~ Home Cookery in War-Time, by Ernest Oldmeadow, 1915

Actually very good advice

(if this isn’t making sense to anyone, older enamel often had lead in it. perfectly safe if the enamel is intact, but if it’s cracked or chipped…)

(and yes, they did know about lead poisoning back then. we’ve actually known about it for a long time; it was sort of the Microplastics Issue of the 19th and early 20th centuries- dangerous, but impossible to avoid. so you had to just take the best precautions you could)

[Image Description: a picture from a book reading “Any enamelled saucepan which has failed to keep a whole skin must be sentenced to death. It is not to be given to the charwoman or even thrown into the dustbin. If a saucepan with a bald patch in the lining is dangerous to you and your family, it will be equally dangerous to the charwoman’s son Clarence or to the dustman’s little daughter Eva. If you are dead against waste, you can save the saucepan for a day when you wish to relieve a fit of bad temper and you can then bash it out of shape with your largest hammer.”]

I say, jolly good show, chaps. And did I panic? I think not.

#the comic relief who is genuinely comic  #and who makes the ‘incompetent bufoon’ trope actually work as an endearing quality as originally intended  #well played movie - well played  #john hannah  #WHAT A FOX

#but! BUT!!!#THE GREAT THING ABOUT JONATHAN#IS HE’S NOT INCOMPETENT#he can read ancient Egyptian albeit not as well as his baby sister#he clearly has an interest in archaeology if only for treasure-related reasons#he had to go through intensive schooling to get the sort of permit required#to even have digs of his own#WHICH HE CLEARLY DOES#on a dig down in Thebes#he says and Evie believes him#Jonathan reads from the Book of the Living and he’s an excellent shot with a rifle and is clearly a boxer#Jonathan is SO COMPETENT and SO IMPORTANT#while simultaneously being plucky comic relief without JUST being plucky comic relief#u get me?

Jonathan, like Phryne Fisher, clearly hasn’t taken anything seriously since 1918.

And, I would suspect, for similar reasons.

^^^This. Jonathan being in World War I makes total sense. It’s almost impossible for him not to have been. Given his age and background, he probably volunteered in 1914.  

Of course he’s going to not take anything seriously. Of course he can shoot. The drinking, the skittishness, the recklessness, the sense of ‘keeping your head down’, the scepticism about traditional heroism….

The one with more actual experience of death, carnage and fighting is Jonathan. Not Rick. Not Ardeth Bey. Jonathan.

When Rick says ‘I’ve had worse (situation/odds)’ and Jonathan replies “ Me too”. That’s probably true. 

Drop The Mummy into the real world context and that’s a character who’s going to have seen a lot of his school friends die, along with the myths and tales of heroism they were raised on. Sort of makes the line where Evie’s scolding him for drinking/messing about a lot darker…

Evie: Have you no respect for the dead? Jonathan: Of course I do, but sometimes I’d rather like to join them.

I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS RIGHT NOW

*record scratch*

Wait a minute. Why is it being assumed that Rick and Ardeth wouldn’t have fought in WWI, as well? Johnathan isn’t that much older than any of them–in fact, there is a good chance that he, Rick, and Ardeth are all of an age. Just because Johnathan’s hair is thinning doesn’t mean he’s a decade older.

It was a LOT easier to lie about your age back in the day. So much easier.

Johnathan is the soldier who fought in WWI and became disillusionsed with pretty much everything except wanting to live (most of the time) and live well–and where is the shame in that? He would have seen some of the darkest shit humanity has to offer, and he kept going. And the thing is, though, archaeological digs at that time were DANGEROUS. Not from curses (usually) but from assholes who would turn up with guns to try and steal anything you discovered. Johnathan never really STOPPED having to deal with dangerous pricks, it was just less dangerous than death raining down from the sky in bomb, bullet, and mustard gas form all the time.

