the thing about “well-behaved women rarely make history" is that the author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, didn’t write it about women who would be considered “badly-behaved;“ she wrote it in a book about a midwife, about women who had been largely ignored and erased from history because as a result of their “good behaviour.” So it’s not a “BAD GIRLS DO IT WELL" kind of quote; it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.
it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.
Foch (center, with cane) and Wemyss (to the immediate left) pictured outside the train car in which the armistice was signed.
November 11 1918, Compiègne–The German armistice delegation at Compiègne had attempted to secure better terms, but had failed at doing so, apart from a slight extension of the two-week timeframe to evacuate Belgium, France, and Alsace-Lorraine. On November 10, they received notification that the Kaiser had abdicated, and received instruction from the new Chancellor, Ebert, that they were to sign the armistice as they were. Shortly after 5AM local time (GMT) on the 11th, Erzberger, the other Germans, Foch, and Wemyss signed the armistice. The armistice was slated to go into effect six hours after the signing (backdated to 5AM), at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Fighting continued until 11AM across the front, though dampened by rain that day. Gunner B.O. Stokes, with the New Zealand Field Artillery, recalled:
We heard the announcement of the Armistice when we were still in the Forest de Mormal on a cheerless, dismal, cold, misty day. There was no cheering or demonstration. We were all tired in body and mind, fresh from the tragic fields of battle, and this momentous announcement was too vast in its consequences to be appreciated or accepted with wild excitement. We trekked out of the wood on this dreary day in silence.
In some sectors, six hours was not enough time to convey news of the armistice to troops in the thick of fighting. Parts of 89th Division, which had attacked at 4AM that morning, did not stop fighting until noon. There are no known reports of any shooting continuing beyond 12:30 in the afternoon.
I leave you with a recollection from American Private Frank W. Groves:
At the front our days and nights were filled with the sounds and smells of the bombardment. Never were we free of it and we had learned to live with it. On November 11 at 11:00 am those sounds and vibrations abruptly stopped. The quietness that followed was awesome; you could feel it – almost smell and taste it. There was no singing, no shouting, no laughter; we just stood around and looked and listened.
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
Not just an actual bear. A polar bear cub.
Imagine a fully grown man running offstage to be “killed” by a baby polar bear.
Anyway, if you read marriage certificates from church records, a full 85% of first marriages for young women were around 18-19 years old. The rest skewed higher, into the early twenties, with only a few being below that age and only one in a thousand was younger than 16.
The age of puberty has declined over the centuries as girls get better nutrition, as well, so throughout the middle ages the age at which a girl could expect her first period was around 16, where modern girls often get it much younger.
The idea that women in earlier ages were married and mothers in their early teens is a myth. Marriages of children were usually only between noble families, and made for political reasons, or creepy old bastards who wanted a child-wife and could get away with it because they were rich and powerful. They often would point to the fact that the Roman elite did the same thing as justification. The Romans, of course, would point to the Greeks doing the same thing as justification, the Greeks pointed at the Assyrians, and so on back through the ages.
It was considered disgusting by normal people then and still is.
This myth is still brought out and touted by sick fuckers. Know it for what it is; a falsehood.
And EVEN among the nobility marriages at such a young age were a much rarer occasion than those apologists would make you believe.
Let’s look an an egregious example, Henry the bloody VIII:
First marriage:
He was 18, Katharine of Aragon was 23.
Second marriage:
He was 40/41, Anne Boleyn, depending on which theory you believe, was anywhere between 24 to 32.
Third marriage:
He was 44, Jane Seymour was 28.
Fourth marriage:
He was 48, Anne of Cleves was 25
Fifth marriage:
He was 48, Catherine Howard, depending on which source you believe, was between 17-22. And yes, people at the time actually were squicked out by this age difference. And rightly so.
Sixth marriage:
He was 51, Catherine Parr was 31.
Even the most notorious LECHER and WIFE MURDERER in history did not marry teenagers in at least 5 if not 6 out of 6 marriages.
And here’s another Tudor tidbit, both Henry VII and VIII knew how traumatic and damaging it is for women marrying/having children too young. Henry VII’s mother was married at 12 and gave birth to Henry VII at 13. It caused so much damage and trauma that she never had another child after him despite being married three times.
