You're Either A Poet Or You're Dead

zorascreation:

gowns:

josé julio sarria, gay latino who ran for public office in 1961 - many many years before harvey milk

he ran for the san francisco board of supervisors and almost won by default, until people noticed there was a gay man running and immediately submitted everyone possible for the position. he didn’t win, but he still got 6000 votes, which shocked conservatives

he was also a drag queen popular at many of the balls at the time…and he still does it today (lookin good for a guy in his late 80s)!

It’s so funny how White “Queerstorians” conveniently never tell us about this beautiful querido right here. <3 

nicholas-lovecraft:

ratsoff:

Look At This Fucking Ancient Dental Work

“The earliest evidence of ancient dentistry we have is an amazingly detailed dental work on a mummy from ancient Egypt that archaeologists have dated to 2000 BCE. The work shows intricate gold work around the teeth. This mummy was found with two donor teeth that had holes drilled into them. Wires were strung through the holes and then around the neighboring teeth.”

(via megret.)

FUCK I love knowledge.

a-l-ancien-regime:

English silhouettes late 18th century - early 19th century

(Source: missingsun)

sourcedumal:

theillustratednerdgirl:

strugglingtobeheard:

ethiopienne:

steviemcfly:

fromonesurvivortoanother:

theoceanandthesky:

[tw: racism, bombs, explosions]

witchsistah:

queennubian:

socialsociety:

BLACK WALL STREET is not a record label started by The Game.

 Black Wall Street was the most prosperous black community in America during the 1920’s located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was known as “Little Africa” or “Black Beverly Hills”, a prime example of racial nationalism. To put into perspective of how money flowed in Black Wall Street, a dollar took 365 DAYS to leave the community, now a dollar leaves an African American Community every 15 MINUTES. The community had hundreds of businesses all negro owned and their motto was “To educate every child”. 

 June 1, 1921 white supremacists bombed BLACK WALL STREET and killed over 3000 people and destroyed over 600 businesses. 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, a hospital, bank, post office, and most schools were destroyed. The dead were buried in unmarked graves. It wasn’t till 1997 that Oklahoma decided to pass the “1921 Race Riot Reconciliation Act” which provided decedents of that area a free college education.

SMH AT AMERICAN HISTORY

 READ THIS. They for sure aren’t teaching this in school. Tell your babies. Share with your students.

For all those “BOOTSTRAPS” bastards.

reblogging for history that i was never taught

As many people were killed that day as on 9/11 and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Reblogging again for that last comment because I’m in the same boat. I had NEVER heard of this before, and the numbers are the same. I wonder why that is.

And this isn’t the only place something like that happened. 

I went to Booker T. Washington H.S. in Tulsa, OK, one of the few buildings that survived the riot, and I feel like this was mentioned maybe once, and incredibly briefly. Nobody wants to talk about this shit. If you try to look back and find old articles about it, you’ll find they’ve been expunged from those old (white-owned) newspapers. And the original reported death toll was something like 26 black people and 13 white people, which is ridiculous. They buried people in mass graves. They dropped bombs on them. They rounded up Greenwood residents at gunpoint and put them in detention centers, some say for protection, but not everybody believes that. Although, with white rioters out committing murder, burning every building in sight and looting businesses and homes, Greenwood was suddenly the least safe place ever to be a black person. Dr. A.C. Jackson was one of the most prominent black physicians in America at the time and he was shot outside his house.

And nobody wants you to know how many people died. The official death toll is still 39. But I’ve read 300, 3000, 3900. Thousands of people were rendered homeless. And the Greenwood district is still there, but it’s no thriving community.

And you know what started it? Aside from a white girl shrieking and a black guy running away? The newspapers ran a story about how there was gonna be a lynch mob outside the courthouse. And the shit of it is, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that there was going to be a lynch mob before the story ran. 

But I guess the sick and disgusting truth of it is if hadn’t been that newspaper story it probably would have been something else. At the time of the riot, Tulsa had 3200 Klan members and a thriving black community who dared to succeed in life. Seriously, there were some black people in town who had more money than some white people that was what fueled so much of the violence and looting. How dare they.

WHITENESS DESTROYS BLACK SUCCESS.

This is fact. Just look at this and learn.

oopsavirginedge:

anderjak:

notcuddles:

lakidaa:

archiemcphee:

Here’s an awesome little piece of history:

Archaeologists in the Burnt City have discovered what appears to be an ancient prosthetic eye. What makes this discovery exceptionally awesome is the striking description of how the owner and her false eye would have appeared while she was still alive and blinking:

[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE. 

So she was an extraordinarily tall woman walking around wearing an engraved golden eye patterned with rays like a tiny sun. What an awesome sight that must have been.

[via TYWKIWDBI]

Holy shit.

Wow that’s fucking badass, holy shit.

ETA: the wiki page reads like something out of a well crafted fantasy novel. 

Dear god, even more material to pull from. Tonight’s been good to me.

wow boners inducing mental image yes good

(Source: strawberrysleep)

petticoatguru:

Early 18th century.

