Greek myths: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘What do we mean when we say Greek myths? Which stories and works are we generally referring to when we say this?’...
‘That's a really big question, I'm not going to lie to you. So the problem is that we have lost almost all literature from the ancient world. So between 97 and 99%, of literature written in ancient Greek has been lost to us and also literature written in Latin, which is often retelling Greek myths. And yet, we've still got loads of both literary sources, but also artistic sources… I guess the texts that we probably would think of being kind of the earliest texts, the ur texts if you like, but there's not quite any such thing, really, with Greek myth, because it's always been recreated are the two big Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey...
Helen of Troy... there's this version of her story, which dates back at least as far as Homer so at least as far as our earliest literary source for Helen going to Troy. And this alternative version, has Helen not going to Troy. She goes to Egypt, she lives out the entirety of the Trojan War in Egypt and the gods created an eidolon, an image of her, which is made of air but looks exactly like her. And that is what goes to Troy, the war is fought in the exact same way, her name is cursed by the Greeks on one side, and the Trojans on the other end the exact same way. Helen herself isn't there. And then on their way home, when the Greeks finally claim her at the end of the war, the eidolon disappears into the air that it's made of. It is the perfect metaphor for the futility of war...
Pandora... we’re told she has a jar, which is full of the world's evils. In the first version, no mention of a jar at all. In no ancient source whatsoever is she described as having a box ever, ever. In every single visual representation of ,pen representation of Pandora from the ancient world, she's never shown with any kind of receptacle, she's always shown in the act of being created. She's sculpted from the earth, by the God Hephaestus. And then Erasmus comes along, Dutch polymath 17th century, and he makes a mistake. He sees a Greek word pithos in Hesiod, jar, and he translates it to the Latin word Pyxis, box. And within 20 or 30 years of him doing it, every image of Pandora shows her with a box. It's like, oh my god. So that phrase is incredibly common. And yet it has absolutely no basis in ancient Greek writing...
[On Homer] These stories were composed and memorized and performed, and that's why you get these lovely repetitive phrases in Homer, the Homeric epithet, *something* rosy fingered dawn is my favorite probably, and they were aide memoire, quite aside from being beautiful. They were also, this was part of the, you know, performance. So I feel really confident telling you that they were performed, it seems impossible that there wouldn't be some kind of religious element just because religion and performance are so intimately connected in Greek culture. So drama, for example, as we know ,it is always performed in honor of the god Dionysus… the versions of poems being performed that we see inside the poem of the Odyssey, which is full of bards, who are almost always making someone cry, Penelope in Book one, or you know, but they're pretty much always doing their absolute best and getting given wine and snacks. And you think, how much of this is representing reality? And how much of this is the poet who's performing the Odyssey going, look how well poets normally get treated? Look how well bards normally get treated. Maybe I could have a drink here...
Almost every culture worldwide, pretty much as far as I know, has a has a lost city under the sea, the Atlantis myth, and we have to assume I think that that's to do with, with, you know, freak, incidents with the sea, a tsunami, I guess, or, you know, sudden and dramatic land erosion, which obviously would have been very frightening or earthquakes. Which, you know, you can sort of see that the connection between earthquakes and the sea is really intimate in Greek myth, because Poseidon is the god of both… [Hercules is] enslaved because of that and has to do these labors these tasks impossible tasks are almost always again, they're a feature of myth cycles all over the world… women almost always have like sorting tasks. So Psyche in Greek myth has to sort of sort out seeds and you know, essentially make neat piles of things and she gets, you know, bugs and insects, that was all very Disney. Yeah, insects help her arrange them all into the right pile. So she can, you know, succeed in the task, or sometimes you have to weave something impossible, and men have to go and perform an impossible quest...
This is an attempt to really specifically by the time we get to book six of the Aeneid to connect Augustus, to the Trojans. And the fact that there's a huge time gap between the Trojan War which is like the 13th, 12th century BC, and even the legendary foundation of the city of Rome, which is 753, is that right? BC, it's like 500 years later, and the Romans are so relentlessly efficient. They go, Oh, okay. How long is that? Well, how long is the lifespan? We had 12 kings, fill in the gap. Good work.’"
