Does anybody have a good recommendation for a book about the history of cooking ingredients? For example I'd love to read about how onions came to travel the world and be a staple in nearly every type of cooking.

#books #history

History of trans musician Wendy Carlos (2/3)

I learned about this incredible woman after coming across an old video with her on YouTube the other week (see part 3 of the thread for link).

And I thought it’s important to share given that trans history is being actively erased from public consciousness these days, and right-wing politicians / pundits are trying to claim that trans people are invading and ruining culture. In reality, people like Carlos have been here this whole time, creating the very culture that these jerks claim is being ruined by “woke”.

This is also telling. Carlos said about the public’s reaction to her transition, back in the 80s:

"The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent ... There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life."

#trans #synthesizer #Grammy #transHistory #transgender #history #music #musicHistory #funFacts

History of trans musician Wendy Carlos (3/3)

And here is the video where I first came across Carlos.

Two bits of context here:

1. This is one of the most impressive explainers of how electronic music works and the different wavelengths that go into turning electric signals into sound that I’ve ever seen (and I studied physics for 2 years in university, so I had at least some background on this.) youtu.be/4SBDH5uhs4Q?si=kll8Uv…

2. At this point, Carlos had started hormone therapy but was not public about her transition. So she’d put on fake sideburns, a wig, and try to appear more masculine.

#trans #synthesizer #Grammy #transHistory #transgender #history #music #musicHistory #funFacts

Wendy Carlos demonstrates her Moog Synthesizer in 1970

Wendy Carlos interview on PBS' NOVA in 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EtH5E1N91YNote: the BBC has posted a longer version available here: https://www...

^YouTube

Hi everyone, I wanna tell you about a really cool #trans person I’ve learned about recently - Wendy Carlos. (Thread: 1/3)

Carlos was born in 1939 and is currently 86 years old. She helped develop the first ever commercial #synthesizer, Moog, in 1964. She created the scores for iconic movies including A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Tron (1982). She even won three #Grammy awards in 1970 for her album Switched-On Bach. (First trans woman to ever win one!)

She was also one of the first public figures to disclose that she underwent a feminizing gender-affirming surgery (she got the procedure in 1972, went public in 1979).

#transHistory #transgender #history #music #musicHistory #funFacts

Happy 25th anniversary to this Daily Mail article from the year 2000, proclaiming that internet "may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it".

#internet #TheWeb #OTD #OnThisDay #history

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

Did you know that the 1st commercial #Christmas card was a #marketing scheme for a new #postal service?

In the #UK, prior to the 1840s, letters were paid by distance & sheets. This was expensive & poorer households rarely used it.

Some men decided to implement a general rate of 1 penny per letter.
While this doubled the letters sent in the 1st year, it was financially bad for the government.

Entrepreneur Henry Cole commissioned the first Xmas Card in 1843. It was a rousing success.

#history

The entire #WhiteHouse #EastWing is demolished as #Trump moves forward with his #ballroom, AP photos show.

The East Wing, where #FirstLadies created #history, planned state dinners & promoted causes, is now history itself. The 2-story structure of drawing rooms & offices, including workspace for first ladies & their staffs, has been turned into rubble, demolished as part of Trump’s plan to build what he said is now a $300M ballroom nearly 2X the size of the White House.

apnews.com/article/trump-white…

Now free for all to read... Imagine a family living in 1980s Bulgaria. They're the Petrovi family: father Plamen, mother Elena, and son Boyan. I say "imagine", for the Petrovis aren't real; they're a fictional family created to illustrate life in 1980s Sofia, the Bulgarian capital - and they live in the so-called Red Flat:

patreon.com/posts/sofia-enteri…

#Bulgaria #Sofia #museum #history

Starvation as a tool for genocide was always part of the invaders acts to crush and exterminate resistance of the natives.

#USpol #History #Starvation #Genocide

#OnThisDay, 2 Aug 1855, Elizabeth Ann Holman goes on trial in Plymouth, UK, for being a suspicious person because she was discovered to be a woman disguised as a man. The case is dismissed. As is a second charge against her for wearing trousers in 1858.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #BritishHistory #Histodons

Hi to all #history readers and lovers. I am developing a daily history puzzle with all of my heart. You have to guess a year with the help of 4 historical events. Afterwards you get interesting links to these events.

