Standalone Interesting Historical Articles

[JimW]

The Gibbon in China - this blogger's scanned an out of print book-length essay by polymath diplomat Robert van Gulik (of Judge Dee mysteries fame):

Archive #25 – The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore (1967) by Robert van Gulik

Last updated: 12-10-2021 The gibbon, a small, arboreal ape endemic to East and Southeast Asia, is known for its ethereal song and spectacular displays of acrobatics. Anyone who studies this primate…

journeytothewestresearch.com

 

[RedRedRose]

The Jewish Refugees Who Fought for China

 

[petee]

big news

Iraq Reclaims 17,000 Looted Artifacts, Its Biggest-Ever Repatriation (Published 2021)

The cuneiform tablets and other objects had been held by the Museum of the Bible, founded by the family that owns the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, and by Cornell University.

www.nytimes.com

When the Iraqi prime minister’s plane touched down in Baghdad last week after an official visit to the United States, its cargo included 17,000 archaeological artifacts returned by a prominent museum and an Ivy League university in the largest-ever repatriation of looted Iraqi antiquities.

 

[petee]

Did lead poisoning cause downfall of Roman Empire? The jury is still out

this is a chestnut in the professional roman business, so i'll throw in my $0.02. the very phrase "downfall (sometimes "collapse") of the roman empire" contains loaded language. the result of this "downfall" was a greater degree of local control, as a result of a loss of control at the center. how "local" is the question. did towns or individual farmers and smallholders have more control over their lives? a question about which reams have been written. but within my ambit of knowledge on this topic, minerals in the water would coat the lead pipes used to transport the water within a space of time, meaning that the lead was no longer leaching. the whole lead thing is a canard (sorry RedRedRose) for socio-political developments.

 

[RedRedRose]

I’d never heard of this incident in 2016 until I’d come across this article.

The Lazarus heist: How North Korea almost pulled off a billion-dollar hack.

 

[Idris2002]

Letters to Stalin:

Letters to Stalin

Stalin lived in the epoch of mail, telephone, and telegraph. The habit of keeping up correspondence was an integral part of his character. Letters served as an important means of constructing relat...

journals.openedition.org

How did the arch-dictator and seminary student drop-out hear from the subjects of his vast empire? The answer may surprise you!

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Fantastic interview with Hugh Beynon and Ray Hudson on their book examining the South Wales and North East miners. The interview examines how mining communities were able to build working class power, resources and become didactic places of cultural production. Their book examines the rise and fall of mining communities, the miners union, the defining 1984-5 strike and the effect of Deindustrialisation. The book is superb, this discusses many of its themes:

British Miners Built Their Own Power and Culture. Deindustrialization Wiped It Away.

Miners’ labor militancy transformed British politics and culture in the twentieth century. Then neoliberalism destroyed coal miners’ institutions and communities, upending British politics at the entire working class’s expense.

jacobinmag.com

 

[BristolEcho]

I’d never heard of this incident in 2016 until I’d come across this article.

The Lazarus heist: How North Korea almost pulled off a billion-dollar hack.

There is a good podcast on BBC sounds I think that covers it. I got it through acast.

 

[Kate Sharpley]

Not an article, but if you read French (and are interested in anarchist history) you might find this interesting:
La perception des volontaires britanniques de la guerre d’Espagne, de la surveillance à la redécouverte http://acer-aver.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/BertrandLargeaud_MemoireBIbritaniques.pdf
Jack White, Ethel MacDonald... but also look for Samuel Rees - Royal Navy to Iron Column...

 

[Artaxerxes]

Neat little thread on identity in antiquity

 

[petee]

i've gone down a rabbit-hole of minor bolsheviks and came across this interesting story

"Big Bill" Builds the Turksib

Here on Walking Almaty, I've been sharing little-known stories of American and Kazakh friendship. In earlier installments, we learned about Richard Nixon's visit to Almaty and Mukhtar Auezov's trip...

www.walkingalmaty.com

 

[seventh bullet]

The Soviet Jewish experience that influenced the creators of Cheburashka.

Less well known, even among those who grew up with these cartoons on something of a perpetual loop, is that the series’ creative team was made up almost entirely of Yiddish-speaking Jews who had lost their families and homes in the genocidal campaigns during WWII. The director Roman Kachanov typifies the classic refugee background of many of the Jewish men that he drew into the project. Kachanov was born in a poor Jewish neighborhood in the city of Smolensk and pursued boxing in the cultural atmosphere of Smolensk’s Labor Zionist Movement before his father and sister were murdered point-blank at an execution site near Smolensk as Jews.