Berlin’s tumultuous history | HistoryExtra - "‘A lot of Germans said to me, why are all the books written about German history always about the Nazis or the Cold War? Why doesn't anybody write about German history beforehand? You know, here is this extraordinary culture. Yes, something went very badly wrong in Germany, and we know that between 1933 and certainly 1945, arguably, then, in some parts of Germany, right up till 1989. But actually, there is a German history before that, was a story to Germany, was a Germany that's produced all this fantastic culture, this wonderful language, this glorious architecture. Why doesn’t anybody write about that? Why doesn't anybody ever tell the story, extraordinary story of Berlin. And it is it's such a unique story. It's such an unGerman story, actually, in many ways. So I wanted to put the two things together...
There's a tendency to think of Germany as sort of West Germany and the Rhine. Actually we forget, but Prussian extended right up to Königsberg, which was the capital of Prussia before, before Berlin. Until the beginning of the 18th century, Königsberg was Prussia’s capital. And it was that huge expanse and Berlin then was pretty well in the middle... we actually forget that there is, there are, there are Brandenburg, Saxony, these great. Pomerania were great German lands to the east of which Berlin is part of... it is as much an eastern city as a western city. In cultural terms, it's probably more Western. But in terms of geography, in terms of politics, and in terms of the things that influenced the early Hohenzollerns’...
‘There was quite a lot of reticence wasn't there around Germany, about making Berlin capital again. I mean, do you think that the city’s reputation has been kind of unfairly tarnished by the, by the episodes of the 20th century?’
‘Yes I do… and it goes back to what we were just talking about, about sort of Berlin Bolshins [sp?], because the great thing about Berlin is, although it was nominally the capital, or was, the capital of Brandberg, then the capital of Prussia, and then the capital of Germany, it was never a Prussian or German city, it's always been the most individual. The city has always been the one if you like, which has sort of opposed the big revolutions I was talking about. The regime, so to think of it as being the sort of seat of Prussian militarism is completely wrong, actually, you know, the opposition to a lot of opposition to Prussia, a lot of a beginning of a leftward democratic movement, actually became very left wing movement, and we look at the Berlin politics at the end of the 19th century, it's pretty left wing. The left wing parties have have a majority in the Berlin assembly. By the early 20th century...
Some would say the very earliest interpretations of German history. There are two Germanys, some people would say. I don't, but some historians say there is a Germany that is between the Rhine and the Elbe that is, was civilized by the Romans, that is West Germany, that is, if you like the sort of cozy Rhineland that we were talking about. And then there is the savage sort of bestial Germany beyond the Elbe, and Adenauer, the great post war chancellor of Germany always said when you cross the Elbe, he used to shut his eyes because he reminded him he was going into Asia...
The Kaiser on a shooting party with his his military cabinet, and the head of his military cabinet actually has a heart attack after dinner one night and everyone says this is very sad. It then transpires, the head of the military cabinet was dancing in front of the Kaiser wearing nothing but a pink tutu. And then you have the famous Eulenburg Affair...
It is the least crowded city in Europe, it's got a huge amount of open space’"
Mexico’s ill-fated Austrian emperor | HistoryExtra - "Now, the politics is confusing, but you can simplify it down into two very broad coalitions: liberals and conservatives. They are not political parties in today's sense, as I say very, very broad very loose coalitions, but they do have some shared ideas in common, and they both have a response to the US invasion, but the response is very different. So liberals argue that the reason why Mexico was catastrophically defeated… is because it's backwards, it's not liberal enough. It's not a modern nation state and it needs to be drastically reformed. Their principal target here is the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church is enormously powerful in Mexico. It's a Catholic country. It's been there since colonisation way back in the 16th century. It's also the biggest landowner. It has enormous political and economic power as a consequence and beyond the fact that it's the one true faith is, so Catholics would argue. Now the property that it's owned is owned in perpetuity. Now that's a red flag to any liberal. You can't buy and sell church property on the open market so the Liberals think well aha, this is short and easy when we can attack the power of the church and undermine it by nationalizing church property and selling it as private property on the market. Now for conservatives, this proves what they've long believed, which is that liberals are impious, potentially even atheists, because their response to the US invasion is not that Mexico is a backwards nation, it's not modern enough. It's in fact that it's gone back on, what you might call traditional values. In fact, the one thing that conservatives believe is binding Mexico loosely together is the Catholic Church. So you've got a war of ideas here over the future of Mexico and how to respond to that invasion, it very quickly becomes an actual war, based on those ideas, In 1855 liberal sweep to power violently, again, and this time, there have been previous liberal regimes in Mexico, but they've been very moderate. This time, they are determined to transform Mexico. And the key reform here is nationalization of church property. Now, this is something that had happened in other countries, it happened during the French Revolution. So it's not unheard of. But in a very Catholic country like Mexico, for conservatives, it's anathema to their to their vision. It's so, it's seen as an impious assault… for conservatives, what's the most egregious thing about this constitution is actually what it doesn't say. I mean, they don't like what it does say, but they really don't like what it doesn't say, because all other constitutions in Mexico had put Catholicism front and center, the sole religion to the exclusion of all others. So no religious tolerance. This one doesn't mention it at all. And therefore, conservatives think this is a process to create that that secular republican government, which they think will actually lead to the collapse of Mexican society and potentially further US involvement. So when this constitution that's come into effect, they launch a coup d'etat, they put one of their own men into power. And that results in a three year civil war...
