To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal.
And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist.
Gun control is a contentious issue in the United States. Its origins are complex, tied to a history of racial tension, political power dynamics, & competing interpretations of the Second Amendment. One significant chapter in this history is the emergence of the Black Panther Party and their role in the gun control debate.
John Brown was known for his militant tactics in the fight against slavery while Frederick Douglass, the slave who became a powerful orator & writer, used the power of words and alliances to end that barbarous practice. Although the two men shared the same goal, their approaches were vastly different, and their relationship was often strained. In fact, John Brown's actions almost got Frederick Douglass killed.
British Caribbean slavery, cornerstone of the British empire, was characterized by extreme & brutal exploitation. It yielded substantial wealth for a privileged few and the British government, but inflicted immense suffering on the majority of enslaved individuals, making them the most overworked & harshly treated people in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. This history had enduring consequences.
A significant number of white Americans opposed fighting in a civil war that would grant freedom to Black Americans. Their concern was former slaves, whom they considered inferior, would compete for jobs at lower wages. Consequently, in July of 1863, a white mob, furious with conscription, targeted Black New Yorkers in an attempt to eradicate them from the landscape. The Union was not as united as it is often portrayed.
Mary Fields (Stagecoach Mary) was the FIRST Black American & 2nd woman to deliver the mail in the U.S. At 60, she applied for a mail carrier position in Montana's Cascade region. She aced the job by skillfully hitching her horses faster than anyone else. Despite bandits, wolves, & grueling weather, Mary never missed driving the route with horses & Moses, her mule. She would often trek by foot over 10 miles with sacks over her shoulder.
Onesimus, a Boston enslaved man, saved hundreds of people from the horrors of smallpox in 1721. His contributions to science reverberate to this day b/c his knowledge led to what became the 1st vaccine-related study in America. Onesimus’s story illustrates the degree to which reputable men of science depended on the testimony & experience of Africans in dealing with a dreaded disease.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history.
In 1961, a mob of armed KKK attacked the Monroe NC neighborhood of NAACP leader, Robert F. Williams. But they messed with the wrong ones that day. Williams & his followers engaged in an intense confronration that sent the Klan bolting. Contrary to the prevailing narrative that they were hapless victims of violence, Black Americans regularly handled business protecting themselves & their families from KKK & other racist mobs.
HELP: looking for sources on fascist aesthetics. Why fascists (Nazi Germany, other fascist countries, and current fascist movements) like minimalism, Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and “elegant” beauty.
If you were Black and woke up in NYC on Monday, July 13, 1863, things got terrifying quick. For Black New Yorkers, there was no reprieve. Black life was dispensable to white mobs & law authorities. The Civil War, poverty, & rabid racism in 19th-century New York explains the events of that week. For Black Americans, the NYC Draft Riots were a heinous episode in an already brutal age. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Interesting fact of the day: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation only freed the southern slaves and kept the north slaves legal and enslaved. It was a sort "screw you to the south" more so than to abolish slavery.
Lincoln only supported and pushed through the 13th amendment once slavery was voluntarily abolished at the state level first.
Evolution doesn’t look how it’s depicted in pop culture. We often picture the famous “March of Progress” illustration where a series of apes stand in line leading to a modern human.
But evolution is not linear. It branches & divides without an intended direction or endpoint through natural selection.
The Great Migration in America saw mass movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North, Midwest, & West in search of economic opportunity, & escape from racism. Historians divide the Great Migration into 2 distinct periods:1910-1940 & 1940-1970, reflecting the changing dynamics of the migration waves during different time periods. Both had profound impact on society & culture.
Alan Turing was a mathematician & cryptographer who was a leading code-breaker in the team that decrypted Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine during WWII. He inspired modern computing & what became AI.
Instead of being hailed as a genius & hero, Turing was convicted as a homosexual & forced to endure chemical castration. He died by suicide at 41 in 1954.
The British government didn’t apologize until 2009 & Queen Elizabeth II finally pardoned him in 2013. #history#science
The perception of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is one where the two men are diametrically opposed figures in the battle against white supremacy (political insider vs. political renegade). The truth is more nuanced. King and Malcolm X shared "convergent visions" for the betterment of Black America. However, their strategies to attain their shared goal were shaped by their disparate upbringings.
#Google just announced that going forward, any account not logged into for two years gets deleted.
This means huge amounts of rare or unique #video is about to disappear from #YouTube as accounts get flagged as inactive, such as when the user dies. Families' #HomeMovies (often posted by an older relative for their family's benefit), historical footage, rare #television clips, etc. What an incalculable loss to human #history and culture!
If there are videos important to you on someone else's video channel, find a way to download them. And if you have rare #media of historical importance, consider leaving it to institutional #archives or lending it to archives for digital preservation.
They referred to her as “Moses” for guiding the enslaved from the South to freedom in the North. But, Harriet Tubman’s resistance to slavery extended beyond her role in the Underground Railroad. As a Union Army soldier and spy during the Civil War, she made history by becoming the first woman to lead an armed U.S. military mission.
A knocker-upper was someone whose sole purpose was to wake people up during a time when alarm clocks were expensive and not very reliable. In this photo, Mary Smith earned six pence a week using a pea shooter to shoot dried peas at the windows of sleeping workers in East London, 1930s. She would not leave a window until she was sure that the workers had woken up. #history#blackandwhitephotography
The March on Washington did not happen, spontaneously. It grew out of decades of interconnected efforts by myriad civil rights stakeholders. Among these were the founding of the NAACP, the flowering of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, and the monumental court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Is it possible that our super-advanced modern global civilization actually could collapse? Or is this just hyperbolic clickbait, intended for doom-scrolling?
Michael T. Klare is professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Most recently, he is the author of "All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change."
In an essay published today, Professor Klare has a warning for us --
"We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse"