historyisntboring reblogged
historyisntboring reblogged
Listen if the study of ancient humans doesn’t make you at least a little bit emotional idk what to say.
I started crying today at the museum because they had reconstructed the shoes of Otzi the iceman.
Either he or someone he knew who cared about him made these shoes out of grass and bear skin and twine and he was wearing them when he died over five thousand years ago.
And a Czech researcher and his students did reconstructions of these shoes and wore them to the same place where he died to test them out and they were like yep! These shoes are really cozy and comfy and didn’t give us blisters while hiking!
Is that not just the coolest shit ever????
historyisntboring reblogged
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, School For Dragon Babies, 1884, pencil on paper
i can’t believe you posted this without posting the sequel!
It gets better and better
Oh my god. This is the same Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter who in the extra-dramatic BBC series about them, was played by Peter Sandys-Clarke, whose oeuvre is more usually represented by this kind of stuff:
It’s that Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Who drew all the dragonbabies at school. I’m.
onewhodarestohope
People are people. Artists are artists. And sometimes you just want to draw a lot of dragon babies.
For the last stop on this FeelsTrip, they were from a sketchbook he gave his granddaughter Angela at eighteen months old; he would draw something new in it for her whenever he visited.
historyisntboring reblogged
"you should've been at the club" YOU should've been at the club. in the catacombs. on april 2nd 1897.
i went to the illegal 1897 catacombs concert and nobody there knew you
historyisntboring reblogged
Bronze incense burner in the form of a peacock, Seljuk Empire, 12th-13th century
from The Brooklyn Museum of Art
I want it to skitter up to me on all its little legs because it's *so sure* that what I need to fix my problem is to be censed with myrrh, and then do a jump of surprise and let out a smoke ring when I wave it away.
I feel bad immediately and lure it back over with the combustible bay leaf off my dinner.
A gardener reports that I really should stop feeding them, because a flock of incense peacocks has burnt through a prized lavender bush and the smoke has sedated his beehives.
You will LOVE this thing!!!
Source: brooklynmuseum.org
historyisntboring reblogged
It’s PRIDE MONTH and wanting to start with this little remembrance from queer people in the past.
From the book: Baby, You Are My Religion by Marie Cartier
maileesque
[IDs, in order:
two tweets reading:
if you ever need to cry on cue, what works for me is thinking about the fact a queer person once would call every gay bar they had a number to just to hear the sound of other queers laughing somewhere, just listen, say nothing. as to not be alone. every week. for fourteen years.
i remember reading that interview like, six years ago, and FEELING this knowledge integrate itself into my cellular makeup. i can never unknow this window to someone’s loneliness and need. and now you have it too. godspeed
text reading:
INFORMANT: Well, I had insomnia. I used to phone up all the gay bars, just to hear them answer the phone … Just to hear the noise, oh yes.
INTERVIEWER: So you would call and just be on the phone?
INFORMANT: No, I would just hear the noise and the laughter in the background. I just wanted to be there.
INTERVIEWER: … it helped you just to know it was out there?
(Pause)
INTERVIEWER: .. that’s a really special story.
INFORMANT: Yeah, oh God.
text from an article, reading:
PREFACE: MYRNA’S STORY
I would stay on the phone … that was my lifeline.
“I came out as gay in 1945-the year that the war ended” Myrna Kurland told me from her home high in the Hollywood Hills of California. “I was dating a softball player that I met at the gay bar. I met her at Mona’s or else it was the Paper Pony. My first night in a gay bar was—freedom. I had a gay male friend and he took me there.”
Myrna was in the gay bars for eight years. She showed me her “treasure from the 40s"—a gold softball on a necklace chain from her first lover—inscribed with the initials from the professional softball league to which women belonged while the men were in the war. “We went to the bar all the time. My entire social life was there—there was no other place.” However, that night she first went to the bar-something else happened. Her father died that night. And she blamed herself, even though she knew that was irrational. She couldn’t get over it. Also she told me that, “I’m Jewish and we lost so many people in the Holocaust. I felt it was my duty to have children.