Another thing that sets Mexico apart from other Latin American nations, is that it becomes independent as a monarchy. Brazil also does so. In Mexico, there's a military leader called Agustin de Iturbide. He is actually a Spanish royalist, switches sides, had been fighting against Spain, switching sides and unites all of those people fighting for independence behind a plan. Now his plan is very simple. Mexico should be an independent monarchy, but ruled by either the Spanish King Ferdinand VII, or one of his family members. Now, of course, Ferdinand VII, the Spanish king, one of the most incompetent monarchs, I think, in the 19th century, and that's, that's a that's a pretty competitive field. He refuses his outright. So you're left with a monarchy without a monarch. Iturbide’s solution is to cram himself Emperor of Mexico. At this stage, empire just means state. So the Mexican Empire is not an empire that controls overseas territory, it's just a state with a monarch. That monitor is Iturbide. His reign is incredibly short. Within months, he's he's deposed, abdicates and actually comes back and get shot, which could have been a warning, potentially. And so this idea of monarchy never goes away in Mexico, because they're they're increasing number of people who think the solution to Mexico's instability is to get back to the original idea of independence, which was to have a monarchy, and actually creating a Republic with a president, which happens in 1824, that's the original sin of Mexican politics from which all other problems come...
He's what we would call a snob. He's someone who loves etiquette and the finer details of court, he spends a lot of his time, in fact, on the voyage to Mexico, when you think you might be sort of going through the political and military history of the country, or whatever it might be, writing a 600 page handwritten manual for the etiquette that will be observed at his court. And this goes down to minute detail about you know, who is going to take his hat at particular ceremonies and things like that. Potentially, you know, critics would say, not the most important detail that needed to be resolved...
There were sort of one or two farcical attempts to to break him out of jail, where again, his prevarication comes in. And so he said, well, we'll just do it tomorrow. We don't need to break out today. And of course, but you know, the plot the plot is uncovered"
The American Revolutionary War: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Americans have paid about a fifth as much in taxes as the average British person did. They were not heavily taxed, they gained a great deal from being part of the British Empire. And so, no one likes paying taxes. But the issue of taxation itself was not really the issue, right. For the Americans, it was the idea of, the principle, right, of taxation without the consent of the governed, that they're increasingly getting getting angry about. But it's, but even that is never the only thing. It was about free trade. It was about the white colonists’, the desire for westward expansion, or settler colonialism. It was about local sovereignty and governance. It was about cultural independence. It was about religious and racial concerns. And to some degree, it was about mutual miscommunication between the people in London and the people in the in the colonies... Depending on how you count, there were 26 colonies in the Western Hemisphere, not just the 13, who eventually rebelled. And even in some of those colonies that did not rebel like Jamaica, or Barbados, there were also complaints about the Stamp Act of 1765. So annoyance about new forms of taxation and new direct forms of taxation was fairly widespread. Even a lot of people who eventually remained loyal to the British Empire in the 13 colonies also, you know, were not, were not excited about about new forms of taxation. So it is a widespread issue, but it's not the only grievance. I mean, the Declaration of Independence is a long list of grievances and not all of them were about taxation’
‘Okay. Can we hear a few more of those then?’
‘Well, sure. I mean, the ones that formed the climb, I mean by then the war had already started. So they're they're complaining about ships being seized and towns being burned. And, you know, the British supposedly agitating enslaved people and Native Americans to attack the colonists. So, you know, by the time the war has actually broke out, there are a whole list of new grievances. But you know, things like policies surrounding the fisheries, things like the Royal Navy, occasionally going on to the docks and seizing Americans to join the Royal Navy, right, there were, there were a whole host of other grievances that we don't tend to talk about. Some of them were quite quite complicated. Some of them were about, you know, vetoing legislation that was passed by the by the various colonies. So there's, there's a whole long litany of, of grievances against the British Empire.’…
‘Was there any way that Parliament could have effectively addressed this issue of taxation without representation?’
‘What from their perspective from from the British perspective, and I'll be a little bit sarcastic here, they could give up all notion of sovereignty, except for very narrow trade regulations. You know, but to answer that question a little bit more seriously. I mean, students ask this all the time, right? What if the Parliament had somehow granted the Americans representation, but that was probably not realistic, and not really what the Americans wanted, right? Any group of American representatives in Parliament could be easily outvoted, or their representatives could be corrupted, because, of course, it took three to four months for messages to get back and forth. You know, on the issue of taxation, right, what the Americans would have preferred is that they use their own colonial assemblies, and voluntarily make grants back to, back to Parliament, and that that would be the way that they could get revenue from the American colonies. But in the meantime, right, like, is Parliament just to continue to only tax British people for the safety and security of these American colonists overseas? Or should the Americans be paying a little bit more of their fair share? You know, so again, it's exclusively on the issue of, of taxation. You know, it looks like the, you know, the, that's something that the British might have addressed if, you know, through a variety of negotiations over taxation and governance. But again, it's it's probably about more than just taxation...
The types of people that that stamp act hits are exactly the type of people you don't want to annoy. Lawyers, overseas merchants and, and tavern owners, right? You know, those were people who were particularly effective at making their grievances known and getting the message out about how annoyed they were. And they are the people that, whose livelihood would be most directly affected by the Stamp Act. And so the outrage that pours out of American newspapers and the, you know, the American legal minds who begin standing up and fulminating against this winds up creating a kind of tidal wave of protest and cartoons and things, and political cartoons and things like that against against that particular act. And so Parliament actually repeals it a year later, but also inserts this Declaratory Act saying, you know, we still have the right to make legislation on all of the colonies over anything whatsoever. And don't think that just because we're repealing this act, that we can see the the right to tax you, you know, Parliament believes it still has the right to tax these colonies.’"
Britain’s WW2 island internment camp | HistoryExtra - "‘During the Second World War, hundreds of German and Austrian born citizens living in Britain were rounded up and sent to internment camps on the Isle of Man... Internment had been used in the First World War by the British government… Germans were arrested, who were in this country at the time and sent to internment camps on the Isle of Man. And it was a complete disaster… it was like a real managerial disaster, but also PR disaster for the British government, who, after the First World War pledge, never again to, to in turn, to bother with this business of internment because it was complicated and difficult and costly. Then, at the start of the Second World War, Britain has accepted around, you know, between 70 and 80,000, Jewish Austrian refugees from Nazi oppression… at first, though, you know, we, there's this sort of acceptance in Britain that the people we have allowed in are genuine asylum seekers, genuine refugees that, you know, we've welcomed with, with open arms. And of course, there's the famous Kindertransport initiative to bring children over, which was a complete PR triumph for the British government, as well as, of course, being a very worthy initiative. And so there's this understanding that we've offered sanctuary to people who need it. Then in May 1940, with the invasion of of Holland, the narrative starts to change. So British reporters begin to write newspaper articles about that particular invasion, claiming that when the German paratroopers sort of dropped into Rotterdam harbor there, they are met there by people who had been posing as refugees who come out of their houses where they're perhaps working as maids, or butlers or whatever, and, and now they're no longer refugees, but they're dressed in German uniforms, and they're guiding the paratroopers where to go. And, you know, this is obviously very compelling copy. And there's all sorts of elaborations on how the paratroopers were disguised as nuns and there were people handing out poisoned chocolates and all of this stuff. So it all makes for great tabloid copy. But it has the effect of changing the public mood in Britain… Neville Bland, who is a British diplomat, who is in Holland at the time arrives back in London, writes up a report called The Fifth Column Menace... a copy of this report reaches the King who summons the Home Secretary, says we need to do something about these enemy aliens. The BBC then broadcasts the findings of Bland’s report across the nation. And of course, by this time, the the popular press is in full motion and saying we need to intern the lot. We've got all of these these frightening people in our in our midst, and we've got no way of knowing if they're safe or not. And this is really the sort of set of circumstances that pushes the British government into another internment policy that it had, after the previous war, pledged never again to repeat.’"