Jewish artistic works from the Soviet Union are typically thought of as “underground,” and made their way to the West via smugglers and defectors. Yet, as this animated series demonstrates, despite systematic anti-Semitism and narrow dogmatism, a lively and active Jewish culture developed in the centralized animation studio Soyuzmultfilm—the largest animation studio in all of Eastern Europe—right in the middle of Moscow. The embedding of Jewish material into the series by its Jewish creators calls into question the narrative that Jewish self-expression was wholly suppressed in Soviet popular culture.

 

[petee]

archive.ph

i have ALOT to say about this, but i need to calm down first.

 

[petee]

a chara,

Irish words in English and the OED

Dozens of Irish English words and phrases were added to the OED in March 2022, including Irish words used in Irish English. I’ve written about some of these before (hames, notions, plámás, ráiméis,…

stancarey.wordpress.com

mise le meas!

 

[petee]

a fair question

When did people stop being drunk all the time?

Trends in alcohol consumption from the middle ages to the modern world tell a story.

www.lefineder.com

Since modern consumption of alcohol is more diverse, let us put the historical consumption of wine and beer in terms of pure alcohol and compare it to latter rates of alcohol consumption. When this is done we see that consumption of pure alcohol was at least 2-4 times higher in the past.

 

[Kate Sharpley]

The Most Interesting Library in America
"The Communistic Library in Trenton, N. J., is located at 512 1/2 Hudson street, in a dingy, unattractive building, but it is the home of the most interesting library in America...
"A leading factor and an influential force in the education policy is Jules Scarcerieux, potter by day and teacher of French by night."
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v17n08-feb-1917-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf [page 81 of the pdf]

 

[ska invita]

This is a great Twitter account, interesting one today


Unroll

Thread by @AfricanArchives on Thread Reader App

@AfricanArchives: Did you know Sesame Street was originally created for black and brown inner city kids? A THREAD Children usually spend a lot of time watching a lot tv and technically it was sort of a...…

threadreaderapp.com

 

[DotCommunist]

Rebel Britannia

11th May 1812:

rebelbrit.substack.com

this ones about the death of spencer perceval, the only assassinated brit PM

The rebels in this week’s drama aren’t either of the main actors – they’re the audience.

When the prime minister was shot dead on this date, around teatime in the lobby of the House of Commons, people all over the nation literally danced in the streets with joy, much to the disgust (and fear) of their remaining rulers.

One contemporary reporter in the Potteries recorded disapprovingly how “a man came running down the street, leaping into the air, waving his hat around his head, and shouting with frantic joy, ‘Perceval is shot, hurrah! Perceval is shot, hurrah!’”

1812 had this in common with 2024: it was a time when the alienation of governed from government could hardly have been wider. Then as now, the view in Westminster on almost every imaginable issue of the day was opposed to that held by most people.

 

[yield]

Can Western Civilization Save Itself? Our Present Anxiety in the Light of History
February 1949. Culture & Civilization. Arnold J. Toynbee (Polly Toynbee's grandad.)

The shock caused by Communism is not, of course, something entirely unprecedented in the history of Christendom. You have to go back rather a long way, but if you do go back to the sudden emergence of Islam and the seizure of great provinces of the early Christian world by the primitive Moslem conquerors, and if you recall the general challenge of Islam, not only to Christendom’s possession of certain territories but to the whole Christian belief and way of life, you do get back to something comparable to the shock which Communism has given to the Western world since 1917.

_____________

There are, I think, closer likenesses. Islam might be described as a heretical version of Christianity, a version which seized upon certain elements of Christianity, took them out of their context, exaggerated them, and made something out of them which was a criticism of Christianity as it was practiced at the time.

Similarly in Communism certain social precepts of Christianity have been taken from their context, exaggerated and turned into a potent criticism of the Christian world in our time. In one sense, I suppose Communism is more formidable as a missionary religion than Islam. The Moslem missionary never had much success in still unconquered Christian countries. Islam gradually converted those Christians who were conquered by the Moslems, and, in the Ottoman Empire, down to the 17th century of our era, Christian converts were mostly found among Western Christian deserters or prisoners, and subject Eastern Christians who had been conscripted in childhood as public slaves and had been brought up by the Turks. What most horrifies people in the West in facing Communism today is that this is a missionary religion which, unlike Islam, has “cells” in our own world. If you could imagine, in medieval and early modem Europe, there being centers of Moslem propaganda in France, in England, in Christian Spain, and so on, that would be more comparable to the present fear that we have of the missionary penetration of Communism.

