In this 1671 painting from Hubert van Ravesteijn we see an exclusively designed paper packet leaning against a clay pipe, ready for consumption in a tavern.
In order to sell small units of tobacco, paper was needed: used papers and freshly printed papers. Zoom in:
@dbellingradt@histodons The #Neolatin poet Jacobus Balde SJ (1604-1668) wrote a satire against the abuse of tobacco in which you've also got a reference to paper as wrapping material for tobacco:
"Exin, membranâ positâ, vis magna Tabaci, / Nimirum niger atque ingens evolvitur anguis." (Tab. 10,26-27).
(Context: tobacco smokers unpack the tobacco and once the paper is taken off, black tobacco appears like a snake).
🔖 Most recent contribution on early modern tobacco literature probably is Kühlmann, Wilhelm. ‘Schreckensvision oder Drogenfreuden: Kontroverse Perspektiven der spätbarocken lateinischen und deutschen Tabaklyrik: Der Nordhauser Gymnasialrektor Johann Joachim Meier versus Johann Christian Günthers studentisches “Lob des Knaster-Tobacks” (1718)’. Daphnis 51, no. 4 (20 September 2023): 563–632. https://doi.org/10.1163/18796583-12340095.
Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25
Thomas Jefferson, 33
John Adams, 40
Paul Revere, 41
George Washington, 44
Samuel Adams, 53
Ben Franklin, 70
One of the biggest mysteries I am having right now is the #mixtec#sabre
Every #mesoamerica or #aztec#history person I ask have either never seen this thing or only seen it shown in Mixtec codices and certain papers call it a sabre.
Mexicolore has a panel of experts and said they know nothing about it.
Codices often represent real weapons in them, but they can also be symbolic of something else.
Does anyone know more about this design of #sword ?
This is a recreation from a forum post that is now gone. The only image left is the page from Mexicolore, who do have experts but they have been wrong before.
I would love to have ballistic gel and test it out if I had the resources to make this.
@9Wind@histodons@academicchatter
You could experiment with a watermelon & glass chips affixed to straight & curved plywood 'swords.' My guess is you'd get a lot deeper cut with the curved blade & it would be less likely to get stuck.
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
Couple of little nuggets I left out because I'm trying to be concise (ha), but they're so interesting:
The BEIC was able to unload tea in the American colonies because the English parliament, rather than let the company fail, bailed it out. Part of the bailout conditions were that they got a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. Same as it ever was, eh?
BEIC agents who wrote letters and contacted the media (such as it was) to spread the word, and the outrage, about the completely unnecessary famine, were possibly the world's first whistleblowers.
What do you see as the pro's and con's of #documentaries? I'm often not a fan, but want to be. My issues with them, and mostly it comes from I love to learn and want docs to be a starting point, not the end:
Credentials of the experts can be spotty
No sources given
No way to ask follow-up questions
Too much theatrics / reenactment
Not as detailed as a book
Often don't cover the topics I want (social science, #religion, #history, etc)
@theotherotherone@histodons you’re right, you have to invest all your faith in the documentary editor. They have total control over the impression portrayed.
@peterbrown@histodons To be fair, the same can basically be said about a single book, too. But it just seems with books, especially scholarly or academic, we're more willing to put some time into researching the author, their biases, and criticisms of the book. With a documentary, people tend to just accept it without any verification.
@TheConversationUS@histodons
A great read and a reminder that colonial leaders were business and plantation owners and more importantly slave owners.
Private property and business interests were important to them. Actual democracy (as in rule by ordinary people) was never really in their plan.
I believe Winston Churchill speculated on how different history would have turned out if the British government had reached out and offered colonial aristocrats a role in shaping imperial policy and laws (perhaps representation in parliament).
Greetings from Trento!
Turning Points: ‘Turns’ in Recent Historiography #history 👉 bit.ly/3PDK1GF
The #conference reflects on the meaning of a series of recent historiographical turns and on their impact on our interpretation of the #past @histodons@historikerinnen@digigw
@histodons@historikerinnen@digigw
Another day of this fascinating conference on „turns“ - now: Olivier Poncet on the archival turn - and the Duomo di Trento
"Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?" by Jason Wilson (#TheGuardian)
"Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US."
"The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy."
"For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”."
It doesn’t surprise me. Probably the same crowd that praises the “Chilean Miracle” and thinks that “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”
I also don’t doubt that the idea of summary executions (a mainstay of Franco even years after winning the war) secretly appeals to them. Such an efficient way to purify society.
Unfortunately, the idea of a society that must be "pure" (in its various variants) is very attractive to those people who seek above all Order and Hierarchy.
@TheConversationUS@blackmastodon There are sooo many white Dahl fans who are about to leap to Wonka's defense it's not even funny. (I say this from my perch as a Gene Wilder fan.)
P.S. to The Conversation: I tagged the actual #BlackMastodon group, and I hope that was your intent.
Christmas pudding is a relatively recent concoction of two classic medieval dishes: a runny porridge known as “plum pottage”, which featured any seasonal mixture of meats, dried fruits, and spices; and “figgy pudding” (yes, the one mentioned in the song), a mixture of sweet and savory ingredients bagged with flour and cooked by steaming.
@TheConversationUS@histodons Very informative review. The Haitian revolutionaries successful fight for freedom and independence came with centuries long debt repayment to France for loss of property (slaves).