This is the first time I'm hearing about this racist and xenophobic move. Too bad they were white, or everyone would know about this
Casanova: more than a serial seducer | HistoryExtra - "'I always have the image purely a sort of seducer. So to hear that he's tried to go into the priesthood, gone into the army, done a law degree, I find that really surprising'
'I think he genuinely loved women. They could feel he was interested in them as individual people. They were not accustomed to that. When he had a successful relationship, and he had several, they seemed to be very powerful and mutual. But it was always provisonal... he often had affairs with married women who usually didn't get married for love but family reasons who found him a very enjoyable alternative, but not one who could last'"
British schools and education: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "Internationally there are a higher proportion of boarding schools in Britain than there are in many other countries. And other places which do have a lot of boarding schools often have kind of British links or British root or Imperial roots. So the kind of Northeast of America, there're quite a lot of boarding schools as well... you have schools like public schools... it was partly a matter of convenience... by the 19th century certainly there was quite a lot of mobility for people of the social condition whose children would go to boarding school, maybe. Kind of within the empire, going to different jobs, moving around. So boarding school could provide a mix of childcare but also a cultural base which didn't mean the whole family moving internationally... keep the children at home, and the parents might move around, particularly if the postings weren't for a hugely long period of time"
Reconstructing black lives in the Antebellum South - History Extra podcast | Acast - "'The disconnect sometimes between execution of the law on the ground and what we have at the higher levels say in the state legislature or judicial opinions or that sort of thing. And I'm wondering if there were other circumstances in which enslaved people were protected by the law... what I found was really unexpected. These are people who don't have legal standing, who don't have legal personalities and so on who are, who are not to be protected by law. But I found that there are thousands upon thousands of cases out of there of both free black and enslaved people using law to their own benefit in the civil courts in ways that we would not expect."
Gold rushes: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'The typical image of a gold rush be a kind of single, white man, probably bearded, probably with a pan. And a kind of lone prospector and speaks this powerful idea about the notion that you can individually make it big in the gold rush. I think that is largely a myth though I'm afraid. But there's a truth in it in the sense that there were many white anglo male settlers. These societies that are fundamentally, often very male. You think of California in 1852, state census, the population is 92% male. The female population then increases to about 40% by 1860 so it does rise quickly but in the initial period, they are overwhelmingly male. So these are places that come to be dominated by white anglo males. But this is not a change over time though. When the California rush begins in particular. The first rushes are not white Americans. They'll be synorans [sp?], Yaqui Indians from the northern part of Mexico and from, and Californios, so these are settlers who have moved into the state a long time before the rush. So we think there are probably 10,000 Mexicans and Yaqui Indians who begin the California gold rush, and the population remains relatively cosmopolitan. So they come from Chile, from Peru, other parts of South and Central America. There're also Australians and New Zealanders in California. But about a quarter of the population though would be Chinese migrants. And that remains stable across gold rush societies around the world... the Australian colony of Victoria, 1859, 8 years after the rush begins, there are 42,000 Chinese miners in that colony. It's about 1 in 5 of the men there are Chinese... Queensland, about 2 decades later... 17,000 Chinese to 1,400 people of European origin. So they are a very large part of the population'
'So how do we explain that? Because it's a long way'...
'These are largely migrants from the southern coastal provinces of late Qing China... that's only possible because of the treaty port infrastructure that the British Empire and others have created... these are prosperous, outward looking young men seeking new opportunities... they're very well-organised. There's a myth too that they tend to be contracted single men, sometimes called coolie labour. But in fact they're very well organised, they work in companies together. They're responsible for transfers of technology between gold fields... this is a very small proportion of migrants leaving Fujian and Guangdong'
First World War poets: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'There's probably an awful lot more of First World War poetry that is about things that are funny and silly and rude than there is about the mud and the awfulness. It's just that we don't see it, because the futility poetry has come to dominate what we understand to be First World War poetry '"
Measurement: an unexpected history | HistoryExtra - "'People were very suspicious of [metric] because of this association with the French Revolution. People saw it as godless. They saw it as the product of these bloodthirsty atheist republicans. And there developed this, I think... conspiracy theory or a pseudoscience, but they developed this belief during the 1800s that the Imperial System, certainly units of the Imperial System, were not just historical artifacts but they were divine artifacts. There was this pseudoscience that sprung up called pyramidology which was all about measuring the Great Pyramid at Giza and the belief that the Ancient Egyptians, they knew stuff that we didn't. They knew all these grand historical truths about the world and they encoded these within the dimensions, the architecture of the pyramid. And so they measured the pyramid in all these various ways and they worked out to their own satisfaction that the inch was used to construct the pyramid... the inch is not an Ancient Egyptian unit of measurement. The cubit is. But an inch happens to be about 1/25 of a cubit, so it fitted into the calculations. And they came to believe that the Egyptians had been instructed in how to build the pyrmaid by God. And for that reason, the pyramids were meant as this sort of lasting monument, this monument in the desert was what they called it, that was meant to enshrine for all of humanity, the divine system of measurement that happened to be based on the inch. So anti-metric sentiment becomes motivated not only by xenophobia... but by religious zeal. And this is something you see in both the US and the UK... we still see these arguments happening today... 'Why should we let the French impose their system on us?'''"
