When Germans living the Weimar Republic weren’t battling unemployment, rampant inflation or dodging street battles between political extremists, they shuddered at stories of killers in their midst. German newspapers burst with accounts of monsters disguised as respected citizens. Peter Kürten, … Continue reading History Thread: The Serienmörder Who Never Was
Beware the Tatzelwurm! This curious critter supposedly inhabits the mountainous regions of central Europe, especially the Alps in Bavaria and Switzerland. It’s known to prey on livestock and generally make a ferocious nuisance of itself. Descriptions of the Tatzelwurm vary: … Continue reading The Wormy History Thread
Historians generally don’t have much nice to say about Andrew Johnson. The 17th President, who succeeded to office after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, had a chance to heal the nation recently divided by civil war and end or at least ameliorate … Continue reading History Thread: Vampire of Liberty
Outside the town of Bures in Suffolk, a unique geoglyph can be glimpsed on the hills. The Bures Dragon commemorates a bizarre local legend about a rampaging reptile which scourged the town sometime in the Middle Ages. It’s a great … Continue reading History Thread: A Brief History of the Bures Dragon
Today is a baleful anniversary for animal lovers: the death of Benjamin, the last known Thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) in 1933. Once endemic to Tasmania, this carnivorous marsupial was considered a nuisance for feasting on livestock and subject to massive overhunting. … Continue reading The History Thread Goes Extinct
Welcome back to the History Thread! My head is still in Civil War land, as I’m rereading Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy alongside Leon Litwack’s brilliant Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. Additionally, my … Continue reading The History Thread Soldiers On
Thanks to Dave and Colm for filling in while I was preparing for/on vacation. I will share some pics in the comments below, but I wanted to draw your attention first to this most awesome of battle flags. In keeping … Continue reading The History Thread Sticks it to the Secesh
On November 23, 1861 New Orleans hosted a military review like no other. A force of nearly 800 officers and men, most of them people of color, paraded through the Crescent City to the cheers of assembled citizens. One journalist … Continue reading History Thread: Black Confederates, or a Study in “Alternate Facts”
Last week, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bust was finally removed from the Tennessee state capitol. The predictable neo-Confederate voices, including the state’s Lieutenant Governor, are shrieking about “woke culture” ruining Tennessee heritage by no longer honoring the man responsible for the Ft. … Continue reading History Thread: That Devil Forrest
Another week without a proper header! I’m researching a couple of potential subjects for future threads, but they’ll take more research than a week or so of cramming so I’d rather hold off for now. I’m also starting to plan … Continue reading The History Thread Looks Ahead
Well, the History Thread is taking the week off from substantive writing. I’m mulling over a few topics for future threads but they’ll probably take a deeper research dive than usual to write about. (See: Reconstruction, voter suppression during.) And, … Continue reading A Low-Fi History Thread
In her own mind, Mary Steichen Calderone was hardly radical. She was a practicing Quaker and a well-regarded doctor; a mother of three, she expressed pride in her role as “a mother and a grandmother and a “great-grandmother.” Even at … Continue reading History Thread: Fighting “Raw Sex” in the Classroom
By the mid-1960s, many expected the next Civil Rights battleground to be in education. Martin Luther King lamented that “the history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the … Continue reading History Thread: Propaganda and Poppycock in “The Land of the Free”
This week’s History Thread didn’t have much time to prepare, so today we’ll share some links instead of a normal post. The History of Garden Gnomes Glenn Burke, the first openly gay baseball player The Daughters of Bilitis, the first … Continue reading The History Thread Shall Call Him Vandor!
Mesopotamia, the region roughly occupying modern Iraq, is one of the oldest inhabited areas of the Earth. It’s been settled, conquered and fought over for millennia, being the seat of many empires and the graveyard of others. But until relatively … Continue reading The History Thread Cooks the Mesopotamian Way
In 1914, white supremacy was as dominant in America as ever. Ben Tillman, the one-eyed Senator from South Carolina who in his youth led the Paramilitary Redshirts in taking over his state, proclaimed that “this is a white man’s country … Continue reading History Thread: William Monroe Trotter vs. D.W. Griffith
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race riot (or Tulsa race massacre), which resulted in the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the deaths of anywhere from 39 to 300 Black Tulsans at the hands … Continue reading The History Thread Remembers Tulsa
In 1974, America was coming apart at the seams. Disillusioned by Watergate, infuriated by foreign oil embargoes and spikes in meat prices, frightened by terrorism, cults and kidnapped heiresses, depressed by an economic downturn, there seemed little respite from misery. … Continue reading History Thread: The Year of Pitching Dangerously
In 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew were stricken with the disease near modern-day Montreal. The symptoms were gruesome: Cartier’s men “had all their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour: then did it ascend … Continue reading History Thread: The Triumph of Scurvy
During a recent visit to Fort Ligonier, I was impressed anew with their remarkably thorough, well-curated exhibit on the Seven Years War. This visit, I found myself particularly struck by a mural-sized reproduction of the famous painting, The Execution of … Continue reading History Thread: To Kill an Admiral
For all the recent outpouring of World War I books, it’s doubtful whether most add anything significant to existing scholarship. Some, like Max Hasting’s Catastrophe 1914, are well-written but don’t deviate from the classic Barbara Tuchman narrative. The converse are books … Continue reading History Thread: Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel (2014)
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