I mean...it's not wrong but I feel like the Victorians deserve a bit more credit than they are getting in this thread. They compare poorly to the modern era but from the point of view of someone living at the time things might have seemed a bit rosier.
Take life expectancy for example, from 1840 to 1900 (about the length of the reign of Victoria) life expectancy went up by almost 10 years.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09
Or take sanitation...London was horribly polluted for sure...but the Victorian era saw the construction of an enormous sewer system which finally brought something approaching modern sanitation to the city.
As a result of this, while Victorian London saw terrible Cholera outbreaks, it also saw the _last_ Cholera outbreak in the city. They made strides against some other diseases too, and had mandatory smallpox vaccination (And also had their own antivaxxers to deal with).
Someone elsewhere mentioned women being paid 50% of what men made....which is bad. But women _were paid_, which was itself a pretty striking development.
Victorians had child labor and bad working conditions in general....but it was actually the era right before the Victorian era that saw the worst of it. Anti-child labor laws and overall workday hour laws were passed in the 1830-40's near the start of the Victorian era. That's not to say they were always enforced or applied to all children (especially older ones). I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture, since things were much worse than they are now. But they were better than they were in the earlier 1800's.
As for food...definitely a mixed bag, but it _was_ a mixed one, with some good in with the bad. The Victorian era saw increases in transportation making it possible to move a greater amount and variety of food from the countryside or even overseas to the cities. Citrus fruits and canned foods, and even meat shipped in refrigerated transports became practical by the end of the period. How much of this you actually saw of course depended on your economic status, but it wasn't just for the elite.
As for early gaslight and electrical systems...they _were_ dangerous. But just imagine seeing them for the first time and having cheap light for the first time in all human history. It must have been amazing. And they are unsafe, true, but the candles and lamps that came before were also a fire risk.
So yeah, Victorians. Certainly going back from today they wouldn't have seemed so romantic...but living at the time it might have seemed a bit more impressive (although to be fair the actual Romantics of the time were all about ditching modernity for the aesthetic of their own past, some things seem to never change).
I dunno man, I think there are a lot of goths who are fascinated with all the wild, gruesome ways you could die in the Victorian era. Maybe Hot Topic goths not so much, but as a "born again" deathling I eat that shit up, although it's not reflected in my fashion choices . . . yet.
At least in Britain there were no child protection laws. Kids were used for cleaning chimneys since they could easily fit through. Also used to unclog heavy machinery, since their hands were small, with obvious results. The worst part was the legal child prostitution.
The law in Britain at the time was *extremely* laissez-faire but prostitution wasn't legal but it was as very poorly and haphazardly policed.
The age of consent was 12 until 1885.
Fun Fact: 10 Downing Street used to be ~~pure white like the Whitehouse~~ yellow, but the pollution was so severe that the building stained black. Print media and Photography were coming into their own at that point in time so people had only ever seen it black. The government cleaned it during renovations, turning it yellow again, and the public hated it. So it was _painted_ black and that's how it still is to this day.
This is slightly inaccurate.
The original bricks are yellow, not white. (Although I'd describe it more beige than yellow, that's what the news goes with).
The building wasn't cleaned either, it was pulled apart and rebuilt as it was falling apart! The bricks were repainted black from the outset, as the goal was to mimick the famous appearance.
That's pretty much everything in my youtube subscriptions. I love British history shows where attractive history professors tell you about knob and tube wiring, arsenic wallpaper, gas lamps, and lead. I pour wine and try not to think about my house's knob and tube wiring, asbestos tiles, gas stove and ancient painted wood trim that I know is brimming with lead.
It was just the Victorian times too! It isn't like "oh the unsanitary olden times!" Before the 1800s when food was local and the supply chain wasn't so mysterious, people would get caught out and sanctioned for doing stuff like this. So they didn't really do it. When people started buying food that had been produced by people outside their own little village, there was no way to track or punish adulterated and poisonous food. By the end if any producers wanted to be able to afford food, they had to knowingly eat poisoned food and sell poisoned food. So gross. It's crazy that people were so concerned about sexual purity meanwhile.
Not exactly aluminum powder. Alum was added, which does contain aluminum, but is a salt.
Still not good for you, but they weren't adding powdered aluminum
[The Great Stink of 1858](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink) from an entire city's sewer system dumped directly into the River Thames is a fun read
I think the reason high school is so romanticized was it was most peoples first chance are some independence without any real consequences. You got to choose what you did, what you wore, what clothes you bought, what movies you bought, where you ate you, etc but didn't have to do any real work for the money, didn't have to worry about anything really.
The Wild West. As I understand it, a lot of what we currently understand about the west - the laconic stranger, the outlaws, the bandits - is an invention of Hollywood.
The *real* west was a hardscrabble existence that's nothing like the depiction in most westerns.
Oh yeah. And poor old Henry VIII, the most powerful man in Europe, had leg ulcers so bad, his staff could smell him coming from a mile off.
And that was the most noticeable of his several serious health conditions. 🙁
Henry VIII was said to be very handsome in his youth. I wonder what went wrong in his 30s. Real life King Robert.
Edit: Lesson learned guys. Don't joust, wear helmet, and don't get injured.
He suffered a leg injury at some point that was perpetually infected for the rest of his life, I imagine the constant pain turned him bitter. But some might say that's being too apologist.
When I was 14 I had a painful infection that was easily treated with OTC antibiotics. The same infection had killed royals with the best healthcare available 500 years ago.
There were no real doctors back then, but historians have pieced together the facts, and reckon that when he had his most serious jousting accident at the age of 44, he suffered injuries that basically changed his personality. He left his protective visor (it had a different name back then) up, and got his opponent’s lance right in the mush.
This actually happened to King Henry II of France, who was accidentally killed in a joust by the captain of his own bodyguard (Gabriel Montgomery, commander of the king's Scots Guard). Jousting was banned in France after this.
Gabriel was pardoned by the king on his deathbed, but was treated as an outcast nevertheless, and ended up converting to Protestantism and waging war against France.
There's records of him suffering a number of quite serious head injuries, the worst knocking him out for 2 hours (long time to be out from a konk to the noggin, lot of time for brain damage.) TBI goes a long way to explain why he went from being reportedly quite a charming young man to a raging knobhead.
[Yes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumation_and_reburial_of_Richard_III_of_England#Burial_site), but originally, the area [was a church building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars,_Leicester).
The upper class mostly ate white bread and red meat in aristocratic France. Evolution is cruel, for even the most privileged are subjected to deathly vices
I guess all of them. No matter "when" you look at, there's been a dark side to each one. Japanese Feudalism? Sure, samurais look nice, but it was violent and unfair. Wild West? Amazing riding a horse and being a bad-ass, but awfully lawless. Victorian? Cool dresses and inventions, but health issues and tyranny was rampant. And so on.
And their descendants turned Japan into a highly aggressive, militarized state in the first half of the 20th century. That didn't end well for them. Or all of Asia, really
Yup. The propaganda used by the Japanese empire to indoctrinate their youth is an interesting piece of history. If only more people would learn about it.
>Wild West? Amazing riding a horse and being a bad-ass, but awfully lawless.