From 75 years ago. Thought some might find it interesting for historical reasons?

 

[yield]

Americans are taught FDR was the hero of the Great Depression. For one historian, that’s erasure
Guardian Sun 5 Jan 2025
In a new book, Dana Frank tells stories of the people who ‘made history happen’ through organizing and mutual aid

At the heart of the book is a critique of the US’s idealization of individualism – the idea that men pulled up their bootstraps and navigated the throws of the Great Depression by themselves. It’s the “stories that tell us that you can’t do anything about it, that it’s up to the important men …

“It’s a white-centered narrative, so racism is a minor thing, immigration is a minor thing,” Frank said. “But most of us live different lives. Our lives are embedded with having to deal with the ravages of capitalism.”

For Frank, the through-lines from the Great Depression to today are very clear. The Depression reshaped the role that the American government plays in managing the economy and economic welfare of its citizens. Social security didn’t exist before 1935, and neither did federal unemployment insurance. Two key regulating bodies, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which oversees the stock market and banking in the country, were created at the time. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was created to give structure to employees who wanted to form unions at their workplaces.

Though the second term of Donald Trump spells an uncertain future for these institution, Frank notes that collective action has grown in recent years.

Workers have formed new unions at major companies like Amazon and Starbucks. During the pandemic, many Americans were introduced to the concept of mutual aid, with communities coming together to share food and supplies, much like during the Depression. Climate activists pushed for a “Green New Deal”, advocating for a new social order that would address the effects of climate change.

“The labor movement wasn’t invented overnight. Fascism was not invented overnight. People are drawing on all kinds of ways that they see a path forward, and they do it collectively,” Frank said. “It’s not an individualistic story.”

Good piece

 

[yield]

The Black Book of Communism Is a Shoddy Work of History
Stefan Gužvica. Jacobin 01.07.2025

Cold Warriors

To understand the context of the creation of The Black Book of Communism, we must take into account another common denominator of its authors. In addition to the fact that most of them were former communists, they were also mostly collaborators of the Paris-based Institute for Social History (Institut d’histoire sociale).

The founder of that institute, in 1935, was Souvarine, and it served as an archive of Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement. In 1940, after the occupation of France, the Nazis destroyed the archive, and Souvarine was arrested. After the war, Souvarine abandoned his heterodox communist views and became an active anti-communist.

The new political positioning breathed new life into his institute. In 1954, the renewed Institute for Social History and Sovietology was created with financial support from Georges Albertini, a former socialist who had become a Nazi collaborator and antisemite during World War II and recruited French volunteers to fight against the USSR on the eastern front.

From the very beginning, the institute became an outpost of Cold War propaganda, part of the cultural war between the two blocs. Still under Souvarine’s leadership, it forged links with the neofascist organization Occident and the CIA-funded anti-communist union Force Ouvrière, and became a place of employment for former far-right activists.

After Souvarine retired in 1976, the institute was taken over by figures previously associated with the neofascist group Ordre Nouveau. During the 1980s, after the institute fell into financial difficulties, it was rescued by Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, since local authorities in France are generally responsible for the financial maintenance of research institutes. From 1984, the institute was aided by the newly founded National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit organization charged with promoting US foreign policy interests.

Most of the future collaborators on The Black Book of Communism were formed intellectually in this milieu. The researcher Roger F. S. Kaplan explicitly credited the institute with involvement in the creation of the book. Pierre Rigoulet was an associate of the institute and editor of their journal Les Cahiers d’histoire sociale. Jean-Louis Panné worked as its librarian and personal assistant to the retired Souvarine from 1979 to 1984.

The initiator of the whole project, Ronsac, was never formally connected with the institute, but he knew its collaborators through Souvarine. Therefore, he connected them with Courtois, whose books he had previously published. Courtois included with him in the project the editorial staff of his scientific journal Communisme, which included Nicolas Werth, Sylvain Boulouque, and Bartošek.

 

[tobias1995]

The impact of democracy on warfare