https://www.khm.at/en/artworks/rundschild-373817-1

https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010139554

Best lil guys, they recharge my shields

Luckily, I grew up in a time (and state - deep blue) where it was taught, but even then I was acutely aware that it was a very recent change in the curriculum. In many places in the US I’m sure it’s still not on the curriculum - or quietly skipped or skimmed over.

If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans

About 127,000 Japanese Americans then lived in the continental U.S., of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei (‘second generation’; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei (‘third generation’, the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei (‘first generation’) immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship.

Internment was intended to mitigate a security risk which Japanese Americans were believed to pose. The scale of the incarceration in proportion to the size of the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures undertaken against German and Italian Americans who numbered in the millions and of whom some thousands were interned, most of these non-citizens. Following the executive order, the entire West Coast was designated as a military exclusion area, and all Japanese Americans who were living there were taken to assembly centers before they were sent to concentration camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas. Similar actions were taken against individuals of Japanese descent in Canada. The internees were prohibited from taking more than they could carry into the camps, and many of them were forced to sell either some or all of their property, including their homes and their businesses. Inside the camps, which were surrounded by barbed wire fences and were patrolled by armed guards, the internees frequently lived in overcrowded barracks which contained minimal furnishings.

On December 17, 1944, the exclusion orders were rescinded, and nine of the ten camps were shut down by the end of 1945. Japanese Americans were initially barred from U.S. military service, but by 1943, they were allowed to join, with 20,000 serving during the war. Over 4,000 students were allowed to leave the camps to attend college. Hospitals in the camps recorded 5,981 births and 1,862 deaths during incarceration.

By 1992, the U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $4.36 billion in 2025) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated.

A dark moment of our history often passed over, and only recently begun to be more widely taught.

“What are you going to do, stab me?” - Gaul just before being stabbed

There appears (unless there’s something specific here I’m missing, which is very possible - even on Rome, my favorite obsession, what I don’t know fills libraries!) to be a minor mistake in this drawing, funny enough - a legionary’s scabbard in this period should be on his right side. Only officers wore their swords on the left.

While this is unusual in European swordsmanship in general, the Roman Legions of the Mid-Late Republic and Principate era of the Empire preferred it because it kept the shield-hand unimpeded when drawing the sword, especially when in close-order formation. The current two ways of thinking are that it was drawn with a reverse grip, and then shifted to the correct, forward-pointing position (fast, but potential for clumsy fingers is high); or that the scabbard itself was worn somewhat loosely (and the gladius was short enough) so that the scabbard could be pointed forward, and then the blade be pulled out in a ready-to-strike position (useful, but reliant on very good proportions between sword length, belt length, arm length, and, well, soldier length).

2nd-3rd century AD is suggested by the helmet (note the ridge over the forehead - uparmored helmets like that were only popular in the 2nd-3rd century) and wearing of trousers (while trousers were worn on the Germanic frontier as early as the 1st century AD, they didn’t become widespread until the 2nd). The distinctive body armor, the lorica segmentata, was only in use from the 1st-3rd centuries AD, with a smattering of suspected remnants in the 4th century AD.

I mean, consider it from this perspective - if the USSR broke apart, but Russia remained in the hands of the Communists, what would it look like?

My thinking would be closer to Vietnam or China than North Korea. Starvation was not a major problem by the 1980s - inconvenience, inefficiency, and low civilian access to nearly everything else was the problem. Russia’s modern incarceration rate is actually higher, embarrassingly, than it was in the 1980s Soviet Union.

Certainly their foreign policy alliances haven’t changed much, but that’s neither a point for or against in comparison. And for all of its many, many faults, the USSR, at least, genuinely placed a higher value on engineers, scientists, academics, and artists than the modern Russian Federation does.

This is not to say that people in those careers were used well or morally, but rather than the Soviet Union, as a government, encouraged and lionized participation in those fields, and received likewise relatively enthusiastic participation and good returns from said fields from Soviet society.

The modern Russian Federation is a brutal and violent oligarchy, with mock elections, mass repression, and outright imperialism, just like the Soviet Union. Some lip service is given to freedom of speech, which is better than nothing, and thus better than it was under Soviet hardliners, but doubtfully better than glastnost. Modern Russia’s primary ‘saving grace’ to its population is that their consumer markets are open to more of the world than the old Soviet Union’s were, and that’s connected more with the global transformation of markets since the 1970s.

Getting people to pay attention to economic history in any country, though, is an exercise in futility, so instead it’s “Things were bad then, and they’re less bad for me now. It must be the people in charge.”

Mainland China is also ruled entirely by an authoritarian regime whose presence is extremely notable to those tourists who aren’t interested in putting blinders on. For some people, that’s crap.

Plot twist: Floyd is not tripping balls

A beautiful shot! It really puts the scale of the ruins into perspective!

https://www.khm.at/en/artworks/krummdolch-diwandolch-373809-1

Explanation: During WW2, the pride of the Nazi navy, the battleship Bismarck, engaged and sunk one of the capital ships of the British Royal Navy. This was celebrated by the Nazis as a victory.

This resulted in the Royal Navy organizing a massive search-and-destroy operation to AVENGE BRITISH NAVAL HONOR, at which point the Bismarck was quite promptly sunk.

Good riddance to Nazi rubbish!

Explanation: Despite their many differences, the KPD (Communist Party) and SPD (Social Democratic Party) of Weimar-era Germany actually managed a very successful period of cooperation against the conservative capitalists and reactionary monarchists in the early-mid-1920s.

… which ended with the ascension of the dictator Stalin in the USSR, and his associated bootlicker Ernst Thalmann in the German KPD. Marching orders from Comrade Stalin were that the Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists in the SPD were ‘social fascists’, and in some vague way even worse than regular fascists, and the only cooperation possible with the SPD was contingent on the SPD’s complete submission to the Soviet Union’s- sorry, the Germany Communist Party’s- goals.

After several years of this stonewalling and street fighting, the KPD heroically ensured the fall of the SPD and Weimar Germany as a whole to the fucking Nazis, and Stalin began ordering his proxies to cooperate with the Nazi regime.

It’s monumental. “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings”

Kraut Space Magic was the future we deserved 😭

Ass clapped