Vote for who you like, it won’t make any difference-I own the seat and I’m going to fix the result anyway! My name’s Mad Jack Mytton and I will be MP for Shrewsbury whether you like it or not.

This is something I've seen compared a LOT and it's really ridiculous. While both are serious issues of oppression and while the American and Irish Civil Rights struggles have been compared and contrasted, they are two entirely different things.

You don't get to point to the plight of the Irish under English occupation as some gross excuse for racially based oppression just because they were the first example of oppressed white people you could think of. You don't know what you're talking about, show me some sources or sit the fuck down.

Man selling muffins in London, 1910.

Oh, yah, I know the muffin man.

Kind of a weird one, isn't he?

i summed up half of english history in like 2 sentences

And then in 1798, Ireland was like.

Hey.

Hey you.

Yah you. With the undercooked meat.

You don't like Englaaaaand.....?

Us neither.

Why don't you come over and bring summa dat sweet rebellion?

Yah. Yah this will really fuck with England!

(Spoiler alert. It didn't work.)

Guy Fawkes’ Post-Torture Signature

Guy Fawkes, or Guido Fawkes, was a member of a group of English Catholics who plotted to blow up parliament and kill the King in 1605. Fawkes was charged with the job of lighting the gunpowder the group had secretly stored in the cellars below parliament. I made a more detailed post on this last year and, conscious of repeating myself, I thought I’d dedicate this year’s post the Fawkes’ torture specifically.

After being apprehended by guards who had been previously tipped-off about the plot, Fawkes was first interrogated but, as he remained defiant and refused to give the names of his co-conspirators, the King ordered that he should be tortured. Fawkes was transferred to the Tower of London where a confession was eventually pulled from him through various means of torture. The King dictated that these tortures should begin with the most ‘gentle’, perhaps manacling the prisoner, and by degrees get worse, for example the rack.

It is unknown precisely what methods of torture Fawkes was subjected to, however, the worsening state of the signatures obtained on his confessions (images 2 and 3, which were written a day apart. Image 1 is an example of Fawkes’ signature before torture) suggest the horrors he endured. Fawkes made his third and final confession on the 9th November, three days after his capture. Fawkes was executed for high treason. He was dragged behind a horse and carriage before being hung, drawn and quartered. His body parts were then distributed to the four corners of the kingdom to be displayed as a warning to others.

[Sources: Wikipedia]

Casual reminder that he was a terrorist and not at all someone to look up to.

Lady Florence Norman, a suffragette, on her motor-scooter in 1916, travelling to work at offices in London where she was a supervisor. The scooter was a birthday present from her husband, the journalist and Liberal politician Sir Henry Norman.

Nineteenth-Century Graves Protected from Body Snatchers

  WEST BROMWICH, ENGLAND—

While moving a nineteenth-century cemetery in the West Midlands, England, to make room for a new road, archaeologists found that some of the bodies had been buried with protective devices to deter grave robbers. At the time, fresh bodies could be dug up and sold to medical schools. One of the devices, called a mortsafe, was a metal cage fixed around the coffin of a young woman who suffered from a skin and bone disease. Her condition would have made her corpse desirable. Another grave contained a brick coffin with a false bottom that protected two bodies. “The simplest method of protecting the graves was to employ a guard. However it appears from records in other towns that the money paid for a fresh body, which could be over £25, that these guards were often bribed to turn a blind eye,” said Frank Caldwell, Sandwell Council’s Museums Manager.

Gas masks for babies tested at an English hospital, 1940 (via Imgur)

I like that they come with handles.

Viking Settlements in the British Isles

Since moving to America I’ve found that apparently very few Americans know all this. So I spent six hours designing a fancy photoset to explain it all. Naturally.

(EDIT: I’ve made a number of corrections and removed a couple of generalisations/oversimplifications in response to a few snyde comments. Hope this helps.)

December 27, 1831: The HMS Beagle embarks on its second voyage, with Charles Darwin aboard.

Twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle, a sloop captained by one Robert Fitzroy, an amateur naturalist and a prospective parson. The expedition was to last two years, though it ended up lasting five, taking the Beagle and its crew across the Atlantic, around the coasts of South America, and eventually around the Earth. The main objective of the voyage was to conduct hydrographic surveys, but it was the ship’s young “gentleman naturalist”, hired almost as an afterthought, who cemented the trip’s place in history. 

The Beagle set sail from Plymouth on December 27, 1831. Darwin was ill-suited for life at sea, commenting that “the misery I endured from seasickness is far beyond what I ever guessed”; luckily, he spent much of his time exploring and theorizing on land rather than sailing at sea. In Punta Alta, Argentina, Darwin discovered giant fossils of extinct mammals. On an island near Chile, he witnessed a volcano and earthquake that levelled cities and altered the coastline. In 1835 he arrived at the Galápagos Islands where he briefly observed his famous finches without bothering to label and categorize them properly. On the islands he noted that “by far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago” was “that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings”. 

By the time he returned to England, Darwin had established his reputation as a respected up-and-coming geologist among the country’s elite scientific circles. In the years following his return, Darwin wrote extensively on his five-year journey. Between 1838 and 1843 The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, a book Darwin edited, was published in five different parts, and in 1839 he published The Voyage of the Beagle. Neither work directly addressed evolution or natural selection, although Darwin was most certainly formulating his theories by that time, and in fact he may have been pondering the idea during the voyage. Although it would take years of further research, when he finally published his 1859 work On the Origin of Species, which presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin conceded in the introduction that his travels with the Beagle played a key role in formulating the theory:

THE FUCKING GALAPAGOS, THO. IT IS FREAKY AS FUCK. 

GO RESEARCH IT. AND FIND THE MARINE IGUANA. BECAUSE IF GRENDEL WERE AN ANIMAL, SHE WOULD BE ONE OF THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS.

December 10, 1815: Ada Lovelace is born.

Today’s Google Doodle honors Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child and the woman who is popularly credited as “the world’s first computer programmer”. Lady Byron, who separated from Ada’s father just a month after she was born, sought to raise her daughter in a manner that ensured she would not end up like her volatile poet father. Ada, often ill as a child, began studying mathematics at a young age and soon discovered her natural flair for the subject, so strong that one of her tutors, Augustus De Morgan, suggested that she become a mathematician “of first-rate eminence” later in life. In 1833, Ada attempted to elope with another one of her tutors, although her attempt failed, and the entire incident was covered up.

That year, she also met Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor with whom Ada shared a close correspondence for the rest of her life. Over a nine-month-long period in 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an Italian memoir regarding Babbage’s Analytical Engine; she supplemented her translation with her own set of notes (which actually ended up longer than the memoir itself) explaining in detail the differences between Babbage’s machine and his Difference Engine. Ada was optimistic about the future of these engines and machines. Although a mathematician, she was not limited by numbers and predicted that someday a more complex descendant of Babbage’s engines “might act upon other things besides number… the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. She also provided what is today recognized as “the world’s first computer program” - a proposed algorithm that would generate Bernoulli numbers using the analytical machine. Whether Ada formulated the plan herself, or whether it was the product of close collaboration between herself, Babbage, and associates, or whether it was someone else’s work entirely, remains subject to debate to this day. Babbage, at least, was as impressed by Ada as she was by him; in 1843 he wrote of her:

Fun fact: Grendel shares a birthday with a wildly cool woman of history.