worldhistory

worldhistory, 10 months ago

Child labor was quite common in America deep into the 20th century. One of the most important reformist organizations was the National Child Labor Committee, created in 1904. Its leaders, many of whom were key figures in the progressive movement, understood that they would need to expose the realities of child labor in a visceral way. So they hired a photographer named Lewis Hine, whose photographs created a haunting record of American child labor.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@coachtony This all looks really good! So glad that Medium is moving toward quality over quantity and toward more transparency with creators about how writing will get boosted and compensated.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Could this by Cybele? In Çatalhöyük, an Anatolian site that ranks as one of the oldest settlements in the world, archaeologists found figurines of a mother goddess, flanked by lions (a signature of Cybele), that date to 8,000 years ago. Since this figurine predates the invention of writing by thousands of years, we'll never know.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons But let’s get to the versions of Cybele we’re a little more sure about. Here’s Cybele depicted over 5,000 years later (around 500 BCE), in a figurine discovered in northwestern Turkey, accompanied by musical-instrument-playing children rather than lions.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons The Greeks adopted the worship of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele as they settled in Asia Minor, merging her with their own mother goddess, Rhea.

This Greek relief of Cybele from the 300s BCE shows her in her Anatolian and her Greek forms. The Anatolian version of her sits with a lion at her feet; the Greek one is a little less wild, holding only a bowl for making offerings to the gods.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Here’s another Greek depiction of Cybele, seated in her typical style with a little lion (this one’s kind of adorable rather than intimidating) in her lap.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Here's my favorite Greek depiction of Cybele -- found in the far reaches of Alexander the Great's Empire, in Ai Khanoum, Afghanistan. At Ai Khanoum, archaeologists found this stunning plate showing Cybele riding in a chariot next to Nike, the god of victory, under the watchful eye of the sun god. The chariot is pulled by a pair of lions toward what appears to be a Zoroastrian altar.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons The Romans adopted Cybele because they thought she helped them win the Punic Wars. But they found the "orgiastic" rites surrounding her -- involving castration and self-flagellation -- to be a little too exotic for their tastes. So the Romans, especially Augustus, turned her into a staid Roman matriarch.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Here’s another Roman depiction from around the same time, which attempts to incorporate all of the symbolism associated with Cybele. We have the lion, which signifies her power over nature; a cornucopia, symbolizing her role in providing abundant harvests; and her crown, representing her role in protecting Rome’s cities.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Anyway, you can read the whole piece I wrote about Cybele's journey through the ancient world -- and what it tells us about ancient religion and ideas of ancient womanhood -- here:

https://worldhistory.medium.com/the-strange-journey-of-a-blood-soaked-mother-goddess-d40b41d12f32?sk=6c831897584abfbf05dcd2db56d0f2cd

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons In the early 1700s, Voltaire, the French Enlightenment philosopher, fell in love with China. He extolled the virtues of the faraway land, calling it the “wisest and best-behaved nation” in the world.
Fashionable French people became enamored of Chinese goods, Chinese culture, and Chinese philosophy. Chinoiserie — European imitations of Chinese styles — became all the rage. You can see the French fascination with China in paintings like Francois Boucher’s 1742 The Chinese Garden:

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Right around the same time, the Qianlong Emperor in China was building a new summer palace. He included in the grounds an elaborate area called the Xiyang Lou, or “Western Mansions” — an area full of buildings and gardens designed to mimic European palaces. He, like many wealthy and powerful Chinese people, had become fascinated by European culture. The complex looked something like this:

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Jesuit missionaries were some of the first westerners to enter China in the 1500s. They made a sincere attempt to understand Chinese culture.
One of the Jesuits’ first projects was to learn Chinese in order to translate Western works into Chinese and vice versa. Here’s a page of a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary compiled by two Jesuits, Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri:

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Chinese people were just as fascinated with the discovery of the Americas as Europeans were, so the Jesuits filled them in on what was known about the lands across the Pacific:

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons In the 1670s, the Jesuit astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest — after a lengthy rivalry with Chinese astronomer Yang Guangxian that saw both men thrown in jail (!) — impressed the Kangxi Emperor by defeating Yang in an astronomy-prediction contest. The emperor then tasked Verbiest with revamping the imperial observatory, where he installed the latest instruments:

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons The Jesuits were instrumental in translating and dispersing the philosophy of Confucius in Europe. By the late 1600s, their translated versions of Confucius’ works were widely available. Soon after, Voltaire would read Confucius and declare that his philosophy was a more humane and tolerant worldview than Christianity.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Europeans were also fascinated by Chinese society and culture more generally. A Jesuit named Athanasius Kircher — who had never been to China, but used the reports of those who had — published one of the more popular books of the 1600s, China Illustrata, which contained many scenes from China. He depicted wildlife (no, I do not know why that turtle is airborne):

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons Some of the images were more accurate than others. Here’s Kircher’s illustration of Chinese people training a “large squirrel:”

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons By the middle of the 1700s, the Jesuits had made enemies in the Catholic Church -- partially because of their acceptance of nonchristian elements of Chinese culture. Tensions rose between the church and the Chinese government. As the Qing Dynasty weakened, European merchants began to push their way into China, often in spite of rules that prohibited them from doing so. Many of these merchants sold opium, addicting millions of Chinese people and unleashing all sorts of social problems.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons By 1860, British and French troops occupied the Summer Palace. Incensed at the news that the Chinese had tortured and killed some Westerners — and hoping to get some valuable loot — they stole many of the palace’s treasures and burned much of the complex to the ground.

worldhistory, 10 months ago

@histodons If you visit Beijing today, you can see the ruins of the old Summer Palace’s “Western Mansions.” They were built as an homage to European culture, designed at the emperor’s request by the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, and then destroyed by European imperialists — as succinct an encapsulation as you can find of the complex relationship between Europe and China between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.