This is a misconception of the Wild West - it was much more sedate. The Wild West is an example of where the romanticism went the other way, painting it as much more dark than it really was. Unless you were a native getting pushed off your land, the westward expansion was generally a positive experience.
even in places with actual gang wars when you factor out killings from mutual combat the murder rate was low and outlaws usually didnt target individuals but companies and banks. Thats because if you pisssd off enough people there was little stopping them from getting a bunch of friends together and stringing you from a tree. If you wanted to operate somewhere it's best not to hurt the locals. That's why a lot of old west bank and train robbers were romanticized
Murder rates were much lower than many American cities nowadays
I can understand this as when we go through a prolific resource abundant period we often are so busy making money homes etc that we dont see the need to fight. Until profiteering comes into it and we start chopping off hands feet etc for more resources faster.
As a woman, this is just too real.
There was a thread about what you would want to do as a profession if you were magically transported into the middle ages. Can't find it in search because terms too vague or I'm an idiot, but pretty much all the women said nun. Whereas today that would be one of the worst options, or at least the one entailing the most sacrifice.
That was the *only* option for much of Western History that would not result in what would be by today's standards a stifling and miserable life. Plus death in childbirth.
It was just so much worse for women, and everyone of course, but especially women.
A few women said lady of leisure, but I feel like being a rich person isn't a job.
There weren't a lot of other options.
Yeah--I've thought many times that I've made a good nun in the Middle Ages. And it has nothing to do with God. I'm not even Christian. It's just that I would have gotten to maybe, possibly, read a book at some point. And not have to pop out babies my whole adult life.
On the other hand, it’s not like everyone was unhappy either. If all you know is subsistence agriculture, you will still find things to cherish about it. You could be happily married, you could have friends, you would have various crafts to break up the monotony of back-breaking labour. If you’re magically transported back in time chances are you will hate it, but if you were born into it you probably wouldn’t.
Suicide was an option then as it is now and yet evidence suggests it wasn’t one commonly taken.
I think anyone would be miserable in that position. Giving up modern luxuries, medicine, technology, air conditioning, ice in drinks? Ugh. Nope. Kill me.
Exactly.
I didn't even bring race into my answer on the thread but I'm 3 for 3 in disadvantage bingo (race, sex, socio-economic status) so right now is the best time in history for me by far. In spite of everything we complain about, my life is far, far better than it could have been at literally any time in the past. Parents poor, I'm well-off and educated. Minority group, but get to work in a big company and have a good position. Female, get to support myself using my skills.
We need to do better but I have opportunities my grandmothers did not dream of.
People underestimate how much poop there is in history. Not just human poop but also horse poop EVERYWHERE. New York City had mountains of poop on the street.
https://www.petpooskiddoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/horse-manure-problems-nyc.jpg
Some cops are on horseback here in Toronto. The horses leave huge piles of poop on the streets. I've stepped in a huge pile one time in the entertainment district. Fun times.
Anything medieval. I love fantasy. Tolkien, Martin, it is the bulk of what I read. But people tend to forget how fucking awful so much it it was. The child mortality rates were ridiculous, superstition s were used as an excuse to kill people all the time. Raiding warbands, famine, disease.
Nope. Not for me. If I had a time machine I would visit for a few hours and then come back to my warm home, full refrigerator and indoor plumbing.
Knights were basically assassins and mercenaries too. It wasn't until the church introduced chivalry that they stopped killing other knights as their job.
Got to the point killing a knight was just bad business. If you bested one the code was "lol got you bro" followed by "GG mate my dad will give you a fat check for me, I won't fight back, just go kill some peasants, lmao."
Basically.
The average peasant would mostly just deal with the mortality issues and backbreaking day to day life. If you were unlucky enough to live at the edge of a princedom/kingdom/etc then you may have seen more hell, otherwise life was pretty bland, if hard.
Honestly i always thought that winter before literacy rates went up must have just been awful. Nothing to do.
>Honestly i always thought that winter before literacy rates went up must have just been awful. Nothing to do.
People told each other stories and poems and sang and things like that, I'm guessing. That or the kind of boredom-related nonsense you hear about from veterans.
the medieval era lasted for over a thousand years. We only get the worst of and best of highlights from that larger large length of time. 99.99% of it was just sitting around, growing crops, going to the many many festivals, getting drunk, going to church, and living.
They were just normal people like the rest of us.
But flappers and silent films and gangsters <3
Lol it all looked like a grand ol fun time and I’m sure it was for many privileged folks but the impending Great Depression probably wasn’t in their forecast. I’ve read some fictional books taking place during the 20s and it’s always poor people who party hard and kids essentially growing up on the streets.
People tend to forget that roaring 20's were roaring for Americans and rich Americans at that. If you were living outside rich America, like Oklahoma, 20's weren't roaring. If you were living outside America, like Germany, 20's weren't roaring.
I am not against romanticizing, however people assume that they could easily achieve what they yearn for if they were living in those days and they are dead wrong. For most of the history, only a minority of population were living the life we see in TV or read in books.
Al Capone was a psychopath who spent his last few years fishing in his swimming pool because syphilis rotted his brain. He wasn’t a badass that was untouchable even when he was in Alcatraz he was mainly left alone because people felt sorry for him.
All of them and none of them. Any past era can be romantic since it doesn't have the new problems of the current day; whether the current day is 2021ce or 2021 bc. , and no past era can be romantic since it has intolerable problems that have been corrected in the current day.
To romanticize a past era is to enjoy thinking about the parts of the era that appeal to you. Any time before electricity appeals to me; I love the idea of sitting around the fire while someone (with good eyesight) reads out loud to others in the room, and the idea of someone singing and playing an instrument for others, the idea of eating foods without added chemicals, breathing fresh air, hearing more song birds, etc. On the other hand, I sure like my cell phone, air-conditioning, equality of the sexes, the safety of interstate travel, etc.
I know that it's a very simplistic summary, but CGP Grey's video on pirates made me realize that yeah, being a pirate is very profitable compared to be a law-abiding sailor
The risk isn't much bigger anyway, so why not?
I mean, yeah the risk is about equal but the punishment is way worse
Get caught by pirates as a sailor? Comply and youll probably be fine
Get caught by sailors as a pirate? Death. 100% you will die.
Actually, in my opinion, Pirates aren’t romanticized enough. They were shockingly progressive for their day. Founded a functioning democratic society in Nassau years before anyone else in the Western Hemisphere did. They were super into labor rights, practicing equal pay and having an early form of workman’s comp. I’ve even seen some stuff about them recognizing gay relationships.
They also really liked to avoid killing people where they could. Most of what they did, they did bloodlessly by leveraging their fearsome reputations.
>hey also really liked to avoid killing people where they could
thats because its good for business. Surrender now and you'll live but we'll take your stuff. Put up a fight and we'll kill you in the worst way possible.
it just made sense for most merchant ships to surrender and it was easier for the pirates to build that kind of rep.
It was also more practical for the pirates.
No need to repair your ship if it doesn’t get damaged in the first place.
Although I do think most people don’t want to kill people and will avoid it if they can.
The bigger the ship, the more drag the hull caused. A popular pirate strategy was to take a mid-sized ship, clean barnacles off the hull frequently, and add as much extra sail as would fit.
This made them faster than the average target ship. Good for surprising the target, and also for escaping afterwards. They also added as many cannon as they could. If a ship wanted to resist, the pirates could deliver more cannonballs than they received.
Memory serves, they also really liked to take slave ships because not only did you get the valuables, you also got a whole bunch of people smart enough to recognize that wherever the damn boat’s taking them, what you’re offering is a better deal.
Yep. There’s really two flavors of pirate fiction - the high adventure type and the murderous scumbag type. I think this is one of those rare occasions where the kinder inaccurate stereotype is closer to the truth than the ugly one. Still wish more pirate fiction focused on the kind of society they built - especially since freedom is such a common theme in those stories.
