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whumpster-fire · 3 years

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Trivia Fun Facts

Defenestrating Sphere has been voted the Best Dungeons and Dragons Spell for sixteen consecutive years since its publication in 2004 by the Royal Society For Yeeting Your Bitch Ass Out Of A Fucking Window, which is the greatest number of consecutive wins of this award for any spell published in a D&D splatbook by nine years, and the most awarded spell in the game overall by four years with the runner-up being Telekinesis (although Telekinesis has more total wins due to its being in the game for longer - it was already published at the founding of the Royal Society For Yeeting Your Bitch Ass Out Of A Fucking Window in 1983.

The American Your-Bitch-Ass-Out-Of-A-Window-Yeeting Association predates Dungeons and Dragons, but has only given awards for tabletop RPG spells since 2006. Defenestrating Sphere has won every single year in America, except for 2016 and 2008. In 2016 the award was given to Bigby’s Grasping Hand in a close vote, with the prevailing opinion being “come on, it’s just too easy, man.” The resulting riots nearly led to the AYBAOOAWYA’s collapse, and over twelve members were killed, most by the obvious cause but one by gunshot wounds. In 2008 the award was given to Hurl Through Hell. However, this was no longer valid in 2010 with the resolution to no longer consider D&D 4th Edition a Dungeons And Dragons Game, resulting in the award being moved to the new “Best Spell From A Tabletop Imitation Of A MMORPG” category, later renamed the “Best D&D 4th Edition Spell” in 2013. Hurl Through Hell has won this award every year since its inception. The 2008 “Best Dungeons And Dragons Spell” award was reinstated in 2014 after the release of D&D 5e and the inclusion of Hurl Through Hell, but was later rescinded in 2018 when somebody pointed out that Hurl Through Hell is a class feature and not a spell in 5e.

The AYBAOOAWYA currently does not recognize a winner for Best D&D Spell in 2008. The Czech Defenestration Society is the oldest and ninth-most prestigious recreational defenestration organization, established in 1419. However, to date CDS Windowlords have refused to add roleplaying games as an awards category, on the basis that it would detract from their reputation. This is hard to argue, as a photo of Lake Prague, once the site of a medieval Czech city that was hurled through a window-shaped dimensional portal by CDS mages on multiple occasions, clearly demonstrates the society’s power. After its third defenestration in 1618 which resulted in Prague falling over 17 miles (27358.8 meters), the city was never rebuilt and the crater was allowed to fill with water, though there are several villages surrounding the lake, as well as several villages that now lie at the bottom of the lake after being flung through a 400-meter tall iron window purpose-built by the CDS. Sadly this window was destroyed by Nazi bombing campaigns during WWII as retaliation for the 1939 Defenestration of Wolfenbüttel . Nevertheless the foundations of the great window, and the lake as a whole, have been designated a world heritage site by UNESCDO, the United Nations Cultural, Scientific, Cultural, and Defenestration Organization, and tourism has replaced fishing as the dominant industry in the area.

But this atrocity did not deter the CDS, and over the course of the war the Czechs proceeded to defenestrate several other German settlements including Cloppenburg, Dingolfing, and Bad Mergentheim (Good Mergentheim fifteen kilometers to the South was also leveled in an unrelated attack by the Budapest Pyromancy club. Sorta Okay Mergentheim still stands to this day, although it has been depopulated since 1971 due to the actions of the Slovenian Necromancer’s Guild), as well as Lubbock Texas, which was sadly confused with Lübeck, Germany (Which was sunk into the sea in 1955 by the Liverpool Cult of Neptune), and Ipswich, which was destroyed just for the fun of it. Luckily for the allies, the CDS was finally brought to its knees with the 1942 defeat of most of its Council of Archdefenestrators by Defenestrierungsmeister Hans Von Liechenberg, also known by his post-war professional wrestling stage name Hurl-It-Out Hans, using his signature finishing move, Defenestrierenkugel (roughly translates as: Defenestrating Sphere). Hurl-It-Out Hans was the third most popular defenestration-themed professional wrestler of all time, after Max Pane, and The Undertaker, best known for the 1998 match where he threw Mankind out the window of Hell In A Cell and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.

However, while the Czech Defenestration Society has the most total destroyed cities to its record, the largest individual city to be defenestrated was San Antonion in 1993 by the Texas-based biker gang known as Yeet-Haw. A 2008 attempt by the CDS to overturn this record by defenestrating Hamburg ended in tragedy when Hamburg, Arkansas was accidentally defenestrated instead of Hamburg, Germany. After major public outcry, the CDS’s Senior Geography Officer Pepik Otradovec was ejected via the 14th-story window of the organization’s headquarters in Hradec.

This was also the same year that American Your-Bitch-Ass-Out-Of-A-Window-Yeeting Association retroactively failed to crown a Best Dungeons and Dragons Spell winner. As a result of these two incidents 2008 has been voted the Worst Year In History by the Royal Society For Yeeting Your Bitch Ass Out Of A Fucking Window five times, the third-most wins of any year. It is tied for third place with AD 79, when both Pompeii and Herculineum were destroyed by a volcanic eruption without windows being involved at all. In second place is 1965, when the Chicago Municipal Building Code briefly banned windows. This ban was quickly overturned due the entire committee responsible being hurled out of an existing window which had been grandfathered in and was not affected by the ban. In first place is 1903, the year when impact-resistant windowpanes for high-rises were invented.

1903, coincidentally, is also exactly 173 times the number of votes by which Bigby’s Grasping Hand won in 2016. But even more impressive is that 2016 happens equal the height in feet of the current world record for Highest Purely Architectural Defenestration in the Women’s Category by use of a rolling chair, set by Agnes Bilchmoitner of Lincoln, Nebraska (Defenestrator) and the late Joe Rusell Bracegirdle Junior (Defenestratee) of Schaumburg, Illinois, off the 137th floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which shattered not only the previous record but also the impact-resistant glass in use on the tower, although the record would have been higher if the structure had not been built with lower roofs which interrupted Mr. Bracegirdle’s fall against the recommendation of the American Your-Bitch-Ass-Out-Of-A-Window-Yeeting Association. Regardless, the floor number this record was set from with the last two digits reversed is equal to the ratio of the calendar year which was voted the Worst Year of All Time by the RSFYYBAOOAFW to the margin of victory for Bigby’s Grasping Hand, and the last two digits of the year when Bigby’s Grasping Hand won Best D&D Spell is the same as the distance in feet that the Undertaker threw Mankind out the window of Hell In A Cell and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table. This took place in 1998, which is not only the best version of Windows Operating System according to the AYBAOOAWYA, but is also equal to the current height in feet of the world record for Highest Magically-Assisted Purely Architectural Defenestration By A Minor, set by 16-year-old Brian Woolworth in 2004, which is when the D&D 3.5 edition Complete Arcana was published, including the spell Defenestrating Sphere, and Brian’s age when he set the record is equal to the number of consecutive years Defenestrating Sphere has been voted the Best Dungeons and Dragons spell by the RSFYYBAOOAFW.

And that, according to the Czech Defenestration Society’s 2021 annual awards ceremony, is the Greatest Defenestration Trivia Fact of the year.

#shitpost #high-effort shitpost #defenestrating sphere #defenestration #the defenestration of prague #war crimes content warning #defenestration content warning #destruction of historic defenestration-related monuments content warning #Lubbock Texas mention content warning #Hell in A Cell Pasta warning #awful content #Dungeons and Dragons Fandom #History #trivia #pseudo-fiction #my hideous sense of humor

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skypagex · 3 years

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let me see you get yourself out of this situation

aka three unlikely allies ditch detention and go on an adventure

word count: 2320

trigger warnings: stds (aids mention), drugs, nsfw mention

Okay, so maybe the detention is fully deserved. Sky probably shouldn’t have hotboxed his bedroom and expected to get away with it. In fact, he was pretty lucky to get away with detention, although he suspects that’s related to his mother’s call to the school and probable sizeable donation. (He should never have texted her. He knows that’s a bad idea. Thanks for the soccer team uniforms or whatever, mom.)

But regardless of how much he deserves to be in detention, he can still think of about a billion things he’d rather do than come into an almost empty room to the sight of Jack fucking Kelly (or is it Fielding? To be honest, he remains wilfully oblivious to the Jack updates. Like if he ignores him he’ll cease to exist) sprawled across the back row of seats with a smirk on his lips that so obviously says that this is his domain and Sky is trespassing. As if he owns the whole fucking room.

(Knowing Jack, he probably thinks he does. Not that Sky has had much personal contact with the boy besides an odd rumour that he died. But the boy’s reputation seems to carry through the school like a biblical plague of locusts. And besides, Sky’s friendship with Juliet gives him equal parts way too much information about Jack’s personal habits and currently, post break up, far more information about how disgustingly horrible he is. Either way, he’s well aware that there’s a sizeable ego present. He’s almost jealous, to be honest. Sometimes Sky feels like if he had Jack’s ego he’d probably be a rock star already.)

Still, he’s hoping that maybe he can pass under the radar of the British boy long enough to make it through at least half of the detention, maybe more, considering that the teacher has already apparently left - probably done with the delinquents before having even begun to lecture them on their crimes - so if Jack so much as starts a conversation Sky’s pretty sure there’s nothing present to hold him back from absolutely verbally annihilating Sky, which will therefore mean there’s nothing present to hold Sky back from tears and public humiliation. It’s hard being a crybaby, you know?

Such hopes are almost immediately dashed when Jack turns and gives Sky the most ravenous look he’s ever seen another human come up with, like Jack is starving and Sky is a walking hamburger about to satiate him. Yum.

“Pagey,” well there’s a nickname Sky didn’t know he had, and to be honest it makes him feel slightly nauseous even knowing that Jack has whole separate nicknames for him that he doesn’t even know about. How the fuck does Jack know everyone at the fucking school anyway? “How’d you end up here? Cried so much you flooded your bedroom?”

(Which would be insulting enough even if it wasn’t a plausible suggestion and didn’t need the rude addition of Jack proceeding to laugh at his own joke.)

Fortunately Sky’s saved from the perils of having to answer the question by the slamming of the door, which indicates the arrival of a third addition to the detention squad: a blonde girl, he thinks he’s seen her in a shared class (Helena or something along those lines, definitely the same name as a My Chemical Romance song since he remembers thinking that at registration) and a disgusted look upon her face as she has the same realisation as Sky upon seeing Jack’s face: that they are well and truly fucked.

“God,” Helena (if that’s really her name, Sky hopes it is because he suspects from her demeanour that she’s not the type to take a misnaming incident lightly) “was detention itself not punishment enough? Are they truly going to make me look at your ratty little face for an entire forty five minutes? I feel ill just thinking about it,” she placed a hand over her chest as if the sight of Jack was causing her physical pain. Relatable, to be honest.

“I know,” and in that moment Sky feels more grateful than ever because it’s clear from Jack’s tone of voice that his admirably short attention span has now passed Sky straight over in favour of a pretty worthy opponent. “You really should complain, love. Like, how is getting to look at me for free a fucking punishment? It’s like getting to go into the Tate Modern for nothing.”

“The Tate Modern is already free,” Sky says helpfully. He is ignored.

“Your confidence,” Helena blasts back, “is truly insane considering how absolutely disgusting your physical appearance is. Have you considered being committed to a mental asylum at any point?”

“I would,” Jack counters, “but how could I? When the population of Luxor would just pine for me. Nothing would be interesting if I left.”

“Contrary to your totally unfounded belief, not everything in this school involves you.”

“Possibly,” the boy reasons, and then the smirk returns. “But you have to admit the majority of things do.”

Seemingly done with the conversation, Helena stomps over to the desk next to Sky and sets her things down. Her meaning is pretty clear to him: you’ll do, in comparison to being sat next to rat man.

The ticking of the clock succeeds in covering for their lack of conversation for all of about five minutes before Jack apparently just cannot keep words in his own head anymore and has to interrupt the perfectly nice silence again: “so how did you end up in detention, princess? Kiss a frog?”

“I don’t recall having any physical relations with you,” Helena says haughtily. “If I did, I can assure you I must have been under some sort of influence unwillingly and therefore I shall be suing imminently. And if you must know, I am being unfairly victimised for skipping my medieval lecture for a perfectly valid reason.”

“To get a nose job?” Jack asks innocently, “or was it Botox?”