There was no other way to have children in the 1950s without getting married to a man. I married someone I disliked that’s what I felt I deserved because I was gay and I felt so guilty” She married a psychiatrist—someone to whom she would never be able to tell her secret. Her husband’s practice was very involved in actively trying to change the sexuality/sexual deviancy of his clients as would be almost any psychiatrist’s practice at the time. If her sexual past and preference had been known to him in all likelihood she would have lost her children.
This brief story came as I was packing up my things, and although we had been speaking for about three hours, this was in response to my final question, “Is there any last thing you want to say about what the bars meant to you?” I meant when she actually went to the bars in the 1940s—not knowing there was another story. She told me a story about when she did not actually go to the bars, but when she made sure the bars were still there—when she was married.
INFORMANT: Well, I had insomnia. I used to phone up all the gay bars, just to hear them answer the phone … Just to hear the noise, oh yes.
INTERVIEWER: So you would call and just be on the phone?
INFORMANT: No, I would just hear the noise and the laughter in the background. I just wanted to be there.
INTERVIEWER: … it helped you just to know it was out there?
(Pause)
INTERVIEWER: … that’s a really special story.
INFORMANT: Yeah, oh God.
MYRNA’S STORY … CONTINUED
Myrna was married from 1953 to 1968 when she separated, and then divorced her husband in 1970 when no-fault divorce law passed in California. She had terrible insomnia throughout her marriage. “I would get up at one or two a.m. and I would call every gay bar I had the number to from the 1940s. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just stay on the phone and listen to the sounds in the background. I would stay on until they hung up, and then I would call another one of my numbers, until I had called all the numbers I had. ‘That was my lifeline.”
What did it mean to call those bars and to hear the sounds in the background? “That phone. Those numbers. That was my lifeline.” she whispered, and put both hands by her heart. “It meant there was a place somewhere—even if I couldn’t go there—that place was out there. I could hear it. Freedom.” She called the bars two to three times a week like this—for fourteen years.
/end ID]
historyisntboring reblogged
Y'know, I'm kinda surprised I haven't seen Jack Chains more in fantasy tbh, like it's a really interesting and low budget armor style, I'm legit surprised I've almost never seen it in media
Couple examples I pulled from google images
Actually kind of! It's built with a very interesting principle behind it and I'm gonna explain it below because it's neat
historyisntboring reblogged
#ToucanTuesday:
Handle Spout Vessel in Form of a Toucan
Moche culture, North Coast Peru, 100 BCE–500 CE
Ceramic & pigment
22.9 × 17.2 cm (9 × 6 3/4 in.)
historyisntboring reblogged
i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls
historyisntboring reblogged
historyisntboring reblogged
Incredible reporting from 1964.
(to give some context, in 1963 a newspaper published a fun fact about how George Harrisson liked to eat jelly babies, and people in the audience started to throw some at the band during some concerts afterwards. Apparently, in the US, people were throwing jelly beans at them instead, which was worse)
historyisntboring reblogged
1963 Refrigerator 🤔
Look what they took from us 😭
I am drooling
This gets me more excited than anything smart refrigerators can offer. I want to learn refrigerator repair just so I can buy one and maintain it for all eternity.
I literally gasped
As someone currently having to shop for fridges I want these features more than anything on the current market
historyisntboring reblogged
Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.
The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.
Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!
abyssalcorvid
They were also called Nightingale Floors, and looking up to make sure I had the right term, I found they were super clever! They were more than just ill-fit boards or whatever makes floors creak normally, they actually used little metal bars under the boards placed into small holes in the boards to cause the creak.
The best things on the internet are when someone makes a joke and then Miss Frizzle rolls up for an educational adventure.
historyisntboring reblogged
hrrrggghhhh......philosophy of art......praxis.........the idea that a certain level of complexity or a certain kind of technical skill is what qualifies something as art is bullshit.............so you have to think that way about your own art too you have to be consistent.........you have to choose how you refer to your art thoughtfully to reflect this or it will never sink into your brain..............save me jacob geller video essay "Who's Afraid of Modern Art" ............
I Don't Care How Silly It Makes You Feel, That 10 Minute Bust Sketch Of Your Gay OC Facing Left Where One Eye Is Too Big And The Hair's Wrong Is Just As Much A Piece Of Art As The Fucking Mona Lisa And You Will Refer To It As Real Art With Inherent Value By Virtue Of Being Art Or Your Inconsistent Praxis Will Subtly Eat Away At Your Confidence In All Forms Of Creation, Forever
Yeah, it's also art. It just fucking sucks. Art does not mean good. Value does not mean good.