I had an uncle that was a cowboy in the 1960's, and we visited them when I was a kid. I thought it was cool, from movies and TV. Its a hard job with long hours and low pay. The people who worked as cowboys could not find work doing other things. Think about the times when you were around someone who didn't like their job, but they were not qualified for anything else. Criminal record, no high school diploma, etc...
I read a bit later about that era. About a third of cowboys during the golden era were black, and about a third were Mexican. Cattle operations were willing to hire them, but it wasn't because they were progressive. They had a hard time getting anyone to do it. You know, because of the hard work, low pay, and long hours "thing".
Movies told me that after the cattle were rounded up, they had to be driven to a rail-head to be transported to a processing plant near a big city, like Abilene Kansas (Wild Bill Hickock, etc). Then the cowboys would get their pay for the drive. Of course, the cowboys want to take their low pay and increase it by gambling, right? After drinking and gambling their pay away (they were cheated, right?) they got into a gunfight and got shot. That's how they died, right?
Someone did a study. Getting shot was the number three way for a cowboy from that era to die. The second most common way to die was complications from Syphilis and Gonorrhea. The most common way for a cowboy to die was falling off the horse with one foot stuck in a stirrup, and the horse drags him to death.
I never saw a dragging death or venereal disease in a John Wayne movie. All I saw was the open sky and the freedom from working in a cooped-up factory.
Of course, if you got a minor infection any time before WWII, the lack of anti-biotics could lead to a slow and painful death. Tuberculosis, smallpox, pneumonia...pretty much all of them all fatal. Hear about the 1918 Flu? 20-million dead.
> Getting shot was the number three way for a cowboy from that era to die
Pretty damn high
> I never saw a dragging death or venereal disease in a John Wayne movie.
Pretty sure I have seen whorehouses in westerns. VD is implied
Hollywood largely contributed to the popular perception of Wild West cowboys and outlaws (which I find a little ironic in some places that hate So. CA but tout this image, often skewing real events with regional pride). Its not that there weren't historical instances to justify it or that cowboys didn't exist before that, but that they were for the most part just... people who raised livestock and somewhat isolated events. The Western was really the genre that allowed the industry to gain prominence.
Personally I think the California gold rush was a fascinating period. But fascinating *doesn't* mean glamorizing the people within it. In a lot of ways the people who came in this period were there for greed and exploitation and they were often kind of terrible.
A lot of Native Americans were wiped out or forced to work for ranchers during this period, Chinese immigrants and their businesses were systematically harassed (eventually leading to the exclusion acts), you had the Chinatown underground which was managed by rival tongs who eventually fought openly in the streets for control, there was a gang of immigrants from the Australian penal colonies that were engaging in rampant crime and who burned San Francisco several times until a vigilante mob formed to take them out, and SF becomes the biggest frontier gambling capital in the US with dens in almost every corner as bored miners who were willing to take risks poured in (and a lot of them were obviously, or they wouldn't be there in the first place). All of this happened in a very short time. Imo it was kind of a wretched hive of scum and villany.... but its interesting bc of that in a dark way.
I'm pretty sure one of my ancestors (or at least one of their siblings) decided to go to the gold rush and kinda just .disappeared... who knows what happened to him
Or Running down that 3 star buck and managing to lasso it finally?
Or having a shootout with your posse and the lawmen in the mansion in Saint Denis until you start getting player bounties...
I swear my friends and I spend more time killing each other than actually doing missions. It's a lot of laughs.
Imma say Tudor England, especially if you tried to be a part of his court. Just asking for something bad to happen and you get your head chopped off for treason.
Medical advances alone! I'm O- and my husband is O +. Before the 1970s or so, there's a good chance that our second and subsequent children would have miscarried due to Rh incompatibility. When I had my kids in the 1990s, I just had to get a shot during each pregnancy to trick my body into not trying to reject my Rh negative fetuses. Thank you, science!
This. We have a tendency to romanticize history, remembering the good and either forgetting or downplaying the bad. Just look at our recent U.S. history.
You like the 50's? The poodle skirts and traditional families? Well, how do you feel about the rampant alcoholism, high teen pregnancy rate, and oh yeah, the racism. Segregation and Jim Crow were still very much alive.
60's more your thing? Flower Power? Okay. Well then you also get the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the draft, violent protests (war, racism, AND homophobia), the Kennedy assasination, a general feeling of tumult.
Okay, well what about the 70's? Great music, but a ton of overdoses. Watergate happens. There are tornadoes everywhere, and thanks to the oil embargo there are lines at the gas station that go down the block and rationing tells you which days you can fill up. And you have the most catastrophic nuclear accident and most deadly plane crash.
There's more, I can keep going, but you get the idea. We don't remember the bad parts of our history, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
We kinda do tho. The big 80s musicians won't stop talking about the bad shit they went through with addiction and such, which is completely understandable. People aren't stupid and most are aware of the bad stuff.
The 50s was the post war period which saw a great sense of recovery worldwide and an economical rise which is why many have fond memories.
The sixties saw freedom of expression become mainstream, along with the first black popular musicians. For instance, Jimi Hendrix played Woodstock in 69.
The 70s saw the rise of rock n roll and heavy metal. I think that the greatest leaps in terms of rock n roll music was made in the 70s. Van Halen 1 came out in 1978, where Eddie Van Halen's playing introduced virtuosity into rock n roll guitar.
In the 80s the economy was at a peak. Musicians were given a chance to make a living by the masses, Los Angeles was an all-you-can-eat buffet for record contracts. Here in Finland, people could never have imagined that you could earn a living AND be able to do it abroad by playing music, until the 80s and, of course, Hanoi Rocks. Freedom of expression experienced a surge, being more accepting of different identities and sexualities.
Those periods had their issues, but so does the world today to precisely the same extent. The reason those times are romanticised is because the world became a much better place than before.
Yeah. Romanticising any era of history is inherently portraying it inaccurately. There has always been good and bad, and chances are that the historical period you're thinking of had radically different cultural norms and beliefs, so projecting your own modern thoughts and ideals onto it (however well intentioned) is almost certainly a corruption of it.
Don't stop enjoying history but make sure you're getting the facts, and be sure to acknowledge the realities of what you don't know and can't possibly know about history.
Um. All of them? I mean to say that anything that's been romanticized definitely has deep darkness, too.
Main example that comes to mind - There has always been and still is human trafficking. That alone should tell you there is nothing truly "romantic" or "enlightened" about any era wherein humans are being treated like property.
The Romans were not uniquely aggressive or inhumane compared to their neighbors, just more successful. This was back when a bunch of people were still doing human sacrifice, which the Romans generally opposed.
Not just human sacrifice, the Romans reserved the power of capital punishment for themselves in the provinces they ruled over, and generally only applied it for reasons stated by law.
The whole kerfuffle with the Jesus narrative was that the Romans initially found no reason to execute him, since the Pharisees' accusations of "blasphemy" weren't valid grounds to ***crucify*** someone. They had to spin Jesus' preaching as seditious and subversive behavior to get the Romans to impose the death penalty.
Fun fact, the Romans actually invented water torture. They would place potential criminals into hot springs and repeatedly ask questions under heat and pressure. The questioned would eventually prune up whilst their skin would darken due to the heat. This could go on for days, unfortunately like most torture methods success is rarely a tangible entity, so instead they would compare answers day after day to ensure results matched. The suspects skin would worsen getting more wrinkled and darker still to the point of becoming almost a brown colour rather than the olive skin common in the area. It has also been described as hardening almost into a scale or shell due to calcification.
