@flyingfish1 / flyingfish1.tumblr.com
If you were the handsome blonde flag bearer in yellow at the Battle of Prestonpans Jacobites Rising of 1745 I’m sorry if I knew you and didn’t recognise you if that’s why you kept staring at me, I didn’t want to wave during the battle and look like a fool
THIS WAS A REENACTMENT
The Oakland Post Enquirer, California, January 13, 1938
"Salty, mascot of the San Diego Coast Guard Air Station, introduced her kittens to the dramatic side of the sea-serve life early." 1945. Source.
Boy with cat, 1949. Source.
tfw you see some stupid post that paints medieval peasants eating just plain grey porridge and acting as if cheese, butter or meat was too exotic or expensive for them, and have to use all your inner strength to not just reblog it with an angry rant and throwing hands with people. so i will just post the angry rant here
no, medieval people did not only eat grey porridge with no herbs or spices, they had a great variety of vegetables we dont even have anymore, grains and dairy products, not to mention fruits and meats, all seasonal and changing with the time of the year. no, medieval food was not just tasteless, maybe this will surprise some of you but you can make tasty food without excessive spice use, and can use a variety of good tasting herbs. if you'd ever tried to cook some medieval recipes you would know that. medieval people needed a lot of energy for their work, if they would only eat fucking porridge all of the time they would get scurvy and die before they could even built a civilisation. they had something called 'pottage' which was called that because it was cooked in one pot. you could leave the pot on the fire and go about your day, doing stuff and come back to a cooked meal. they put in what was available that time of the year, together with grains, peas, herbs, meat etc etc. again, if you would try to make it, like i have with my reenactment friends, it can actually be really good and diverse.
dont confuse medieval peasants with poor people in victorian england. dont think that TV shows what it was really like. dont think that dirty grey dressed people covered in filth were how the people looked like.
they made use of everything. too poor to buy proper meat? buy a sheeps head and cook it. they ate nettle and other plants we consider weeds now. they foraged and made use of what they found. hell, there are medieval cook books!
most rural people had animals, they had chickens (eggs), goats (milk and dairy), cows (milk and dairy), sheep (milk and dairy) and pigs (meat machine), and after butchering they used ALL THE PARTS of the animal. you know how much meat you can get out of a pig, even the smaller medieval breeds? the answer is a lot
if you had the space you always had a vegetable garden. there are ways to make sure you have something growing there every time of the year. as i said they had a variety of vegetables we dont have anymore due to how farming evolved. you smoked pork in the chimney, stored apples in the dry places in your house, had a grain chest. people could go to the market to buy fish and meat, both fresh and dried/smoked. they had ale, beer and wine, that was not a luxury that was a staple part of their diet.
this post ended once again up being longer than i planned, but please for the love of the gods, just actually educate yourself on this stuff and dont just say stupid wrong shit, takk
As this post is making the rounds again, let me just add some medieval cook books for all of you!
Here is a great collection of information about medieval cook books from all over europe with links! Here is another simple summary and some cook book links from the british library!
Here two books that I have myself and found great, and am soon going to try to remake some dishes:
It is also important to note that of course the food was VERY dependent on where you were living! Like wine and grapes were super normal every day food and drink for people where i come from (Vienna) where most of the economy was built on wine and the city (that is in a basin surrounded by low hills) is surrounded by massive wineyards, even today, going back over 1000 years. Where I live now (Norway) life and diet was fundamentally different! The ground is frozen most of the year, it is always cold, but you have a lot of access to fish (no wonder they went raiding).
To the many people on the notes asking over and over again (even though I answered it already) about the vegetables we don't have anymore:
Every modern vegetable used to look quite different, and we used to have a lot more variety of all of it. E.g. carrots: you are probably most familiar with the orange one, but that is just one vaeiation. Even today we have yellow and purple carrots, and back in the medieval period they had even more variants. There are a lot of things, especially salads that have grown 'out of fashion' and thus are not cultivated anymore like they used to be. There are a lot of kinds of peas dying out that used to be an important crop before we had potatoes in europe. Grains used to look very different (think of grain fields as high as corn fields). A lot of foods that need to be foraged also are out of fashion, sadly.
But I am happy so many people agree, and so many people enjoy learning how medieval food was really like instead of buying into hollywood/victorian era propaganda :D
I would also like to recommend Tasting History's Medieval & Renaissance Recipes playlist. A lot of good examples there of how medieval people used spices in their dishes.
That’s how they plugged it when sliced bread first went on sale, 96 years ago today.
“Excuse this blot but a bee scared me just then.”
An amazing explanation for smudged ink I came across in an October 1, 1897 letter from Rachel (a teenage girl in finishing school in Philadelphia) to her cousin Jack at Yale.
If you want a good object lesson about what we can and can't know about the past, we don't know Ea-Nasir was a dishonest merchant selling shoddy goods.
What we know is we have found a cache of complaint tablets about him selling low quality copper as high quality, in a site that was probably his own residence. We know multiple people complained he was a cheat. It's entirely possible they were right. It's also entirely possible that he kept these complaint letters as records of people he would no longer do business with, because they had made accusations and threats in order to bully him into giving them free copper. That is an equally valid interpretation of the evidence.
My point is not that we have maligned Ea-Nasir, my point is that thousands of years later, we do not and cannot know.
Actually he wrote all the complaints himself with various sock puppet accounts to drum up sympathy subscribers to his Claytreon
The Times, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 20, 1897
Hi! Where do you find all your news clippings, especially the Victorian ones? Currently I’ve been devouring every book I can get my hands on about Victorian era anything. But really I want to get a sense of the people, and I’d love to just browse through Victorian era letters/newspapers.
