I decided this should be the first thing you see when you come to this blog.
As most of my followers (nearly 7,000 of you! I never imagined!) have undoubtedly realized, I am no longer updating this tumblr. I was going to just let it sit, unchanged, for eternity (or at least until the heat-death of the universe), but it seems tumblr itself is dying a slow and terrible death already.
Rather than allow almost two years’ worth of posts about Steve Rogers and what his world (maybe) was like disappear without a trace, I have imported and archived everything in a mirror site on Wordpress. I haven’t yet changed reference links to their Wordpress posts (it’s a bit of a daunting task, so that may or may not ever happen), but everything is there.
I won’t be shutting this tumblr down - if I do, I will definitely make an announcement about it - but I wanted everyone to know in case we wake up one day to find that tumblr is gone and the world we once knew has changed irrevocably.
Thank you to everyone who has sent me questions and tagged me in posts over the years. This started as a little project to amuse myself and grew to be much bigger than I ever could have imagined. You have all been wonderful, even the trolls.
Thank you and good night. It’s been a dream. <3
Howling Commandos: what’s up with Morita
I want to know more about his history in MCU-verse. Comic-verse even doesn’t have much info, but I’m not really a comics person so I could be wrong here. Where is his family? Are they in a camp (maybe one of these?) or were they one of those allowed to live ‘under the supervision of an American family’ (wtf). Does he have siblings? What year did he join the army? Pre-1942 also makes the most sense, right? because that’s when FDR signed Executive Order 9066 (Feb 19, 1942) I am so curious about all of this. He’s potentially got such complex motivations and I want to include them in fic. I may just not have looked hard enough.
hey followers, can anybody help samtalksfunny out? I’m not terribly familiar with this part of comics-verse.
karnythia started this hashtag, let’s get it trending. There’s already some amazing stuff in there! #diversifyagentcarter
historicalagentcarter, historicallyaccuratesteve, historicalblackwidow, any of you on to this?
I'm down for this.
VE Day: May 8, 1945 - The War Ends In Europe
“Throughout the world throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe. It is five years and more since Hitler marched into Poland. Years full of suffering, and death, and sacrifice. Now the war against Germany is won.”
Excerpted from “The War Ends in Europe” Motion Picture Films from “United News” Newsreels, 1942 - 1945
Source: catalog.archives.gov
This isn’t necessarily Peggy Carter-related, and god knows I’m not going to be the one to do it, but now that we have history blogs for Steve Rogers and Peggy, I feel like the universe needs a Historical Black Widow blog.
Just putting that out there.
historicalblackwidow
right here!
Photojournalist Paul Kitagaki Jr. is trying to keep history alive.
It’s been harder than he ever imagined.
Mitsuo Mori next to a 2012 portrait of him and a 1944 shot of him from Tule Lake
His exhibition at the California Museum in Sacramento reflects a decade of work. It explores the World War II internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent — two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. But it doesn’t just look at the past: Historic photos by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and others are juxtaposed with contemporary images of the same people, taken by Kitagaki.“A lot of them right now are in their 80s and 90s,” he says. “And soon they’ll be gone, and the stories will be lost forever.”
“We were kind of the silent generation,” 81-year old Andrew Nozaka says. “We were told to study hard and achieve. Looking back on it, maybe we should have protested a hell of a lot more.”
Mary Ann Yahiro and Helene Nakamoto at what used to be Raphael Weill School in San Francisco, 65 years after their original photo
Kitagaki’s exhibition eventually will include audio and video, and he wants to produce a book. Meanwhile, he’s looking for more people. He has interviewed and photographed 31 so far, with seven more lined up. He’s hoping for 50 total.
Pictures of people he’s searching for can be found on his website, along with some sets of then-and-now photos. If you know who they are, just email him at paul@kitagakiphoto.com.
The California Museum exhibition runs through May 3. Twenty-one of the photos will then be on display at the Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento from May 7 to June 7.
In life Bonhoeffer was a young man, just starting his career when the Nazis came to power, and throughout the 1930s he was finding his way. In the 1980s, I interviewed a number of Germans who had been in the Confessing Church and was struck by the number of people who told me they had never heard of him until after 1945.
As one of the editors of his collected works, I read Bonhoeffer as a good man and a brilliant theologian, a man who questioned the very legitimacy of the Nazi regime in early 1933 precisely because of its persecution of German Jews—but who then wrote and spoke surprisingly little on the issue in the ensuing years. Although his writings call to activism, he seldom took an activist role.
In 1936, he filled out the required political questionnaire and provided an “Aryan certificate” in an attempt to keep his teaching position. He was brought into the resistance only as a ploy to keep him out of Hitler’s army. Once there, he found himself part of a plot that included a wide range of figures, some of them honorable, others men who had fully participated in Nazi misdeeds before ultimately turning against the regime.
In the process he came to understand something we easily forget in our quest for heroes. When it reaches the scale of National Socialism the nature of human evil is like rising water, leaving nothing untouched, no one untainted or unchanged.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death. You can read more about his life and death here.
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Today marks the anniversary of FDR signing executive order 9066, which authorized the “indefinite detention” of nearly 150,000 people on American soil.