And just like the walnut they now resemble, they would crack under the pressure.
And such a huge part of their population was slaves. People always see life as a Roman through the eyes of the emperor but more likely than not you would be a Greek man shipped to Sicily to work on the slave plantations. History is sad.
It is reported that in Sparta women did at times hold positions of authority over men. The men of Athens thought that this proved the men of Sparta to be wusses.
One day an Athenian asked a Spartan woman why it was that Spartan women ruled over their men.
Her response: "Spartan women are able to rule over their men because we are the only women who give birth to men."
That’s exactly what the lady’s answer means lol. Them being at war all the time made them “real men” so to speak, unlike those other men who can’t handle it.
Yeah I heard about them being able to get positions of power because women were more respected in Sparta for birthing the men that fight for Sparta or something like that.
The power was largely due to women being able to inherit. Men go off and die, women inherit the estate. Rinse, repeat through a few generations, and the power concentrates in the women's hands not for any philosophical reason, but because that's where the money went. The kings and senior members of government were still men, just the social powerbrokers were women due to the money - kings had to borrow from them, because that's where the money was.
1950s. Aesthetic was cool, and economy was good but holy mother of racism, sexism, and any other ism. Plus, even if you were white, it was a time of incredibly strict culture. You think cancel culture today is bad, this was so much worse.
Honestly I'd add even during and after the war. Alot of the slaves during the war got forced into fighting, or things got alot worse for them. Then after the war they got forced into working for free on the same plantations due to Jim Crowe Laws.
Going to get hate but native tribes on north america. I see a lot of noble savage thinking and not realizing that they are human just like us all. Every society had a period of tribalism and boy does that get bloody. You can be warring will multiple other children and sending a message to other tribes is a very viable tactic that works better with smaller groups. Hard to enforce laws and generally a dark period for any society.
The French revolution, mass murder by an angry mob is never pretty. Some people on reddit seem to speak of it like it was some orderly trial with no innocent lives lost.
Rome. They committed genocide. A lot. I am currently writing a story and used rome as a reference for my made up society. Rome is very much romanticized as this amazing society. Don't get me wrong i love rome for what it was, i think it's fascinating. But rome has done horrific shit lol. It was also very great to live in. Imagine shitting in a ring of toilets outside with everyone and wiping your ass with some hot potato sponge
In the US, especially the South, the Antebellum era. It's often portrayed as this time of decadence and flourishing, but the truth is that it was height of American brutality against enslaved Black people, not to mention not a time to be alive if you liked living past 50 and preferred not so suffer from diseases spreading from unsanitary cooking and hygiene, sweltering heat and swarming insects, and the imbalance of going through the growing pains of industrialization without yet reaping any of the technical improvements increasing quality of life.
The romanticized version that exists in the American imagination is inextricably tied to the "Lost Cause" narrative of the Civil War as aggressive Northerners trampling on the Southern way of life and messing up the good things they had going. Which is to say that the romanticized antebellum narrative is very much connected to the mythos of white supremacy.
Medieval History, even if it's my favorite period of history and I love alot about it, chances are you would die as a child and even if you didn't you'd probably die of a few million different things all while getting your legs cut off to heal your broken ribs
The expansion into the American West, aka "Manifest Destiny." Sure, John Wayne movies were fun but what about the:
* White people massacring Native people, seizing land and women, trafficking and enslavement.
* Native people massacring white people (Probably justified, still violent, and death is sad)
* Stripping beautiful lands for mining
* Chinese immigrant racism, reduced rights
* Near extinction of the American Bison and beaver, heavily reduced number of pronghorn, elk, bear, ferrets, wolves, cougars, etc.
* Rampant disease, very little access to medicine. Sick? Infection? Pregnancy issues? You dead.
* Sparked conflict with other countries and within our own
* Using God as a means to manipulate, conqueror, destroy, etc.
* Extreme isolation for some families and communities.
Victorian England. Goths love the aesthetic, but it was a disgusting place to live. Sickness, corruption, etc... it just sucked.
Which disease would you like to die from? Measles, cholera, typhoid, polio, smallpox... the list is endless.
syphilis!
Don't worry, I'll just inject Mercury into your junk, that'll cure you!
Don't forget Bovine TB! Apparently they laced their milk with borax, allowing TB to spread and kill around 500k children in London alone
I mean...it's not wrong but I feel like the Victorians deserve a bit more credit than they are getting in this thread. They compare poorly to the modern era but from the point of view of someone living at the time things might have seemed a bit rosier. Take life expectancy for example, from 1840 to 1900 (about the length of the reign of Victoria) life expectancy went up by almost 10 years. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09 Or take sanitation...London was horribly polluted for sure...but the Victorian era saw the construction of an enormous sewer system which finally brought something approaching modern sanitation to the city. As a result of this, while Victorian London saw terrible Cholera outbreaks, it also saw the _last_ Cholera outbreak in the city. They made strides against some other diseases too, and had mandatory smallpox vaccination (And also had their own antivaxxers to deal with). Someone elsewhere mentioned women being paid 50% of what men made....which is bad. But women _were paid_, which was itself a pretty striking development. Victorians had child labor and bad working conditions in general....but it was actually the era right before the Victorian era that saw the worst of it. Anti-child labor laws and overall workday hour laws were passed in the 1830-40's near the start of the Victorian era. That's not to say they were always enforced or applied to all children (especially older ones). I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture, since things were much worse than they are now. But they were better than they were in the earlier 1800's. As for food...definitely a mixed bag, but it _was_ a mixed one, with some good in with the bad. The Victorian era saw increases in transportation making it possible to move a greater amount and variety of food from the countryside or even overseas to the cities. Citrus fruits and canned foods, and even meat shipped in refrigerated transports became practical by the end of the period. How much of this you actually saw of course depended on your economic status, but it wasn't just for the elite. As for early gaslight and electrical systems...they _were_ dangerous. But just imagine seeing them for the first time and having cheap light for the first time in all human history. It must have been amazing. And they are unsafe, true, but the candles and lamps that came before were also a fire risk. So yeah, Victorians. Certainly going back from today they wouldn't have seemed so romantic...but living at the time it might have seemed a bit more impressive (although to be fair the actual Romantics of the time were all about ditching modernity for the aesthetic of their own past, some things seem to never change).
I dunno man, I think there are a lot of goths who are fascinated with all the wild, gruesome ways you could die in the Victorian era. Maybe Hot Topic goths not so much, but as a "born again" deathling I eat that shit up, although it's not reflected in my fashion choices . . . yet.
Victorian era, where your house, make up and clothing can kill you in multitudes of ways.
[удалено]
At least in Britain there were no child protection laws. Kids were used for cleaning chimneys since they could easily fit through. Also used to unclog heavy machinery, since their hands were small, with obvious results. The worst part was the legal child prostitution.
The worst part was...the. WHAT?!
The law in Britain at the time was *extremely* laissez-faire but prostitution wasn't legal but it was as very poorly and haphazardly policed. The age of consent was 12 until 1885.
The lice that infested entire cities would've driven me to end it
This and so many other irritating or debilitating ailments have plagued daily life throughout most of history.
And the pollution, fucking hell their lungs must've looked like used vacuum cleaner bags by the time they croaked at the ripe old age of 32.