Sure. Who gives a shit about these weird fat horses.
These fucking dumbass idiot shitheads didn't even use perspective. Who cares. Fuck them.
I can't even tell what this is. Fuck this stupid ugly drawing from Pompeii. There were tons of guys making sexy sculptures around the same time and place, why'd this idiot even bother. No one gives a shit because it's not good, right?
Oh wait oh my god all of these pieces of art are valuable and irreplaceable reflections of the human experience! They all communicate tons of things about the values held by their creators!!!! Wait holy shit everyone cares about them because they're a direct communication from people we could otherwise never communicate with!!!!! Oh my goddddd art has value besides looking "good" that's so crazy! This applies to everything everyone makes forever and you can't change my mind.
historyisntboring reblogged
Prehistoric depictions of owls.
historyisntboring reblogged
Horse wearing reconstructed 2500-year-old Scythian horse armor unearthed in the Altai Mountains in Siberia
historyisntboring reblogged
I think if you said that to the medieval artist they’d just go, “oh good you understand my vision”.
Like… that’s 100% what they’re going for. Does the tweeter think it looks like that by accident?
I apologize, but I'm taking this as an excuse to infodump just a little. I am excited to tell you a number of things.
First, it is genuinely medieval; that's a pilgrim badge. This particular photo may actually be a replica of the original -- I'm not sure -- but it's a medieval design.
Second, it's definitely supposed to be a vagina. It might also represent Jesus's side wound, but it's primarily a vagina. We know this because the "anthropomorphic vagina" thing is a recurring motif in pilgrim badges and a lot of those badges also have dicks, a context which I think makes the intent clear. (And, of course, there are plenty of badges that are just dicks.)
Third, nobody is exactly sure why this is a thing, but there is some ongoing academic debate on the subject. I've seen arguments for different theories, including:
- some kind of apotropaic function
- medieval hookup culture
- funy
Fourth, two badges have been found with this design, and it has developed a colloquial name -- here's an excerpt from an M.A. thesis by Lena Mackenzie Gimbel that mentions it. (I was just doing a quick check through the library catalog to make sure I could verify this was a real design, and then I found this source and had to show y'all the screenshot.)
I love the Middle Ages, and so much of it is just objectively friggin' goofy. Also I will be referring to kings as "god's favorite munchkins" in future, thank you.
Reminder that the characters in the Canterbury Tales - some of the raunchiest stories available in any age - are religious pilgrims.
Medieval pilgrims were, at least some of the time, horny as fuck.
I did a work exchange at a museum in the netherlands for a bit when I was 16, and they had a whole cabinet in one of the stable storage rooms just dedicated to drawers and drawers of pilgrim badges shaped like dicks. big dicks, small dicks, fat dicks, skinny dicks, dicks in hats, regal dicks, dicks disguised as birds, dicks disguised as beasts, dicks disguised as pilgrims, ornate dicks, crude dicks. the curator who showed me around was so defeated like "we have no idea what to do with them all. people keep finding them and sending them to us. every time someone digs up a water main they find another dick badge. we have so many already."
Thank goodness I can now reblog a version of this which points out that yes it is indeed 100% a vagina
Reminds me of when I tried to find one of these on tumblr once
Literally 1984. Medieval pilgrims were raunchier than us 😔
Oh hey! One of my friends is a medievalist and has written papers about these, she has infodumped to me about them a bazillion times.
Her theory is that these may have been satirical items -- that, essentially, what these badges are saying is 'look how silly these women being out on their own are, isn't it ridiculous to see women traveling alone, they might as well just be wandering vaginas.' The dicks carrying around the vulva is a further statement of ridiculousness, basically.
The idea of 'hysteria' literally being 'wandering wombs' means it's sort of a ... visual pun? 'Look at these hysterical women just wandering around like their loose wombs.'
Dunno if it's true or not, because we really don't know for sure, but that's her theory!
If you have @jstor access, there's a review of her book which talks about this here: