and your eyes seeing happiness;
feminism. bbc radio 4. history. zombies run. les misérables.
formerly: halfway-outofthedark
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and may you achieve millions of years,
you who love thebes,
sitting with your face to the north wind,
and your eyes seeing happiness.
-- the wishing cup of tutankhamun
“And the programme was a Pozzitive production for the BBCCCCCCCC!!!”
Found in History of the later years of the Hawaiian Monarchy and the revolution of 1893 by WD Alexander. I always thought he looked a bit like Vernon Dursley.
brb, turning hetero for Thomas J Osborne, most useful historian alive (or has he died? eh, irrelevant).
And now this guy is calling US imperialism ‘moral progressivism’ please help
In response to mounting unrest in Cuba, in early 1898 President McKinley sent the US warship Maine to Havana harbor. While the US government announced that the Maine’s was a “friendly act of courtesy,” everyone knew that this was a lie. Its real mission was to protect American life and property if and when Cuban revolutionaries took control of Havana. On the evening of February 15, a mysterious explosion suddenly blew up the Maine while it was resting at anchor in the harbor, killing 260 navy servicemen.
Without a shred of real evidence, the “yellow press” and prominent individuals immediately blamed Spanish authorities for the disaster. Even though Spain had no rational motive for provoking the United States, and no evidence of Spanish guilt has ever come to light, the incident was instantly seized upon to inflame passions for war. Headlines in the New York Journal (February 17) told readers that “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was The Work of an Enemy,” that “Assistant Secretary Roosevelt Convinced the Explosion of the War Ship Was Not an Accident,” and that “Naval officers think the Maine was destroyed by a Spanish mine.” (Hearst’s Journal would later shamelessly take credit for the Spanish-American war itself.)
- Aristotle said “[The Hellenic race] continues free, and is the best governed of any nation, and if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world.” I do not know why this makes me giggle so much but it does.
- This book is talking about how it must reject the prejudices against “white male and top-down history” and “set aside assumptions, implicit in much recent work, that any past exercise of American imperial power abroad was morally wrong”. This is slightly concerning to me, firstly because it’s telling us to throw away all the historiographical movements since the 1960s and also because saying American imperialism wasn’t morally wrong is awkwardly close to saying it was right. Which it really wasn’t.
- I cannot afford to pay attention to the big flashing lights vibe this book is giving me because maybe it has useful things but oh god it just tried to defend the annexation of the Philippines as totally the right thing to do.
- Maybe not.
Thurston Twigg-Smith.
Um, missionaries WERE colonialism? And I would hardly argue they were ‘benign’.
Surely the argument that the US took over Hawai‘i because it kept getting taken over by other countries is like Britain saying it should take over France because it keeps getting invaded. I just don’t understand, mainly because Hawai‘i getting invaded only lasted a couple of months at a time and they were always rogue citizens who didn’t have the backing of their respective governments. So it makes even less sense. I just cannot.