Rick grew up in Egypt as an orphan. What paperwork? He joined the French Foreign Legion, which fought in World War I in some seriously critical battles on the Western Front in Europe. Rick is the soldier who quickly grew disillusioned with everything, but he didn’t know how to stop being a soldier. Johnathan had a career and schooling to fall back on. Rick had guns, the talent of not dying easily, and not much else. When the army finally left him behind because he was literally the only survivor of his last FFL battle, he literally didn’t know what to do. At all. “Looking for a good time” was code for “Please someone give me a fucking purpose.”

Ardeth grew up in the desert. He probably never enlisted…but if you think his people didn’t fight against invading forces during WWI, think again: that region of North Africa was swarming with soldiers on both sides, and they alll tried to claim everything they stumbled over even while in the midst of fighting each other. Ardeth spent his entire life fighting to protect what belonged to him, what belonged to his people, and trying to keep assholes from stealing things that didn’t belong to anyone (for good reason). By the time the war was over, Ardeth was disillisioned in everyone except his own people, and seriously fucking done with stupid idiots who stole in the name of archaeology. He is completely (justifiably) resigned to the worst when Rick the Magic Survivalist returns to Hamunaptra.

This has been another episode of “Actual History adding context and depth to character behavior”

I love when “The Mummy” fandom comes out to play. But it’s even better when the history side of tumblr is also in “The Mummy” fandom.

Every time this post comes around I am compelled to watch The Mummy again.

There is an explicitly nihilistic ‘old soldier’ in the movie too, just to drive home the point.

Winston: “Is it dangerous?”

Rick: “Well, you probably won’t live through it.”

Winston: “By Jove, do you think so?”

That “old soldier” is one element which jars with me. YMMV, of course.

“The Mummy” is set in 1926, so Winston is far too old to have been a pilot in WWI (actor Bernard Fox was 72 at time of filming). He should have been a “young soldier” or more correctly, “young airman” of about Rick or Jonathan’s age.

The script was also a wee bit confused about what he served in…

The British air arm was the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) until 1918, when it became the Royal Air Force (RAF).

His survivor’s guilt and heavy drinking is spot on, though: average aircrew life expectancy was between ten days and three weeks. In “Bloody April” (1917) when superior new German aircraft were introduced before the Allies had anything to match them, average life expectancy dropped to about two days. The RFC lost almost 250 planes during that month, the Imperial German Air Service lost just over 60…

WWI pilots didn’t have parachutes until 1918, and even then Allied pilots NEVER had them: the top brass, who of course didn’t fly, considered they would “impair a pilot’s nerve” to continue fighting.

Pilots who saw combat soon saw the results of that policy when a plane caught fire (gasoline, linen and canvas in a 120 mph draft makes a great barbecue). No parachute left three options: a long jump, a slow roast or the service pistol carried “in case of being forced down in enemy territory”. Seeing that happen, and the thought of experiencing it personally, would make anyone hit the bottle.

The pilot of this German aircraft is having a very bad day final few minutes…

Also, in WWI the only oil that didn’t thicken at altitude was castor oil - it’s where the “Castrol” oil company’s name originated - so aircraft engines were lubricated with that. Breathing the vapour had the same laxative effect as swallowing the stuff, so aircrew fought diarrhoea as well as enemy aircraft, trying to stun their insides with enormous amounts of booze. US ace Eddie Rickenbacker swore by cherry brandy. Pints of it.

Funny thing is that Winston could have been Biggles - not the silly subject of Monty Python skits, but the original character from WWI air-combat stories written for late-adolescents, before they were revised for children with the removal of serious adult elements like alcohol abuse and PTSD.

Biggles in those early stories was like many real-life WWI pilots, a chain-smoking, heavy-drinking young man of about 20, living on his nerves and skating along the edge of a breakdown, whose principal talents were killing the enemy, not being killed himself, and not letting the deaths of his squadron mates affect him. He wasn’t as good at that last one as he thought he was.

Left to right: Major James McCudden, VC, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar, MM, killed in action July 1918, aged 23. Lieutenant Arthur Rhys-Davids DSO, MC & Bar, killed in action October 1917, aged 20. Captain Albert Ball, VC, DSO & Two Bars, MC, killed in action April 1917, aged 20.

