I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.
Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.
Today on “Europe thought it was special, but really isn’t”
Read 1001 inventions: Muslim heritage in our world. Some things you won’t find in your history books.
Your friendly neighborhood historian here reminding you that the “dark ages” weren’t really that dark at all as you had people in Asia and Africa getting shit DONE. 👌
im so ANGRY that we don’t know shit about history!!!!! i want to know people’s personalities!!!!! what was fredrick the great’s favorite color?????? did antinous freakin smash whenever somebody played a specific song on the lyre?? what was hatshepsut’s favorite animal??? we’ve lost all this information and it’s killing me!!!!
my favorite part of hamlet is at the beginning when they see the ghost of hamlet sr for the first time
and the guards are like “Horatio, you go talk to it! You went to college!”
and Horatio is like “Yeah! I did go to college! I will go talk to the ghost!”
like. where did horatio go to college. did he go to ghost college
YES, ACTUALLYYES HE FUCKING DIDBC
(a) EVERY COLLEGE THEN WAS GHOST COLLEGE bc ghosts were widely believed to be Real™ n thus scholars learnt abt them. moreover, as everybody knows, ghosts only communicate in Latin; Latin is the scholastic language. Horatio is a scholar, thus both knows abt ghosts and knows Latin, so it is very reasonable to assume he will b able to ask this one what up (as obviously sth must b up 4 it 2b wandering around, why else wld it b here, gawd, this is like. the most basic of basic-level shit)
(B) WITTENBERG WHERE HORATIO STUDIES WAS LIKE. T H E MOST SPOOPYOF GHOST COLLEGES bc they were alllllll about theology n the supernatural n shit so SUPPOSING HORATIO WILL KNO HIS SHIT ABT GHOSTS IS IN FACT A THOROUGHLY SENSIBLE ASSUMPTION
this has been said before but i am fucking adding it again bc it HACKS ME TF OFF when ppl reblog the post w/o commentary as if OP jsut fucking checkmated Shakespeare when in fact all they managed to do was fail at the most basic historical contextualisation of this scene n make a fcuking fool of emselves lmao
this feels less like a “checkmate, Shakespeare” moment than a “fuck was this dude on, this shit’s surreal” moment
personally I kinda love the complete effect of “thing that made sense when originally written appears hilarious/fascinating/weird as balls to people who don’t have that context, and then context is made known to them and it’s like a whole new level of supercool”
it’s like the circle of life for shakespeare plays. “lol have the college guy talk to the ghost because as a college guy he has the necessary experience” transmutes into “every college was ghost college in shakespeare’s time” and the whole effect is awesome.
just gonna add a bunch of things here bc i love this moment in the play actually and it’s really interesting! because shakespeare was p smart.
marcellus and bernardo have seen the ghost before but they go to horatio with this information before they go to, say, anyone who actually fucking lives there
given hamlet’s reaction to horatio showing up in the next scene we can be pretty sure that no one knew horatio was even coming to elsinore (unless maybe claudius and gertrude invited him without telling hamlet and the soldiers got to him before they could work on him like ros&guil, but a) that’s a stretch and b) horatio’s relationship with the family outside of hamlet is seriously up for debate and a big question to answer for that role)
so like… how did m&b even find horatio to tell him about the ghost and why was it him they told? clearly they want to get validation before going to someone Important but the circumstances of this arrangement are RULL WEIRD
(the ‘you went to ghost college’ line isn’t just about horatio being able to speak to the ghost bc he’s been to ghost college, it’s about having a SCHOLAR validate what they saw, so when they go to someone with power to do something about it they can push horatio to the front and say ‘the learned rich guy thinks there’s a ghost too please actually listen to us’)
when they DO go to tell hamlet it’s basically just a bff reunion + btw ghost so clearly they did some strategizing after this scene as to how best to broach that topic (it’s horatio that says ‘it’ll probably speak to hamlet’ but if it had been someone different would they have thought ‘it’ll probably speak to gertrude’? that they go to hamlet with it is BECAUSE horatio is there so like… again i come back to how did they find him)
PEOPLE P MUCH ALWAYS CUT THESE LINES BUT BOTH THE SOLDIERS AND HORATIO ASSUME THE GHOST IS THERE BECAUSE OF THE WAR WITH NORWAY, NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIS DEATH– it would’ve been a HELLA PLOT TWIST when he started talking about murder in 1.5
wittenberg was also famously associated with dr. faustus and martin luther, which the audience at the time would have known, which is part of why it was the most spoopy
we don’t know horatio went to wittenberg at this point. like we the reader know, we the people putting on this play know, but we the audience don’t know. it’s actually a cool ‘aha’ moment in the next scene when claudius brings up wittenberg and you’re like AH YES, GHOST COLLEGE
we also have no idea what horatio and hamlet’s relationship is like so when horatio shows up in the next scene and hamlet goes from ‘i hate everyone’ to ‘OMG UR HEEEEEEEEEERE’ with this dude we only know as ‘new in town’ and ‘intellectual’ we know that hamlet will believe him about the ghost and that (because we’ve already been over how he’s level headed and smart) he’ll be there to help us out with our lead who’s not quite all there which is a p cool setup by billy
why is the ghost just like wandering the battlements? it’s pretty heavily implied he won’t speak to anyone but hamlet so why doesn’t he just go to him? the haunting rules for the ghost are all over the place and again that’s like a serious conversation you have to have with the actor, what the heck is he doing here