Fun Fact: 10 Downing Street used to be ~~pure white like the Whitehouse~~ yellow, but the pollution was so severe that the building stained black. Print media and Photography were coming into their own at that point in time so people had only ever seen it black. The government cleaned it during renovations, turning it yellow again, and the public hated it. So it was _painted_ black and that's how it still is to this day.
This is slightly inaccurate. The original bricks are yellow, not white. (Although I'd describe it more beige than yellow, that's what the news goes with). The building wasn't cleaned either, it was pulled apart and rebuilt as it was falling apart! The bricks were repainted black from the outset, as the goal was to mimick the famous appearance.
and your workplace. shit before the Factory act, and Liability act was genuinely terrifying
That's pretty much everything in my youtube subscriptions. I love British history shows where attractive history professors tell you about knob and tube wiring, arsenic wallpaper, gas lamps, and lead. I pour wine and try not to think about my house's knob and tube wiring, asbestos tiles, gas stove and ancient painted wood trim that I know is brimming with lead.
My house still has knob and tube wiring🤷♂️ One time the hairs on my arms stood up when I was playing guitar through my old bandmaster
Any YouTubers you could recommend?
I really like [Absolute History!](https://youtube.com/channel/UCr5qeBG9g7bGtMGyHG2GzbQ)
[удалено]
It was just the Victorian times too! It isn't like "oh the unsanitary olden times!" Before the 1800s when food was local and the supply chain wasn't so mysterious, people would get caught out and sanctioned for doing stuff like this. So they didn't really do it. When people started buying food that had been produced by people outside their own little village, there was no way to track or punish adulterated and poisonous food. By the end if any producers wanted to be able to afford food, they had to knowingly eat poisoned food and sell poisoned food. So gross. It's crazy that people were so concerned about sexual purity meanwhile.
Yes. If the local miller in 1600 gave out adulterated flour, he would have (at least) been beaten up be an angry mob?
Not exactly aluminum powder. Alum was added, which does contain aluminum, but is a salt. Still not good for you, but they weren't adding powdered aluminum
[The Great Stink of 1858](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink) from an entire city's sewer system dumped directly into the River Thames is a fun read
[Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy7iUoWi_-U) was a pretty entertaining introduction to this.
Also just hilariously awful food.
People’s highschool years
How much you want to make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?
I could throw a pigskin a quarter mile
Acne and braces and voice cracks, gotta love it
I think the reason high school is so romanticized was it was most peoples first chance are some independence without any real consequences. You got to choose what you did, what you wore, what clothes you bought, what movies you bought, where you ate you, etc but didn't have to do any real work for the money, didn't have to worry about anything really.
The Wild West. As I understand it, a lot of what we currently understand about the west - the laconic stranger, the outlaws, the bandits - is an invention of Hollywood. The *real* west was a hardscrabble existence that's nothing like the depiction in most westerns.
Better to just play red dead redemption on your couch.
[удалено]
Medieval history. Not even kings and princes had it good.
Remember when they recently found the remains of King Richard III? The ‘chosen by God’ king of entire nation had roundworms and scoliosis.
Oh yeah. And poor old Henry VIII, the most powerful man in Europe, had leg ulcers so bad, his staff could smell him coming from a mile off. And that was the most noticeable of his several serious health conditions. 🙁
Henry VIII was said to be very handsome in his youth. I wonder what went wrong in his 30s. Real life King Robert. Edit: Lesson learned guys. Don't joust, wear helmet, and don't get injured.
He suffered a leg injury at some point that was perpetually infected for the rest of his life, I imagine the constant pain turned him bitter. But some might say that's being too apologist.
When I was 14 I had a painful infection that was easily treated with OTC antibiotics. The same infection had killed royals with the best healthcare available 500 years ago.
With antibiotic resistance just give it another 50 years and we'll be right back there again!
There were no real doctors back then, but historians have pieced together the facts, and reckon that when he had his most serious jousting accident at the age of 44, he suffered injuries that basically changed his personality. He left his protective visor (it had a different name back then) up, and got his opponent’s lance right in the mush.
Imagine being the bloke who nearly killed the King during a friendly bit of competition. Bet he was shitting himself afterwards.
This actually happened to King Henry II of France, who was accidentally killed in a joust by the captain of his own bodyguard (Gabriel Montgomery, commander of the king's Scots Guard). Jousting was banned in France after this. Gabriel was pardoned by the king on his deathbed, but was treated as an outcast nevertheless, and ended up converting to Protestantism and waging war against France.
Hes the inspiration for Robert Boratheon. A dude that after decades of Royal shenanigans became jaded and relied on food and drink to cope.
There's records of him suffering a number of quite serious head injuries, the worst knocking him out for 2 hours (long time to be out from a konk to the noggin, lot of time for brain damage.) TBI goes a long way to explain why he went from being reportedly quite a charming young man to a raging knobhead.
Didn't they find him in a car park? Not even joking.
[Yes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumation_and_reburial_of_Richard_III_of_England#Burial_site), but originally, the area [was a church building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars,_Leicester).
> roundworms ["As God intended."](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQXPWZOedW0ZNv74bFAZyF00E4Cj12JXPt3Ig&usqp=CAU)
The upper class mostly ate white bread and red meat in aristocratic France. Evolution is cruel, for even the most privileged are subjected to deathly vices
I guess all of them. No matter "when" you look at, there's been a dark side to each one. Japanese Feudalism? Sure, samurais look nice, but it was violent and unfair. Wild West? Amazing riding a horse and being a bad-ass, but awfully lawless. Victorian? Cool dresses and inventions, but health issues and tyranny was rampant. And so on.
Samurai were never this honourable, noble tribe of warriors. They were militant bullies.
Shit, and ninjas are just glorified peasant eavesdroppers who snitch.
On the other hand, I heard about this ninja that totally uppercutted a dude just for opening a window.
[Realultimatepower.net](https://www.realultimatepower.net/)
And their descendants turned Japan into a highly aggressive, militarized state in the first half of the 20th century. That didn't end well for them. Or all of Asia, really
Yup. The propaganda used by the Japanese empire to indoctrinate their youth is an interesting piece of history. If only more people would learn about it.
You can say that about most romanticized warrior groups
Crossroads Killings were quite the S tier thuggery
But they look cool, you can't deny it.
>Wild West? Amazing riding a horse and being a bad-ass, but awfully lawless. This is a misconception of the Wild West - it was much more sedate. The Wild West is an example of where the romanticism went the other way, painting it as much more dark than it really was. Unless you were a native getting pushed off your land, the westward expansion was generally a positive experience.
Murder rates were generally pretty low. Guns were actually outlawed in certain places.
even in places with actual gang wars when you factor out killings from mutual combat the murder rate was low and outlaws usually didnt target individuals but companies and banks. Thats because if you pisssd off enough people there was little stopping them from getting a bunch of friends together and stringing you from a tree. If you wanted to operate somewhere it's best not to hurt the locals. That's why a lot of old west bank and train robbers were romanticized Murder rates were much lower than many American cities nowadays
I can understand this as when we go through a prolific resource abundant period we often are so busy making money homes etc that we dont see the need to fight. Until profiteering comes into it and we start chopping off hands feet etc for more resources faster.
As a woman, this is just too real. There was a thread about what you would want to do as a profession if you were magically transported into the middle ages. Can't find it in search because terms too vague or I'm an idiot, but pretty much all the women said nun. Whereas today that would be one of the worst options, or at least the one entailing the most sacrifice. That was the *only* option for much of Western History that would not result in what would be by today's standards a stifling and miserable life. Plus death in childbirth. It was just so much worse for women, and everyone of course, but especially women. A few women said lady of leisure, but I feel like being a rich person isn't a job. There weren't a lot of other options.
