An odd but hilarious rabbit hole, courtesy of this French history podcast:

https://thesiecle.com/episode48/

Most notoriously, in 1831 the cartoonist Charles Philipon published an image depicting Louis-Philippe’s head as a pear. Put on trial for insulting the king, Philipon defended himself by telling the court that Louis-Philippe so resembled a pear that an “artist could quite easily have drawn the parallel unintentionally” — and then demonstrated it by drawing a four-panel caricature in which a drawing of the king’s face morphs into a pear.

Tl;dr:

• Several geographic effects of the erosion of the Appalachian range over hundreds of millions of years, like the Fall Zone, being the dividing line between the hilly, higher altitude Piedmont interior and the flat, sandy, swampy, and nutrient poor exterior.
• Hurricanes
• Malaria

• Institution: University of Toronto
• Lecturer: Timothy Snyder
• University Course Code: MUN180H1
• Subject: #authoritarianism #colonization #communism #democracy #fascism #genocide #history #holocaust #politics #soviet #worldhistory
• Year: 2026
• Description:

  The first lecture in a ten-lecture series on Hitler and Stalin today.

  The first lecture (video above) is titled “What is history?” We speak often about history, but we are careless with the past. When we choose not to know what has happened before, we are also choosing not to influence what will happen after. If we don’t care about history, we find ourselves in an eternal present, denied any sort of imagination about the future, and nurtured on lies about a past in which we were innocent. History does not mean these misleading tales; it means a search for knowledge, using a certain set of tools; it means a process that enriches and humanizes, one that allows us to name things by their proper names.

  There are two readings to go along with this lecture:

  • Tadeusz Borowski, Here in Our Auschwitz
  • The War on History is a War on Democracy

#20thcentury #democracyindanger #freecourse #historymatters #hitler #hitlerandstalintoday #massatrocities #nazi #nazigermany #neveragain #riseofauthoritarianism #sovietunion #stalin #timothysnyder #totalitarianism #universityoftoronto #uoft

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9013913

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/64004

This story was originally published by Colorado Newsline.

Chase Woodruff
Colorado Newsline

The jubilant sounds of music and fireworks on the “Centennial Fourth” had barely faded away when newspaper editors and telegraph operators began spreading alarming reports of a major defeat suffered by the U.S. Army in the Montana Territory.

To the Lakota Sioux — whom the Army had declared “hostile” in early 1876 when they resisted pressure to negotiate the sale of the Black Hills, where a gold rush by white settlers was underway — the June 25 battle that led to the annihilation of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 of his cavalry soldiers was known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

The Great Sioux War of 1876 would ultimately end in defeat for the Lakota, after the Army regrouped and launched a series of winter campaigns that scattered and drove some of them into Canada. But Custer’s defeat left a powerful impression on an American public that had assumed the Plains Indians were “no match for the army of a modern industrial nation,” writes historian Richard White in “The Republic for Which It Stands,” a history of the U.S. during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

“The Little Bighorn was a minor battle compared not only to the Civil War but to the losses American armies suffered against Indians in the wars of the early republic, but shocking because of its timing,” writes White. “When news of the battle came during the (Centennial) Exposition, Americans greeted it with incredulity and outrage.”

Gen. Alfred Terry’s official report of the defeat to Army headquarters was printed in the Rocky Mountain News on July 9.

“Confirmation of the Custer Catastrophe,” said the News headline. “Gen. Terry Tells the Sad Story — How No Soldier or Officer Has Been Found Alive.”

The Colorado Territory had followed the events of the war more closely than much of the rest of the country. After gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, thousands of fortune-seekers had gradually left Colorado’s mountain mining camps to try their luck in the Dakotas instead.

Colorado, too, had a long history of bloody conflict with the Indian tribes who had been gradually dispossessed of their lands on both the Eastern Plains — from which the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes had been expelled following a U.S. militia’s slaughtering of hundreds of tribespeople in the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre — and the Western Slope, much of which still belonged to the Ute people in the centennial year.

Alongside the Lakota, a handful of Cheyenne and Arapaho people had fought Custer at the Greasy Grass, including Lame White Man, a Cheyenne chief who had fled north after the Sand Creek Massacre.

John Stands In Timber, a Cheyenne tribal historian and Lame White Man’s grandson, collected oral histories from many members of the tribe, including recollections of “the Custer fight,” and published them in the 1967 book “Cheyenne Memories.” Some of those who looted and mutilated the bodies of Custer’s men in the aftermath of the battle, he wrote, had had family members killed in the Colorado massacre 12 years earlier.

“Some claimed they never touched them while others said they took things,” Stands In Timber wrote. “But those who had relatives at Sand Creek might have done plenty.”

‘Justification for conquest’

William Byers, the Rocky Mountain News editor who had endorsed a campaign of “active extermination” of Plains Indians in the months leading up to the Sand Creek Massacre, now called for another militia force of volunteers to be raised to fight the Lakota and their allies.

“If a volunteer force is authorized for the Sioux campaign, as seems now probable, the requisite number of men can be quickly raised in Colorado and neighboring states and territories,” declared the News. “To do the job up right and finish it for all time, there ought to be about ten regiments of frontier volunteers called into the field.”

No such step would be taken by the Army, and most Lakota bands surrendered by the following spring, leading to the formal annexation of the Black Hills in 1877. Just over a century later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the tribe had not been compensated for the seizure, issuing an award — which the nation has refused to accept — that now totals over $1.5 billion.

