Tag: history

Boston Tea Party happened 248 years ago today

Thursday, December 16 marks the 248th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party – a protest during which Massachusetts colonists, angered by Britain’s “taxation without representation,” dressed up as Mohawk Indians and dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston harbor.

Throughout the 1760s, the British government imposed a number of taxes on American colonists in an effort to pay off the crown’s debts. According to History.com, in 1765, the Stamp Act taxed colonists on nearly every piece of printed paper, including playing cards, business licenses, newspapers and legal documents. Two years later, the British government passed the Townshend Acts of 1767, taxing other basic items like paint, paper, glass, lead and tea.

On March 5, 1770, a street brawl turned deadly riot on King Street in Boston inflamed already rising tensions between the colonists and British. The event that left five colonists dead and six others wounded would come to be known as the Boston Massacre.

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The Real Story of Rosa Parks 66 Years Later: What You Learned in School Is Wrong

Unjust laws will remain unjust until they are disobeyed by good people. Had brave individuals throughout history not risked imprisonment or worse to challenge tyrannical, racist, and immoral laws, society today, would be much less free — this rule is especially true for black people in America.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks made history by disobeying an unjust law that required people of color to yield their seats on the bus to white people. When the bus driver told the entire row of black people to move to the back of the bus because a white man boarded, everyone complied, except for Parks.

Parks was arrested and convicted for failing to obey the driver’s seat assignments. The events following her arrest, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the federal ruling of Browder v. Gayle which ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional, would be a turning point in segregated America.

While Rosa Parks is certainly a large part of American history, her idea to disobey the unjust bus law was not entirely original.

Can you name the first woman who wouldn’t give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama? The answer is not Rosa Parks.

Rosa Parks’ decision to disobey that fateful day was inspired and, in fact, modeled after a 15-year-old hero named Claudette Colvin.

Nine months before Parks was arrested for her choice not to give up her seat, on March 2, 1955, this brave child, without the support of the NAACP, or Civil Rights groups, took a stand on principle alone and refused to give up her seat.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones Admits Her ‘1619 Project’ Is A Useful Political ‘Narrative’

On Oct. 13, the Roosevelt Institute awarded The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones the Freedom of Speech Award, one of their Four Freedoms Awards. In her acceptance speech, Hannah-Jones unknowingly revealed the truth about her ahistorical 1619 Project, as well as the Orwellian nature of the award she received.

Hannah-Jones has a way of letting slip her true goals. The 1619 Project was published in New York Times Magazine to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown, where it “reframed” American history by replacing 1776 with the year 1619, when our real Founding — as a “slavocracy” — really began.

In her Oct. 13 remarks, she confirmed this project is actually advocacy journalism. She gave the game away when calling the project a “narrative.” She also noted “the narrative allows for policy.” The policy she was referring to was reparations.

The bestowal of the Roosevelt Institute award came only weeks after Hannah-Jones gave the annual Kops Freedom of the Press lecture at Cornell University and served as featured speaker at “Banned Books Week” events. The stream of accolades is astounding. But they have much to do with the image of persecuted speaker of truths Hannah-Jones has cultivated through social media and television appearances.

The performative ritual was put on display at the Oct.13 ceremony as Dorian Warren, president of the nonprofit Community Change and cohost of a Nation magazine podcast, interviewed Hannah-Jones in the fawning manner to which she has become accustomed. He marveled at her “resilience.” How are you “holding up?” he asked.

Hannah-Jones acted as if she were being hounded by the U.S. attorney general and the FBI — like the parents voicing objections at school board meetings to the kind of curricula she supports. It depends “on the day,” she sighed. She took the hostile reactions as a “testament” to the power of journalism.

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Anglo-Censored? English History YouTuber Purged from Facebook

Rowsell warned that Facebook censorship has consequences. “This will inevitably negatively impact my earnings but also my social life and that of my wife who uses that platform to stay in touch with her family in Sweden,” he said.

He offered a grim estimation of why he was censored:

“I think this has social implications since I am only posting about historical subjects and not the controversial topics of immigration and vaccines that normally get people banned. I may be the first person banned not for what [I] have said, but for what they suspect me to think. Obviously this isn’t as big a deal as when they banned the President, but can be seen as a next step in their steady decline into totalitarian censorship.”

His videos explored everything from Anglo-Saxon/Norse warriors to the roots of Indo-European pagan religions in India, England and Sweden. 

Videos on his page also range from explorations into niche English rural folklore to speaking with Vedic guru Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya or even traveling to Bali to learn about Balinese Hinduism. He described himself as a YouTuber with “over 10 million views” and said he previously worked for a subsidiary of the World Health organization in Sweden. His academic writings include headlines such as “Gender Roles and Symbolic Meaning in Njáls Saga” and “Representation of Hakon sigurdsson in Viking Age literature,” indicating a clear scholarly background.

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Top 10 Black Slaveowners

The US has a long and gruesome history of slavery that has affected almost every part of its culture. Children in school learn the harsh circumstances that slaves were forced to live with and the incredible cruelty white slave owners showed them. American history teachers know how important it is to teach the horrors of slavery—not only so the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated but because the long-term oppression and cruelty toward black people extends even to modern times in important cultural issues such as police brutality and a cycle of poverty that is directly linked to racism caused by slavery.

What isn’t often taught is that there were many black people who not only participated in the slave trade but who often profited greatly from it. They owned slaves as property in order to enhance their own economical well-being by having free labor for their plantations. Many were biracial children of former white masters and were either freed or were left some property in a will. The American South is infamous for using slaves on their large plantations, and many of the black slave owners on this list are from South Carolina and Louisiana. Some were considered slave magnates (for owning more than 50 slaves), but others earned their place simply for their unique stories.

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