History according to random people...

[Lucky13]

"Saying that you are offended is essentially saying that you are incapable of controlling and managing your own emotions and so everybody else should do it for you."

....or as Stephen Fry puts it, "It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Another thing I think important for people to remember is that while we all have the right to free speech, we don't have the right to be free of offense -- that privilege is only enjoyed when we are civil to each other.

 

[Gnomey]

 

[swampyankee]

Helium

Helium-- at 1 atm pressure -- is still a gas at 5 K.

 

[Sabrejet]

On social media, a news piece about Japan's JS Kaga visiting the U.S. west coast during the finalization of it's F-35B trials is circulating.

Aparently, for many, the name "Kaga" is offensive, because it "clearly shows Japan's connection to it's aggressive past" (among other ridiculous assumptions).

I tried (in vain) to point out that Japan had always named it's warships after provinces (prefectures old and current), geographic features and such, just like many other nations do (USN did this with states, state capitols, etc.).

But nope, I came under fire for being sympathetic to fascists and war criminals...

Horses for courses; you're more likely to come under fire here for persistent use of the superfluous apostrophe.

 

[swampyankee]

Wana start with some history that we all know is TRUE!
1. Thanksgiving wasn't originally intended to be a holiday celebrating multi-cultural togetherness and the ritual observance of overconsumption. The original proposal was to give thanks…to the Constitution. George Washington's original proclamation in 1789 asked for a day of "prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."
2. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s real first and middle name weren't Martin Luther. His first name, like his father's, was Michael. The Michael Kings changed their chosen names after a trip to Nazi Germany, although both of them lived and died under the legal name of Michael King. MLK Jr. almost wasn't even a doctor. Years after his death, Boston University concluded that King plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation but felt that "no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree" because of his passing. There was just no point anymore to taking the doctor title way.
3. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, it wasn't her first altercation with that bus driver. Parks had been ejected by the same driver 12 years earlier for refusing to board in the back of the bus after she had already paid up front.
4. Although Jamestown is often credited as the first British colony, it was only the first as far as the British were concerned. The Spanish beat them by a half century, setting up St. Augustine in Florida in 1565. Neither camp even counted as the first overseas visitors to settle in North America. The Vikings settled in Newfoundland (hence the name) around the year 1001 AD. Africans had been making boat trips to the "New World" prior to Columbus' voyage. Native Americans also landed in the Netherlands (then Holland) around 60 BC, beating the Vikings by a millennium. Take that Jan!!
4.5. While we're on the subject of Jan. Vikings never wore horned helmets. That idea like came out of the myth-making of the 16th and 17th century Europeans, who viewed the Vikings as warrior crusaders with wings and horns on their heads.
5. We think of dirty politicking as a relatively new trend, but our negative campaign ads can't beat the ones of the past. An attack ad on FDR claimed, "If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he so sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White backyard come Wednesday." When fighting Lincoln, opponents went after his looks: "We know Old Abe does not look very handsome, but if all the ugly men in the US vote for him, he will surely be elected." But my favorite, ever, was written about Grover Cleveland. It goes, "We do not believe the American people will knowingly elect to the Presidency a coarse debauchee who would bring his harlots with him to Washington."
6. Woodrow Wilson was a huge fan of the movie Birth of a Nation, as he went to school with Thomas Dixon, who wrote the play the movie is based on. When the notoriously racist film debuted, Wilson is reported to have said, "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Although many defenders of Wilson's racist tendencies have tried to say the quote was misattributed and Dixon made up the quote to endorse the film, Wilson held a private screening of it at the White House, making it the first film ever shown there. Scholars claim that Wilson himself loved "darky" jokes and felt that segregation was a "rational, scientific policy," placing many noted segregationists in his cabinet.
7. Old-school Coca-Cola put cocaine in their drinks, but did you know Bayer coined "heroin" as a thing and produced opium products, encouraging you to use these "medical breakthroughs" on children? They also invented mustard gas. It was a simpler time. You might wonder then, with the backing of corporate America behind drugs, what got us anti-drug legislation. Racism. In 1878, San Francisco saw the first anti-drug laws pass as a way to stop people from frequenting opium dens. City officials claimed, "Many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise." Watch the movie: Reefer Madness and this logic will make much more sense to you contextually.
8. Most remember Helen Keller as the second lead in The Miracle Worker. However, Helen Keller had a second career: as a socialist activist and organizer. Keller advocated for rights of the differently-abled, women's suffrage, birth control, and was a noted pacifist. The radical thinker was also an opponent of Woodrow Wilson (who was against universal suffrage) and supported Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs in his presidential runs. Because of her impairments, the media universally discredited her organizing work. A Brooklyn publication wrote that Keller's socialist "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development."
9. Napoleon was a little guy, right. Not so, Napoleon wasn't short — at least not by the standards of his day. M. Bonaparte stood 1.58 meters tall (or a little over five feet), well within the average of the compatriots of his era. Instead of suffering from a lack of height, Napoleon reportedly was stricken with far worse: hemorrhoids. Some scholars even suggest that a terrible flair up of butt pain cost Napoleon the Battle of Waterloo.