That elicits a slight smile from Sky, which reminds the other two that he does in fact exist and it’s almost funny the way they both turn to face him as Jack continues his questioning, “what about you, Pagey?”

“Uh,” his mouth goes dry and he gulps, “weed… stuff,” he finishes lamely, shrugging as if that’s completely self explanatory. It should be. He damn well hopes it is, because frankly Sky does not have the strength to take part in this conversation and he’s really hoping that Helena can carry the anti Jack side of it without him. “You?” He asks hopefully, as if turning the conversation back to Jack will immediately throw him out of it and he can go back to his people watching.

“Oh, I jumped out a window,” Jack says airily, apparently oblivious to the looks of total confusion both Sky and Helena give him. The resulting silence proceeds to allow the clock ticking to become audible again.

“Are you seriously telling me,” Helena asks after about ten minutes have past and Sky can just about see Jack, out of the corner of his eye, beginning to meticulously colour in something which looks suspiciously like a poster, “that I have woken up today and willingly come to this godforsaken room and sat in the company of absolute dimwits and the teacher in charge is not even going to deign to show up?”

“Sometimes they just don’t,” Jack shrugs as if this is a usual occurrence. “Especially if they see me on the list.”

“Can’t blame them for that,” Helena mutters.

“Well, it would be hard not to treat me like the god I am. Can’t be unfair to the other students.” He grins. “Nah, guess they get lazy. I dunno. Most of the time I just leave.”

“Well that’s a wasted day of mine then.” She scowls. “Don’t they know time is money? Although I do have plenty of both.”

“That was the most ungraceful segway into a brag I have ever heard,” Jack observes, “and this is coming from me.”

“What can I say? I’m pretty, it allows for more leeway.”

She actually gets a laugh out of Jack from that, and it kind of fascinates Sky. Partly because he’s always assumed that Jack was more aggressive. He gets into enough fights for that. But he seems more… amused than anything else by the back and forth. Like he’s less of a punching devil and more of the type of person to push buttons out of enjoyment and amusement. He supposes that’s one way to get out of boredom.

“Hey, crybaby,” he’s so caught up in psychoanalysing the other two that he doesn’t realise for a minute that Jack is addressing him, and before he can say anything the other boy is waving a hand in front of his face. (He flinches back, predictably. God, he’s always so fucking predictable.) “You got any weed?” Jack asks, his face inches from Sky’s, close enough that Sky can see a stray eyelash on his cheek (would it be ridiculous to point it out considering that Jack would undoubtedly take that as Sky confessing his undying love for him?) and the freckles littering his cheeks.

“Uh.” Truthfully, Sky’s pretty sure this is going to end in him having to share so he’s really not willing to answer, but he’s never been good at lying so instead Jack gets a slow nod by way of response.

“Well there we fucking go,” Jack takes a step back thankfully, so he’s no longer close enough that Sky can literally smell whatever cologne he puts on (ugh, straight men) and glances back at Helena, gesturing wildly to Sky. “Don’t have to be a fucking waste of your day, princess. Or are you too good to come smoke a joint with me and Page?”

“My name’s Sky,” Sky offers. He is ignored.

“As long as nobody sees us,” Helena sniffs, but she gets up all the same, sliding her things into her bag. “And for the record, I’m a Queen, not a princess. I understand that your male mind finds words difficult though,” she adds with a condescending smile.

“I’m the British one,” Jack argues. “I’d know about fucking Queens.”

“I’m literally half English, you absolute cretin. My surname is literally Spencer. Like Princess fucking Diana? Ring any bells?”

“Nah,” Jack says with absolute conviction, “her surname was Wales.”

“No she was the Princess of Wal- oh my god,” Helena rolls her eyes with such energy that Sky is amazed that her eye muscles don’t straight up propel her out of the door. “Sky, can you please back me up?”

“I’m from Chicago,” Sky says helplessly, and gets two very dirty looks as they leave the classroom.

“I’d suck your dick,” he’s lost count of how many hits he’s in and the rooftop is starting to take on a hazy quality, which Sky attributes to the fact that he’s actually confident enough to laugh out loud at Jack’s comment, leaning back and looking up at the sky, “no you wouldn’t.”

“Sure I would,” Jack insists. “I’d try anything fucking once. And I never sucked a dick. Maybe it’s my fucking talent.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Sky’s words are coming out sing song and he lays back on the roof now, shaking his head still, “you’re such a straight boy it’s not even funny. Straight, straight, straight,” he takes a long drag on the joint and holds it out between two fingers to Helena, who is giving both of them another disgusted glare.

“Two boys talking about their penises. Exactly the company I desired. Not.”

“We could talk about vagina instead,” Jack offers diplomatically, so Sky mimes gagging. “Yeah, okay crybaby. We get it. You patented the fuck a boy at church camp vibe, we understand.”

“I didn’t fuck a boy at church camp,” Sky says indignantly.

“No, he probably fucked you,” Helena hisses.

“I thought you were too good for this conversation,” Jack observes.

“Do you see another conversation happening?”

“You could just shut up.”

“And let your disgusting accent ring in my ears? Horrific.”

“My accent is sexy.”

“I like Kai’s more,” Sky gets a glare from both of them for that. Oops. Supposes that’s what he gets for interrupting the bickering. “Yours is fine too,” he says quickly.

“God, just take a side,” Helena mutters. “It’s fine to admit Rat sounds like a coal miner, you know?”

“Isn’t that a bit….” Sky searches for the word. “Classist?”

“No, it’s a fact. Anyway,’ she points to Jack accusingly, “he didn’t even know Princess Diana’s surname. So his national pride is absolutely a farce.”

“She died in like, nineteen ninety whatever? That’s old news,” Jack argues.

“She,” Helena says hotly, “remains an international style icon.”

“Can we get back to vagina and/or dick yet?” Jack enquires hopefully. Sky resumes the pretend gagging.

“You become more disgusting with every waking moment,” she mutters under her breath. But Jack will probably take that as a compliment either way. “And I need to go.”

“Don’t miss me too much,” Jack looks up to bat his eyelashes at the girl, resulting in her flipping him off.

“I think I would miss the dog shit I stepped in more than you,” Helena informs him, before glancing at Sky. “You, though. We’re going shopping tomorrow.”

He gives her a confused look.

“You have potential,” she decides. “Like style wise. As an aesthetic and thankfully quiet sidekick.” He can take that. “Like a Harry Styles vibe but unattractive.”

Okay, Sky’s starting to regret listening.

“Or Timothée Chalamet minus the bone structure and redeemable features.”

He really regrets listening now.

“Doesn’t Timothée Champagne have chlamydia?” Jack asks with a gleeful smile.

“Didn’t everyone say you have AIDS?” Helena snaps. “Goodbye, male specimens. It is starting to rain and this blouse is vintage.”

#self para #sky & jack #sky & helena #unedited soz for typos

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ofgraveconcern · 3 years

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22nd May 1666, death of German Jesuit and natural philosopher Gaspar Schott. His 1662 book ‘Physica Curiosa’ is a compendium of engravings and stories based upon monsters and bizarre animals considered at the time to exist, and also physical abnormalities and deformities. Although dating from the medieval period, the persistence of fabled creatures in the imagination continued, as we shall see. 23rd May 1707, birth of Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician Carl Linnaeus, the "father of modern taxonomy" for his formulation of the system of naming organisms. Studying plants and animals, he published Systema Naturae in 1735, which outlined his ideas for the hierarchical classification of the natural world, dividing it into the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the "mineral kingdom". Also included are dragons, the phoenix, sirens, and the manticore, as well as frogs that revert back to tadpoles, and a plant whose fruit is in the form of sheep. Such was the persistence of the existence of these mythological creature that they were included in Linnaeus' Systema Naturae until the sixth edition. In 1735, Linnaeus travelled to the Dutch republic to study medicine, stopping at Hamburg he was invited by the Mayor to see the town’s natural wonder, the remains of a seven-headed hydra, which the local monks claimed to be the Beast of Revelation. The town was in the process of auctioning off the beast for an enormous sum, Linnaeus was eager to see the fabled creature, and subsequently disappointed when he saw that it was the size of a dog, and had been stitched together from the remains of a snake and a weasel Publicly declaring the creature to be a fake, (continued in the comments) #fabled #cryptid #cryptidcore #cryptids #cryptidart #cryptidartist #cryptidsighting #cryptidaesthetic #medievalbeasts #carllinnaeus #historyofscience #strangehistory #bizarre #bizarrehistory #strangetales #weirdhistory #monstersamongus #zoology #zoologist #curiositycabinet #taxonomy #gothictales #cryptidcreatures #strangecreatures #hydra #manticore #hamburggermany #mythologyart #mythologymemes #mythologicalcreatures https://www.instagram.com/p/CPQwGfMnDt4/?utm_medium=tumblr

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rrocketgrunt-archive · 3 years

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Castelia Smash ‘N Grab Pt. 1

Castelia’s Sewers were something of a city in themselves. Expansive and oddly spacious. If you could tolerate the smell and hordes of rattatta, you could make your way deep within to find the nightclub established in some dried out section. It was here where Aiden was currently suffering a migraine which put him off his tequila.

“AJ! Yo, Ay-Jay,” yelled a voice, barely audible over the music. Over the crowd, a tall and enthusiastic man waved and gestured for Aiden to follow. He forced his way through the sweaty patrons, cursing at those who refused to just move. He hated this place... But, it was Samson’s venue of choice for pitching new jobs and ideas.

“Hey, Sam.” The two of them did a sort of fist-bump/handshake that only they knew. Samson welcomed him into the repurposed maintenance room and Aiden gave a relieved sigh when the door closed and reduced the lobotomizing music to a dull, repetitive thud. It was still enough to vibrate the table and put ripples in Aiden’s drink. He stretched and leaned back in his chair.

“What’cha got this time, Sam?”

Samson swept his dreads aside to avoid sitting on them and placed himself across from Aiden. He was a bit of an entrepreneur, or thought himself to be and so his latest project always came first. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a handful of vials which looked almost identical to standard battle items aside from the cartoon spinda haphazardly printed on them. “Call these Xtremes,” Samson explained. “Guaranteed to max out specific stats in battle. Hell of an advantage in the Pro Circuit.” The Pro Circuit was the name for Unova’s underground battle scene which was illegal for its lack of restrictions, gambling and fight-to-the-death standards.

Aiden examined an Xtreme Speed. “Yeah? And what’s the catch?”

Sam frowned. Of course he’d ask about the fine print... “The catch is, they have a pretty high chance of afflicting a random status condition on the user. Sometimes it poisons ‘em, sometimes they’re fully paralyzed, sometimes they just fall asleep. You never know what you’re gonna get. But! When that doesn’t happen or when your fighter shakes it off?” He whistled. “Serious power.”

Aiden set the vial down. Too many kinks for his taste. “I’ll pass it along, but you know I’m not a drug pusher, Sam.”

Sam went straight faced. A little hurt that his hard work was rejected. “Your loss,” he shrugged. He placed the vials back in his jacket and pulled out his phone. “Ok, alright, next we got... Ah yeah, this group. Call themselves Team Plasma. They’re lookin’ for info. Seems right up your alley.”

“Plasma?” Aiden raised an eyebrow. Those are the medieval larpers who think wool is murder and Combee are being enslaved for honey, right?”

“Yeah, something like that. But the pay’s good!”

Aiden rubbed his jaw. “I’ll keep it in mind. I’m sure I can scrounge up a video of a meat packing facility lowering a live Tauros into a grinder to make hamburger.”

Sam went wide eyed. “......They do that?”

Aiden couldn’t contain his laugh and he put his head down on the table and pounded his fist. He wiped a tear from his eye. “Snrk, ok. Anything else? Gotta be something more juicy than battle drugs and Poke Rights Activists.”

Sam looked unamused at having his chain yanked. “You’re sick, man... Ok. Lastly, I got a leak that says a new corporation in working on a way to artificially copy pokemon, any pokemon, by exploiting storage box technology. Catch one, get an army free. Imagine that! Having an army of bootleg legendary pokemon! That is some seriously valuable intellectual property. They know it, too. Evidently, all info is analog so hacking isn’t an option.”

"How reliable is your source? If it’s this valuable and physical penetration is the only way in, it seems a bit... suicidal.”

“The source is an employee concerned about the abuse of power of this sort of thing. Low key recorded a conference meeting where the execs discussed the project’s military applications.”

Aiden frowned. This was, indeed, a dangerous prospect. One that governments and criminals alike would want. He didn’t like the idea of it being in anyone’s hands, but he figured if it was possible, it would exist sooner or later anyway. Maybe this could be an opportunity to broker that power appropriately. Or maybe just destroy it.

And besides. A high-stakes death-run of a mission could be just what he needed to ease his boredom. He leaned back in his chair.

“Sounds dumb as fuck. I’m in,” he grinned.

#drabble #pre-rocket #pre-plasma #NOT the drabble I wanted to write #but the one that's been on my mind...#can you believe there was a time where Aiden WASN'T a useless maniac??

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skippyv20 · 5 years

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Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

Origin stories about some of our favourite foods

Food is the one constant that binds us all. Every culture has its own style of cooking. We assume that staple items in our own cuisine have a deep history in our culture. Some of the foods we eat every day have wildly bizarre origin stories that you would never guess. From the almost “Belgian fry” to a recipe brought to life by a spirit-walking nun, this list will have you thinking about the food you eat in a whole new light.

Ketchup

Ketchup is perhaps the American standard in condiments. It is a highly popular topping for hot dogs and hamburgers and the dipping sauce of choice for most everything, especially for kids. It is so popular that 97 percent of US households report having it in the fridge.

Surprisingly, the origin of ketchup is actually Chinese. The word “ketchup” comes from a Hokkien Chinese word ke-tsiap, which was a sauce derived from fermented fish that was wildly popular in southeastern China. The British drew inspiration from this sauce and began attempting to replicate it at home. This was indicated by a recipe for “ketchup in paste” published in 1732 by Richard Bradley. It listed “Bencoulin in the East Indies” as its origin.

However, this was far from the ketchup that we know and love today. Eventually, a man named Henry J. Heinz got involved and started producing his own ketchup recipe in 1876. The rest, as they say, is history.

Fried chicken

Fried chicken is another deeply rooted standard. Fried chicken was actually invented in Scotland. In medieval times, the Scots were among the only people who preferred to cook their chicken in hot fat in a method we now know as “frying.”

In the 1800s, many Scottish immigrants came to the United States, widely populating the American South and bringing the dish to prominence.

Pancakes

No modern-day food could have been popular over 30,000 years ago, right? Well, researchers have actually found pancakes in the stomach of Otzi the Iceman, a corpse dating back 5,300 years.

In ancient Greece and Rome, pancakes were made from a mixture of honey, wheat flour, olive oil, and curdled milk. During the English Renaissance, the popular breakfast dish was flavoured with apple, sherry, rosewater, or spices.Thomas Jefferson loved pancakes so much that he sent a recipe for speciality pancakes to his hometown from the White House.

Bacon

Unsurprisingly, bacon has been bringing joy to people’s lives since 1500 BC. What is surprising is that it originated in ancient China. At that time, the Chinese were curing pork bellies with salt and giving birth to arguably the most important historical invention in the world: bacon. Eventually, through their conquests, the Romans and the Greeks learned of the curing process and began manufacturing their own bacon. The ancient Romans’ early form of bacon was known as petaso, which was a pork shoulder boiled with dried figs, browned, and served with wine.

The word “bacon” is thought to have many possible origins—the French word bako, the Germanic word bakkon, and the old Teutonic word backe. All of them reference the back of a pig. In the 17th century, they finally got it right. The word “bacon” evolved to mean the salted, smoked pork belly that we know and love today.

Mac and cheese

As it’s pasta related, it’s no surprise that this dish has roots in Italy. However, the dish served there is a far cry from the meal that Kraft released in a box in 1937. In fact, the mac and cheese that existed prior to the 1300s in southern Italy was more of a lasagna. That recipe called for pasta sheets boiled in water and layered with grated cheese and spices.

“American mac and cheese” has far more humble roots. Like most good origin stories, however, it is muddled with controversy. According to some, mac and cheese was invented as a casserole dish to bring to New England church suppers. This story gives credit to the fact that the dish was known for a long time as “macaroni pudding.” According to others, Thomas Jefferson brought a pasta machine back from Italy and his wife used it to create the dish with Parmesan, which Jefferson later substituted with cheddar.

The Hamburger

Common knowledge tells us that the hamburger was invented in Hamburg, Germany, in the 19th century, but that’s only partially true. Meat from the Hamburg cow was minced, combined with spices, and formed into a patty (which is traditionally known as a “Hamburg steak”).

This was considered an upscale meal in the early days as just a spiced meat patty with no bun was one of the more expensive items on high-end restaurant menus. However, real bun-covered hamburgers didn’t come around until quite a while later. In fact, they didn’t really evolve into sandwich form until the Industrial Revolution. During that time, factory workers were served hamburger steaks from a food cart. One brilliant soul, whose name is lost in history, started putting the meat between two pieces of bread to make it easier to eat while working—and viola! The modern-day hamburger was born.

The hot dog

Hot dogs were invented in Germany. Of course, they were called “dachshund” or “little dog” sausages there. These terms referred to this sausage being smaller and thinner than traditional German sausages. The man behind the invention of these sausages was Johann Georghehner. He took his product to Frankfurt to market it, giving birth to the term “frankfurter.”

So, how did “frankfurter” become “hot dog”? Well, in a shocking twist, the name was coined by drunken college kids, or so the theory goes. Frankfurters were incredibly popular because they were cheap and easy to eat. Somehow, one budding collegiate genius figured out the origin of the hot dog and that its initial name in German referred to a “little dog.” That led him (or her) to start the rumour that hot dogs were made from dog meat. Somehow, this funny theory increased the popularity of the frankfurter, and the name “hot dog” stuck.

French Fries

One competing theory suggests that the golden, fried, crispy potatoes were originally made in Belgium. Villagers near the Meuse River often ate fried fish as a staple dish. In the winter, the rivers would freeze, cutting off access to the fish, so they would fry potatoes for their meals instead. It’s rumoured that US soldiers stumbled upon this. As the predominant language in that part of Belgium was French, the soldiers dubbed the food “french fries.”

Like any good origin story, there is a third theory. Some believe that the “french fry” is really Spanish. The Spanish were the first-recorded people to encounter the South Americans as mentioned in The Chronicle of the Incas, or the Seventeen-Year Travel of Pedro Cieza de Leon Throughout the Mighty Kingdom of Peru. This was written by Pedro Cieza de Leon as a memoir.

Chili

According to a Native American legend, a nun is responsible for the first chili recipe recorded on paper. Apparently, Sister Mary of Agreda of Spain

would go into a trance, leaving her lifeless body behind for days. Shadow-walking into different cultures, she used her soul to preach to “savages” and encouraged them to seek out Spanish Christian missions. Although the corporeal Sister Mary never left the confines of Spain, it is believed that she spirit-walked across the globe. The Native Americans refer to her as la dama de azul (“the lady in blue”).

Chocolate chip cookies

As it turns out, the chocolate chip cookie was the product of a happy accident. Ruth Graves Wakefield ran an inn in Massachusetts called the Toll House Inn. She and her husband were getting ready to bake some Chocolate Butter Drop Do cookies, a colonial favourite, when Ruth realised that she was out of baking chocolate.

Earlier in the week, she had been given a block of Nestle semisweet chocolate from Andrew Nestle himself. She decided to chop that up and use it as a substitute. Instead of dissolving into the batter during the baking process, the chocolate chunks held their form, resulting in the most delicious accident in US history.

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newvision · 5 years

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The Beatles in Hamburg

I am in Hamburg right now, and for me facts about their time here have always been kind of confusing. So, since I found out a lot of things that were new to me, I decided to make this post about their years here. I tried my best, however it’s possible that there are some mistakes. If so, feel free to tell me! It’s not my intention to spread false information.

Okay, so first of all, the part of Hamburg the Beatles stayed in is called St. Pauli (coincidence? I don’t think so). Like George once said, it’s a bit of a “naughty” place. The music clubs they used to play in are on the so called “Reeperbahn”, a street, that is the city’s major redlight district and entertainment/nightlife center. There are a lot of night clubs(most of them disgust me. I do not, in any way, approve of (forced) prostitution.), bars and sexshops. I don’t believe much has changed since the sixties, except that there are very few music clubs these days. For the boys it must’ve been very exciting there — their main audience consisted of sailors and prostitutes (a harsh contrast to their safe homes at their parents & auntie’s houses).

I want to start at the beginning, though. The Beatles got to Hamburg, because Bruno Koschmider invited them to come play for him in his clubs: the Starclub and the Kaiserkeller. The Kaiserkeller does still exist, the Starclub however doesn’t. There is a memorial for it, though.

1: sign over the Kaiserkeller; 2: entrance to the Kaiserkeller; 3: Starclub memorial

When the Beatles got there, they still looked like they were trying to look like Elvis. Stuart Sutcliffe quickly fell in love with Astrid Kirchherr, a German photographer. She wanted to take pictures of the Beatles, but didn’t like their hair. So, being quite the artist, she just cut their hair like her own (Stuart was the first one to let her do this). The famous Mop-Top was born. However, Astrid was no hair stylist, and when Bruno Koschmider saw them, he brought them to the place he went when he needed a haircut: the “spezial Herren-Friseur” (roughly translates to “special men-barbershop”).

1: barbershop from the outside today (2019); 2: barbershop from the inside today

It must’ve looked different, when the man who owns it now, bought it in the seventies. When I got there he was very nice and told me about how he saved two of the chairs, sinks and mirrors that were used when the Beatles got their famous haircuts. They were going to throw them away, but he took them and put them in the basement, which he also showed me. I was even allowed to touch everything! It was truly magical.

1: one of the chair & sinks used when the Beatles got their Mop-Tops cut for the first time; 2: confirmation that it really were those chairs by the former owner of the shop

The second picture says: “The Beatles and I sat here in the end of the year 1961 to cut their Beatles-haircut, after Astrid had made the first step. Horst Farder (?).

The first step to becoming the most famous band in the history of music was done! However, they were all still quite the Rock n Roll guys — I don’t think they ever stopped being that, though — and of course, they were quite the troublemakers, too. In fact, George lost his virginity to a prositute, while the others were watching.

“In the late ’50s in England, it wasn’t that easy to get it. The girls would all wear brassieres and corsets, which seemed like reinforced steel. My first shag was in Hamburg – with Paul and John and Pete Best all watching. We were in bunk beds. They couldn’t really see anything, because I was under the covers, but after I’d finished, they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet while I was doing it.” - George from the Anthology

Paul also rembers Hamburg to be “a case of a sexshock”: “Suddenly, you’d have a girlfriend who was a stripper. If you had hardly ever had sex in your life before, this was fairly formidable. In Liverpool, all the girls wore very rigid girdles; it was medieval. Here, in Hamburg, they were almost flashing it. It wasn’t your average sweet virgin that you were mixing with.”

They also used to walk in on each other having fun with a girl: “That was the intimacy we had … I’d walked in on John and seen a little bottom bobbing up and down with a girl underneath him. It was perfectly normal: You’d go, ‘Oh … sorry,’ and back out the room. It was very teen-age: ‘Are you using this room? I want to have a shag.’ And you’d pull a girl in there. That’s why I’ve always found very strange the theory that John was gay … Not one of us has an incident to relate of catching John with a boy.” - Paul Mccartney

There are tons of other pictures, qotes, stories and facts, but those are the ones I came across in Hamburg! If you have any questions, feel free to drop an ask or send me a message.

Please do no save the pictures. They’re not from google or something, I took them myself.

#the beatles #Beatles #beatlemania #hamburg #beatles hamburg #paul mccartney #ringo starr #george harrison #john lennon #astrid kirchherr #stuart sutcliffe #pete best

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scotianostra · 5 years

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On July 22nd 1298 William Wallace's army was routed at The Battle of Falkirk.

With the phenomenal success of Stirling Bridge under his belt, Sir William Wallace, Guardian of the Realm of Scotland, continued his campaign of guerrilla warfare upon the Northern English counties.

While being remembered as a warrior Wallace was also active in trying to restore trade between Scotland and Europe which had been nearly halted by English efforts. In a remarkable letter, we now know as "The Lübeck letter" tried to persuade German cities (Hamburg and Lübeck) to restore trade with the Scots declaring that “through battle, the Scots have been freed from the tyranny of the English"

Throughout the rest of 1297, Wallace ravaged the Border land of England for corn and cattle. Such a turn of events wrenched Edward I back from his negotiations in France with King Philip. He transferred his headquarters to York. Now he would hammer the Scots. Feudal dues were called upon. Crossbowmen from Gascony and Welsh archers were recruited. So were foot soldiers from Ireland to serve in the English campaign.

De Warrenne, the Earl of Surrey and Sussex having failed at Stirling to stop Wallace, forced Edward to march north himself. He assembled at York the largest invasion force to enter Scotland since the days of Agricola. It consisted of perhaps as many as 2,500 heavily armoured knights and at least 12,500 infantry. Eight earls joined Edward: the Marshal, the Constable, Ralph de Monthemer, Arundel, Guy of Warwick and the young Earls of Lancaster and Pembroke, each bringing their own large contingents of minor knights and infantry, swelling his host to a monstrous size. By June Edwards army were at Roxburgh, but Wallace would have had his spies watching the English army, and would not be drawn into a full scale battle on Edwards terms.

Unfortunately for Scotland the French had come to an uneasy peace with England and The Auld Alliance could not be invoked, we stood alone against a battle hardened army, ripe from plundering the continent.

But the English army was not without its problems, the fleet that should have provisioned it had been delayed by weather. It was undisciplined. Welsh archers quarrelled viciously with Gasons, and sickness raddled its splendid chivalry. At Kirkliston, near Linlithgow, Edward decided to fall back on Edinburgh, where he might calm and feed his mutinous men.

One of the stories goes that when a few ships did get through, they were only carrying two hundred barrels of wine, which were then issued to Welsh soldiers. The Welsh got drunk and rioted, so Edward sent in his household knights to restore order. Eighty Welshmen were killed, along with eighteen priests who had tried to mediate.

This story comes from the quill of the chronicler Walter of Guisborough, a "notable fantasist" when it came to Welsh affairs. The actual evidence tells a different story. In July 1298 seventeen supply ships from Yorkshire arrived at Berwick. Only five of these reached the army at Kirkliston before the battle. Now if we know anything about the English it is how good they were at recording everything, the purse strings were tight and it all had to be accounted for, there are records that still exist telling us what actually made it to Edwards army. reads as follows:63 quarters of malt, 7 meat carcasses, 250 quarters of oats, 725 quarters of wheat.

As you can see, there was no wine; certainly not 200 barrels of the stuff, to the exclusion of all else. It also doubtful that anyone would have been stupid enough to issue wine to the infantry on empty stomachs. The above supplies have been calculated as enough to feed 20,000 men for a week.

While we don't know how many Scots Wallace had at his command that day he is thought to have not been willing to meet the English in open battle, his tactics, used by Bruce years later, were Guerrilla warfare, small battalions of men hitting targets and what they couldn't carry away they destroyed, what is now called a scorched earth policy, Wallace had to try and starve Edwards force, hence the supply ships being so important.

Edwards army is also said to have had problems with defence, and again numbers back this up, many Welsh had headed home, 195 within a month according to their records, far more worrying were the infantry numbers that were dwindling. For the period up to 20 July infantry numbers reached a peak of 25,781. In the next 24 hours - before the battle - there was a drop of over 3000 to 22,497. It seems desertion was reaching chronic levels, and the battle occurred just in time to prevent the army falling apart.

Nobody knows why Wallace was drawn into a full on fight on this day in 1298, some say his army were "itching" for a fight and with the enemy in sight would have been arguing with Wallace, possibly sensing he was losing the morale he may have given in and given them what they wanted. Perhaps he also thought the English army were hungry and unruly. So on 21st July, Wallace led his army forward to meet the English. In the early dawn of the following morning scouting parties from the two opposing forces met each other near Falkirk, heralding the opening of battle.

Wallace had heard of the troubles in Edwards Army and had planned a night attack upon the English camp, but two ignoble peers, jealous of his power, went to the English King’s side and warned him. These traitors, unnamed, told Edward where Wallace was encamped in the forest near Falkirk and told of Wallace’s position and intended tactics.“Thanks be to God, who hath hitherto extricated me from every peril!, exclaimed Edward. “I shall go forth to meet them”.

Wallace had badly misjudged the fighting condition of the English army, but he came to the field well prepared. He realised that his infantry must defeat Edward’s cavalry and this had not happened for centuries. With the experience of Stirling Bridge behind him this seemed possible, although it was a rare event in medieval warfare of that period. He had trained his ferocious and hearty soldiers to fight in four tight box or oval formations, schitrons. However Wallace’s formations hadn’t yet mastered moving in unison, as Bruce would do later on. They stood in one defensive position and tried to hold out. In addition to the front row of spear points, the unit was further protected by two more rows (triple rows) of the twelve foot spears, pointing outwards, the front rows kneeling whilst those behind stood. All around the marching ground were stakes, murder holes and ropes tied to the stakes to trip up English horses.

By an unusual twist of historical fate, Edward also came to Falkirk with new tactics. He had learned from bitter experience in his Welsh Wars of the devastating firepower of the south Welsh longbowmen; and despite the cost and difficulty of dealing with the Celtic Welsh and their constant quarrelling with the English, he now included large numbers of them (for a price) in his army and began to use them as part of his coordinated battle plan. It would set the tone of English battle tactics for the next two centuries and serve the English remarkably well in France during the One Hundred Years War.

On St. Magdalen’s day, 22 July, the army came in sight of the Scot’s position.The English heavy cavalry was the greatest threat to the Scottish force and accordingly Wallace adopted a defensive formation. Drawing his men up on firm ground fronted by a stream and a marsh, he configured his army into four densely packed schiltrons (phalanx rings). Each man was armed with a four metre spear which collectively provided an impenetrable barrier to a cavalry attack. Further protection was achieved by a placing a palisade of sharpened stakes around the formations. Wallace placed his archers between each schiltron and put his small cavalry contingent to the rear.

The English approached from the south in the traditional three battle formation. The vanguard, which included a significant cavalry component, was led jointly by Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. The middle guard was under Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham with Ralph Bassett as his deputy. The rear guard was under the Edward I himself.

Despite the dominant Scottish position, the English were keen to attack. The two Earls dismissed the stream across the battlefield as insubstantial and advanced on the Scottish centre. However, whilst the stream may have been small, it was surrounded by boggy ground which was quite unsuitable for cavalry. The advance of the vanguard was thus slowed and slewed right.

Seeing the vanguard move to the right, the Bishop of Durham cautiously moved his middle guard to the left to open the opportunity of a co-ordinated attack on the Scottish flanks. However, he was wary of sending his cavalry component forward given the dominant Scottish position. His caution was vigorously opposed by his deputy, Ralph Bassett, who led his cavalry forward regardless. Bassett's cavalry likewise found their attack defused by the bog but their advance was threatening enough to scare off the Scottish cavalry who fled the field without engaging. However, both English cavalry formations had lost their speed and were unable to penetrate the densely packed schiltrons. Instead they turned upon the Scottish archers who, with no cavalry force to protect them and being outside of the schiltrons, were slaughtered. Their leader, John Stewart, died alongside his men.

Having witnessed his cavalry failing to make an impression of the schiltrons, Edward I sounded the recall. With his Knights recovered to his own lines, he advanced his archers - Crossbowmen from Gascony and Longbowmen from Wales and the Marches - to attack the schiltrons. The massed, static Scottish formations formed the perfect target and heavy casualties were inflicted. Crucially their ranks were thinned and the wall of spears, that hereto had so effectively kept the English cavalry at bay, started to have gaps.

The English cavalry, now reformed, charged against the depleted and now ineffective schiltrons. They smashed into the Scottish formations which broke into rout. The English followed cutting them down with one English Chronicler recording "they fell like blossoms in an orchard when the fruit has ripened". Casualty numbers are unknown but, for the Scottish forces, are likely to have been extensive.

With his army destroyed and his reputation in ruins, Wallace escaped the battlefield. He would spend the next seven years mounting a guerrilla war against the English but in reality his power was broken. In 1305 he was betrayed to the English by John de Menteith, a Scottish Knight. After a show trial at Westminster, he was hung, drawn and quartered in Smithfield.

The Battle of Falkirk was significant in that it saw the destruction of the Scottish army in the field and heavy Scottish casualties but, due to the escape of the Scottish nobility, failed to have the long term decisive outcome sought. For awhile Robert the Bruce was hopeful that Edward I would look to him for another King to fill the Scottish throne. However Edward had no intentions of appointing any new King in Scotland and accordingly Robert rebelled in 1306 starting a campaign that would see Scottish victory at Bannockburn,the Declaration of Arbroath and English recognition of the independence of Scotland in 1328, it would be a long 30 years though.

#Scotland #scottisih #Scottish Battle #Battle of Falkirk #History #Sir William Wallace

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 5 years

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Yesterday, the world watched in open-mouthed horror as Notre Dame Cathedral, an 800-year-old monument in Paris, France, burst into flames. As the Paris fire department scrambled to saved the priceless relics and artworks inside, French officials gradually started to take inventory of what had been recovered from the wreckage and what had been lost forever, with many — particularly Catholics, who had flocked to the city to celebrate Holy Week — gathering outside to sing hymns and mourn.

But while the spire of the building — which famously dates from the 19th-century restoration, not from medieval times — and much of the roof are destroyed, the iconic facade, the three large stained glass rose windows, and much of the internal structure, as well as many of the priceless artworks and relics contained within, appear to have been saved. “I have to say, it’s terrible, but it also appears it could have been much worse,” says Jeffrey Hamburger, a professor of art history at Harvard University whose research focuses on the art of the High and later Middle Ages.

The fact that the building did not collapse — a concern in the hours immediately following the blaze — serves as a “powerful testimony to the skill of medieval builders,” Hamburger says. He credits the survival of the structure to the building’s iconic rib vaulting and flying buttresses, which prevented collapse. “It’s worth remembering why they went through the trouble building it this way — it wasn’t for aesthetic reasons, it was for fire-proofing,” Hamburger says. “In a way, what we have here is proof of concept.”

In the wake of the destruction, French billionaires such as Francois-Henri Pinault (perhaps best known in the United States as the husband of Salma Hayek) and Bernard Arnault, chair of luxury goods brand LVMH, have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward the reconstruction of the cathedral, and Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron has issued a public statement on Twitter vowing to rebuild. Yet the damage wrought by the Notre Dame fire has also raised important questions about the cathedral’s symbolic significance in an increasingly divided France, and how to rebuild (or which version of the cathedral should be rebuilt) going forward — and in some ways, these questions are one and the same.

Over the course of the past few centuries, the cathedral has played a role in major historical events, from the coronation of kings to the crowning of Napoleon to the requiem mass of President Charles de Gaulle. And Notre Dame has served as a symbol of not just French historical identity, but Catholicism in general. “It has a double meaning,” says Jean-Robert Armogathe, a French Catholic priest and historian who served as the chaplain at Notre Dame from 1980 to 1985. “It has been the center of Catholic life and of France for 800 years.” As Armogathe points out, it is also quite literally the center of Paris: a gold star outside the cathedral marks Point Zero, the supposed center of the city.

But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times.

Despite politicians on both sides of the French political spectrum discouraging people from trying to politicize the Notre Dame fire, it would be a mistake to view the building as little more than a Paris tourist attraction, says John Harwood, an architectural historian and associate professor at the University of Toronto. “It’s literally a political monument. All cathedrals are,” he says. For centuries, the cathedral was the seat of the bishop of the Catholic Church at a time when there was virtually no distinction between church and state. “It was the center and seat of political power not just in Paris, but in France,” he says. “And that remained the case even after the French Revolution and through successive revolutions and political power and regimes.”

Notre Dame acquired even more overtly nationalist symbolism following its renovation in the Nineteenth century by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who is widely considered the godfather of modern historical architectural restoration. Viollet-le-Duc sought to restore the edifice’s Gothic past, a style that was largely unpopular at the time; his restoration that accounts for the western facade, the (now-destroyed) spire, as well as modifications to the choir and the additions of gothic stained glass-windows.

Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of the church was highly controversial, and to an extent still is today. “His approach to restoration was not, ‘Let’s fix the building as it is and put it in decent structural condition,'” says Cesare Birignani, assistant professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York. “In fact, he acted in a much more inventive and problematic way, because he claimed to reestablish or restore the church to an image that it may never have had. [It was] his own reinvention, or his own idea of how the church may have existed at the beginning of the 13th century” — an idealized version of French history that arguably never existed in the first place. The restoration also led to the reappraisal of the Gothic style as “a kind of the ultimate symbol of French architecture,” says Birignani. Unlike Renaissance-style architecture, the Gothic style was something the French people could claim as their own, which led to it becoming “a kind of collective symbol…[or] a collective creation of the French people,” he says.

What it means to be “French,” however, has obviously changed a great deal over the past few centuries. While France is still predominantly Christian, the number of practicing Catholics has fallen year after year, from 64% in 2010 to 56% in 2012, according to one census figure. The number of Muslims in France is also growing, comprising more than 5% of the population (up from 3% in 2006) giving rise to rampant Islamophobia and the birth of far-right extremist parties like the National Front, headed by extremist Marine Le Pen. A profound income gap has also led to the explosion of protests from so-called “yellow vests,” a movement primarily made up of lower-middle-class and middle-class youth on the left who have vandalized many similarly historically significant French monuments (and whose latest actions Macron was expected to comment on in a scheduled press conference, which was postponed when Notre Dame started burning). In fact, in the hours following the fire, many started blaming the accident on the yellow vests; there was also a flurry of Islamophobic posts on social media attributing the fire to Muslim extremist terrorists, despite the fact that all evidence currently indicates that the blaze was accidental.

Despite the lip service many French people and politicians have given to the symbolic significance of Notre Dame in the hours following the fire, Birignani says that as France has changed, so too has Notre Dame lost some of its weight as a totem of national identity, and is skeptical of some of the effusive rhetoric that has been borne from the flames. Now that the world has rallied in support of the rebuilding of the cathedral, however, and donations have started pouring in from all over the world, there’s likely to be renewed interest around the cathedral as an emblem of French history and culture. For some, this is deeply concerning. “One of the things that worries me about this event is that in a country that is deeply divided right now like France is and having this assumption of [Notre Dame] serving as a bedrock institution, it creates a hole and you have to imagine what it has to become again and who does the imagining, and that is a really loaded question,” says Harwood.

Although Macron and donors like Pinault have emphasized that the cathedral should be rebuilt as close to the original as possible, some architectural historians like Brigniani believe that would be complicated, given the many stages of the cathedral’s evolution. “The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?,” he says. Harwood, too, believes that it would be a mistake to try to recreate the edifice as it once stood, as LeDuc did more than 150 years ago. Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we want — the Catholics of France, the French people — want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?,” he says.

Hamburger, however, dismisses this idea as “preposterous.” Now that the full extent of the damage is being reckoned with — and is less than many initially feared — he sees no reason to not try to rebuild and preserve one of the few remaining wonders of medieval architecture. “It’s not as if in rebuilding the church one is necessarily building a monument to the glorification of medieval catholicism and aristocracy. It’s simply the case that the building has witnessed the entire history of France as a modern nation,” he says. “[You] can’t just erase history. It’s there, and it has to be dealt with critically.”

#notre dame

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ayittey1 · 5 years

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African Participation in the Slave Trade -- The Myths

History can be written from three perspectives: from that of the victor, a neutral observer and that of the vanquished. Much of Africa’s history was written by the colonialists (the victors) and obviously the victims of colonialism see things differently. For example, seeing no boxes with “ballots” written on them or a building with “Parliament” written on it, many European colonialists jumped to the conclusion that Africans were laboring under horrible and despot chiefs. Therefore, colonialism was good for the Africans because it liberated them from their terrible rulers. This was one monumental nonsense.

True, there were no boxes with ballots written on them and no building with Parliament written on it but that did not mean the essence of democratic governance was unknown. That mythology was as nonsensical as the claim that since there were no hamburgers in the village, Africans did not eat.

That mythology originated from their failure to make a distinction between the existence of an institution and different forms of the same institution. There are different types of food. The absence of one type – hamburgers – does not mean a complete absence of other types of food. Similarly, there are different types of democracy. Democratic decisions can be taken by majority vote or by consensus. In traditional Africa, decision-making is by consensus. The absence of voting did not mean Africans were living under terrible despotic Chiefs.

There are many other myths about Africa – in particular, African participation in the slave trade. Written from the African perspective, we seek to demolish the following myths.

MYTH No. 1: Africans were selling themselves off into slavery before the Europeans arrived on the continent. African chiefs were selling off their own kind into slavery.

It is true there was slavery in Africa but not the inhumane chattel variety. Slaves in Africa enjoyed certain rights and privileges. Generally, there were no slave markets in black Africa because of the value black Africans place on humanity. More importantly, Africans generally did not have demands for large amounts of labor. Even if they did, they could turn to their clans or extended families.The slave markets that were in Africa, according to historians, were in North Africa (or Arab North Africa) - in such places as Fez and Tripoli.

Slaves generally were principally war captives from inter-tribal warfare. Say there was a war between two neighboring tribes – the Ashanti and the Fante – and 5,000 Fantes were taken prisoner. The Ashanti King had the following options:

1. Keep the 5,000 Fantes in prison, which meant he would have to feed, clothe and shelter them - an expensive economic proposition;

2. Execute them, a very inhumane prospect; or

3. Sell them off as slaves and use the proceeds to purchase weapons to defend his Ashanti people;

4. Absorb and integrate the war captives into Ashanti society, a long, arduous and dangerous process since safeguards must be put in place to ensure that former combatants would pledge allegiance to a new society and authority.

Which option do you think the Ashanti King would take? If you said the third option, you are right because it was the most humane and economically expedient. The Ashanti also chose option 4, absorbed former war captives (slaves) into their society. To make their integration into Ashanti society as smooth as possible, even the Ashanti King was forbidden to disclose the slave origins of any of his subjects. He would be DETHRONED or removed from office if he did so.

Now, the more important issue is this. YES, the Ashanti King did sell Fante prisoners of war as SLAVES and therefore participated in the slave trade. BUT the Ashanti King did NOT sell his own kind/people - an important distinction. It was the Europeans who failed to make this distinction, which has been the source of much mythology about the slave trade.

The Europeans made no distinction between the Ashanti King and the Fante slaves. To the Europeans, it was a BLACK African King selling BLACK Africans. Therefore, Black kings and chiefs were selling their own kind or people. Nonsense. To the Ashanti King, the Fantes were NOT his people but rather the Ashanti.

Recall that about that time in history, medieval Europe was also fighting tribal wars - between the Flemish, French and the Germans. They were also enslaving one another. But you don’t hear the expression, “The Europeans were enslaving their own kind?” do you? Rather, you read of Germans taking French slaves and vice versa. So make the same distinctions in Africa - The Ashanti King taking Fante slaves, etc.

The real purpose of that mythology was to whitewash European participation in the slave trade. After all, African chiefs and kings were enslaving their own kind, so it wasn’t that bad for Europeans to do so.

MYTH NO.2. “African chiefs just went to the market and just grabbed their people to sell off as slaves.”

You often hear this from African Americans but it is not true for four reasons. First, no African chief can do this and expect to remain chief. He would be removed. As chief, his prerogative is the survival of his tribe. Second, he would be committing an ethnic suicide if he were to sell off his own Ashanti people into slavery. Third, it did not make military sense. He would be depopulating and weakening his own tribe to the benefit of a stronger neighboring tribe. Fourth, their clans would rise up to protect the victims. More importantly, there were traditional injunctions against that. To test this, go to Onitsha market, grab and beat up .Hausa market trader. The entire Hausa ethnic group would go to his/her defense. In fact, many tribal wars started precisely this way – from a dispute or conflict between two individuals. Furthermore, the Ashanti King’s or chief’s role is to minimize any external threat to his people. And if this means depopulating or selling off the entire Fante tribe into slavery he would do so and the better off his Ashanti people would be as that would mean less competition for resources. Yes, he would sell Fantes into slavery but not his own Ashanti people – an important distinction.

MYTH No. 3. “Africans are brothers and sisters and it is treacherous for them to participate in the slave trade.”

Again, tribal or ethnic distinctions are important in Africa. To think that Africans consider members of another tribe as “brothers and sisters” is totally ridiculous – an exercise in grand delusion. Why would a Hutus in Rwanda slaughter more than 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994? Or tell the Igbo that the Hausa are their brothers and sisters in 1967.

Before the twentieth century, many societies in the world practiced some form of slavery. Prisoners of war, political opponents and religious dissidents were often enslaved in Old England. For example, in 1530, in England, under the reign of Henry VIII, a vagrant picked up for the second time was whipped and had half an ear cut off; taken for a third time, he was “to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal” (Marx, 1915; p.806). Seventy-two thousand vagrants were thus executed during that reign. In the time of Edward VI (1547), “if anyone refused to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who denounced him as an idler” (Marx, 1915; p.806). The owner of such a slave might whip him, chain him, and brand him on the cheek and forehead with a letter “S” (for Slave), if he disappeared for two weeks. If he ran away a third time he was executed. An idler vagabond caught on the highway was branded on the chest with a “V” (for vagrant). The same laws were in effect during the reigns of Elizabeth (1572) and of Louis XVI in France. The supporters of Monmouth’s rebellion in England were sold by the Queen. Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish prisoners were sold to the West Indies and non Muslims who opposed the Sokoto jihad were sold to North Africa.

Criminals in Europe and Africa could be executed, transported or sold. Europeans favored execution; Africans favored sale.

“In the eighteenth century there were 300 different offences in Britain for which one could be executed. In Dahomey, there were only two, for the king preferred to sell rather than execute his troublemakers. Those who could not pay their debts were sold for life or until the debt was paid. Among the Yoruba, debt slaves (pawns) were called Iwofa, among the Asante Awowa, and among the Europeans indentured servants. About a quarter of a million white debt slaves entered America before the nineteenth century” (Boahen and Webster, 1970; p.69).

In pre colonial Africa, social conditions were such that,

“All the white minorities living in Africa might own Black slaves, but slaves and white masters alike were all subjects of a Black Emperor: they were all under the same African political power. No historian worth his salt can permit the obscuring of this politico social context, so that only the one fact of Black slavery emerges from it” (Diop, 1987; p.92).

There was, however, an important distinction between the slave/master relationship in Africa and that in Europe between serf/lord, which is often overlooked. In Africa, slavery was more of a social distinction without economic consequence than fact. The African slave, “instead of being deprived of the fruits of his labor, as was the case with the artisan or the serf of the Middle Ages, could, on the contrary, add to it wealth given him by the `lord’” (Diop, 1987: p.2). Slaves of the kings of Mali and the Askias of Gao “enjoyed complete liberty of movement. Thus an ordinary slave of Askia Daud, a native of Kanta, was able to carry out a pilgrimage to Mecca without his master’s knowledge” (Diop, 1987; p.153).

To avoid the ugly connotations associated with commercial slaving, Vaughan (1986) suggested the use of limbry: “Existing data, albeit tenuous, suggest that about 80 percent of African societies had limbry” (p.174). In contrast to commercial slavery, African “limbries” “were not on the whole mistreated, dehumanized or exploited” (Vaughan, 1986; p.174).

The privileges accorded them, however, varied from tribe to tribe. In Nigeria, the treatment of slaves was by no means harsh; nor was their lot deplorable. The majority were integrated into the society and the respective families of their owners in order to retain their loyalty, prevent rebellion and get the best out of them (Falola, 1985; p.99). The slaves were free to some extent; they could intermarry among themselves, own property and redeem themselves if they had the means.

Among the Lobi of Gabon, slaves were considered as “new children.” The Massangou of the Chaillou Hills in Gabon, incorporated slaves (war captives) into the entire community to replace those lost in war. In Dahomey, the children of slaves were free people incorporated into the master’s family with all the rights except the right to inherit political leadership (Simiyu, 1988; p.59). But in Senegal, slaves (djem) were closely associated to power. They were represented in royal courts and many became de facto ministers (Diop, 1987:2).

More importantly, Boahen and Webster (1970) pointed out that:

“Slaves had many privileges in African kingdoms. In Asante, Oyo and Bornu, they held important offices in the bureaucracy, serving as the Alafin’s Ilari in the subject towns of Oyo, as controller of the treasury in Asante, and as Waziri and army commanders in Bornu. Al Hajj Umar made a slave emir of Nioro, one of the most important of the emirates of the Tokolor empire, and in the Niger Delta states slaves rose to become heads of Houses, positions next in rank to the king. Jaja, who had once been the lowest kind of slave, became the most respected king in the delta, and was no exception; one of the Alaketus of Ketu, and Rabeh of Bornu, rose from slave to king (p.69).