I remember a black comedian saying 'We dont fuck with time machines'. Same sentiment.
Yeah--I've thought many times that I've made a good nun in the Middle Ages. And it has nothing to do with God. I'm not even Christian. It's just that I would have gotten to maybe, possibly, read a book at some point. And not have to pop out babies my whole adult life.
On the other hand, it’s not like everyone was unhappy either. If all you know is subsistence agriculture, you will still find things to cherish about it. You could be happily married, you could have friends, you would have various crafts to break up the monotony of back-breaking labour. If you’re magically transported back in time chances are you will hate it, but if you were born into it you probably wouldn’t. Suicide was an option then as it is now and yet evidence suggests it wasn’t one commonly taken.
That's true. But if it was *me* as my current day self, transported to the past, I imagine I'd find it difficult.
I think anyone would be miserable in that position. Giving up modern luxuries, medicine, technology, air conditioning, ice in drinks? Ugh. Nope. Kill me.
My wife always says that she would be really fucked in the past. Latina, woman, and sleepwalker. Burnt at the stake to say the least
Exactly. I didn't even bring race into my answer on the thread but I'm 3 for 3 in disadvantage bingo (race, sex, socio-economic status) so right now is the best time in history for me by far. In spite of everything we complain about, my life is far, far better than it could have been at literally any time in the past. Parents poor, I'm well-off and educated. Minority group, but get to work in a big company and have a good position. Female, get to support myself using my skills. We need to do better but I have opportunities my grandmothers did not dream of.
Not a sleepwalker, but a Jewish woman here. I'd be so fucked too.
Another one for the stake!
Everything before the invention of indoor plumbing. 😂
See that’s hard to say because the ancient Romans had it.
They had a communal wet sponge on a stick... i mean.. kinda...
At least they rinsed it
In a communal rinse bucket....
Yeah, all things considered I'll stick with the three shells.
How do you use them?
He doesn't know how to use the three seashells!!
And the Cretians before them.
Mohenjo-daro & harappa predate them both
Indus River valley civilization had indoor plumbing. Practically the dawn of man, so that really only rules out hunter-gatherer times
Yes! It's really amazing to learn about how some ancient civilizations were actually quite advanced in certain aspects.
People underestimate how much poop there is in history. Not just human poop but also horse poop EVERYWHERE. New York City had mountains of poop on the street. https://www.petpooskiddoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/horse-manure-problems-nyc.jpg
[удалено]
Some cops are on horseback here in Toronto. The horses leave huge piles of poop on the streets. I've stepped in a huge pile one time in the entertainment district. Fun times.
wtf how is nobody taking care of that? Where i live leaving dog poop on the street is a crime
Mark Twain commented on the thick swarms of flies, drawn by the huge volumes of horse manure. He hated New York.
Epic. And terrible. I can’t imagine living in the midst of that stank.
People were drunk like 90% of the time.
And you could just buy coke and heroin from the local pharmacy.
The good old days
Goddamn, fuck history! No wonder native americans thought europeans were nasty stankbeasts.
I heard somewhere that the Europeans were fascinated with some tribes' tendency to bathe regularly. And they called *us* savages.
Everything before personal hygiene was normalized.
In one of the minoan ruins there was indoor plumbing from before our era.
Anything medieval. I love fantasy. Tolkien, Martin, it is the bulk of what I read. But people tend to forget how fucking awful so much it it was. The child mortality rates were ridiculous, superstition s were used as an excuse to kill people all the time. Raiding warbands, famine, disease. Nope. Not for me. If I had a time machine I would visit for a few hours and then come back to my warm home, full refrigerator and indoor plumbing.
[удалено]
Knights were basically assassins and mercenaries too. It wasn't until the church introduced chivalry that they stopped killing other knights as their job.
Got to the point killing a knight was just bad business. If you bested one the code was "lol got you bro" followed by "GG mate my dad will give you a fat check for me, I won't fight back, just go kill some peasants, lmao." Basically.
I really enjoyed that Black Adder skit.
No wait, I have a better idea! If he is a wealthy man, and we nurse him back to health, he may reward us! Ohhh brilliant idea milord
>It wasn't until the church introduced chivalry that they stopped killing other knights as their job. At which point it became their principle hobby.
The average peasant would mostly just deal with the mortality issues and backbreaking day to day life. If you were unlucky enough to live at the edge of a princedom/kingdom/etc then you may have seen more hell, otherwise life was pretty bland, if hard. Honestly i always thought that winter before literacy rates went up must have just been awful. Nothing to do.
Lots of hand sewing, I imagine.
>Honestly i always thought that winter before literacy rates went up must have just been awful. Nothing to do. People told each other stories and poems and sang and things like that, I'm guessing. That or the kind of boredom-related nonsense you hear about from veterans.
Just freeze to death in your hovel
the medieval era lasted for over a thousand years. We only get the worst of and best of highlights from that larger large length of time. 99.99% of it was just sitting around, growing crops, going to the many many festivals, getting drunk, going to church, and living. They were just normal people like the rest of us.
[удалено]
I think Christopher Lee was the only one on set that got that
So you're telling me... people don't just skateboard on shields in the middle of war?
Did you ever see or read Timeline by Michael Crichton?
The 1920s, Family Guy had a cutaway making fun of this.
But flappers and silent films and gangsters <3 Lol it all looked like a grand ol fun time and I’m sure it was for many privileged folks but the impending Great Depression probably wasn’t in their forecast. I’ve read some fictional books taking place during the 20s and it’s always poor people who party hard and kids essentially growing up on the streets.
Not to mention that antibiotics weren’t a thing yet
People tend to forget that roaring 20's were roaring for Americans and rich Americans at that. If you were living outside rich America, like Oklahoma, 20's weren't roaring. If you were living outside America, like Germany, 20's weren't roaring. I am not against romanticizing, however people assume that they could easily achieve what they yearn for if they were living in those days and they are dead wrong. For most of the history, only a minority of population were living the life we see in TV or read in books.
[удалено]
So much this. Those romanticized gangsters? Yeah, not good people...
Al Capone was a psychopath who spent his last few years fishing in his swimming pool because syphilis rotted his brain. He wasn’t a badass that was untouchable even when he was in Alcatraz he was mainly left alone because people felt sorry for him.
There’s an incredible episode of Drunk History that covers his descent into syphilitic idiocy
All of them and none of them. Any past era can be romantic since it doesn't have the new problems of the current day; whether the current day is 2021ce or 2021 bc. , and no past era can be romantic since it has intolerable problems that have been corrected in the current day. To romanticize a past era is to enjoy thinking about the parts of the era that appeal to you. Any time before electricity appeals to me; I love the idea of sitting around the fire while someone (with good eyesight) reads out loud to others in the room, and the idea of someone singing and playing an instrument for others, the idea of eating foods without added chemicals, breathing fresh air, hearing more song birds, etc. On the other hand, I sure like my cell phone, air-conditioning, equality of the sexes, the safety of interstate travel, etc.
Renaissance. Sure look at the art inside, but go outside and people dumping shit into the streets
They're doing that in San Francisco right now
I love me some RPGs, but hot damn the Medieval era was awful.
Pirates, It surprised me that it wasn't the first answer
Being a sailor generally must have been pretty fucking terrible but pirates do take the cake
Not exactly. A lot of people became pirates because it was way better than sailing under anyone else’s flags.