The unrevised stories suggest Biggles might well have turned out like Winston. By the time of “The Mummy” he’d have been about 27-28, and looking like this pilot painted by J.C. Leyendecker.

At a guess, that age casting didn’t happen because a young alcoholic pilot with haunted eyes and a death-wish wasn’t as automatically funny as an old alcoholic pilot with a pompous accent and a death-wish, and would have the wrong “tone” for the movie.

I think it says something about the American movie audience of the time. The Mummy was released in 1999. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War wouldn’t start for another couple of years. Americans were used to allowing veterans of WW2 and the Korean War their traumas, but veterans of every conflict since then were treated like their trauma was either unimportant, a joke, or attention seeking. You only have to look at how often “Nam flashbacks” were treated as a punchline, or how the “agent orange” business of the Gulf War was disregard by the rest of society. (It was a concerted propaganda effort by the people in power, of course, both so they could continue justifying imperialist wars and so they wouldn’t have to take care of returning veterans, but that’s a different discussion.)

American audience wouldn’t have known what to think about a young traumatized, alcoholic pilot. It didn’t fit the narrative of old heroes that they had been fed since the end of WW2.

This fandom conversation just gets better every time it makes the rounds.

I agree with the probable motivations for age adjustment of the character. Balancing the worldbuilding and the way the audience will most likely relate at the time any given story hits the public eye seems astoundingly challenging.

Its a little unsettling how 1999 feels a world away right now.

I should do a Mummy homage art at some point…

Winston I believe is a case of the character being much younger than the actor - I can easily see him being in his fifties. And while today fifty is not seen as an “end of life” age and it seems preposterous for a 70 year old (even one who looks as damned decent as Bernard Fox) to play one, for the time period it fits perfectly. This “youthful fifty” is a relatively modern invention, and it definitely was a very different matter before the postwar (II) prosperity (for a very stark example compare Hartnell’s 1st Doctor with Capaldi’s 12th - both actors were roughly the same age during their tenures).  The RFC did have officers born in the 1860′s and later, so while it would have be career military, including air corps (which fits Winston to a T, including his old soldier persona) it is believable that he was an older First World War veteran.  If he was serving for a large enough period before the name change, then yes, it would explain the word salad, especially as an older soldier well used to working under the RFC moniker.   I suspect Ardeth very likely at least peripherally was involved with TE Lawrence’s shenanigans - you can’t tell me the Meiji weren’t keeping a bloody close eye on the Great Arab Revolt, especially since the whiteboy involved was a goddamn archaeologist who had previously been digging around an Egyptian necropolis…

@deadcatwithaflamethrower more history about The Mummy!

More history, and @fluffmugger pointing out that the “Youthful Fifty” years of age is SO VERY NEW, GUYS.

Example: Alec Guiness, in 1975, filmed his role with Harrison, Mark, Carrie, & Co. at the tender age of 57. In today’s terms of fifties, he looks like he’s in his late 70s to early 80s.

Peter Cushing, same year, same film: age 62, looked like a healthy and well-groomed modern era mid-to-late 80s.

Casting Bernard Fox was actually spot-on. The Mummy might’ve gone for comedy, but they didn’t fuck around when it came to acknowledging that all of these characters were PTSD-riddled from at least one major war, and also completely fucking nuts.

If I ever don’t reblog this it’s because I died

I would like to point out that, tho Winston is too old to have been an active WW1 pilot, he could have been someone who trained those pilots who went up and died in the war.

Imagine, for a moment, you are the teacher of a group of young men. It’s 1912. The flight school is new, these kids are going to learn how to fly machines and you’re the one responsible for that. How, then, do you think you’d feel when war begins two years later and the men you taught go to fight and die in flames?

Survivors guilt doesn’t just affect the pilots who didn’t die, you know. The shame and guilt, the responsibility, a superior officer can feel for essentially sending young men to die… That’s very real too.

