If any of you have ever wondered what it felt like to hear Martin Luther King’s speeches or FDR’s “Day that will live in infamy” speech in the present day, without knowing if it would have an impact on history but somehow believing that, yes, what you are hearing will be in a museum someday…listen to this.
They suddenly had money, fridges, freezers, and access to a variety of foods – all things that hadn’t been widely available before. Suddenly people had access to things that were beyond the dreams of people just a 100 years prior.
Enter corporations willing to go “oh yeah, you know what’s great (now that you can afford it)? Cold beef soup, served in a glass. Drink up your beef!”
Early 40s/50s foods are something I’m very passionate about.
They had no concept of what flavors tasted good together so they tried everything. The biggest ideas that were latched on to were things like loafs with layers that compose your entire meal and the suspension of basically anything/everything in jello (jello actually helped food last longer, because the gelatin sheltered whatever ingredients were used from bacteria. So, naturally, you put a fish in it).
Also pineapple. It was harder to get before then so the sudden availability of it made people go nuts. Bananas too to a degree.
Welcome to the wild and wacky world of Aspic, otherwise known as meat jello.
jello history is a fucking trip
i am pretty sure the entire 1940′s was made out of hollandaise and aspic
Aspics were around for a LONG time before the ‘40s… again, it was about the best way to keep leftovers edible.
IN FACT, ASPICS ARE HOW USING AGAR FOR PETRI DISHES GOT INVENTED
The science dudes started out using gelatin but a) some bacteria just dissolve the shit out of gelatin so it turns into goop and smells terrible and b) it melts at like 80-90F so you can’t incubate it at body temperature on account of, again, it turns into goop
so this lab tech named Fannie Hesse started using agar instead of gelatin
why? because agar had been used in southeast Asian cooking forever to make food do the gel thing, and it was starting to get adopted by European cooks to make things like ASPICS THAT DON’T MELT IN THE SUMMER
which apparently had been a thing that plagued European cooking previously?
anyway 50/50 this is a story about the triumph of girl power and also how to profit off of the knowledge & biology of non-European places, or “colonialism in a nutshell.”
the dudes in the lab had been futzing around for years trying to find different ways to make gels for growing bacteria, but none of them tried agar because none of them knew it existed. Fannie had learned it from a Dutch ladyfriend who’d learned it during her girlhood colonizing Indonesia/the Dutch East Indies, where people’d been using agar for centuries to make jellies that don’t melt in the tropics. European men at that time… did not cook. So it was pretty much impossible for knowledge of agar to spread through male social & professional networks.
so anyway that’s the story of how horrifying jello salads, colonialism, fucking off gender norms, and seaweed came together to bring us pretty much the entire science of microbiology.
Tiffany Haddish getting drunk and telling the story of Rose Valland, an art curator who recovered stolen art from the Nazis during WWII, is everything I’ve never thought I needed in life. Someone PLEASE make this a regular thing with her. I guarantee our children and we, as a society, would learn more from her valuable teachings. [Full video here]
why are greaser aesthetics still used to depict “bad boys” in art and media, when it hasn’t been that way since the 50s. this is a real mystery, i’m a serious scientist.
thats probs right.
it’s a so frustrating because greasers were originally Mexicans or other latinxs, or Italians – either by subculture reclaiming, or slur. “Greasers” started out as the object of white fear.
Ethnically, original greasers were mostly composed of mostly Italian Americans in the Northeastern United States and Chicanos in the Southwest. Since both of these peoples were mostly olive-skinned, the “greaser” label assumed a quasi-racial status that implied an urban lower class masculinity and delinquency. This development led to an ambiguity in the racial distinction between poor Italian Americans and Puerto Ricans in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s.[6] Greasers were also perceived as being predisposed to perpetrating sexual violence, stoking fear among middle class males and arousal among middle class females.[8]
What most people remember is NOT the actual era of the greasers, but instead the 60′s and 70′s “sanitization” of who they were, why they were stereotyped against, and why they were used as villains.
so before the 40′s-50′s, greaser was heavily used to portray a racist stereotype of a Mexican/Chicano man as violent/aggressive. (at least in media). This term also got used against some other latinxs in general, as well as Italians and sometimes Greeks. At least in hollywood this “greaser” type promoted mexicans as bad/dangerous and while also promoting latin lover stereotypes:
The Mexican Government soon objected to Hollywood’s portrayal of its citizens as “bandits and sneaks” and threatened to ban all films produced by companies which offended its people. This 1922 threat caused screenwriters to treat their neighbors to the south with more care. The “greaser” swiftly lost his Mexican nationality in the attempt to diffuse potential complaints, but his ghost still haunted new screenplays which concerned Hispanic characters.
Clever subterfuges often placed an unnamed “greaser” in a new locale. Rather than use the name of an actual country and risk offending its inhabitants, screenwriters began to create mythical cities and nations. “The Dove” (1928) provided an obvious example. The film concerned Don Jose Maria y Sandoval (Noah Beery), who considered himself “the bes’ damn caballero in Costa Roja.” Costa Roja, as the title cards explained, was situated in the Mediterranean!
those images don’t look super like what you’d think of as “greaser” subculture, but…when you go forwards a decade or two, and then look at the actual people:
Wikipedia mentions that the Mexican American community was then…investigated to see if they had ties to the Nazis. (Yeah.)
On June 21, 1943, the State Un-American Activities Committee, under state senator Jack Tenney, arrived in Los Angeles with orders to “determine whether the present Zoot Suit Riots were sponsored by Nazi agencies attempting to spread disunity between the United States and Latin-American countries.” Although Tenney claimed he had evidence the riots were “[A]xis-sponsored”, no evidence was ever presented to support this claim. […] In late 1944, ignoring the findings of the McGucken committee and the unanimous reversal of the convictions by the appeals court in the Sleepy Lagoon case on October 4, the Tenney Committee announced that the National Lawyers Guild was an “effective communist front.”[15][27]
so that 1940′s look becomes this over time:
three Cholos showing off their outfits (1950′s). why? because zoot suits were deemed horrifically unamerican and “wasteful” during WWII.
but then ofc bitch ass racist white boys and motorcyles co-opted the look, add in a little bit of Travolta white washing of the radical pushback against racism in the origins of this stuff, and now we’re here.
I need y’all to go and watch “The Ascent of Woman” on netflix right now if any of you care about women’s history, intersectional feminism, or how societies were organized before ideas of the nuclear family fucked everything up.
I want to but it’s not on German netflix *whiiiiine*
:(((((((
The lady historian doing this show is 70000% done with men’s bullshit it’s glorious.
The faint hint of utter disdain every time she says “Patriarchy” is beautiful.
And then she’s pointing at a tablet written by Enheduanna, high priestess of Inanna and first published author in history, and you can see the profound respect and love in her eyes.
Oh my god I just realized that she has not spoken to a single male expert in this whole show yet.
Just women.
Okay one dude has popped up but he’s happily expanding on Scythian tribes and how women ran the shit out of that social structure and weapons being found in female burials.
Oh my god she is dragging the Athenian Greeks right now and it is glorious.
SHE’S GOING AFTER ARISTOTLE FOR BEING A DICK NOW I LOVE THIS
I’ve repeatedly seen British people make fun of American food for apparently always being either “too sweet or too salty” but our cuisine is still pretty mild compared to a lot of other countries, and having repeatedly tried British food, I’m pretty sure the term you’re looking for is “having any flavor at all.”
Britain invaded over half the world for spices and then decided they didn’t like any of them
My grandparents left their home country as children when they heard the whispering of antisemitism starting in their home town. They got out and fled to America so I and future generations could be safe from persecution and mass murder. Only 2 generations ago.
And now America is becoming that country that they probably would have fled.
If you are not resisting, you are part of the problem.
And yes, I want non-Jews to reblog
Except I’m sorry but it’s not is it? A couple thousand white dudes babbling about jew conspiracies is not equal to Hitler and the holocaust no matter what. A couple thousand vs a few million? Your country isn’t fucking dumb. They FOUGHT to SAVE your kind and lost tens of thousands of men in the process. How about, fucking stop making it sound like the majority is Nazi and actually do some research. Jesus fucking christ.
Funny, since the Russians freed more prison camps than the US, including Auschwitz. The US didn’t care about the camps, they cared about fighting the ally of their declared enemy, Japan. And the US almost sided with the Nazis and had a large Nazi party in our boarders all the way up until (and even a little after) we entered the war.
Also do you know how large the Nazi party was at it’s peak? Just 7% of the German population. Smaller numbers don’t mean shit when they have people that aid and abet them by saying shit like “oh don’t worry they are too few to do harm.”
“My kind” have centuries of actual oppression running through our history, we can sense when something has changed and when it’s coming (back, again), it’s in our blood. Our grandparents and great-grandparents always told us to always have a bag packed, because they were afraid this would happen. “My kind” always know they will come for us again.
Offense but why does literally every dude that says stuff like “oh they’re not actually Real Nazis” “oh so you call everyone you disagree w/ a Nazi” like why are you all so hilariously uneducated and unable to see things as they are? Literally none of them have ever known what they’re even fucking talking about lmao
Most comments that call Trump Hitler are referring to 1933 Hitler, when he first ran for office and later seized power, who drew an enormous euphoric fan following based on hating a particular religious group and a political slogan that roughly translates to Make Germany Great Again. His solution to Jewish people started with encouraging them to emigrate, identification tags, then moving them to the Jewish Ghettos “to be monitored” and eventually to more secure concentration camps. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE was mentioned by Trump or his closest allies as a solution for the “problem” of Muslims in America during his campaign. It took Hitler until January 1940 to authorize the Final Solution, which started the death camps as an official government policy. How much do you think Trump could do to Muslims in about 7 years if given the chance, all before any organized killings begin.
Similarly, the Nazi Party in the early 1930’s was just thought of as a joke, a few angry people due to the bad economy (to the level which would make the Great Recession we just experienced look like a cloudy day) and the need to place the blame for that on a particular group of people. The Nazis gradually grew their support base until they had about 30% support while those in the middle were divided, actually giving them 50% support and allowing them to do whatever they wanted. Germany rapidly went from probably the most liberal place in the world in the 1920’s to becoming the most hateful and murderous place a decade later.
Bayard Rustin was an openly gay Black man who was Martin Luther King’s right hand man. He planned the Million Man March and was subject to scrutiny for his sexuality and deemed a “deviant” and “pervert”.
Bayard Rustin can be found in nearly every picture of MLK yet he has undoubtedly been erased from history. We have to fix that.
Well then, let’s bring that name back.
Bayard Rustin, openly gay, human rights activist, proud black man.
(the guy on the left in case you wondered)
Yeah he was literally the guy who was the head of planning the March on Washington.
If you want to learn more about him, there’s a great documentary on him called Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin
I did a research project on him, Ella Baker, Claudette Colvin and Stokely Carmichael comparing their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement to the lack of recognition and misrepresentation they received in commonly used high school American History textbooks. All of these people played major roles in the Civil Rights Movement—almost on par with MLK—yet they go largely unnoticed or unfairly pushed aside not only during their time, but even now in classes on American History.
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