“In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. Facing cruelty (personified by a malevolent slave owner, portrayed by Michael Fassbender) as well as unexpected kindnesses, Solomon struggles not only to stay alive, but to retain his dignity. In the twelfth year of his unforgettable odyssey, Solomon’s chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist (Brad Pitt) forever alters his life.”
HISTORY OF PROSTITUTION: PROCON.ORG
Prostitution has been around almost since the dawn of time. It has been called the world’s oldest profession…other would debate that. However it existed and that’s why it earns a spot on this history blog.
GUYANA INDENTURED SERVANTS “From Whence They Left: Paying homage to Indentured Servants 1834-1920”
“The Indian indentureship program started as early as 1834. By 1839, about 6,100 labourers, of whom only 100 were women, arrived in Mauritius, Australia and British Guiana. By 1916-1917, the period preceding the abolition of Indian indentureship, 1,194,957 labourers had left India on ships, many of which had been slavers, and transported to Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, St. Lucia, the Colony of Natal, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Reunion Island, Surinam, Fiji, Australia, East Africa and the Seychelles. Those emigrants, departed for personal reasons, with a variety of dreams and aspirations, as immigrants do, that drove them to seek out a new life. They left loved ones behind forever, setting the stage for the evolution of a diaspora that today touches every corner of the world, and encompasses decorated and recognized professionals, prominent world leaders, entrepreneurs and academics, to touch on only a few professions in which they excel. With the passage of time, and 176 years between then and now, much has been forgotten, and little has been done to preserve that aspect of Indian emigration, apart from scholarly works and academic studies on the subject of Indian indentureship and the answer it provided the British plantocracy’s labour question during the post-abolition period.” 
History journal examines early New Orleans as multicultural Atlantic enclave
“In the most recent Journal of American History, Pierre Force portrays Tremé’s development at a time when New Orleans’ racial categories were fluid and mixed-race “free people of color” owned property and interacted freely with white residents of the city. The Journal of American History is published by the Organization of American Historians, based at Indiana University Bloomington.
The Journal of American History cover illustration shows fashionably dressed free women of color in the 1760s in Saint Domingue, a street scene similar to what might have been seen in New Orleans in the same era.
In “The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” Force, the dean of humanities at Columbia University, tells the story of “two families, one ‘black’ and one ‘white,’ whose paths briefly crossed in New Orleans in 1811”
“In an effort to reform the way American classrooms approach the conversation of race, author and scholar Henry Louis Gates will soon introduce a new PBS documentary that will trace 500 years of African-American life.”
To Govern a Republic, One Must Know the Minds That Created It …while a nation goes speculation crazy the people neglect to think of fundamental principles.
These were the words of Franklin Roosevelt in the months leading into the Democratic National Convention of 1932.
Roosevelt knew that the fight for the United States Presidency was not simply a game of political machines and punditry, but that this coming fight demanded a leader who understood the historic enemy of the United States and the founding principles of the nation.
“JAZZ begins in New Orleans, nineteenth century America’s most cosmopolitan city, where the sound of marching bands, Italian opera, Caribbean rhythms, and minstrel shows fills the streets with a richly diverse musical culture. Here, in the 1890s, African-American musicians create a new music out of these ingredients by mixing in ragtime syncopations and the soulful feeling of the blues. Soon after the start of the new century, people are calling it jazz.
Tonight, meet the pioneers of this revolutionary art form: the half-mad cornetist Buddy Bolden, who may have been the first man to play jazz; pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who claimed to have invented jazz but really was the first to write the new music down; Sidney Bechet, a clarinet prodigy whose fiery sound matched his explosive personality; and Freddie Keppard, a trumpet virtuoso who turned down a chance to win national fame for fear that others would steal the secrets of his art.
The early jazz players travel the country in the years before World War I, but few people have a chance to hear this new music until 1917, when a group of white musicians from New Orleans arrives in New York to make the first jazz recording. They call themselves the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and within weeks their record becomes an unexpected smash hit. Americans are suddenly jazz crazy, and the Jazz Age is about to begin. ”
In the Dominican Republic, Professor Gates explores how race has been socially constructed, and how the country’s troubled history with Haiti informs notions about racial classification. In Haiti, Professor Gates tells the story of the birth of the first-ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves hard fight for liberation became a double edged sword.