Castles: from mighty fortresses to fantastical palaces | HistoryExtra - "'People begin to pull them to pieces. And if the Civil War hadn't happened, we would have many many more houses that were castles than we do... One of the ways in which we have deceived ourselves that Britain becomes peaceful and castles become unimportant is the sort of myth that the Tudors sort of civilised medieval England. And that then we cease talking about castles and we start talking about country houses. But in fact I think lots of castles remained in occupation until the Civil War and the Civil War is the counterpart to the dissolution of the monasteries. It's the final ovetthrow of the medieval social order. And of course in 1649, England, unthinkably, beheads its monarch. And that's the dying gasp of the Middle Ages in some ways. And that's when so many castles disappear... These great great great buildings, that have commanded enormous landscapes and estates. And they just are torn to pieces. Some survive'"
How nomads changed the world | HistoryExtra - "'The chronicles of, for instance of the Destruction of Baghdad talk about the entire city having been devastated, and yet you read 10 years later, the city is again one of the great commercial centres in the world. So you think. they can't have completely destroyed the place. And they can't have killed everybody. So there was an exaggeration on the part of the chronicler, who was one of the victims of this violence. But the other thing to note about it, and again this is the problem with history, the history we have about nomads, it stresses the violence. It doesn't pla up very often the other side of nomad culture, which is the way they have flourished the world's culture, in Eurasia in particular but also in Africa actually but also in North and South America. And certainly in Australia... the movement of ideas, beliefs and goods between East and West. And we're all familiar with the Silk Road... the Pax Mongolica... it was said you could walk from one side of the Empire, which was up to the Chinese border, and right up to the Middle East, you could walk from one end to the other as a girl with a golden bowl on your head without fearing assault or theft. And we know about the great Roman roads with posthouses. The Mongols had exactly the same thing. If you had the right token at a Mongol posthouse, you got to sleep in silk sheets and you got fed this royal banquet and things like that. We never hear about that side'
Chaos, ruin & renewal: Germany in 1945 | HistoryExtra - "'Many people reflected on this moment of crisis as a happy time. How can you explain that?'
'That's a really astonishing thing. The Germans' official German memoir paints the first months after the war in very dark dark colours. But the more I researched these days, the more I discovered that the despair and joy were lying very close together. The neighborhood of death heightened the feeling of life enormously. People were happy that they escaped the disasters. And they want to express the joy of living. There was a real dense frenzy these days. Even some days after the end of the war, people start to dense again. In many cases, the houses were completely destroyed, but the the dance floor in the cellar worked. They are looking for new adventures. So they had lost everything in many cases. And now they are longing for new experiences... explosion of lust for life...
The relationships between the Allied soldiers and the German women were very important. The German woman were not only interested in these soldiers because of the cigarettes or the chocolates, they were keen on the new behavior. They were looking for a new culture. These women were pioneers on our long way to the West... love plays an important role between cultures'"
Cuba & the USA: an intertwined history | HistoryExtra - "A lot of the trade in human beings happens after the abolition of the slave trade. So Britain and the US abolish the trade in 1807 and 1808 and Spain agreed with Britain to abolish the slave trade in 1820, yet most, the vast majority of Africans who entered Cuban ports in chains occured, arrived rather, after the trade was illegal, became illegal in 1820... Cuba continues to blame all its ills on the US Embargo, not taking into account its own failings, so in some ways it hasn't changed that much post-Castro"
The vanishing inventor | HistoryExtra - "Alexander Graham Bell comes up with the telephone. Thomas Edison does a thing he called perfecting it, which means I steal it and I swap out a piece and call it mine and says it works better. And then when Alexander Graham Bell talks about it, Thomas Edison calls him a pirate in the papers, smears him, six floors [?] on him and kinda uses the whole machine. And there're people like Alexander Graham Bell who carried on their work regardless, there were others who were put out of business and gone bankrupt and all this stuff. There're people in Edison's employ who kind of put stuff that he would fire and smear and make sure that he didn't get other jobs"