The order authorized the Secretary of War and the U.S. Army to create military zones “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The order left who might be excluded to the military’s discretion. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt inked his name to EO9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, it opened the door for the roundup of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens living along the west coast of the U.S. and their imprisonment in concentration camps. In addition, between 1,200 and 1,800 people of Japanese descent watched the war from behind barbed wire fences in Hawaii. Of those interned, 62 percent were U.S. citizens. The U.S. government also caged around 11,000 Americans of German ancestry and some 3,000 Italian-Americans.
Source: dailycaller.com
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I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD. If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?
“Thousands of our men who are convalescing and very many who feel the strain of these trying days, are being advised by their doctors that knitting is the perfect tonic for steadying the nerves. The womanfolk are only too anxious to help, but there are a great many men, especially in our hospitals, who miss the guiding, feminine hand.
In taking the lead, Penelope teaches you with the aid of clear illustrations, the more simple knitting stitches from which are created such useful articles as scarves, blankets and cushion covers.
Before commencing any knitting always be sure to have the correct materials quoted in the instructions and thus ensure satisfactory results”
There’s been a few fics that have Steve or Bucky knitting as a therapeutic activity so I thought I’d share this pamphlet I found while researching for a fic. It was issued during WWII to soldiers dealing with PTSD.
(If you’re interested in the actual patterns, the whole thing is available on this website as a PDF for £1.50.)
Pioneering street photographer Rebecca Lepkoff captured a Lower East Side that now seems distant and familiar at the same time: http://blog.nyhistory.org/photographs-rebecca-lepkoff/
Hester Street, 1940s. PR 295, Rebecca Lepkoff Photograph Collection
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The famous La Marseillaise scene from Casablanca.
You know, this scene is so powerful to me that sometimes I forget that not everyone who watches it will understand its significance, or will have seen Casablanca. So, because this scene means so much to me, I hope it’s okay if I take a minute to explain what’s going on here for anyone who’s feeling left out.
Casablanca takes place in, well, Casablanca, the largest city in (neutral) Morocco in 1941, at Rick’s American Cafe (Rick is Humphrey Bogart’s character you see there). In 1941, America was also still neutral, and Rick’s establishment is open to everyone: Nazi German officials, officials from Vichy (occupied) France, and refugees from all across Europe desperate to escape the German war engine. A neutral cafe in a netural country is probably the only place you’d have seen a cross-section like this in 1941, only six months after the fall of France.
So, the scene opens with Rick arguing with Laszlo, who is a Czech Resistance fighter fleeing from the Nazis (if you’re wondering what they’re arguing about: Rick has illegal transit papers which would allow Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, to escape to America, so he could continue raising support against the Germans. Rick refuses to sell because he’s in love with Laszlo’s wife). They’re interrupted by that cadre of German officers singing Die Wacht am Rhein: a German patriotic hymn which was adopted with great verve by the Nazi regime, and which is particularly steeped in anti-French history. This depresses the hell out of everybody at the club, and infuriates Laszlo, who storms downstairs and orders the house band to play La Marseillaise: the national anthem of France.
Wait, but when I say “it’s the national anthem of France,” I don’t want you to think of your national anthem, okay? Wherever you’re from. Because France’s anthem isn’t talking about some glorious long-ago battle, or France’s beautiful hills and countrysides. La Marseillaise is FUCKING BRUTAL. Here’s a translation of what they’re singing:
Arise, children of the Fatherland! The day of glory has arrived! Against us, tyranny raises its bloody banner. Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers? They’re coming to your land to cut the throats of your women and children!
To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let’s march, let’s march! Let their impure blood water our fields!
BRUTAL, like I said. DEFIANT, in these circumstances. And the entire cafe stands up and sings it passionately, drowning out the Germans. The Germans who are, in 1941, still terrifyingly ascendant, and seemingly invincible.
"Vive la France! Vive la France!" the crowd cries when it’s over. France has already been defeated, the German war machine roars on, and the people still refuse to give up hope.
But here’s the real kicker, for me: Casablanca came out in 1942. None of this was ‘history’ to the people who first saw it. Real refugees from the Nazis, afraid for their lives, watched this movie and took heart. These were current events when this aired. Victory over Germany was still far from certain. The hope it gave to people then was as desperately needed as it has been at any time in history.
God I love this scene.
Remember when I made that post about a puzzle of a map from 1941? Well here is what it looks like finished!
That is really cool.
Undoubtedly the most-requested episode in our two years hosting the show: The Night Witches were an all-women’s bombing regiment in the Soviet military in World War II. They flew wood-and-canvas biplanes that were never meant to be used in combat. By the end of the war, they’d flown roughly 24,000 combat missions, all of them at night, earning 23 of them the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
YESSSSSSSS
aspiringdoctors
Thank you!
Dr. Grace Eldering and Dr. Pearl Kendrick were doctors in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who pioneered research of whooping cough, a disease that used to kill roughly 6,000 children every year. Unlike many researchers at the time, Eldering and Kendrick did not use orphans or institutionalized children in their research, choosing instead to build networks with local health departments and welfare commissions to gather statistics on the prevalence of the disease.
Loney Gordon was a lab technician who worked closely with Eldering and Kendrick. She is credited with discovering a remarkably strong strain of the infectious disease, which led the three scientists to creating a stronger vaccine than those previously available.
You can read more about Eldering and Kendrick on the CDC's website, and about Loney Gordon at the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.
In honor of Dr Seuss’ birthday we share this poster made by U.S. Army Captain Theodor Seuss Geisel to warn soldiers serving in World War II about malaria. It’s now in the smithsonianlibraries.
Read more on their blog
Source: blog.library.si.edu