LISTVERSE: 10 Historical Oddities You Don’t Know
The Lewis and Clark expedition was sent out by President Jefferson to cross the continent of America. They were to make scientific discoveries and contact the native Americans. Because they were to be gone for so long it was necessary to train them in medicine so that they could treat illness and injury. Benjamin Rush, famous doctor and founding father, was a key advisor. He was a keen advocate of purgatives and laxatives. To clear out the bowels of the expedition he provided them with his own invention, Bilious Pills. These contained a large amount of mercury. They were so effective as laxative that the expedition termed them Thunder Clappers. The problem with mercury is that it remains in the environment for a very long time. When the expedition used the pills they left such large amounts of mercury in the ground that later archaeologists have been able to identify the path of the expedition by the levels of the metal still remaining from the Thunder Clapper purges.
It is a common complaint, especially in election years, that politics has become too divided. Today even slight criticisms are thought to be devastating. In the past politics was a lot less dainty. When Senator Sumner made a speech attacking “the harlot Slavery” Senator Preston Brooks, representing the pro-slavery South Carolina, took offense. Two days later, on the floor of the senate chamber, Brooks approached Sumner and began to thrash him with a heavy walking stick. When other senators attempted to stop the beating, an accomplice of Brooks held them off with a pistol. Sumner was beaten unconscious, the injuries he suffered affecting him for the rest of his life. It was three years before Sumner was able to return to his duties. Brooks was re-elected and hailed as a hero in the pro-slavery south.
Because Brooks had broken his cane in the attack he was inundated with gifts of replacement walking sticks by admirers.
In many cultures certain people are held to be taboo; that is, they are not to be touched. In 19th century Siam, it was absolutely forbidden for a commoner to touch the queen. To break this rule carried the death penalty. One day Queen Sunandha Kumariratana was in a boat which capsized, plunging her into a river. Though there were many people who might have come to her aid it would have meant their own death to touch the royal body. She died at the age of 19 along with her daughter.
In the ancient world the color purple was a rarity. The word purple derives from the Latin Purpura, and that from the Greek Porphrya. The Greeks knew only one source of a purple dye, a secretion of a certain type of sea snail. To make up any significant amount of dye it was necessary to harvest vast quantities of snails. This made the resulting dye hugely expensive. For centuries only the very rich could afford purple. In many cultures the color became so associated with royalty that commoners were banned from wearing it.
Only one person can claim to be the first person to have been born on a continent. Emilio Palma was born at the Esperanza Base in the Antarctic in 1978. His birth was planned by the Argentine government to bolster their claim to a region of Antarctica. When heavily pregnant, his mother was flown to the base for the birth. Unfortunately it failed to have much effect on the international scene, though made for an interesting anecdote.
On a side note of continental births: the first European to be born in the Americas was born around 1005 in the Norse settlement of Vinland. He went by the great name of Snorri Thorfinnsson.
It is well known now that the people of the ancient world were well aware that the Earth was not flat. Even looking at the horizon of the sea it was possible to see the curvature of the Earth as ships fell below the horizon. What is less well known is how accurately they knew the circumference of the planet. Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician who lived in the 3rd century BC, using only sticks and the shadows they cast, was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth to a size of 25,000 miles. This compares to the actual (polar) circumference of 24,860 miles.
We all know what the terms clockwise and anti-clockwise mean. But why do clocks move in the direction they do? The answer is based on tradition. Long before mechanical clocks were invented, sundials were the best way of estimating the time of day. In the Northern Hemisphere, the direction of a shadow on a sundial will move clockwise due to the Earth moving in an anti-clockwise direction when viewed from the North Pole. When mechanical clocks were invented they were modeled to be similar to sundials and so we still use the movement of the sun in the way we read the time.
The Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 is the shortest war on record lasting an exhausting 38 minutes. After the death of the pro-British sultan Hamad he was succeeded by his nephew Bargash. The British favored another candidate. With Bargash in the sultan’s palace refusing to abdicate the British gathered a fleet in the harbor beside it. An ultimatum was delivered requiring Bargash to step aside by 9am on the 27th of August. When no reply was received the British opened fire at 9:02. The entire fleet of Zanzibar, a single royal yacht, was sunk and the palace caught fire. The sultan’s flag was removed and the firing stopped at 9:40. By the afternoon the pro-British Hamud bin Muhammed was in place as the new sultan. The supporters of Bargash’s short sultanate were forced to pay for the cost of the shells shot by the British.
Poor William Bligh has gone down in history as a tyrannical captain, mainly due to various film depictions of him. The mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 is the one fact that has become associated with him. Most people at the time blamed the mutiny not on Bligh being too strict with his men but rather being too lax. Unfortunately Bligh seems to have been a magnet for rebelliousness. In 1797 his crew again rebelled, as part of a larger mutiny. After this was settled there was a second mutiny in 1797 which involved Bligh’s ship. While neither of these mutinies focused on anything Bligh was responsible for, it set up a pattern which was to shape his memory. Perhaps because of his now extensive experience with rowdy crews he had hardened his style of command. The now harsh Bligh was made governor of New South Wales in 1806. He antagonized several important people in the colony and in 1808, in a mutiny known as the Rum Rebellion, Bligh was arrested and held captive for two years.
Had these mutinies not occurred Bligh would be best known today for the transplantation of the bread fruit to the West Indies.
I recently wrote a list with unusual facts about the US presidents. While the human occupants of the White House have been occasionally bizarre there have been an equal number of strange animal residents. John Quincy Adams used to keep an alligator, a gift from the Marquis de Lafayette, in a bathtub. Calvin Coolidge kept a pygmy hippo called Billy, an ancestor of many of the pygmy hippos to be found in US zoos today. It should perhaps be no surprise that the legendarily pugnacious Andrew Jackson kept fighting cocks. The hungry President Taft was the last president to keep cows, called Mooly Wooly and Pauline Wayne, at the White House and enjoyed drinking their milk. It would probably liven up press conferences today if the sitting president would keep bears as his predecessors Jefferson and Coolidge did.
http://listverse.com/2012/11/06/10-historical-oddities-you-dont-know/
QUAKERS EXECUTED FOR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
“William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, are executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs. The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death.
The Religious Society of Friends, whose members are commonly known as Quakers, was a Christian movementfounded by George Fox in England during the early 1650s. Quakers opposed central church authority, preferring to seek spiritual insight and consensus through egalitarian Quaker meetings. They advocated sexual equality and became some of the most outspoken opponents of slavery in early America. Robinson and Stevenson, who were hanged from an elm tree on Boston Common in Boston, were the first Quakers to be executed in America. Quakers found solace in Rhode Islandand other colonies, and Massachusetts’ anti-Quaker laws were later repealed.
In the mid 18th century, John Woolman, an abolitionist Quaker, traveled the American colonies, preaching and advancing the anti-slavery cause. He organized boycotts of products made by slave labor and was responsible for convincing many Quaker communities to publicly denounce slavery. Another of many important abolitionist Quakers was Lucretia Mott, who worked on the Underground Railroad in the 19th century, helping lead fugitive slaves to freedom in the Northern states and Canada. In later years, Mott was a leader in the movement for women’s rights.”http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/quakers-executed-for-religious-beliefs
Slavery in Mexico by Shep Lenchek
“In 1493 Pope Alexander VI, while granting Spain the right to colonize the New World, mandated that the indigenous people be converted to Catholicism and prohibited their enslavement. However, he added a “catch 22” by going on to say that those who did not accept Christianity or reverted to their old religion, should be punished and could be enslaved. More positively, in 1500, Queen Isabella of Spain had expressly ordered, “all the Indians of the Spaniards were to be free from slavery.” This order had no ifs or buts. When she died in 1504, her will instructed her successors to continue these policies.
Thus, when in 1519 Cortes and the Conquistadors invaded Mexico, both Spanish and Papal Law seemingly protected the Indians from enslavement. It is not surprising that Cortes, whose very invasion of Mexico was an illegal rebellion against the order of his superior, the Governor of Cuba, ignored the order of the Queen, and used the aforementioned “catch 22” to remain in compliance with the Papal order. As they moved toward Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards went through the motions of converting the Indians but offered them no religious instruction. The erection of a Cross, a speech outlining the virtues of Christianity by La Malinche and the destruction of the local idols was the standard procedure.