I would be glad if you check it out. It is called #PastPuzzle - Thank you! :)

pastpuzzle.de/

Archaeologists Just Pulled Pieces Of The Lighthouse Of Alexandria Out Of The Mediterranean Sea

By Ainsley Brown

allthatsinteresting.com/lighth…

#archaeology #history

wanna give a huge shout-out to Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky for gifting us some absolutely stunning colour photographs from Russia in the 1910s.

YEAH YOU READ THAT RIGHT. he took three photographs of each subject, through coloured filters, and then projected the images again through the filters and superimposed them.

and thus, we have colour photography of early 20th century Russia. and it's beautiful.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_P…

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ser…

#History #Photography

stole your meme, yadda yadda cuz GLUE PEOPLE is who we once called ELDERS.

a hallmark of #fascism is the belief #history is a thing that lives outside of us; and that, thru violent means, only the “winners” write and impose as The Truth.

but History isn’t a thing.

history exists in being, living, doing.

books, archives, GIT repos are great, but give us a false sense of security. when “life happens”, we need Elders to wing solutions.

there is no institutional memory, only Elders.

In 1988, IBM tried to seize the whole PC market back and make it proprietary again.

This seemed to be the end for the PC open platform. Consensus was that you couldn't win against IBM.

Luckily for history, Compaq, and founding CEO Rod Canion, decided to try.

Read my latest #history longform on the fight for the soul of the PC. And how Compaq won. #technology

every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-ma…

The Man Who Beat IBM

Compaq’s Rod Canion broke Big Blue’s hold on the PC market—and changed computing forever

^every.to

This is the original middle finger of the right hand of #GalileoGalilei as it can be seen in the #MuseoGalileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in #Florence:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%…

My personal highlight of this trip to Italy so far.

Yes, the #middlefinger gesture is old enough. Even old greeks and romans used it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_fing…

Maybe this (and the #catholicchurch forcing him to publicly revoke his findings) is why somebody decided to steal this part of his body when he was moved years after his death.

From now on, this picture will be awarded by me to anybody who is talking bullshit that was scientifically proven wrong already.

Use my photos under #CCbyNCSA: creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

#Homöopathie #homeopathy #Schwurbel #nonsense #science #research #galileosmiddlefinger #relic #education #religion #history #church #catholic
/cc #minkorrekt @minkorrekt

This past week, 99 years ago, Miles Dewey Davis III was born in Alton, Illinois.

On November 12, 1989, on 60 Minutes, Harry Reasoner asked him if Black musicians were better at jazz and blues because of slavery. The question could’ve gone sideways.

What Davis said—quietly, precisely—was about rhythm, memory, race, and the meaning of swing. #music #Jazz #Histodons #history #blackmastodon #photography #blackandwhite

1/12
Image: Miles Davis, Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954, photo by Francis Wolff.

What Is the Origin of the Calendar?

The modern calendar borrows influences from a collective of early calendars such as the Jewish, the Babylonian, the Roman, and the Egyptian calendars.

by Mike Cohen

thecollector.com/what-is-the-o…

Books on calendars at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/2…

Maya calendar:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/1…

#history #calendar

New #intro!

I’m a hyperjack musician, writer & video artist. My latest album, ‘Status’, is mainly about escaping Big Tech dystopia.

My website meljoann.com includes nerdy blog posts on Faircamp, Owncast & leaving mainstream social media.

Some stuff I love:

#musicProduction #videoProduction #books #experimentalMusic #electronicMusic #RandB #earlyMusic #improvisedMusic #science #knitting #history #scienceFiction #horror #alternativeComedy #anarchism #foss #linux #introduction

Meljoann.

Website of hyperjack music producer, writer and video artist, Meljoann.

^Meljoann.

#OnThisDay, 30 April 1937, 447,725 women in the Philippines vote to be given the vote in the women's suffrage plebiscite.

Yes, the government did ask women to vote on whether they should have the vote…

asiafoundation.org/2012/03/07/…

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #VotesForWomen #Histodons

Released last Friday, a digital reconstruction of the Titanic chronicles a never-before-seen view of the wreck that is “accurate to the rivet,” a statement says.

thisiscolossal.com/2025/04/tit…

#titanic #history #photography #science #ocean #technology

Very early #OnThisDay, 12 Apr 1944, Odette Wilen parachutes into France to work as a wireless operator for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supports the French resistance.

