#historic inventions

[castlebunny]

beautiful victorian chatelaines found for sale online

[pink-linoleum]

piecing it all together

[fallowhearth]

I don't know how many people remember this, but 2000s internet feminism was obsessed with trying to rehabilitate the reputation of periods with all kinds of stupid reheated divine feminine, feel connected to your womanhood, all negatives are socially constructed, etc bullshit. 4chan had its fun creating extreme versions of this stuff, but they didn't invent it whole cloth. It was inescapable. Anyway, I'm so glad people have moved on and are no longer trying to convince everyone that periods are awesome. So happy that it's now uncontroversial to say that shit sucks.

[arsenicflame]

i absolutely love the small historical details butted right up against huge anachronisms in Our Flag Means Death. like yeah eds wearing full leather biker gear but he has a fall front on his pants and his jacket has buttons rather than a zipper too

[yarrayora]

do you think while kuro was busy sleeping off his depression the servamps were being bitches to each other

[ask18thcenturyrussia]

Imagine a substance that sparkles but sticks to everything and is ultimately impossible to clean. (Thoughts on glitter?)

"Sounds like something he would be thrilled about. Nobody loves sparkle and shine as much as François does."

[goldenstarprincesses]

Out: Puritan and Quaker America

In: America lived with the Shakers because they saw him as just another sad little abandoned orphan and with their interpretation of God leaning more mystical they weren't freaked out by him not aging normally

[arcadiiian]

playing dress up

[st-just]

The writers of this do know that Japan in the 1600s, like, had its own guns, right? Like sure nothing like rifles (to be fair neither did the British) but I'm not sure them being this terrifying superweapon massacring hapless swordsmen and archers is, uh, quite right.

[familiar-anonymous]

Their historical fight!

[amalgamasreal]

TIL humanity has come up with with some truly weird ways to sharpen a pencil:

Source: Rescue & Restore

[rainbowresurrection]

Kinda got a love/hate relationship with the history of K/S because it's like. Can I please have a queer discussion about this 1960s television show without it being reduced to "shipper discourse". I thought Spock and Kirk were homo long before I knew that their characters spawned a fanfiction counterculture. The bisexual dude who wrote the episode that really kick-started the movement didn't know it was going to coalesce into the fan phenomenon that it did, he was just writing what he knew how to write best: the repression of burning male desire, and two dudes doing homoerotic shit. Can I just talk about the repressed burning male desire please, and the implications of a gay angle to Kirk and Spock's story, without it being referred to as shipper discourse. Can I do that. Does this make sense

[fineredmist]

anyway having “period accurate” bigotry in funny hat game fan content is stupid and erases the fact that lgbtq people have always existed

[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

not me typing a whole rant about some catholics being insufferably smug about their "better looking churches" while ignoring the history behind the barebone austerity of protestant churches and then deleting it all because my seething anger isn't christ-like either

*gnaws on wood* God help me love your children even when they are absolute prigs

[blueshistorysims]

February 1923, Henford-on-Bagley, England

Byron’s 28th birthday passed with little fanfare. He didn’t even invite his mother to visit. Instead, he’d spent the last two months holed up in his house, writing correspondence with linguists, philologists, archeologists, etc. He’d taken up Samson’s suggestion and buried himself in his passions, and when someone asked for a person in the UK who could read and translate Akkadian and Aramaic along with fluency in Arabic, he’d eagerly volunteered himself, acting as an additional translator for recently found tablets. He’d gotten so into it that he’d even had replicas made so he could study them.

When he wasn’t doing that, he’d decided to pick up translating books again, though he used a different name for publishers, but after learning there were no official English translations of the complied tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh that included recent discoveries, he’d thrown himself into it, spending nearly all day in his study and library all day, only leaving to sleep, eat, or bathe. It was an obsession, overtaking every other thought he had, but he supposed it was better than being depressed and drinking, even if it was still isolation

A week after his birthday, Byron received a short letter from Wilhelmina. 

Byron,

I haven’t heard from you in months. I hear you’ve been busy with all sorts of translation work, and I am interested to see what you will do with it—I doubt it is a coincidence that you are writing to the same publishing company my husband uses. Jack is about to publish his third book of poems, and we’re throwing a party to celebrate, and not to flatter myself, but I am a very good hostess, and most of our friends aren’t snobby little lords and ladies, but people I think you would like to get know, writers, artists, scholars, etc. both well known and unknown. Although Jack’s not a member of the Bloomsbury Group, he spends enough time with them I think he should be! It will be on the 2nd of March, Friday evening. The party starts at six, but I implore you to come early and stay with us for the week—there is a new exhibit at the British Museum featuring pre-Anglo-Saxon Celtic Britain, and with your knowledge and mastery of Common Brittonic, I fancy you would make a lovely guide and perhaps we’ll find a dirty phrase or two. I expect a telegram within the next two days once this letter arrives.

Warmest Regards (unless you fail to reply),

Wilhelmina Porter

He laughed, setting the letter down and shaking his head. Wilhelmina, he learned, was something of a hostess, and he’d heard of parties thrown by Jack Porter and his wife, though he’d never known it was her. But it wasn’t what he was thinking about. This, alongside being a letter from a friend, was also the first invitation he’d received since getting divorced, and in truth, he missed his heavy social life in New York, and while he wasn’t accepted among men of his noble rank, she was right. He longed to be in the social circles with the beliefs he held—so it didn’t take very long before he left the library to pack a suitcase for London.