Since slaves faced few barriers to occupational mobility or economic advancement, there was hardly any need for a tumultuous social revolution, such as the French Revolution in which the exploited overthrew their lords. Slavery, of course, was never under any circumstances an ideal institution and there were cases of slave revolts. One example was the revolt under Afonja in the Oyo empire. Another was the Koranko revolt in 1838 against the Susu of Sierra Leone. Led by Bilale, the Koranko ex slaves built a fortified town to offer freedom to runaway slaves. In Calabar, the slaves united in an organization called the Blood Men, and forced the freeborn to respect their human rights (Boahen and Webster, 1970; p.70).

MYTH NO. 4: The Europeans were the ones who introduced chattel slavery into Africa.

In pre-colonial Africa, the Europeans and Arabs were battling each other to subjugate Africa. By the 17th century, North Africa, inhabited by the Berbers, was already under Islamic conquest. For centuries, the Berbers have fought – and are still today – fighting Arab imperialism in Morocco and Algeria, where Arab names, religion and culture are being forced upon them. The Berbers had their own language, music and culture until the region was effectively Arabized as Islam spread hundreds of years ago. According to the Amazigh (Berber) Cultural Association in America, a Moroccan law, enacted in Nov 1996 and referred to as Dahir No. 1.96.97, “imposes Arabic names on an entire citizenry more than half of which is not Arabic”. The Berbers in Algeria, too, are up in arms. Fed up with years of discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Arab majority, Berbers, who make up 20 percent of Algeria’s 32 million people, seek more autonomy in the eastern region of Kabylie. They were the original inhabitants of North Africa when invading Arabs introduced Islam. Old tensions erupted into violence after a Berber schoolboy died in police custody in April 2001. Street clashes in Kabylia between the police and Berber militants left more than 100 protesters dead. "The Berbers also want the government’s police force, which they accuse of being partisan, to withdraw from Kabylie, and they want their language, Tamazight, to be recognized as an official language” (The New York Times, June 30, 2003; p.A4).

West Africa was saved from Islamic conquest by the Sahara, which served as an effective bulwark against Islamic expansionism. In East Africa, Islam made inroads in the 17th century – peacefully at first but with diabolical intentions at a later state. While the Europeans organized the West African slave trade, the Arabs managed the East African and trans-Saharan counterparts. For the trans-Saharan slave trade, an estimated 9 million captives were shipped to slave markets in Fez, Marrakesh (Morocco); Constantine (Algeria); Tunis (Tunisia), Fezzan, Tripoli (Libya); and Cairo (Egypt). No black African will ever forget that in the 19th century, over 2 million black slaves were shipped from East Africa to Arabia, a slave trade operated by Arabs.

The Zanzibar slave trade, with an annual sale that increased according to some estimates from 10,000 slaves in the early 19th century to between 40,000 and 45,000 in the mid‑19th century, was at its height during the rule of Sayyid Said (1804‑1856 ‑ born 1794), sultan of Muscat and Oman…

Enslaving and slave trading in East Africa were peculiarly savage in a traffic notable for its barbarity. Villages were burnt, the unfit villagers massacred. The enslaved were yoked together, several hundreds in a caravan, and on their journey to the coast, which could be as long as 1280 kilometres…It is estimated that only one in five of those captured in the interior reached Zanzibar. The slave trade seems to have been more catastrophic in East Africa than in West Africa (Wickins, 1981; p.184).

Diseases such as smallpox and cholera, introduced by marauding Arab caravans penetrating the interior in search of slaves, decimated entire local populations and were far more devastating than the actual export of slaves to Indian Ocean markets. According to Gordon (1989),

“One particularly brutal practice was the mutilation of young African boys, sometimes no more than 9 or ten years old, to create eunuchs, who brought a higher price in the slave markets of the Middle East. Slave traders often created “eunuch stations” along the major African slave routes where the necessary surgery was performed in unsanitary conditions. Only one out of every 10 boys subjected to the mutilation actually survived the surgery.

The taking of slaves – in razzias, or raids, on peaceful African villages – also had a high casualty rate. The typical practice was to conduct a pre-dawn raid on an unsuspecting village and kill off as many of the men and older women as possible. Young women and children were then abducted as the preferred “booty” for the raiders.

Young women were targeted because of their value as concubines or sex slaves in markets. “The most common and enduring purpose for acquiring slaves in the Arab world was to exploit them for sexual purposes. These women were nothing less than sexual objects who, with some limitations, were expected to make themselves available to their owners…Islamic law catered to the sexual interests of a man by allowing him to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many concubines as his purse allowed. Young women and girls were often inspected before purchase in private areas of the slave market by the prospective buyer (p.35).

Some of the African slaves were shipped to Iraq, where they were inhumanely treated. In the latter part of the 19th century, they revolted and were subsequently placed in the Iraqi army. According to Walusako Mwalilino, a Malawian historian, “From 1859 to 1872, between 20,000 and 25,000 slaves were shipped to southwest Asian ports” (The Washington Times, Sept 21, 1995; p.A14). But the Arab slave trade continued well into the 20th century. According to Thomas Cantwell, an American reporter, “the last interdicted slave ship was in 1947, a dhow from Mombasa” (The Washington Post, June 4, 1994; p.A18). American reporter, Timothy Williams, claimed that,

“Officially, Iraq is a colorblind society that in the tradition of Prophet Muhammad treats black people with equality and respect. But on the packed dirt streets of Zubayr, Iraq’s scaled-down version of Harlem, African-Iraqis talk of discrimination so steeped in Iraqi culture that they are commonly referred to as “abd” — slave in Arabic — prohibited from interracial marriage and denied even menial jobs.

Historians say that most African-Iraqis arrived as slaves from East Africa as part of the Arab slave trade starting about 1,400 years ago. They worked in southern Iraq’s salt marshes and sugar cane fields.

Though slavery — which in Iraq included Arabs as well as Africans — was banned in the 1920s, it continued until the 1950s, African-Iraqis say.

Recently, they have begun to campaign for recognition as a minority population, which would grant them the same benefits as Christians, including reserved seats in Parliament.

“Black people here are living in fear,” said Jalal Dhiyab Thijeel, an advocate for the country’s estimated 1.2 million African-Iraqis. “We want to end that” (The New York Times, Dec 2, 2009; p.A22).

The official Libyan and Arab line on slavery is that: “The Arab countries are a natural extension to the African continent. The African Arabs, or those who carried the indulgent message of Islam, were the first to effectively oppose slavery as inhumane and unnatural. The claim that Arabs were involved in the trade at all is a mischievous invention of the West, made in order to divide the Arabs from their brothers and sisters who live in the African continent” (New Africa, Nov 1984; p.12). Nonsense.

During the black struggle for civil rights in the United States and independence in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, Afro-Arab differences and ill-feelings were buried. Black leaders, seduced by the fallacious premise that “the enemy of my enemy must be my friend”, made common cause with the Arabs. In the United States, many blacks dropped their "European” or “slave” names and adopted Islamic ones. In Africa, black leaders entered into alliances and sought support from Arab states for the liberation struggle against Western colonialism. Grand Afro-Arab solidarity accords were pompously announced. Drooling, grandiloquent speeches announced meretricious Afro-Arab summits. Little came out of them, and since independence, black Africans have gradually realized that the Arabs regard them “expendable”. The Arabs are just as ready as the French to use them as pawns to achieve their chimerical geopolitical schemes and global religious imperialism/domination.

Today Africa has found new suitors – Chinese.

REFERENCES

Ayittey, George B.N. (2006). Indigenous African Institutions. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers.

Boahen, A.A. and J.B. Webster. History of West Africa. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Diop Cheikh Anta. Pre‑colonial Black Africa. Westport: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1987.

Falola, Toyin. "Nigeria’s Indigenous Economy.” in Nigerian History and Culture. ed. Olaniyan, 1985.

Gordon, Murray (1989). Slavery in the Arab World. New York, NY: New Amsterdam Books.

Martin, Phyllis M and Partrick O'Meara eds. Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: Kerr, 1915.

Simiyu, V.G. “The Democratic Myth in The African Traditional Societies,” in Democratic Theory and Practice in Africa. eds. Walter O. Oyugi et. al. Portsmouth, NH: 1988.

Vaughan, James H. “Population and Social Organization,” in Martin and O'Meara, 1986.

Wickins, Peter (1981). An Economic History of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

George B.N. Ayittey, PhD

Retired Distinguished Economist at American University and President of the Free Africa Foundation, both in Washington DC, USA.

Free Africa Foundation website www.freeafrica.org

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juliepuskas-blog · 5 years

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Music and the Hansetic League

How Musicians in the Middle Ages used the trade routes of the Hanseatic League to travel through Eastern and Western Europe. Hanse which is German for association, was the inspiration for the merchants who came together to create the Hanseatic League in the north German town of Lubeck in 1159. Going into the 13th century Lubeck became a thriving port near the Baltic sea and The North Sea also becoming known as the Queen of the Hanseatic because of its location in-between both Baltic and North Seas. Before the Hanseatic League the Baltic Sea had not been utilized as a serious trade route. in 1241 Lubeck had the access to both seas and formed an alliance with Hamburg a prominent city that was in charge of the salt trade routes from Luneburg. Soon after ,there was 75 member towns with over 100 Associate towns through out the Baltic coast. At it’s Peak The Hanseatic League covered over modern Germany,Poland,Sweden,Latvia,Estonia,Netherlands, Russia,Norway,Belgium, United Kingdom, Lithuania and Belarus.

In light of the Leagues amazing and vast trade routes, many musicians left their homelands to come study in Germany and do music on what can be called the Hanseatic League Circuit. Organs and Organ Music was new and popular so all of the royal courts wanted to hear and be apart of the new musical trends. Leading to organ enthusiasts who ended up choosing sides on what type of organ playing methods were more appealing to the ear, creating the split in North and South German Organ schools. Both with their own unique specific ways of playing and writing organ music.

In comes Johann Valentin Meder a German Organist and singer who though out his career worked many of the cities among the Hanseatic Route. Meder had come from a strong musical background with his father and four brothers all being organists as well! He was employed as a court singer in the Hansetic league cities of Hamburg, Copenhagen, Lubeck but finished out his career in Riga. He arrived to Riga now Latvia and was there to witness the take over of Riga by the Russians in the Great North War and even wrote music about the war. Over 130 of Meder’s works have been recovered including three operas.

For Many Musicians of the Medieval Period you had two options either travel north and south such as from London to Italy or to take use of the Hanseatic League trade routes and travel east to west. For the English composer and player William Brade his choice was to go east to Hamburg one of the popular cities in the Hanseatic League. Brade was a Vielle player which is similar to a Violin but longer and deeper shaped body with three to five strings and a leaf shaped pegbox with frontal turning pegs. He was in such high demand that at one time he was being employed at two separate courts at the same time! He also loved to compose songs that men and women of the time could dance too. Composing over 167 dances through out his career. What he is most famously known for now is his quarrel with the Count of Buckeburg. At the height of Brade’s popularity he enjoyed traveling to a different city or port every two years. The Count of Bukeburg did not want William Brade to leave his court so Brade asked for a much higher sum of money to stay. When the count of Bukeburg refused this Brade threatened to leave and go back to Hamburg. So the Count sent Hamburg some propaganda about how Brade’s ego had made him a ill tempered and rude guest among the court in Bukeburg. Lucky for Brade Hamburg payed it no mind and he was able to return and continue his lively musical career on the Hanseatic League Trade routes.

These are just two of many successful Hanseatic League musicians who made the most of its plentiful trading routes. Among people traveling from town to town the league was able to distribute goods to areas that had never had such luxuries before. It had great success because of its unique boats which were called Cogs. Cogs were a lighter and faster version of the popular Viking ships that had such durability to sail long distances along the coasts. The red brick of the buildings that lined the ports with marinas filled with Cog ships were the tall tale signs you were in a Hanseatic port! Some of these structure still exist such as the Hanseatic Museum in Bergen Norway.