Wireless operators were at the greatest risk of discovery, as their position could be triangulated whenever they were transmitting messages back to London.

Wilen evades capture by minutes and escapes over the Pyrenees. She lives until 2015.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WorldWar2 #Histodons

Another week. Another museum. This week the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. I came here largely to see this one tool chest.

It's the Mästermyr toolchest. A 1000 year old chest filled with blacksmithing and woodworking tools. It's an incredibly important find. Beautifully preserved in the bog. The tools are wonderful. I'd seen pictures and read about these tools, but to see them up close. That hack saw is exquisite.

I wonder how the chest ended up discarded.

#Making #Tools #History

#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly. Hewish received the Nobel prize for it in 1974: Bell Burnell did not.

In 2018 Bell Burnell received a £3m prize for her work. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons

Hello, I'm new to Mastadon and looking to meet people interested in medieval Silk Road history, especially of women and non-western historical fiction.

To sort of give you an idea of the weird stuff I'm into, here's a post I did about stories written in the Medieval Silk Road that feature women and are available in English:

mariamalmasriauthor.wordpress.…

On this, anyone else into weird and obscure histories?

#intro #history #historicalFiction #silkroad #womenshistory #books

Stories About Women from the Medieval Silk Road and Available in English

The Silk Road had men and women of all walks of life. It also was one of history’s most literate eras and places, prior to the modern age. One of the reasons that we know that is from the sto…

^{Women Along the Silk Road}

I’m researching the life of my 5 x great grandfather Samuel Cottrell. This will be an interesting challenge because Samuel, a non-conformist, managed to avoid all the censuses taken in the 1800s

Samuel was born on 11 July 1796 to John Cottrell and Mary Teek. He was baptised on 2 October 1796 at Saint Luke’s Old Street, Finsbury, London.

During this research, I hope to learn more about London as well.

#FamilyTree #FamilyHistory #History #Genealogy #London #1700s

On this day in 1983, the ARPANET network officially switched to using the TCP/IP protocol, effectively creating the Internet.

"January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other."

usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/…

#internet #technology #history #OnThisDay #OTD

Journalist Carl von Ossietzky was a constant voice against Nazism and rising militarism in 1920s and 1930s Germany. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for it — and he died for it. In this long read for Atavist, Kate McQueen tells his story. "They may condemn us, today, tomorrow, the day after, [and] we will accept it,” he once wrote. “But our pride will be in … becoming more energetic, sharper, denser and tougher. That’s why we are journalists.”

flip.it/K8jWji

#History @histodons #Journalism #Nazism #Germany

The Good Traitor

The Third Reich feared Carl von Ossietzky so much they sent him to a concentration camp. Could winning the Nobel Peace Prize save his life?

^{Kate McQueen (The Atavist Magazine)}

The first text message was sent on this day in 1992 by then a 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth to wish "Merry Christmas" to his colleague.

"It didn't feel momentous at all. For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."

history.com/this-day-in-histor…

#OTD #OnThisDay #technology #history #phone #TextMessage #MerryChristmas

#OnThisDay, 28 Nov 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the existence of pulsars.

Not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for the discovery, Bell received a £3m prize for her work in 2018. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WomenInSTEM #Histodons

Matching dinosaur footprints in Cameroon and Brazil record a time when Africa and South America were still connected & herds could wander between them.

I'm not saying the very same dinosaur was stomping around in both Cameroon and Brazil...but it's possible.

nytimes.com/2024/08/28/science…

#science #history #nature #dinosaurs

I remember David Graeber's insight into #voting being a big 'Aha' moment for me:

"Majoritarian democracy was, in its origins, essentially a military institution. . . .

"It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece was one of the most competitive societies known to history. It was a society that tended to make everything into a public contest . . . So it might not seem entirely surprising that they made political decision-making into a public contest as well. Even more crucial though was the fact that decisions were made by a populace in arms. . . . [I]f a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. . . . [E]ven if the vote was 60/40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest." #history #politics #democracy

- Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology theanarchistlibrary.org/librar…

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

David Graeber Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology 2004

^{The Anarchist Library}