Thanks for any help or ideas!
While many historical newspapers are behind a paywall, there are still tons available for free online. Unfortunately they are scattered on lots of different sites so you sometimes have to dig a bit.
The largest single free online newspaper collection is Chronicling America, which is jointly run by National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress - however it only has American newspapers.
The National Library of Australia has a similar large online collection called Trove, and The National Library of New Zealand has Papers Past.
Most large universities or state historical societies have some sort of online newspaper collection, usually limited to their particular geographic area.
When I start a project focusing on a certain area my first google search is usually '[location] newspaper archives', just to see what pops up.
If you can't find what you're looking for on a free archive, try contacting your local public or university library! Many libraries have subscriptions to paid archival sites, some of which you can even access at home if you have a library card.
hello! i was wondering if you (or any blogs you think might know?) had any resources for edwardian fashion, more precisely edwardian teen fashion? i'm writing a story centering on two edwardian ghosts and would like help on their style of speech as well if you can't help on the fashion aspects. thank you!
In my opinion, if you want to be able to portray the authentic feel of a time period, there is nothing better than diving head first into primary sources.
Whenever I start any large research/writing project that’s centered on a particular year, I usually spend at least a couple of days just immersing myself in the era.
We live in an extraordinary age when it comes to primary source research (especially for the early 20th century) - there are literally millions of period newspapers/books/magazines/films/recordings floating around online.
Find out what books were popular and check them out! Read the newspaper! Listen to popular music! Watch silent movies or newsreels!
For teenagers, school yearbooks are a particularly great source to get an idea of how young people spoke, their senses of humor, common slang, casual fashion, as well as the daily routines and general vibes of the time period. Most universities have their yearbooks digitized and available online and can be pretty easily found on google (try searching: [year] [location if desired] yearbook digital collections).
As for fashion - there are so many great fashion history tumblrs, that it’s pretty hard to go wrong if you just explore the “Edwardian” or “1900s” tag a bit. One thing to keep in mind though - most dresses that end up in museums were owned by very, very rich individuals. So, though a great place to start, scrolling through blogs full of museum pieces to learn about fashion history is roughly the equivalent of learning about modern fashion by only watching Chanel runway shows.
By the Edwardian era most young people were wearing pretty much the same thing as adults by the age of 14/15. You were, however, starting to see the very beginning of what would become the modern “juniors’ section” - usually termed “Misses’” for girls and “young men’s” or “collegiate” for boys. Here are a few examples of this can be seen in period catalogs from 1912, 1911 (starting on page 21) and 1908.
It’s also important to keep in mind that fashion changed much, much more quickly than it does now. A woman in 1906 and a woman in 1911 would have noticeably different styles and silhouettes. I'd recommend scrolling through some fashion plates (going to shout out chic-a-gigot here who has a great collection of French fashion plates organized by decade and year) to get a basic handle on how the silhouette changed year by year.
In my past life I was fashion history specialist for high-end auctions, so I could go on in A LOT more detail about this subject, but I'm going to end it here before this gets too long.
“Will, do you think I am slangy? Allie has been lecturing me. She says she objects to the words “beastly”, “ghastly”, “mucker”, etc. Now I consider those very words as really choice expressions. How people differ.”
Nell to Will, November 27, 1896.
How daring! Everything about this shot is masterly.
So a while back I won a cheap eBay auction listing for a collection of love letters from the first world war.
They arrived today, and…the listing was WAY more than I expected for the price I won it for. There’s over 100, and they’re not just from WWI, but from 1906 (earliest I’ve found so far) through to 1915.
Charlie writes to his girlfriend, Gertrude. This is the most beautiful, lovesick stuff I’ve ever read. He sends her so many letters, sometimes twice a day, and lots of poems. He seems to have been an artist, as he talks a lot about small exhibitions of his stuff, and included a flyer for one. He also talks about how her parents don’t approve of them and how he’s desperately awaiting the day they’ll be married.
I haven’t found the latest of the letters, but the fact it’s up until 1915 and then stops…doesn’t give me hope for a happy ending.
This man continuously refers to his precious beloved Gertie as his queen and goddess, and whilst most of it is sickly sweet, there’s some raunchy stuff too, with him talking about how he can’t wait until they have a little house together and can ‘please each other all day’…
There’s. So many.
I’m going to put them in order by date, read them through, and then maybe even transcribe them so we can find out a bit about Charlie and Gertie’s love story.
This man was absolutely lost in the sauce
Y'all he writes about sending her pressed poppies and postcards for her collection 😭😭😭
111 years after Charlie got his dick touched in 1910, I decided to tell you all about it. Sorry Charlie.
Some more finds:
And some CODE!!!
Also all this is poems:
UHHHHH…👀👀👀
This has a lot of notes so I need everyone to know:
They got married 😭😭😭❤ (thank you to @lovesjustachemical for finding this!!!)
Kinda fucked up that you just stole somebody’s mail
Don’t know how to explain to you that acquiring, preserving, and transcribing historical ephemera that would have otherwise just been trashed from people who have been dead for over 50 years and don’t appear to have any living descendants isn’t the same as ‘stealing someone’s mail’ but Tumblr never ceases to amaze me with it’s cold takes.
The Decatur Herald, Illinois, May 15, 1928
I wrote this for a class on Victorian Literature because my professor let me research knittinf and make a cape instead of writing a literary analysis paper. The cape that is discussed from The Art of Knitting is what I created for this project, with the illustration from the book on the top right and the cape I knit on the left. The book is from 1892 and is free on Internet Archive, and Engineering Knits on YouTube made a wonderful video about it. (More photos of the cape at the end!)
