the mess after the flood. A cousin of hers, who came to help, removed the soggy wall and saw a newspaper from 1940 in a hole. When he took the paper away, the Nazi stuff came out.

The finder is a history teacher himself. He had goosebumps:
They included a painting of Adolf Hitler, metal eagles with swastikas, gas masks and a revolver.

The resident called in the city archives to come and look at the stuff. According to the archivist, during the Second World War a division of the National Socialist NSDAP was in the house and the Nazi attributes were hidden behind the wall at the end of the war.
 
Sounds like an interesting read.

ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS
The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

By Rebecca Donner

It was not only her Americanness that made Mildred Harnack an unlikely member of the German resistance. Bookish and sometimes shy, she expressed her bravery through tenacity rather than swagger. It is difficult to imagine who might play her in a movie. As she gathered intelligence and raised awareness of Nazi crimes, she worried that she was not working on her dissertation on English literature. The Nazi interrogator assigned to crack down on the resistance circle she organized with her husband was surprised by what he found. “It would make a wonderful novel,” he told a collaborator of Harnack’s while deciding the man’s punishment, “if it weren’t so sad.”

“All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” by Rebecca Donner, presents itself as a biography of Harnack, Donner’s great-great-aunt, an American woman executed in 1943 for being a member of the German resistance to the Nazis during World War II. But with an absence of evidence — Harnack destroyed her papers — the book becomes something different: a study of what impels people to act for what they believe. To be a good person. To do the right thing. Who, among us, would not state these as our goals?

Harnack and her husband, Arvid Harnack, passed out pamphlets, gathered intelligence and helped Jews escape. Donner describes how members of the resistance spread information about Nazi crimes hidden in booklets with innocent names like “The Proper Care of Cactus Plants.” A book called “Skiing in the Black Forest” gathered speeches by left-wing politicians. Another, “Home Heating by Electricity,” argued that the Nazis were responsible for the Reichstag fire.

Between 1932 and 1942, Mildred and her collaborators built a network of objectors in Berlin who hoped to stop Nazi power. Idealistic and passionate, she lived her life according to her principles. Her marriage to Arvid, a German she met while a student at the University of Wisconsin, also led her to act. Arvid was born into a family of well-known scholars and theologians, many of whom were involved in the resistance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor hanged in 1945 for his plot to overthrow Hitler, was a cousin. ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/...uent-troubles-of-our-days-rebecca-donner.html
 
The German version below us much better. But I could not find a better text in English. The Wallenstein horoscope by Johannes Kepler:

Through an intermediary, Wallenstein first asked Kepler to do his horoscope in 1608. While this was intended to be anonymous, it seems Kepler guessed whom it was for. Kepler described the subject as an “alert, quick and industrious” man who has a “great thirst for glory and strives for temporal honors and power, by which he would make a great many dangerous, public and concealed enemies for himself but mostly he would overcome and conquer these.”

From this good article:
http://magicbohemia.magic-realist.com/2018/02/19/the-horoscopes-of-albrecht-von-wallenstein/

From the German book by Herfried Munkler:

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And Reg Varney was the first civilian to use a cash machine in the UK...

His real-life persona was totally different from his saucy, womanising character Stan Butler in On the Buses.
His wife Lilian's death in 2002 ended a remarkable 63 years of marriage.
As well as being a well-loved comedy actor and the first person officially to use a cashpoint machine in the UK, Varney was also a talented landscape artist and originals and signed prints, sell for substantial amounts now:

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