In the late 16th century the league began to fall into decline as monarchies and war ships and self interest began the main focus of the individuals at the time. The Swedish Empire took over control of the Baltic sea. Bigger cites like Amsterdam became a more popular port and location for Schools in the Arts and Lubeck was no longer the Queen of the Hanseatic. The German Princes began to put more pressure on it local towns to pledge loyalty, and the league was no longer able to put its self first but had to bend to the will of the German Monarchy. At its last formal meeting in 1669 only 9 towns were left in the league and it did not fall into complete demise until 1862 under the German Empire, who’s leader was a Kaiser Wilhelm I. If you still need more Hanseatic League after this article you can take a road trip through Germany and stop at Historical Hanseatic League cities and landmarks. It is a 20 hour trip with over 25 historical cities on the way including the famous Lubeck! Thank you for reading!

https://mydrive.tomtom.com/en_gb/#mode=itinerary+viewport=52.66145,9.90216,6.74,0,-0+itinerary=%7B%22id%22:%22651d6ab2-58b5-42d4-8225-d2fcf407ad14%22%7D+ver=3 This is the Link to the Hanseatic League Road Trip

http://worldfacts.us/Germany-Lubeck.htm

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/trading-places-and-travelling-musical-legacies-of-the-hanseatic-league

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxPErTtz6lA&t=834s The lecture that talked about music and travel through the Hanseatic league

http://vilnews.com/2013-06-hanseatic-baltics info for the picture of the port

http://www.bergen-guide.com/51.htm museum of the Hanseatic in Norway

#history #medieval #essay #article #music

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badmousestuff-blog · 5 years

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Is TAXATION THEFT

(SHOTS OF ME OPENING A LETTER)

Mmm Money. Oh hello there, Badmouse, I was just enjoying the sweet sweet smell of the British Payslip, nah its pretty bland, this one here’s from a job I had about 2 years ago, ah memories, memories, memories…. (Sees Tax) I’ve been stolen from.

£50 taken from me! Money that I don’t even get to decide how it gets spent, 1 vote every 5 years out of 2 preselected jerks every 5 years I wouldn’t call a great turnaround. We don’t tolerate thieves coming into our houses and stealing our prized possessions, why do we allow the Federal government to do the same?

(British Mouse appears) We don’t have a Federal Government in Britain, you poser twat.

Rational Mouse: Maybe I can be of assistance.

Its not really ‘THEFT’ though is it? Its a lot less of this “Gimmie your money, of you’ll die!” And a lot more of this “Gimme your money, and I’ll give you, Mrs Piggy Winkle.

IrM: Still Theft Buddy! If one man steals from you, is that Theft? What about 5? What if they buy the man a hamburger and give him a vote? Is that not still the…

MYOPIA ———————————————

RM: This is Myopic and Archaic guff dude

(Irrational Mouse Gasps)

This isn’t how the form of governance we now inhabit came to be anyway, its like that Who will Pick the Cotton without slaves analogy when you compare it to Roads.

Its conflating a systemic transport basis, to a generalised commodity thats sold many times over. They’re not the same thing, theres a very obvious reason why business prefers state run roads the same way industrialised economies prefer state run schools. You’re sort of neglecting why these things came to emerge in the first place. Is it it any coincidence that most of the toll roads started being gutted when Feudalism came to a close?

IrM: Who even are you?

RM: Oh, I’m RATIONAL MOUSE

IrM: So that means I’m…

(RM does the Jack Nicolson eyebrows)

IRRATIONAL MOUSE… Well thats not fair is it?

RM: Look just read the script bud, y’know how it ends

IrM: Fucking writers, you don’t do anything…

RM: Excuse me

IrM: The state has been showcased to be an incredibly inefficient, bureaucratic nightmare, that can never innovate like the market can, it wastes too much of its money, I mean have you seen the state’s attempts to be cool, they couldn’t even make a Millennium Dome profitable.

EFFICIENCY ———————————————

RM: Well you’re right on profits but apart from that its pretty much all Chicago School taft

(IrM gasps)

So many of us have a distrust for the public sector these days, its really no wonder seeing as for the past 40 years men in suits have done an active push of erasing the private sector defects by blaming the state. Quite interestingly, and surprisingly for a lot of leftists, the state sector is actually very efficient, especially when it comes to R&D.

IrM: Blow me

RM: No, I’m serious, wide spread free at the point of use services benefit amazingly from economics of scale. https://newint.org/features/2015/12/01/private-public-sector http://www.psiru.org/sites/default/files/2014-07-EWGHT-efficiency.pdf

Let me put it this way, what seems more efficient to you. Have 10 businesses all competing to not to make the best product, but to win them over to you, you can’t just ask them. In order to do that you’ve gotta come up with some snazzy designs, aesthetically pleasing logos, a funky marketing gimmick, before long you’re spending so much dough in marketing you’re not even interested in helping people, just getting yourself seen. Or You could just have one org that does all of that stuff, it doesn’t need to compete. Sounds to me like a lot of hands that could be spend doing R&D.

IrM: Thats investment not waste, besides R&D is the definition of the private sector … Yea?

RM: No. The private sector utilises R&D a lot, but effectively every piece of GPT was created in the public sector. Yes Samsung made this phone, but who made the battery that goes in it? Why is the state sector significant? TIME. Companies flock new models of these out every year to keep the money train rolling, and most importantly keep faith with their shareholders. Makes them flimsy, crappy, liable to break. But GPT takes decades not years to bring it up to commercial satisfaction. Do you really think that shareholders are gonna give you investment with the tagline of “Coming this summer. 2047”

Fact remains, we’ve had plenty of time to analyse the effects of the free-market and what we find is theres hardly any greater efficiency.

IrM: You’re really getting off topic here, okay fine businesses want roads, the market isn’t as efficient as I thought, it doesn’t mean that taxes are moral.

WHY BASE AN IDEOLOGY AROUND IT? —————————————————————

Fair enough, the government sure as hell does take my money through a warm gun doesn’t it?

But for the vast majority of us… its really small, like in my pay check I only lost 1/20th of my monthly income, and sure its annoying not being able to spend that on the latest gamer game or a lush soap but I am getting free healthcare, an education, a polli… I’m getting firemen, ROADS, libraries, Society. If thats worth £50 a month then fuck me daddy I’m ready.

(BRITISH MOUSE gasps)

Point here is, you’ve got no semblance basing your entire ideology around something so insignificant, especially when the majority of us will not be owners we’ll be workers and buyers. Now I’m no normie, I know that a lot of this just goes on corporate warfare, IMF loans, and bailouts. But I recognise that thats part of the system we live in and sadly we have to hang on to what we’ve got whilst the very government I am under is selling it all off to the highest bidder. Don’t want things getting worse do I?

IrM: Yeahh its not a significant thing to base your ideology around, but you’re not getting the point, Taxation is still THEFT!

RM: Ok.

IrM: (Puzzled) eh… No, Taxation is Theft.

RM: Well at this point does anyone care about the views of an An-cap. Come back to reality dude.

(Blinding light)

IrM: The right of a man to own his own own property is a right ordained by common natural law prerequisite to our beings here on earth, through the self-ownership of a person’s own oneself, by natural exclusivity to the creation of ethics and rule of law, as prescribed in first principles, to disagree is literal rape and medieval iceland an…

RM: Alright I get it, you want a wibbly wobbly philosophical answer. Look I could the Positive/Negative rights shit if you want, Kant and Moral hierarchies if we want, I really don’t think folks give a damn about that right now, besides theres probably better people who could do that job than me (Olly)

I think when the dust has settled it all comes down to taxes being negligible compared to what you defend.

IrM: Huh?

RM: Exploited Labour

IrM: Huh, there is no exploitation, if I want someone to pick my potatoes…

EXPLOITATION IN 45 SECONDS

A man has £10 worth of Capital, he uses this to buy raw materials. He pays a wood turner to turn this wood into a chair worth £50. For this he pays the labourer £10. The turner therefore has to make 5 chairs in this arrangement in order to buy 1 of them for himself. You don’t gotta be a genius to see theres a disconnect going on here…

Remember my old pay check? I made about £1000 a month, Now as you…

IrM: Why do you keep leaving? I’m in here?

RM: I got £1000 a month, in an average day we made £1500 worth of goods, generally there were 3 people there each day. Divided by all of us thats £500 each. Now I’m gonna be super generous and say that only half of that is profit, that brings us up to a daily average of £250, but I only saw £60. Whats going on here?

IrM: You decided to take that job…

RM: No I didn’t it beats eating ass omelettes for a living.

I’m not denying its very liberal estimate it is, but £190 is a lot of money that I literally get no say in how its spent, I’m sure a lot of it would of have to have gone back into my employment or taken out as more taxes, but its not the specific amount I’m interested in, the point is I get no say my labour power, I don’t even get a vote, best I can do is fuck my boss. If we drag this out to a month, thats £3000, I’m getting screwed. And this, this small little number, is what we consider… THEFTTTTTTTTTTTT. Those Chicago boys were good.

IrM: You can… You can start your own business…

RM: Majority will always be workers not owners.

IrM: Not if everyone decided to save up their money and open one

RM: Nobody’s going to buy your cigars if they’ve quit smoking to sell you cigars.

PAUSE

And don’t think I’d stop there, I’d consider RENT theft too, think of all the money we spend so just existing in buildings, somehow I don’t think it costs half our pay checks to have personal washing machine fixers.

IrM: But its their property

RM: O RLY?

IrM: Yes, if they weren’t allowed to do that then they wouldn’t bother, nobody would be able to find anywhere to rent

RM: And maybe if jesus had been hanged we’d all be kneeling over a fucking gibbet.

IrM: Wa.httt??

RM: Theres a reason I think why we call them American Libertarians. See if you pick up a copy of Adam Smiths stuff you’ll notice that he’s not the pastiche we think of him as. Check this out… “The landlords like any other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even from its nature produce” Now I’m not saying BOOM Smith’s a lefty, the point is he didn’t view Capitalism as great just because, he was looking at it based in his experience of the system as it existed in Britain.

But America has a very different history to us Anglos, the entire nation was founded upon a certain hatred of taxes, and tea.

BM: Actually it never really was about the taxes, they just wanted to own the slaves whole sale, didn’t want old money controlling the colonies so they could …

And when you take the views of this man, and throw it into the melting pot of Exceptionalism and Capital, you get all sorts of zany concepts, like the Self-Made man, The U-turned addict, the Noble Christian, and above all the cult of the founders. They’re dead, they’re not going to sleep with you, I’m sorry.

So what of it? Is Taxation theft? Sure, but its not worth basing your life around it. We all think the Capitalist process is just the general flow of life but its very recent, Medieval Ireland and Iceland don’t compare guys, and at the heart of that system is Exploitation, something that we all as a class deal with on a daily basis, and gain nothing from. One might argue, Taxes on business are a trade off for what they get from us.

I know when you first get into politics its juicy to claim theft over a little bite out of your salary, but we only see it that way because its… literally right in front of us, there isn’t a spare column that counts your total labour value. We shouldn’t get so pissed off over the pennies scraped off instead of the huge overhead.

IrM: Well, guess you got me there.

RM: The circle is complete

BM: I must say it really is a very American thing this whole Taxation, not good business isn’t it rather? RM: Well at least we don’t live in a socialist country… like FRANCE!

Yeah thats like 2, 3, 4 personas in 1 video, I could start an extended universe.

BOOM RAWRRRRRRRR

Oh what now?

I’M THE LATE FOR TRENDS GUY, FEMINISM IS CANCER!

nope nope.

WAIT, STOP, SOMEONE GIVE ME AN OPINION!

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yourjuhyunghan · 2 years

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Medieval Updates Siraj al-Din al-Sakaki and Miftah al-'Ulum (The Key to Knowledge, on rhetoric) and Kitab al-Shamil wa Bahr al-Kamil (The Encompassing Book and Ocean of Perfection) and Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840) Kunsthalle Hamburg and Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. SMB and John La Farge (American, 1835–1910), Snow Weather, 1869, Princeton University Art Museum.

Siraj al-Din al-Sakaki

Sirāj al-Dīn Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf al-Sakkākī al-Khwārizmī (سراج الدين ابو يعقوب يوسف بن محمد السكاكي) was a Persian Muslim scholar famous for works on language, rhetoric, magic, and talismans. Like many scholars of his region and era, he wrote primarily in Arabic, although his book al-Tilasm (The Talisman) was written in Persian.