So yes CUT THAT SHIT OUT. Teenage girls are NOT adults and anyone preying on them is pure evil.
YOU
I LIKE YOU
And as for the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville to King Edward IV, she was 27 at the time. He? Was 22.
She had been married before, and did marry young…at the age of sixteen or seventeen, to Sir John Gray, who was about five years her senior.
@systlin This is good information, but do you have a source for the information about how most marriages back in the day were not actually usually from a younger age? I tried Googling it but I can only find things talking about modern day issues.
Well, if you don’t want to spend months crawling through digitized copies of marriage records preserved in church archives from the 12th through 18th centuries from England, Italy, Germany, France, ect (which you can do, and it will show you I’m right) you can go read
“
Medieval Households” by David Herlihy, Harvard University Press, 1985. He did the archive crawling for you.
Also
Peter Laslett’s book “The World We Have Lost”, where he details over a thousand marriage certificates, and he dug through many more in the writing of the work.
Wait. I am spanish. Do they actually think henry/enrique VII married fucking katherin/catalina de Aragón as a teenager?
You know we see films about this in school and every one is pretty much adult there, both fisically and in the story.
There’s this…really weird trend in a lot of pseudo-European fantasy/ ‘historical’ books to have girls marry like…really young, to vastly older dudes. Like at about 13, getting married off to like 30 year olds. And then say “Well that’s what it was like back then.”
(Sideyes G.R.R.M)
And…no. No it wasn’t. That’s gross. England was creeped TF out when Henry VIII married Catherine Howard when she was between 17 and 22 and he was 48 as stated above, and rightly so.
All of this is excellent, and there is one thing I would add:
When you DID have these super-young marriages between nobility, it was more or less the same thing we do today when we scream “DIBS!” over who gets the TV remote. You might have a 13-year-old lord marrying a 14-year-old girl, but they weren’t expected to actually act as husband and wife, not yet. He had schooling to finish, she had to learn how to run a household. The union was purely political and not to be consummated until later–you know, at a point when they were 18 or 19 and she could carry a child without dying of it and he could actually support a wife.
I think one of the major causes of many misconceptions like this is because people have been basing their preceptions on life in the past off of works of FICTION written in the past. When I was studying Early Modern literature in undergrad, this topic was brought up regarding the presence of sexual abuse. There were many plays and what not that implied things such as this, however the scene in the play WAS CONSIDERED SHOCKING to people back then too. It would be like someone 500 years from now watching some grimdark noire mopey antihero cop drama in a city of sin, and then thinking that it demonstrates what the everyday life of today’s world is. No one in this thread is saying things like that NEVER happened back then, it was just… not as common as historical fiction and fiction written 500 years ago might have you believe. As OP mentioned, historical documents from the time have far fewer child marriages and sexual abuse than literary works from the time do.
not to start drama in the history fandom but some of yall out there have really bad opinions and also no critical thinking skills
also while I’m here: historical figures aren’t your fandom faves. they’re real people who had profound and often terrible effects on other real people. you can’t apply fandom logic to them. you can’t fill in the blanks with no evidence other than you like the idea. you can’t vilify some of them while simultaneously stanning over “”misunderstood babies”” who committed equal atrocities. and perhaps most importantly of all, you can’t treat real history as “canon” and develop AUs where your fave is exactly how you want them to be with none of the nasty bits attached. that’s not how you read history. that’s how you get a painfully obvious bias which makes your conclusions and contributions useless.
it’s ok u can say hamilton
full disclosure i was talking about the soviet union idk what’s going on in the hamilton sphere and i wanna keep it that way
Finnish soldier gets separated from the rest of his unit but he’s the only one carrying the emergency amphetamines for the unit, takes too many and goes on a one man rampage for like 2 weeks straight giving the opposing Soviet soldiers nightmares for decades. Oh and he did it all on skis.
Did he survive?
Yes, during his methed up 2-3 week rampage he got injured by a land mine, travelled 400km on skis, and only ate pine buds and a Siberian Jay that he caught which he ate raw. When he made it back to Finnish lines he was taken to a hospital where it was found his heart rate was nearly 200 beats per minute and his weight had dropped to 43kg (94.7lbs).
I fell down a rabbit hole of research about inventions circa the 40s and was surprised by a bunch of things that have been around way longer than I thought and some that are strangely reccent, and compiled them into a list. Aka, a resource for fic writers.
Bananas (or rather, the ones we have today. The ones he’d be accustomed to, the Gros Michel, a sweeter, creamier species, went extinct in the 50s and was replaced with the bland Cavendish banana.)
High-fives (the low-five was actually invented first, around WW2, and he may have been familiar with that)
Buffalo Wings (invented in the 60s)
CPR (not really used until the late 40s, not widely known until the 50s)
Tiramisu (invented in the 80s)
Big Macs & McNuggets (while McDonald’s was founded in 1940, the former wasn’t introduced until the 60s, and the latter, the 80s)
Seat belts (the first car to have one was in the late 40s, and only became mandatory to wear them in the 80s. holy shit.)
Walmart (invented in 1962. Or really, the large-scale supermarkets as we know them today really)
Yellow tennis balls (prior to the 70s they were usually black or white)
Panadol (first sold in the US in the 50s)
The smiley face aka 🙂 (popularised in the 60s)
Now alternatively, here’s a list of things Steve WOULD (or possibly would) be familiar with:
I’m not sure why some of these surprised me.
Modern Sunglasses (have been around a lot longer than I thought, and were mass produced in the 20s)
Nokia (was first founded in 1865. I’m not kidding. They began as a pulp mill and moved into making rubber respirators for military from the 30s onwards)
Nintendo (been around since 1889 as a toy company, during the 40s they made playing cards. Wouldn’t be implausible that he knew about Nintendo, perhaps from Morita)
Krispy Kreme (opened in 1937, didn’t spread widely until the 50s however)
Kool-Aid (introduced in the 30s)
Oreos (introduced in 1912)
Printed/graphic tees (didn’t become a trend until the 60s-70s, but they certainly existed in the 40s)
Hoodies (originated in the 30s, worn by workers in cold New York warehouses. Meaning, it’s entirely plausible Bucky could’ve been wearing hoodies in the 40s)
Malls (they weren’t called that back then, but they certainly had shopping centres or plazas since the 1800s)
Converse sneakers (invented in 1908 and have barely changed since!)
I didn’t expect anyone to really reblog this wow! Here’s a couple more things to add to the list:
Would not have known about:
Velcro (patented in 1951)
Modern Sunscreen (in 1944 they had ‘Red Vet Pet’, used by soldiers it was described as a “disagreeable red, sticky substance similar to petroleum jelly”)
Bubble Wrap (1957)
Slinkies (Not sold until 1947)
Microwave oven (invented just a year after he went under)
Frisbees (invented in 1948)
Acrylic paint (not sold commercially until the 50s)
Roller blades (1979)
Would have likely known about:
Reeses’s Peanut Butter Cups (introduced in 1928)
Mountain Dew (introduced in 1940)
Twinkies (1930)
M&M’s (1941)
Lay’s Potato Chips (1932)
Tootsie Pops (1931)
Levi’s Jeans (been around since the 1850s!)
Duct Tape (been around since the early 1900′s, at this time it was called duck tape)
3-D movies (the first 3-D movie with the red/blue glasses was in 1922!)
Monopoly (1935)
Nescafe coffee (1938)
Coming back to this because I found out a few more!
More things he would likely not be familiar with:
Butter chicken (1950s)
Wireless TV remote (invented 1955)
Superglue (not sold until 1958)
Saran wrap (1949. ok and cool fact, the name Saran comes from the combined names of the creators cat and dog, Sarah and Ann!)
Colour TV (invented in his time, but not broadcasted until the 50s)
Things he would possibly/likely be familiar with:
Electric guitars (invented 1931)
Electric washing machines (as early as 1904. They look nothing like they do now though and I doubt he owned one.)
Laundromats (since the 30s or earlier)
Electric razors (produced in 1937)
Air conditioner (invented in 1902)
Pop up toaster (1919)
Robots (in 1928 the humanoid robot Eric was created. Funnily enough during Steve’s time the word ‘robot’ was pronounced as ‘row-boat’)
Wide Spread Interests 