It was not until 1524, after the Aztecs had been conquered and enslaved, that 10 Franciscan Priests and 2 lay brothers arrived. Now, real religious instruction was offered to the Indians. In 1526, 12 Dominicans followed them. The first Jesuits who ultimately were to carry the main burden of religious instruction, did not arrive until 1572. Thus, in 1521 when Cortes gave his followers vast tracts of land called encomiendas,all indigenous people living within the boundaries of these land grants were bound to the land as slaves. Simply baptized, without follow up, it was easy to claim they had reverted to the worship of their old Gods. Thus the ecomienderos could claim they were in compliance with the second part of the Pope’s directive. Recognized by the Spanish Crown as the military governor of New Spain, largely unsupervised, Cortes ran Nueva Espagna until 1526.”http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/666-slavery-in-mexico
When Congress reorganized the peacetime regular army in the summer of 1866, it had taken the above situation into account. It also recognized the military merits of black soldiers by authorizing two segregated regiments of black cavalry, the Ninth United States Cavalry and the Tenth United States Cavalry and the 24th, 25th , 38th , 39th, 40th and 41st Infantry Regiments. Orders were given to transfer the troops to the western war arena, where they would join the army’s fight with the Indians. Directed and shot by William Byers.
“The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a “separate but equal” status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades.” Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws)
“Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.
For most Americans this is entirely new history. Slavery by Another Name gives voice to the largely forgotten victims and perpetrators of forced labor and features their descendants living today.”
http://badassoftheweek.com/toussaint.html
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Click link to see video>>>>>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arSEALgiOr4&list=ELt3y7ksR1t_U&index=6&feature=plpp_video
“In the midst of widespread poverty, fueled by economic inequality and rampant corruption, a new form of slavery – bridal slavery – has flourished in India. Women and young girls are sold for as little as $120 to men who often abuse them.”
“Ideas like liberty, freedom, and self-determination were hot stuff in the late 18th century, as evidenced by our recent revolutionary videos. Although freedom was breaking out all over, many of the societies that were touting these ideas relied on slave labor. Few places in the world relied so heavily on slave labor as Saint-Domingue, France’s most profitable colony. Slaves made up nearly 90% of Saint-Domingue’s population, and in 1789 they couldn’t help but hear about the revolution underway in France. All the talk of liberty, equality, and fraternity sounds pretty good to a person in bondage, and so the slaves rebelled. This led to not one but two revolutions, and ended up with France, the rebels, Britain, and Spain all fighting in the territory. Spoiler alert: the slaves won. So how did the slaves of what would become Haiti throw off the yoke of one of the world’s great empires? John Green tells how they did it, and what it has meant in Haiti and in the rest of the world.”
Episode 1 – The Colour of Money: Colonialism and the Slave Trade.
Reaching back across the centuries, this program sheds light on historical attitudes toward human differences. It assesses the significance of Biblical narratives, including the curse of Ham, in the evolution of European concepts of race, and goes on to examine the basis of institutionalized racism—entwined with fervent capitalism—on which the transatlantic slave trade operated. The destruction of Americas indigenous civilizations and the dehumanization and exploitation of Africans are studied alongside the writings of Enlightenment philosophers and historians. Experts interviewed include Dr. Orlando Patterson of Harvard University, Dr. Barnor Hesse of Northwestern, and Professor James Walvin of the University of York.
See the full film at http://video.pbs.org/video/2176766758
Watch the beginning of SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, the new documentary challenging one of America‘s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Premiering February 13 on PBS.
One of the best documentary that has even been filmed!!!!
This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, ‘We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.’
–Edward R. Murrow, 1960, CBS News
In 1960 CBS aired a television documentary, “Harvest of Shame” that revealed the disturbing plight of America’s migrants who worked in the “sweatshops of the soil.” Producer Lowe said that it aired after Thanksgiving to “stress the fact that much of the food cooked for Thanksgiving [was] picked by migratory workers” and to “shock the consciousness of the nation.” Indeed, the footage was shocking, showing families of workers working and living in extreme, dehumanizing poverty; and the same scenes today should shame the consciousness of the nation even more.
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