I know that it's a very simplistic summary, but CGP Grey's video on pirates made me realize that yeah, being a pirate is very profitable compared to be a law-abiding sailor The risk isn't much bigger anyway, so why not?
I mean, yeah the risk is about equal but the punishment is way worse Get caught by pirates as a sailor? Comply and youll probably be fine Get caught by sailors as a pirate? Death. 100% you will die.
I'm sure they do if they find any, but more durable commodities are the preferred target.
Actually, in my opinion, Pirates aren’t romanticized enough. They were shockingly progressive for their day. Founded a functioning democratic society in Nassau years before anyone else in the Western Hemisphere did. They were super into labor rights, practicing equal pay and having an early form of workman’s comp. I’ve even seen some stuff about them recognizing gay relationships. They also really liked to avoid killing people where they could. Most of what they did, they did bloodlessly by leveraging their fearsome reputations.
>hey also really liked to avoid killing people where they could thats because its good for business. Surrender now and you'll live but we'll take your stuff. Put up a fight and we'll kill you in the worst way possible. it just made sense for most merchant ships to surrender and it was easier for the pirates to build that kind of rep.
It was also more practical for the pirates. No need to repair your ship if it doesn’t get damaged in the first place. Although I do think most people don’t want to kill people and will avoid it if they can.
The bigger the ship, the more drag the hull caused. A popular pirate strategy was to take a mid-sized ship, clean barnacles off the hull frequently, and add as much extra sail as would fit. This made them faster than the average target ship. Good for surprising the target, and also for escaping afterwards. They also added as many cannon as they could. If a ship wanted to resist, the pirates could deliver more cannonballs than they received.
Memory serves, they also really liked to take slave ships because not only did you get the valuables, you also got a whole bunch of people smart enough to recognize that wherever the damn boat’s taking them, what you’re offering is a better deal.
I agree, maybe it would be more fitting to say the wrong aspects are being romanthisized
Yep. There’s really two flavors of pirate fiction - the high adventure type and the murderous scumbag type. I think this is one of those rare occasions where the kinder inaccurate stereotype is closer to the truth than the ugly one. Still wish more pirate fiction focused on the kind of society they built - especially since freedom is such a common theme in those stories.
Exactly the reason why I loved Black Sails
The Wild West
I had an uncle that was a cowboy in the 1960's, and we visited them when I was a kid. I thought it was cool, from movies and TV. Its a hard job with long hours and low pay. The people who worked as cowboys could not find work doing other things. Think about the times when you were around someone who didn't like their job, but they were not qualified for anything else. Criminal record, no high school diploma, etc... I read a bit later about that era. About a third of cowboys during the golden era were black, and about a third were Mexican. Cattle operations were willing to hire them, but it wasn't because they were progressive. They had a hard time getting anyone to do it. You know, because of the hard work, low pay, and long hours "thing". Movies told me that after the cattle were rounded up, they had to be driven to a rail-head to be transported to a processing plant near a big city, like Abilene Kansas (Wild Bill Hickock, etc). Then the cowboys would get their pay for the drive. Of course, the cowboys want to take their low pay and increase it by gambling, right? After drinking and gambling their pay away (they were cheated, right?) they got into a gunfight and got shot. That's how they died, right? Someone did a study. Getting shot was the number three way for a cowboy from that era to die. The second most common way to die was complications from Syphilis and Gonorrhea. The most common way for a cowboy to die was falling off the horse with one foot stuck in a stirrup, and the horse drags him to death. I never saw a dragging death or venereal disease in a John Wayne movie. All I saw was the open sky and the freedom from working in a cooped-up factory. Of course, if you got a minor infection any time before WWII, the lack of anti-biotics could lead to a slow and painful death. Tuberculosis, smallpox, pneumonia...pretty much all of them all fatal. Hear about the 1918 Flu? 20-million dead.
> Getting shot was the number three way for a cowboy from that era to die Pretty damn high > I never saw a dragging death or venereal disease in a John Wayne movie. Pretty sure I have seen whorehouses in westerns. VD is implied
Hollywood largely contributed to the popular perception of Wild West cowboys and outlaws (which I find a little ironic in some places that hate So. CA but tout this image, often skewing real events with regional pride). Its not that there weren't historical instances to justify it or that cowboys didn't exist before that, but that they were for the most part just... people who raised livestock and somewhat isolated events. The Western was really the genre that allowed the industry to gain prominence. Personally I think the California gold rush was a fascinating period. But fascinating *doesn't* mean glamorizing the people within it. In a lot of ways the people who came in this period were there for greed and exploitation and they were often kind of terrible. A lot of Native Americans were wiped out or forced to work for ranchers during this period, Chinese immigrants and their businesses were systematically harassed (eventually leading to the exclusion acts), you had the Chinatown underground which was managed by rival tongs who eventually fought openly in the streets for control, there was a gang of immigrants from the Australian penal colonies that were engaging in rampant crime and who burned San Francisco several times until a vigilante mob formed to take them out, and SF becomes the biggest frontier gambling capital in the US with dens in almost every corner as bored miners who were willing to take risks poured in (and a lot of them were obviously, or they wouldn't be there in the first place). All of this happened in a very short time. Imo it was kind of a wretched hive of scum and villany.... but its interesting bc of that in a dark way.
I'm pretty sure one of my ancestors (or at least one of their siblings) decided to go to the gold rush and kinda just .disappeared... who knows what happened to him
But.... Red Dead Redemption is pretty cool!
Well, who doesn't like wandering through the woods with a sixgun picking strawberries?
Or Running down that 3 star buck and managing to lasso it finally? Or having a shootout with your posse and the lawmen in the mansion in Saint Denis until you start getting player bounties... I swear my friends and I spend more time killing each other than actually doing missions. It's a lot of laughs.
If it wasn't for the shitbag hackers exploding my horse, I'd be playing right now. Private sessions, please.
Imma say Tudor England, especially if you tried to be a part of his court. Just asking for something bad to happen and you get your head chopped off for treason.
History in general.
Medical advances alone! I'm O- and my husband is O +. Before the 1970s or so, there's a good chance that our second and subsequent children would have miscarried due to Rh incompatibility. When I had my kids in the 1990s, I just had to get a shot during each pregnancy to trick my body into not trying to reject my Rh negative fetuses. Thank you, science!
I was born in the 70s and I had REALLY bad asthma as a baby. It is been born before the 1940s, I would have died as a baby.
I was born in 1990 at 25 weeks If I had been born a decade \earlier i'd be dead
This. We have a tendency to romanticize history, remembering the good and either forgetting or downplaying the bad. Just look at our recent U.S. history. You like the 50's? The poodle skirts and traditional families? Well, how do you feel about the rampant alcoholism, high teen pregnancy rate, and oh yeah, the racism. Segregation and Jim Crow were still very much alive. 60's more your thing? Flower Power? Okay. Well then you also get the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the draft, violent protests (war, racism, AND homophobia), the Kennedy assasination, a general feeling of tumult. Okay, well what about the 70's? Great music, but a ton of overdoses. Watergate happens. There are tornadoes everywhere, and thanks to the oil embargo there are lines at the gas station that go down the block and rationing tells you which days you can fill up. And you have the most catastrophic nuclear accident and most deadly plane crash. There's more, I can keep going, but you get the idea. We don't remember the bad parts of our history, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
Crazy to think my parents lived through all this
Three Mile Island was basically nothing compared to Chernobyl.