If Winston wasn’t an active pilot in WW1 because of his age, the next thing is to have been the teacher of those pilots who were. Hundreds of pilots died. How many did Winston teach how to use the throttle, steer the plane, reach the right altitude for costing along and minimising fuel waste? How many funerals with empty coffins did Winston attend, feeling responsible for the absence of a body to inter?

Winston may well have not flown in WW1, but he likely wished to have an end just like the men he taught, an equivalent exchange. The only way to absolve him of the guilt and responsibility for the young men who died in a war they should never have had to fight in in the first place.

it’s just hard not to think about the fact that in 1915, JRR Tolkien went to war not with but certainly in the same army and many of the same battles as his 3 best school friends, all nicely upper class young men who had never known much loss, and only he and one other came back alive - and a couple decades later, he wrote a book in which 3 nicely upper class young men (and one very excellent gardener) who have never known much loss go to war together, or at least they start out together, and they all come home alive. (Though one cannot bear it, and does not stay.)

What more it wasn’t just losing his friends, he was a commanding officer of a battalion of working class men. All farmers and miners from the same area of Lancashire. He felt affinity for them, but wasn’t allowed to socialize between the ranks due to military protocol and he hated it. 

 "The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."

I don’t think it was even 6 months later that he contracted trench fever and was sent home. 

His entire command was wiped out in one charge shortly after, the majority of a whole countryside’s youths slaughtered while he survived. Youths who were brave and steadfast, but thought of as lesser than their superior officers while still being the ones carrying the actual battle. Youths who deserved fellowship, respect, and above all to go home and dance with their own Rosie.

“My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself”. 

This is the basis I've been looking for to try to explain something I've been thinking about! I have some thoughts re: the people who read Sam and Frodo's relationship as 'clearly meant to be' homoerotic - it isn't! I say this as a big gay who loves their relationship and sees a lot of the way I love in it! But what it is meant to be is something that speaks to men who love men, in a way that's very fundamentally important, because what it says is "the roles we were given are not what we have to be to each other".

Tolkien was born in the 19th century. Sam's and Frodo are an absolutely idealised master-servant pair by the values of his time. Frodo is distant, occupied always with higher things, not suited for the grunt work that keeps the world going but not abusive of his position over others. Sam recognises that Frodo is in his correct place and displays honest respect and admiration of him, addressing him with subservience and still feeling honoured to be in his presence. (In the hands of most authors of Tolkien's background, this never goes anywhere good, and despite enjoying the route this was taken I can see why replicating this fantasy at all, even to sort of deconstruct it, would turn people off.) When the journey they go on leaves them alone, away from the society that instilled these roles in them, elements remain of it but their relationship becomes something deeper, purer, the result of the world but not quite of the world they grew up in. It's a direct reaction to the idea he hated, that out in the field, when it really gets down to it, it's possible and reasonable to maintain the roles of "acceptable" society.

And that's something that, when you think about the way gender roles restrict human relationships, something that very naturally speaks to other kinds of people who are trying to have relationships they were taught aren't 'for' them. "We're no longer in the world that built these roles for us, the world is changing forever, and the goodness and honesty of our bond being not-of-the-old-world will make that change less evil" was meant for the rigid class structures of British society, but it has a new iteration every generation, and of course it speaks to gay men now. (I say gay men purely because these characters are both men, and because I can't speak for lesbians.) Knowing that you are not just what you were told to be, as the world seismically shifts around you, is probably the most significant struggle Tolkien speaks to, and he speaks to it over and over.

I’m not crying you’re crying

Vice: Shelter in Place with Shane Smith & Edward Snowden

“People in power who see that there is a political advantage to disguising, or concealing, or massaging, or denying numbers, may choose to lie about it.

It’s happened before and it’s almost certainly happening now.

We see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent reporting from this kind of region.”

Pathologists were able to trace the origins of the Spanish Influenza to Haskell County, Kansas which was a rural farming community. The winter of 1917 - 1918 was particularly brutal in that area with cold temperatures and lots of snow. Because of the weather conditions, farmers in the region began moving their livestock inside to protect them from the elements. It’s around this time that a novel H1N1 influenza virus jumped from a bird (probably a chicken) into a pig, and then into a human. It then began to spread around the local community.

The influenza outbreak in Haskell County, KS was so severe that January, that the local doctor sent a telegram to Washington D.C. indicating the severity of the flu epidemic. That telegram was only a footnote in history and was ignored as the U.S. prepared to enter into WWI. Upon entering the war, we began recruiting troops from all over the country. Some of those troops came from Haskell County, KS and those troops were stationed in barracks at Fort Riley, KS. It was here that the Spring Wave of the Spanish Influenza began. Within a week, Fort Riley had hundreds of cases of influenza and the milder wave of the disease was moving along with the troops.

When the troops went to Europe to fight, people who had a milder form of the influenza continued to fight in the trenches and didn’t infect many people, while people with a more severe form of the disease were transported to troop hospitals where they had the chance to infect far more people. In this way, the wartime conditions rewarded the virus for making us sicker and killing more people. Over time, the virus mutated into a relentless killer.

The Spanish Flu did, in fact, get its name because Spain was a neutral country in the war and was reporting accurate information. From the general consensus at the time, it seemed like the flu was striking Spain particularly hard, with some speculating that the virus had originated from Spain. That’s why it was named the Spanish Flu. When pathologists and historians were able to track the true origins of the virus decades later, the name had already stuck.

reading letters from 1818 is wild

“it’s that time of the year when I get colds for no apparent reason again” have some Clairitin hon

But also we’re not becoming allergic to everything nowadays like certain white moms fear. Allergies have always existed. They were just talked about differently

Like “oh clams always ~turn my stomach~”. Or “what a pity he was taken from us at age 5”

“Well we didn’t have all this fancy chronic illness stuff in the Olden Days, what did people do then??”

They died, Ashleigh. 

This is a picture tracking bullet holes on Allied planes that encountered Nazi anti-aircraft fire in WW2.

At first, the military wanted to reinforce those areas, because obviously that’s where the ground crews observed the most damage on returning planes. Until Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that this was the damage on the planes that made it home, and the Allies should armor the areas where there are no dots at all, because those are the places where the planes won’t survive when hit. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias, a logic error where you focus on things that survived when you should really be looking at things that didn’t.

We have higher rates of mental illness now? Maybe that’s because we’ve stopped killing people for being “possessed” or “witches.” Higher rate of allergies? Anaphylaxis kills, and does so really fast if you don’t know what’s happening. Higher claims of rape? Maybe victims are less afraid of coming forward. These problems were all happening before, but now we’ve reinforced the medical and social structures needed to help these people survive. And we still have a long way to go.

This is one of my favorite anecdotes to show how clever rewording of statistics can make them say the opposite of what they mean:

Every time a state makes riding a motorcycle without a helmet illegal, the number of ER patients seriously injured in motorcycle accidents skyrockets. Every single time.

When you phrase it just right, it makes it sound like it’s more dangerous to ride a motorcycle with a helmet than without one. Of course, the reality is that before those laws, those patients were going to the morgue, not the ER.

That also reminds me of a story from world war 1 where the soldiers started to take their helmets off because more soldiers would come back injured while wearing a helmet. That’s because if they didn’t have a helmet they died.

Okay, these photographs pissed me off a bit, because they don’t show off how much of a genius Dr. Harold Gillies, the father of modern plastic surgery, was.  Rhinoplasty, skin grafts, and facial reconstructions have been practised for centuries.  However, it was this New Zealander surgeon who standardized these techniques and established the discipline of “plastic surgery.”

The introduction of more destructive weapons of WWI and WWII resulted in devastating injuries. In addition, in trench warfare, the head was more exposed than the rest of the body, and soldiers’ faces were often shattered or burnt beyond recognition. Despite the best efforts of surgeons, many soldiers were left hideously disfigured. Traditionally, the edges of facial wounds were simply stitched together, but when scar tissue contracted faces were left twisted and disfigured, so a new type of surgery was needed.