Sakkākī was born in 1160 AD (555 AH) in Khwarazm, Central Asia, where he lived most of his life.[1] He died in 1228-1229 AD (626 AH) in Qaryat al-Kindi near Farghana, in present-day Uzbekistan.[2]

Not much is known about his life. There is a hagiographical account saying that he was originally a blacksmith. When he was 30, he constructed an iron chest for the king. When he brought it to the court, he saw the members of course sitting in admiration of a man. He asked who that man was, and he was told he was a scholar. Sakkaki expressed his desire to become a scholar, at which time he was told that he was too old. In response, he dedicated himself to learning. Ten years later, he was still struggling with his studies. Frustrated, he went into the mountains, looked at the rocks, and decided that his heart (in his era, considered the center of intellect) was not harder than the rocks, rededicated himself to his studies, and became a famous scholar.[3]

In any case, it is recorded that he had connections with the state, in that he was said to have created a magical statue or image for the king at the time ('Ala al-Din Khwarazm-Shah) to use in his war against the 'Abbasid caliph al-Nasir.[4] Biographical literature also credited him with the ability to use magical powers to strike down cranes in mid-flight.[5]

In 2001, a copy of one of his handwritten manuscripts on magic, entitled Kitab al-Shamil wa Bahr al-Kamil (The Encompassing Book and Ocean of Perfection), was sold by auction for GBP 2,350.[6]

While he is said to have written on a breadth of subjects, his surviving works include:

Miftah al-'Ulum (The Key to Knowledge, on rhetoric)[7]

Kitab al-Jumal (The Book of Sentences, commentary on a pre-existing work by a similar name)

al-Tibyan (The Clarification)

al-Tilasm (The Talisman, in Persian)

Risalah fi 'Ilm al-Manazirah (A Treatise on Debating)

Kitab al-Shamil wa Bahr al-Kamil (The Encompassing Book and Ocean of Perfection)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siraj_al-Din_al-Sakaki Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar), 1808, 115×110.5 cm, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_in_the_Mountains

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, 94.8×74.8 cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), Moonrise over the Sea, 1822, 55×71 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonrise_by_the_Sea

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), The Sea of Ice, 1823–24, Oil on canvas, 96.7×126.9 cm (38 in × 49.9 in), Kunsthalle Hamburg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_of_Ice

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), The Stages of Life (Die Lebensstufen), 1835, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stages_of_Life

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), The Giant Mountains, 1830–1835, 72×102 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich#/media/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_016.jpg

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), Seashore by Moonlight, 1835–36, 134×169 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich#/media/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Küste_bei_Mondschein.jpg John La Farge (American, 1835–1910), Snow Weather, 1869, Princeton University Art Museum.

Princeton University Art Museum

January 18 at 1:55 AM

McEntee and John La Farge produced work expressing distinctly different sensibilities, with the slightly older McEntee adhering to the established methods of realistic landscape painting and La Farge embracing a more modern, aestheticized sensibility. These two sketches embody this shift. Winter Sunshine is concerned primarily with representation, its brushwork serving essentially to delineate form. Snow Weather, by contrast, emphasizes facture—the painterly means by which the image is produced—wherein the work’s expressive brushstrokes seem of equal import to the scene depicted.

John La Farge, American, 1835–1910

Snow Weather, 1869

Oil on wood panel

Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. https://www.facebook.com/princetonuniversityartmuseum/photos/a.158652331078/10160163454731079/

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/23930?fbclid=IwAR38eRrJbPIQYkKGdB5W5b1OiREHKhtZk1mhRu36v5yq-q6mS_VcWeIwaAk

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tribal-wars-2-cheat-code · 4 years

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Tribal Wars 2 Review

Tribal Wars 2 Review - Gameplay Commentary

Action into a world loaded with knights, generals and political conclusions - the totally free medieval on the web strategy sport Tribal Wars two awaits you. The phrase "Points will not issue, troops do," is often used in-match. This guide contends that neither genuinely matter they each take a back seat to concepts. Concepts in Tribal Wars are of paramount significance owing to the simple fact that there are so a lot of gamers performing so a lot of factors in real-time. Gamers who evaluate their surroundings, determine what other gamers are pondering and act appropriately will be considerably a lot more profitable than individuals who hold their nose to the floor. For illustration, how numerous times has the ubiquitous "Why did you assault me" message been sent in-recreation? Numerous. And it truly is most always sent to the gamers who are inventive from gamers who are clueless. Players with tips figure out who the clueless are and prey upon them.

I can see how the previously mentioned individuals can see the game. Getting ready to shell out to quickly track some things helps but is certainly not necessary nor the only way to earn. I grew to 100 villages in TW1, entire world 23 without paying anything at all. But then experienced to pay I consider $three a thirty day period to get quality to be in a position to handle so a lot of villages. Spending income did not help me develop or acquire, it saved me time in micro managing my villages. I then grew to in excess of 1,300 villages but at that point high quality ($3 a month) was completely needed to handle my empire.

in tribal wars two, gamers discover on their own as leader of a modest village in the midst of a medieval entire world. not being ready to use some of them with out shelling out 100pp? tw2 is the sequel to innogames' extremely successful method sport, tribal wars. The sport is a comply with-up to InnoGames' relatively successful browser game - Tribal Wars - which has, as of final rely, 55 million registered gamers. The Hamburg-dependent business is hoping that this sequel will give them the exact same sum of accomplishment as the predecessor.

New: our editorial checklist of extra posts. We decided to gather informartion all all around the internet and existing you a listing of useful, external hyperlinks to fascinating reads about Tribal Wars critiques, execs & negatives and equivalent application. Tribal Wars 2, or TW2, is a free of charge-to-perform 2d browser-dependent town-constructing method recreation developed and revealed by InnoGames. The sport went into open up-beta on September two, 2014 and is accessible for the Pc, iOS, and Android.

Tribal Wars 2 is not only a totally free-to-perform browser sport but the sequel to the classic Tribal Wars — the initial function of the German InnoGames studio and a huge hit. Tribal Wars two is a medieval Substantial Multiplayer On the internet (MMO) war match with a emphasis on battle method and castle management. The on the web technique match is totally free and accessible straight in a internet browser and a mobile application which expands the actual-time PvP environment to smartphones and tablets.

#Tribal Wars #Tribal Wars 2 Hack #Tribal Wars 2 Cheat #Tribal Wars 2 Cheats #Tribal Wars 2 Hack Tool #Tribal Wars 2 Cheat Enigme #Tribal Wars 2 Cheats Enigme #Tribal Wars 2 Hack 2020 #Tribal Wars 2 Cheat 2020

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16thstreet · 7 years

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Reform Judaism Founders in America: Isaac Mayer Wise, David Einhorn, and Max Lilienthal

By Josh Daniels, Former Research Intern

Josh Daniels is writing a two-part series of blog posts on the intellectual foundations of Reform Judaism. See his first post here.

Once Reform Judaism began to spread to America, it encountered a very different environment than the one it came from back in Germany. Politically, the American Constitution promised rights to religious freedom, preventing the government from sanctioning the liturgy, practices, and limitations of religious reform as was the case in Germany. From a theological standpoint, there was no central orthodoxy established in America in the middle of the 19th century which could curtail reform, certain small Jewish communities in places like South Carolina notwithstanding. Despite the open-ended possibilities for reform, the directions the movement took in America roughly followed along the paths set down in Germany by Holdheim, Zunz, and Geiger. The atmosphere of religious freedom and optimism in America is summarized by an article by Abram S. Isaacs in the 1899 edition of the American Jewish Year Book:

“…the marked changes that have followed successive landslides of immigrants to American shores have demanded broader and more effective agencies, and given, to a certain degree, shape and direction to our community. While in many countries the medieval spirit still prevails, making the Jew a wanderer and an outcast, on American soil he seems to be preparing a distinctly new era, and, composed of representatives of every clime and nationality, American Israel meets with full confidence the currents of the time.”[1]

Like in Germany, reform in America manifested in areas of liturgy, religious education, positions on intermarriage, and many others. As early as 1824, “The Reform Society of Israelites” founded in Charleston, South Carolina adopted the reform Hamburg Temple prayerbook. As immigrants continued to bring Reform Judaism to America, the positions of Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim would both find proponents on our side of the Atlantic.

Portrait of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1899) by James Landy (1888). Cincinnati, 19th Century. Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York, Gift of Dr. Hyman Bogomolyn Grinstein.

Isaac Mayer Wise was born in 1819 in Germany, and came to America in 1846. He championed the views of Abraham Geiger, such as the position that reform was a project which should take place within the whole of the Jewish community, and not on the periphery.[2] Wise and Geiger can be considered the more conservative strain of reform in the 19th century. While not necessarily associated with what we now know as the Conservative movement, these two thinkers retained the importance of such ideas as the unity of world Jewry, the preservation of Hebrew as the language of prayer, and the aversion to intermarriage.

David Einhorn, c. 1860, artist unknown, Jewish Museum of Maryland, L1987.018.001. http://jewishmuseummd.org/2013/07/museum-insights-july-19-2013/

As Wise became one of the main supporters of Geiger in America, David Einhorn promulgated Samuel Holdheim’s ideas. Einhorn, at first, was a severe critic of Wise. Einhorn attacked Wise’s project of “the unification of all American Jews” and “the creation of a distinctly American Judaism.”[3] English was to take the place of German, primarily in the realm of education. Einhorn was appalled by this, believing that the distinctive European brand of Reform Judaism should be “confined to a cultural elite – a German-speaking cultural elite to be specific.”[4] Wise and Einhorn were both heavily involved in the many conferences held in the mid-19th century, all aimed at implementing reform. The two would trade colorful insults in their respective periodicals, but ultimately, both were able to solidify their visions of reform into institutions of American Judaism – Wise with his Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Einhorn with his contribution to the official ideology of American Reform Judaism.[5]

From the website of Central Synagogue. http://www.centralsynagogue.org/about_us/archives/our-senior-rabbis-through-the-years

Last, there is one more reformer to mention who became a dominant figure in the Jewish Reform community of New York: Dr. Max Lilienthal. Lilienthal’s role more clearly paints a picture of what the details of American reform looked like. This reformer was Dr. Max Lilienthal. Born in Munich in 1814, Lilienthal came from a wealthy family which recognized the benefits of both a religious and a secular education. He studied both at a yeshiva “and became one of the first rabbinical candidates to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Munich, where he became imbued with the discipline and values of Wissenschaft, the historical-philological study of texts.”[6] He emigrated to New York in 1845, where he became the rabbi of three German Jewish congregations. His contributions to The Occidental, the first Jewish periodical in the United States, tells us what the project of American reform looked like. An article about Lilienthal’s activities as rabbi from 1847 describes the institutionalization of a process of confirmation, which entailed that “every boy at twelve years of age, and every girl at eleven, is to receive preparatory religious instructions from the chief Rabbi himself… These instructions are to consist of the knowledge of religion in general, but particularly the principles of the Jewish creed and its revelations.”[7] The article also details the order and conduct in the synagogue during prayer services, the establishment of a rabbinical court, specific marriage laws, and the provision of reliable kosher butchers. Throughout the article, the author continuously mentions that his formulations of all of these elements of the Jewish community are “in accordance with the strictest rules of orthodoxy, as laid down in the Talmud and the Shulchan-Aruch.”[8] The types of contributions made by Lilienthal that I think are most interesting are the interpretations of texts with an eye for historical contexts. For example, one of his articles in the Jewish publication known as the Asmonean contained an article denying “that the Talmud had the status of divine revelation, arguing that historical research concerning its authors would remove their ‘halos’”.[9]

All of this just scratches the surface of the actions of these three great reformers. They took the spirit of reform which was ignited in the synagogues of Germany and not only made them relevant for Jews in an American context, but much of the work they had to do involved building all of the infrastructure required for such a community to exist. Even more importantly, these thinkers and their disciples created long traditions of thought which enabled Jews to engage meaningfully with many other elements of society, such as Enlightenment and secularist values, while maintaining a robust and honest connection to the spiritual heritage of Judaism.

[1] (Isaacs 1899)

[2] (Petuchowski 1976)

[3] (Petuchowski 1976)

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] (Reuben 1997)

[7] (Leeser 1847)

[8] Ibid.

[9] (Reuben 1997)

#Josh Daniels #Research Intern #Reform movement #Reform Judaism

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