Historians today generally agree that there’s little evidence that a valiant “Last Stand” was fought by Custer and his troops, who in fact made a chaotic retreat from a much larger force of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho soldiers. But the defeat quickly attained the status of American myth, anyway.

That was due in large part to William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, whose long-running Wild West Show would feature sensationalized reenactments of the battle — sometimes by Plains Indians performers who had been combatants at the real thing — before Cody’s death in Denver in 1917.

“Why celebrate defeat, particularly catastrophic defeat, at the hands of what by any measure was a weaker foe?” asks White. “The answer was that such defeats provided justification for conquest.”

“An invasion of Lakota lands became the noble defense of outnumbered white men against savage warriors,” he continues. “Americans, by this logic, did not invade Indian lands; they simply defended themselves against ruthless enemies. Their ultimate victory was not the work of invasion, conquest, and empire. It was the product of self-defense.”

Selected sources:

• The Rocky Mountain News, July 9, 1876
• White, Richard. “The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896”
• Stands In Timber, John. “Cheyenne Memories”

The post How the Colorado Territory in 1876 reacted to reports of the Battle of the Little Bighorn appeared first on ICT.

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Thousands of forgotten news reports are reshaping our understanding of Aurangzeb and the Mughal world.

While Europe was inventing newspapers, Mughal India had its own news network.

From the late 16th Century, armies of scribes, agents and secretaries compiled akhbarat - brief news reports on court intrigue, military campaigns, appointments, finances and gossip.

Written in Persian on brittle paper in hurried hands, they formed the Mughal empire's information network: part intelligence brief, part official circular, part news bulletin.

Story time for Lemmings:

"After Igor's death at the hands of the Drevlians, Olga assumed the throne because her three-year-old son Sviatoslav was too young to rule. The Drevlians, emboldened by their success in ambushing and killing the king, sent a messenger to Olga proposing that she marry his murderer, Prince Mal. Twenty Drevlian negotiators boated to Kiev to pass along their king's message and to ensure Olga's compliance. They arrived in her court and told the queen why they were in Kiev: "to report that they had slain her husband... and that Olga should come and marry their Prince Mal." Olga responded:

Your proposal is pleasing to me, indeed, my husband cannot rise again from the dead. But I desire to honor you tomorrow in the presence of my people. Return now to your boat, and remain there with an aspect of arrogance. I shall send for you on the morrow, and you shall say, "We will not ride on horses nor go on foot, carry us in our boat." And you shall be carried in your boat.

When the Drevlians returned the next day, they waited outside Olga's court to receive the honor she had promised. When they repeated the words she had told them to say, the people of Kiev rose up, carrying the Drevlians in their boat. The ambassadors believed this was a great honor as if they were being carried by palanquin. The people brought them into the court, where they were dropped into a trench that had been dug the day before under Olga's orders, where the ambassadors were buried alive. It is written that Olga bent down to watch them as they were buried and "inquired whether they found the honor to their taste."

Olga then sent a message to the Drevlians that they should send "their distinguished men to her in Kiev, so that she might go to their Prince with due honor." The Drevlians, unaware of the fate of the first diplomatic party, gathered another party of men to send "the best men who governed the land of Dereva." When they arrived, Olga commanded her people to draw them a bath and invited the men to appear before her after they had bathed. When the Drevlians entered the bathhouse, Olga had it set on fire from the doors, so that all the Drevlians within burned to death.

Olga sent another message to the Drevlians, this time ordering them to "prepare great quantities of mead in the city where you killed my husband, that I may weep over his grave and hold a funeral feast for him." When Olga and a small group of attendants arrived at Igor's tomb, she did indeed weep and hold a funeral feast. The Drevlians sat down to join them and began to drink heavily. When the Drevlians were drunk, she ordered her followers to kill them, "and went about herself egging on her retinue to the massacre of the Drevlians." According to the ''Primary Chronicle'', five thousand Drevlians were killed on this night, but Olga returned to Kiev to prepare an army to finish off the survivors.

The initial conflict between the armies of the two nations went very well for the forces of Kievan Rus', who won the battle handily and drove the survivors back into their cities. Olga then led her army to Iskorosten (what is today Korosten), the city where her husband had been slain, and laid siege to the city. The siege lasted for a year without success, when Olga thought of a plan to trick the Drevlians. She sent them a message: "Why do you persist in holding out? All your cities have surrendered to me and submitted to tribute, so that the inhabitants now cultivate their fields and their lands in peace. But you had rather die of hunger, without submitting to tribute."

The Drevlians responded that they would submit to tribute, but that they were afraid she was still intent on avenging her husband. Olga answered that the murder of the messengers sent to Kiev, as well as the events of the feast night, had been enough for her. She then asked them for a small request: "Give me three pigeons... and three sparrows from each house." The Drevlians rejoiced at the prospect of the siege ending for so small a price, and did as she asked.

Olga then instructed her army to attach a piece of sulphur bound with small pieces of cloth to each bird. At nightfall, Olga told her soldiers to set the pieces aflame and release the birds. They returned to their nests within the city, which subsequently set the city ablaze. As the ''Primary Chronicle'' tells it: "There was not a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught fire at once." As the people fled the burning city, Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them, killing some of them and giving the others as slaves to her followers. She left the remnant to pay tribute.