Gillies rebuilt faces using tissue from elsewhere in the body. Antibiotics had not yet been invented, meaning it was very hard to graft tissue from one part of the body to another because infection often developed, so Gillies invented the tubed pedicle,” where he used a flap of skin from the chest or forehead and “swung” it into place over the face. The flap remained attached but was stitched into a tube. This kept the original blood supply intact and dramatically reduced the infection rate.  After many surgical construction, grafting, and healing, which could take months to years, the tentacle-like tubing would be removed, and (volia!) a new face!

He was also the first to do sex reassignment surgery from female to male in 1946, then male to female using a flap technique in 1951, which became the standard for 40 years.

tl;dr, these were his patients BEFORE the surgery. He didn’t DISFIGURE these people he HELPED them.

This is amazing holy shit

You know you're European when:

They have to defuse a WW2 bomb in your city and nobody is really concerned because that happens from time to time. 

WHAT #noteuropean 

dude there’s entire fields in the west part of Belgium that just has a small “Watch out, mine field” on it, and sometimes farmers don’t know and put cows on it and they get blown up. Shit happens. #WW2

Happens because of WW1 (WW2 too but there’s less stuff left) in northern France too. 

Almost walked on a non explosed pair of shells while looking for mushrooms. 

I was born in a small town in south Hungary… they didn’t just find one WW2 bomb somewhere around the town… they found 1200 bombs right outside the town in 2014.

Yes, around 1200 German SD-1 fragmentation bombs… only found in 2014!

I love those radio announcements. This part of the city, along with this highway and also, all trains going through, are going to be shut down on Saturday afternoon because bomb.

And all anyone bitches about is the detour they’re forced to take because if it didn’t blow up the past 71 years, they could have waited another week to defuse it, couldn’t they? Eugh.

there’s a flood? oh hello forgotten WWII ammunition in large quantities you go take a walk in the forest? oh hey WWII mine! kids play football in a field? good thing they didn’t kick that mine they found. someone actually looks through the old metal parts in a salvage yard? anti-aircraft mines! tbh nobody usually makes a great fuss because it very rarely actually hurts someone. but yeah until now I was always like ‘lol another one’ and never thought about it much XD

There’s a roadblock in the middle of the city? Oh no worries it’s just a bomb. A whole block gets evacuated? Oh no worries. Bomb.  #LifeinGermany

same in czech… we literally have closed forests where no one can go, because mines everywhere and lol, our neighbor was building water well on his garden last year and he is digging and digging and then he hits something solid, surprise it’s a wwii bomb…

Here’s one being detonated in Yorkshire in 2009 (from WW2)

Wtf are you guys ok

Yeah it’s fine, this shit is essentially gossip material and nothing more

We had one in our city recently(ish). If I recall right they evacuated a student accommodation or something, and they watched it get detonated.

It was more like a social event than trouble.

You all sound so surprised that we still have some bombs around from being LITERALLY IN THE MIDDLE OF TWO WORLD WARS. 

I feel like the US - and fair enough - don’t quite get how present and clear the effect of the world wars is in Europe.

Like I was in TK Maxx in Balham today failing to find any decent bras. As I went in I glanced around and noted not for the first time how there’s this really distinct break in the style of buildings along that road. This is why:

At 8.02pm on 14th October 1940 a German bomb was dropped directly on Balham Underground station. The torn-off shopfronts are where the TK Maxx is now.

My other stop before getting home was at the Lidl on the corner of my street. Why was there space to build a supermarket there in the first place? Because it was a bombsite.

London was a bombsite.

That’s every explosion in London during the Blitz.Around 10% of dropped bombs are estimated not to have exploded. They’re still digging them up all the time. Last year London City airport had to be closed down while two unexploded V2s were dealt with

There are areas in northeastern France which are still off-limits to humans because of the huge number of unexploded shells and mines the toxicity of the soil from World War One, called Red Zones.

War really fucks a place up.

I feel like people really don’t understand the difference between a war some county is waging somewhere else and a war that happen right on top of you.

Any bit of grassland or field you dig in Europe or in my example Poland will yield you some ammo or a piece of a bomb within first 15 min of digging.