THE MODE IN HATS AND HEADDRESS
By R. Turner Wilcox

a-l-ancien-regime:

Asamkirche, Munich
Germany

Munich’s Catholic Church of St. Johann Nepomuk, better known as the Asam Church, was built from 1733 to 1746 by the brothers Egid Quirin Asam and Cosmas Damian Asam as their private church. Due to resistance of the citizens, the brothers were forced to make the church accessible to the public, though they had taken on all the costs of building. The Asamkirche is one of the most splendid achievements of Bavarian late Baroque architecture or rococo. It is framed by the Asamhaus (Asam House), built in 1733, on the left and the Priest’s House (built in 1771) on the right. The church is in the Sendlinger Strasse only a few minutes walk from the Town Hall in the centre of the City.
The ornate facade tells about the deeds of St. John of Nepomuk. The ceiling of the church is decorated by magnificent paintings and gold trim, and the high altar shows the Chair of Mercy Group, with God the Father and the crucified Christ. Ignaz Günther created the two angels of the fraternity altar in 1767; they were acquired and added later.

(Source: flickr.com)

petticoatguru:

German Middle Class (1770-1790)

Braun & Schneider, History of Costume (1861-1880)

ornamentedbeing:

The V&A says: This is an example of the most formal ensemble for a woman in the late 1770s, except for court dress. It is a sack-back gown, worn over square hoops and very elaborately decorated. Feathers, lace, raffia tassels and lengths of satin embellish an already embroidered satin. The pale colours, small floral motifs and light application of the decorations show that the influence of the Rococo style was beginning to wane.

lostsplendor:

Seated German Youth, c. 1916 (by drakegoodman)

lostsplendor:

Train of Tsar Nicholas II, c. 1902.  Via: www.retronaut.co

crookedindifference:

Statistics of the Genocide

The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 was a truly traumatic and horrifying event. It was one of the most brutal acts of murder ever committed.

• Over the course of 100 days from April 6 to July 16 1994, an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide. A recent report has estimated the number to be close to 2 million.
• During this period of terrible slaughter, more than 6 men, women and children were murdered every minute of every hour of every day. This brutally efficient killing was maintained for more than 3 months.
• There are between 300,000 to 400,000 survivors of the genocide
• Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during the 100 days of genocide. Up to 20,000 children were born to women as a result of rape.
• More than 67% of women who were raped in 1994 during the genocide were infected with HIV and AIDS. In many cases, this resulted from a systematic and planned use of rape by HIV+ men as a weapon of genocide.
• There are 10 times as many widows than widowers – almost 50,000 widows of the genocide.
• Nearly 100,000 survivors are aged between 14 and 21, of which 60,000 are categorised as very vulnerable.
• 75,000 of survivors were orphaned as a result of the genocide.
• Of those that survived the genocide over half the children stopped their schooling, because of poverty.
• 40,000 survivors are still without shelter, many whose homes were destroyed in the genocide.
• 7 in 10 survivors earn a monthly income of less than 5000 Rwandan Francs (Equivalent to 8 (eight) American Dollars)

gailsimone:

ataxiwardance:

Five Things You Should Know About Fred Shuttlesworth

When legendary civil rights activist Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth died today, many Americans had no idea who he was or what he’d accomplished in his 89 years on earth. It’s an unfortunate reality that people often think Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were the beginning and end of black activism in the Civil Rights era. In fact, nothing could be more wrong. From the 1950s onward, Shuttlesworth was a major factor in ending Jim Crow laws in the South, and many other oppressive forces throughout the United States. Here are the top five things you should know about him.

1. From the start of his career, Shuttlesworth, who was raised poor in Alabama, was fiery and obstinate. After Alabama officially banned the NAACP from operating within the state in 1956, Shuttlesworth, then a pastor, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. The ACMHR’s first major order of business was a Birmingham bus sit-in, during which Shuttlesworth and others boarded city buses and sat in the “whites only” sections. The ACMHR would eventually become charter member organization in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

2. He lived nearly nine decades, but many people tried to kill Shuttlesworth much earlier for his outspokenness. He was the target of two bomb attacks, one on his home and one on his church. And when Shuttlesworth tried to enroll his daughters in an all-white Birmingham school in 1957, an armed mob attacked him, beating him unconscious and stabbing his wife. The couple survived, and when a doctor remarked that Shuttlesworth was lucky to have avoided a concussion,Shuttlesworth said, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”

3. Though he worked closely with King, Shuttlesworth’s style was decidedly different. “Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” historian Diane McWhorter told The New York Times, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory—meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.” Despite their differences, King once called Shuttlesworth ”the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.”

4. Shuttlesworth’s fiercest enemy in Birmingham was infamous public safety commissioner Bull Connor. Connor’s violent responses—attack dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs—to Shuttlesworth’s peaceful demonstrations were integral in changing America’s attitude about Jim Crow. “The televised images of Connor directing handlers of police dogs to attack unarmed demonstrators and firefighters’ using hoses to knock down children had a profound effect on American citizens’ view of the civil rights struggle,” says the Shuttlesworth Foundation’s website.

5. After his actions helped spawn the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964, Shuttlesworth continued fighting for justice in realms both racial and economic. In 1988 he founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation to help low-income families own their own homes, and in 2004 he became president of the SCLC. A firebrand to the end, he resigned from the SCLC within months, saying “deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization.” Three years ago, the city of Birmingham named its airport after Shuttlesworth. There are still no monuments named after Bull Connor.

Ashamed to admit I had never heard of this man. Wow. What a legacy to leave behind!