10. Disney and elementary school history lied to us about that whole Pocahontas thing. In reality she was twelve when Smith and his compatriots first embarked on their whirlwind New World adventure. Meaning there was no tasteful, PG romance with John Smith, she probably didn't paint any of the colors of his wind and she didn't save his life. She did, however, run away to Europe with John Rolfe, but the romance there was also dubious. The devout Rolfe reportedly fretted over "marrying a heathen" and their marriage was as much about sustaining peace in the colony as it was his affection for her. Pocahontas' thoughts on the arrangement are unknown; although she was often treated with respect and admiration in London, she was just as often a curiosity and an object of derision. Many referred to her as "The Virginian Woman." She died in 1617 while attempting to come back to the New World with Rolfe.
11. Edison was a brilliant man who help invent many things (like the phonograph, the mimeograph, the carbon microphone and moving pictures) but the light bulb is technically not his to claim. Edison developed the technology concurrently with Joseph Swan, a Briton who worked independently of Edison, although each knew the other was developing the technology. Although Edison is credited with inventing it, Swan holds the authorship for the bulb.
12. Einstein was a poor student and bad at math. "Einstein was a terrible student," your parents reminded you, "and look at everything he achieved!" Unfortunately, that's not true. Einstein was a highly gifted and accomplished student. We misinterpret Einstein receiving 4s in school as a sign of poor performance (akin to a "D") but those were actually high marks of the era. Einstein not only aced math but his parents bought advanced textbooks for him, as he often complained that formal education was "holding him back."
13. Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear to win the heart of a woman. Nope, that's not the case. A later story posited that Van Gogh lobbed it off after a particularly nasty fight with his friend, the painter Gauguin, and then handed it off to a prostitute in a brothel before returning home that evening to catch some shut eye (normal day for Van Gogh). But a recent theory claims a different (and more plausible) reason. Gauguin, a skilled swordfighter, likely cut off van Gogh's ear-lobe either in self-defense or anger as the two of them argued. Had the truth come out Gauguin who have been arrested and prosecuted. I like this better, only because it makes van Gogh seem less crazy. After all the poor guy eventually shot himself in the chest and slowly died, penniless and believing himself to be forgotten.
14. Witches were "burned at the stake" during the Salem Witch Trials. I guess because "burning witches" has a nice ring to it (makes me a little hungry for carnitas). But anyway, nobody actually got burned. During the notorious witch hunt, nineteen accused practitioners of the dark arts were hung and one defendant was crushed to death with stones.
15. Abraham Lincoln might have been our first gay president possibly because of those much ballyhooed pillow talks with Joshua Speed, who Lincoln shared a bed with for many years. But unfortunately, such was a common practice of the era and doesn't necessarily prove hanky-panky. However, we did have a queen in the White House elsewhere: one Ms. James Buchanan, our only bachelor president. Buchanan's sexuality was much whispered about on the hill, as was his closeness with William Rufus King. Andrew Jackson gave the two of them the nickname of "Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy" and others called King "Mrs. James Buchanan." A common euphemism for their relationship was to label them "Siamese Twins," the sotto voce name for same-gender couples of the era.
16. Our first bisexual or lesbian first lady: Eleanor. FDR was a well-documented philanderer (even Hyde Park on Hudson, the recent biopic on him, isn't shy about it) and his marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt may have been a marriage of convenience. Mrs. Roosevelt's letters to her longtime best friend, Lorena Hickok, indicate a relationship that went beyond traditional female bonding. Their correspondences were shockingly intimate; Roosevelt often wrote lines like, "Never are you out of my heart" and "I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms." Hickok and Roosevelt's family burned the letters after Eleanor's death, but Mrs. Roosevelt's close friend Gore Vidal (himself bisexual) long affirmed the letters' truth until his death in 2012.
17. The Civil War (America's that is). Although we're told the North and South fought over the issue of slavery, the reasons are also far more mundane. The rebel South was seen as an insurrectionary state and a potential competing power that needed to be stopped. In truth, many Northerners fighting didn't give a damn about slavery and the Southerners enlisted were too poor to actually afford slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation was, in part, a way to convince any blacks who might be fighting for the South to join the other team. Lincoln himself once commented, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."(which is exactly what the Proclamation actually did as it exempted northern slaves) By "freeing" the slaves, Lincoln hoped to cut off the South's resources and preserve the union.
18. Also, World War II is tricky, from a moral standpoint. We like to believe that in 1940s, Americans were these armed crusaders fighting for the rights of all, but the Depression also led to a rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S., just like in Europe. Disney cartoons from the era are fraught with anti-Semitic caricatures, and right-wing leaders accused FDR of allowing his administration to be run by Jews. Henry Ford even printed the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a notorious anti-Semitic screed detailing a Jewish plan for world domination, in his corporate newsletter. Polls in 1938 showed that around 60% of Americans at the time deemed Jews "greedy and dishonest," and by 1945, Americans believed Jews had "too much power" in the United States.
19. There's more. The revered Rockerfeller Foundation funded many of the German programs for eugenics, like the one that employed Josef Mengele before he found himself at Auschwitz. Many in the United States supported the forced sterilization of the differently-abled, mentally ill and criminals and anyone they deemed sterilizable. These folks included being "depressed," "deviant" or "sexually wayward," which often included homosexuals. (Remember: Homosexuality was classified as a disease until 1973.) Indiana passed the first forced Sterilization Bill in 1907 — followed closely by California, then the forced sterilization capital of America. The Oregon Board of Social Protection (originally the "Oregon Board of Eugenics") performed the last ever forced sterilization in the U.S. in 1981.
20. The Korean War never actually ended. The U.S. and North Korea agreed to a cease-fire on July 27, 1953 until the two sides could reach a "final peaceful settlement." This settlement never happened and an actual peace treaty never signed. As you can surmise, we're fighting many of the same battles today.

An error in your essay: Napoleon was 62 French inches tall. The most common French inch was about 27 mm. Napoleon's lack of stature was due to (rather infantile) propaganda and political cartoons. His real height, in US inches and feet, would be about 5'7"

A lot of things "everybody knows" have always been false; sometimes this has resulted in protests when, for example, history books get changed due to discovery of new information. Sometimes it happens when interpretations change.

 

[WARSPITER]

Horses for courses; you're more likely to come under fire here for persistent use of the superfluous apostrophe.

Or the use of the word Yttrium from the periodic table, although it can cause laughter at times too.

 

[bf109xxl]

Helium-- at 1 atm pressure -- is still a gas at 5 K.

No pressure constraints were initially imposed. It was only required to specify which solid would melt at a given temperature.

 

[Frog]

An error in your essay: Napoleon was 62 French inches tall. The most common French inch was about 27 mm. Napoleon's lack of stature was due to (rather infantile) propaganda and political cartoons. His real height, in US inches and feet, would be about 5'7"

A lot of things "everybody knows" have always been false; sometimes this has resulted in protests when, for example, history books get changed due to discovery of new information. Sometimes it happens when interpretations change.

The french revolution had implimented the metric system.
His size was 1.68 meters not 1.58. He could seem small compared to the soldiers of his Imperial Guard that were his common surrounding because size was a selection criteron.
But the required size for conscription of the line troops before 1811 was 1.544 meters. For information, the size of the infantry musket was 1.515 meters...

 

[NVSMITH]

-I'm not sure that this link belongs here but it is certainly a different view of history. I won't explain, just see what YOU think.
Underrated British WWII Aircraft!

 

[SaparotRob]

Was one of those underrated British planes an Il-2?
This is a very funny video. It's similar to the Dark Skies/Docs/… family of craputainment.
The inspiration for my never to be launched channel, "Professor Propwash".