There was this American show about treasure hunters working with metal detectors that wanted to shoot an episode here looking for some meteorites. They gave in after the first day because the detectors kept wailing non stop. They found a lot of ammo and rusted out guns.

It’s not just bombs, it’s also things like : oh, bus fell into a hole!

The hole turned out to be a secret ww2 bunker that nobody knew existed that caved in.

Happened in my city and someone just picked it up and put on the bin

Back in 2011, they went to add a new part to my town. And shortly after breaking ground they found 4 1000 pound bombs. And then another five. That was literally like, a few hundred metres behind my house. So logically they pulled out the ignition. And invited ppl to come look at them. Before eventually destroying them.

As it turns out a plane want down there, and it dumped it’s bombs there in a line.

Later they also found remains of Neolithic settlements there

This happens (much more rarely) in Halifax too. Largely leftovers from the Explosion.

anybody wanna make a comic out of this? :DDD

why are straight white guys so obsessed with world war 2

like i’ll talk about my interest in history and i’ll have guys be like “yeah i’m a history buff too i love world war 1 and 2″ like cool i was talking about ancient history. like the conversation was literally about ancient egypt. 

my fave thing is replying “oh, cool. i just can’t get into it. i like everyday life and religion and art. personally, i find war boring.” and let me tell you it’s a journey to watch them try and understand that killing thousands of people indiscriminately doesn’t hold my attention. 

yup it’s always the “oh you’re just not into history” and the response of “yes i am im just into ancient history” and you’re ready to throw 38 greek myths at them just to shut them up about the kinds of bombers the britsh were using in the second world war

except like. they really dont give a single fuck about wwi/ii. they care about the weapons and machinery. do they care about the events and the people? do they care about why wars were actually important? in my experience, very, very rarely.

I think that gets to heart of it: they’re not history buffs in any real sense. What they are is war fanboys. They collect and curate technical information about wars just like any other fanboy collects and curates technical information about the subject of their fandom. It’s basically not real to them; knowing what exact metal the buttons of SS uniforms were made of is of no greater significance to them than knowing the exact height of the captain’s chair on the starship Enterprise - it’s just another shiny technical fact for their collection.

It’s incredibly annoying because WW1 and WW2 are actually really interesting in terms of how politics changed and the like but all people want to talk about is the fighting. :/

This comic from The Nib is a great analysis of how the cultural obsession with World War II and “the greatest generation” has completely skewed our view of its history and totally fucked us up.

^ definitely definitely read this, especially if you were too young to remember the immediate post-9/11 times.

This does a good job at showing how ridiculously free-for-all and confusing WWI was.

The historical accuracy here, as a History major, makes me weep tears of joy.

*Cries of laughter*

A history major this made me extremely amused. This is beautifully accurate. 

IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW

Russia gets thrown through a plate glass window, gets knocked out, suffers brain damage, and wakes up with a complete personality change

I’m dying.

Why Do People Put Locks On Bridges To Declare Their Love?

The first “love locks” bridge was not in Paris, which has the most famous example, but in Serbia! Specifically in a town called Vrnjačka Banja. Shortly before the World War I, a young man and woman fell in love in Vrnjačka Banja. They would meet every night at the Most Ljubavi bridge. But the man went into the military, and while abroad, he met and fell in love with someone else. The young woman died of heartbreak, or so the story goes. Superstitious local women began going to the bridge, writing the names of themselves and their lovers on padlocks, and locking them to the bridge, in the hope that it would bind their paramours to home.

The tradition was slowly forgotten after World War I. Until a Serbian poet, Desanka Maksimović, heard the story and wrote a poem about it. The tradition was revived but only in Vrnjačka Banja.

So how did love lock bridges become a worldwide phenomenon? It probably comes from a single Italian writer named Federico Moccia. He wrote a book, published in 2006, called I Want You. It featured a couple who put a love lock on a lamp post on Rome’s 2100-year-old Ponte Milvio bridge. The book took off, and a movie was made, and the rest as they say is history!