TBH THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THIS SCENE, THAT A LOT OF LIKE SUPER ESTABLISHED SCHOLARS AND DIRECTORS STRAIGHT UP FORGET: this scene is here at least partially to establish that the ghost is objectively there. there is some sort of fragment of spirit wandering the battlements that looks like the dead king and it wants something. it only TALKS to hamlet, and when it shows up later gertrude can’t see it, but the first thing we learn in this play is THERE IS A GHOST. shakespeare takes great care to make sure we know we can trust our eyes with it. our ears perhaps not, but the play is not from hamlet’s pov. we start with marcellus and bernardo, and grounded loyal horatio, saying ‘what the fuck what is this ghost doing here’. the mystical bit isn’t what’s up for debate
also ‘thou’rt a scholar, speak to it horatio’ is fucking hilarious and no one ever plays it as a joke
like why isn’t this ALWAYS staged as marcellus and bernardo hiding behind horatio and pushing him at the ghost and him going ?!!!?!?!?!?!? i just got here and you have swords what the fuck is wrong with you
basically it’s like a couple of small town cops going “oh thank fuck agent mulder is here”
Happy Pride Month Eleanor Roosevelt was queer, the Little Mermaid is a gay love story, James Dean liked men, Emily Dickinson was a lesbian, Nikola Tesla was asexual, Freddie Mercury was bisexual & British Indian, and black trans women pioneered the gay rights movement.
Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, Leonardo da Vinci was gay, Michelangelo too, Jane Austen liked women, Hatshepsut was not cisgender, and Alexander the Great was a power bottom
Freddie Mercury is well known for his attraction to men but was also linked to several women, including Barbara Valentin whom he lived with shortly before he died. Friends have talked about being invited into their bed and walking in on them having sex (documentary Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender)
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are two of the best-known activists who fought in the Stonewall riots
I just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like “Why is glass transparent?” And that’s an interesting question and I’m sure it’s great that the video exists but my first thought was like “Because glass is terrible, obviously.” Because it’s unwieldy and let’s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn’t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren’t, we’d use something else.
looking through my “me” tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago
If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency. It was most likely started as a sanitary concern. Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.
Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it. That would leak out seemingly at random no less. Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.
Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness. Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation. Also beads. Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.
The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.
this is amazing and I’m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this
i wonder how many historic trans men we’ve lost to “this WOMAN went by a man’s name, wore men’s clothes, took the job of a man, lived as a man… GIRL POWER!”
this isn’t a “pushing my identity on historic people” thing, it’s the fact that every single time i or another person brings up the possibility of someone like us in history, we’re immediately shut down, told that we didn’t “exist yet”, given a billion different reasons why we aren’t ALLOWED to see these people as reflective of us and our struggles and experiences – i get that we didn’t have the vocabulary back then but for so many of you the IDEA that someone who went to the same stretches that we do today to separate from their dead selves and identify similar to the way trans people do is too “far out there” and “disrespectful” to them somehow. they’re dead. we’re alive. we’re trying to connect the pieces. go get your kicks out of isolating us from history somewhere else, away from me.
yeah, there were women who did crossdress in order to take up jobs they would not have been permitted to access
but when people say it about Albert Cashier, who donned Union uniform, bound his chest, and lived as a man even after the Civil War, when he was reclusive and lived in a tiny village, after there would have been no incentive for him to do so, I question their motives.
I also question their motives when they list Alan L Hart, who legally changed his name and was one of the first trans men to pursue a hysterectomy, referring to himself as “a fellow.”
people DONT want historical figures to be trans. they WANT to interpret these historical figures as women, not trans men, because that makes them uncomfortable.
same with the musician billy tipton, who hid his trans status from his wife and children his whole life, and whose son didn’t know his father was trans until billy was dead. he told his wife that his binding was necessary because he had been in an automobile accident before they met, never disclosing his trans status to her. the number of historians that refer to him by his deadname and call him an “actress” make me feel sick. he was a stealth trans man around everyone but his parents, and it hurts trans men everywhere to call trans men in history “lesbians”.
this may sound like a shitpost but in the 19th century green carnations were a sign of being gay AND in ancient rome, yellowish-green clothing was a sign that a man was effeminate and therefore probably gay, so green is a gay color and only gay people can wear it now
C’mon… Even his bottle of wine is gay.
What could be more gay than Grantaire except Grantaire with Enjolras ?
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