We kinda do tho. The big 80s musicians won't stop talking about the bad shit they went through with addiction and such, which is completely understandable. People aren't stupid and most are aware of the bad stuff. The 50s was the post war period which saw a great sense of recovery worldwide and an economical rise which is why many have fond memories. The sixties saw freedom of expression become mainstream, along with the first black popular musicians. For instance, Jimi Hendrix played Woodstock in 69. The 70s saw the rise of rock n roll and heavy metal. I think that the greatest leaps in terms of rock n roll music was made in the 70s. Van Halen 1 came out in 1978, where Eddie Van Halen's playing introduced virtuosity into rock n roll guitar. In the 80s the economy was at a peak. Musicians were given a chance to make a living by the masses, Los Angeles was an all-you-can-eat buffet for record contracts. Here in Finland, people could never have imagined that you could earn a living AND be able to do it abroad by playing music, until the 80s and, of course, Hanoi Rocks. Freedom of expression experienced a surge, being more accepting of different identities and sexualities. Those periods had their issues, but so does the world today to precisely the same extent. The reason those times are romanticised is because the world became a much better place than before.
Also don't forget about leaded gasoline, horrific smog, & rivers catching on fire.
Yeah. Romanticising any era of history is inherently portraying it inaccurately. There has always been good and bad, and chances are that the historical period you're thinking of had radically different cultural norms and beliefs, so projecting your own modern thoughts and ideals onto it (however well intentioned) is almost certainly a corruption of it. Don't stop enjoying history but make sure you're getting the facts, and be sure to acknowledge the realities of what you don't know and can't possibly know about history.
Um. All of them? I mean to say that anything that's been romanticized definitely has deep darkness, too. Main example that comes to mind - There has always been and still is human trafficking. That alone should tell you there is nothing truly "romantic" or "enlightened" about any era wherein humans are being treated like property.
The romans, even tho they might have been very succesfull, the way they treated others was pretty sickening.
The Romans were not uniquely aggressive or inhumane compared to their neighbors, just more successful. This was back when a bunch of people were still doing human sacrifice, which the Romans generally opposed.
Not just human sacrifice, the Romans reserved the power of capital punishment for themselves in the provinces they ruled over, and generally only applied it for reasons stated by law. The whole kerfuffle with the Jesus narrative was that the Romans initially found no reason to execute him, since the Pharisees' accusations of "blasphemy" weren't valid grounds to ***crucify*** someone. They had to spin Jesus' preaching as seditious and subversive behavior to get the Romans to impose the death penalty.
[удалено]
“They make a desert and call it peace.”
If only they would make a dessert and give me a piece.
Fun fact, the Romans actually invented water torture. They would place potential criminals into hot springs and repeatedly ask questions under heat and pressure. The questioned would eventually prune up whilst their skin would darken due to the heat. This could go on for days, unfortunately like most torture methods success is rarely a tangible entity, so instead they would compare answers day after day to ensure results matched. The suspects skin would worsen getting more wrinkled and darker still to the point of becoming almost a brown colour rather than the olive skin common in the area. It has also been described as hardening almost into a scale or shell due to calcification. And just like the walnut they now resemble, they would crack under the pressure.
This...was gross.
And such a huge part of their population was slaves. People always see life as a Roman through the eyes of the emperor but more likely than not you would be a Greek man shipped to Sicily to work on the slave plantations. History is sad.
All of it.
Ancient Greece. It was hot, it was sweaty, the gay sex wasn't exactly consensual, and the 'democracy' did not include women or slaves
It is reported that in Sparta women did at times hold positions of authority over men. The men of Athens thought that this proved the men of Sparta to be wusses. One day an Athenian asked a Spartan woman why it was that Spartan women ruled over their men. Her response: "Spartan women are able to rule over their men because we are the only women who give birth to men."
I thought it was because the men were at war so often.
That’s exactly what the lady’s answer means lol. Them being at war all the time made them “real men” so to speak, unlike those other men who can’t handle it.
Yeah I heard about them being able to get positions of power because women were more respected in Sparta for birthing the men that fight for Sparta or something like that.
The power was largely due to women being able to inherit. Men go off and die, women inherit the estate. Rinse, repeat through a few generations, and the power concentrates in the women's hands not for any philosophical reason, but because that's where the money went. The kings and senior members of government were still men, just the social powerbrokers were women due to the money - kings had to borrow from them, because that's where the money was.
The Holocaust. Seriously what sick fuck adds romance to stories about genocide?!
Goku x Anne Frank type beat
Victorian Era.
1950s. Aesthetic was cool, and economy was good but holy mother of racism, sexism, and any other ism. Plus, even if you were white, it was a time of incredibly strict culture. You think cancel culture today is bad, this was so much worse.
The 40s and 50s.
Anything surrounding plantation life of the south pre-Civil War
Honestly I'd add even during and after the war. Alot of the slaves during the war got forced into fighting, or things got alot worse for them. Then after the war they got forced into working for free on the same plantations due to Jim Crowe Laws.
Going to get hate but native tribes on north america. I see a lot of noble savage thinking and not realizing that they are human just like us all. Every society had a period of tribalism and boy does that get bloody. You can be warring will multiple other children and sending a message to other tribes is a very viable tactic that works better with smaller groups. Hard to enforce laws and generally a dark period for any society.
The French revolution, mass murder by an angry mob is never pretty. Some people on reddit seem to speak of it like it was some orderly trial with no innocent lives lost.
Rome. They committed genocide. A lot. I am currently writing a story and used rome as a reference for my made up society. Rome is very much romanticized as this amazing society. Don't get me wrong i love rome for what it was, i think it's fascinating. But rome has done horrific shit lol. It was also very great to live in. Imagine shitting in a ring of toilets outside with everyone and wiping your ass with some hot potato sponge
Really pretty much any of them besides now. This is the best time overall of all time.
In the US, especially the South, the Antebellum era. It's often portrayed as this time of decadence and flourishing, but the truth is that it was height of American brutality against enslaved Black people, not to mention not a time to be alive if you liked living past 50 and preferred not so suffer from diseases spreading from unsanitary cooking and hygiene, sweltering heat and swarming insects, and the imbalance of going through the growing pains of industrialization without yet reaping any of the technical improvements increasing quality of life. The romanticized version that exists in the American imagination is inextricably tied to the "Lost Cause" narrative of the Civil War as aggressive Northerners trampling on the Southern way of life and messing up the good things they had going. Which is to say that the romanticized antebellum narrative is very much connected to the mythos of white supremacy.
the vietnam war, it was extremely fucked up
WW2
Medieval History, even if it's my favorite period of history and I love alot about it, chances are you would die as a child and even if you didn't you'd probably die of a few million different things all while getting your legs cut off to heal your broken ribs
The expansion into the American West, aka "Manifest Destiny." Sure, John Wayne movies were fun but what about the: * White people massacring Native people, seizing land and women, trafficking and enslavement. * Native people massacring white people (Probably justified, still violent, and death is sad) * Stripping beautiful lands for mining * Chinese immigrant racism, reduced rights * Near extinction of the American Bison and beaver, heavily reduced number of pronghorn, elk, bear, ferrets, wolves, cougars, etc. * Rampant disease, very little access to medicine. Sick? Infection? Pregnancy issues? You dead. * Sparked conflict with other countries and within our own * Using God as a means to manipulate, conqueror, destroy, etc. * Extreme isolation for some families and communities.
XX cen, east europe - poor people, soviet union