ok but this picture is a rendition of an actual historical event!
The duel was between Viennese royal Princess Pauline von Metternich and the Russian-born Countess Anastasia Kielmansegg.
They agreed to a duel in the summer of 1892 after a dispute over how the upcoming event -the Vienna Musical Theatrical Exhibition- would be decorated, on which they vehemently disagreed on flower arrangements.
It’s been dubbed the first ‘emancipated duel’ as there were no men present. Two women played mediators to the duelists, the third was standing medic Baroness Lubinska.
It was Baroness Lubinska, a female medic from Warsaw, who suggested they remove their top garments as a safety precaution! She explained that when stabbed by a sword, small bits of clothing could enter the wound, making it more difficult to clean and putting one at higher risk of sepsis/infection even with minor injuries. Thus, the topless duel was born.
The conclusion? The Paul Mall Gazette (August 23, 1892) wrote:
As for who got final word on the flowers, no one can say with certainty!
BTW, the high five was invented in 1977 which means your parents probably didn’t grow up with it.
For real though Glenn Burke, inventor of the high five was a gay black player in the 70s, and the Dodgers tried to get him to marry a beard and their manager got mad when he befriended the manager’s gay son before being traded to the Athletics, probably for being gay. In Oakland, the rumors of homosexuality followed him and manager Billy Martin started using homophobic slurs in the clubhouse and homophobic behavior from other players lead to an early retirement for the promising young star at 27. After retiring from baseball he introduced the high five to the Castro district of San Franscio where the high five became a symbol of gay pride and identification. ESPN wrote a long form piece about it which I recommend reading, it’s got some homophobic slurs in it although not presented positively.
A few appendices:
Although he was unceremoniously drummed out of Major League Baseball, Burke became the star shortstop for the local Gay Softball League, and even dominated in the Gay Softball World Series, as well as medaling in the 100 and 200 meter sprints in the inaugural 1982 Gay Games. Unfortunately, Burke also picked up a cocaine habit and had his leg and foot crushed in an accident. He spent much of his final years homeless in the Castro, and died from AIDS complications in 1995, but he was in the first class of inductees to the Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame, and his High School retired his jersey number.
The Dodgers Manager in question was Tony Lasorda, whose son “Spunky” died of AIDS complications in 1992 although Lasorda maintains that it was cancer. Likewise, despite the High Five becoming a symbol of the 1980 Dodgers team, Lasorda maintained and continues to this day to maintain to not know its origin. It’s possible that this isn’t a deliberate slight to Burke, but given his homophobia in other matters that’s a hard benefit of the doubt to give.
The Athletics have, in the years since, attempted to make up for some of the wrongs they committed in this story. When Glenn revealed publicly that he was living with AIDS, the As moved in and helped him financially. Burke was honored publicly at Pride Night at the park in 2015 and his brother was invited to throw the first pitch.
Burke was happy to see the high five catch on, spilling out of sports and into the small joys of every day life. He died believing that the high five was his legacy. Next time you high five your friend, remember that the high five came from Glenn Burke.
Npr has a dope story on it
What? Cool! Maybe I can find some of his baseball cards?
Gays are only acceptable in the form of Soviet propaganda
every time i see that last picture it completely baffles me as to what ELSE it could possibly be meant as does anyone know what the children are supposed to represent?
Eleanor Roosevelt and Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a Soviet sniper credited with 309 kills, she is regarded as the most successful female sniper in history. She visited with President Franklin
Roosevelt, becoming the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed at the White
House. Afterward, Eleanor Roosevelt asked Lyudmila to
accompany her on a tour of the country and tell Americans of her
experiences as a woman in combat. Pavlichenko was only 25, but she had
been wounded four times in battle. ↳more х,х,х | gifs from Battle for Sevastopol 2015 trailer.
This criticism of how Hamilton places its title character in context might be legitimate if Hamilton weren’t, well, what it is. In essence, Hamilton is a postmodern metatextual piece of fanfic, functioning in precisely the way that most fanfics do: It reclaims the canon for the fan.
In this case, Hamilton’s canon is history, and the fan, Miranda, is doing a lot more than simply adapting it. Like the best fanfic writers, he’s not just selectively retelling history — he’s transforming it.
Hamilton historians are viewing Hamilton as part of the “Founders Chic” movement — but the musical doesn’t really fit into that trend
Alexander Hamilton has long been a divisive figure in the annals of historical study, but in recent years he’s become a focal point of a historical trend many academics and history enthusiasts refer to as “Founders Chic.” Founders Chic first appeared as a term in a July 2001 issue of Newsweek and quickly caught on to describe the sudden millennial trend of lauding the forefathers.
A year later, in a now-offline essay for Common-Place, Jeffrey Pasley observed that “Founders” really meant “Federalist,” as most of the acclaim was centered on David McCullough’s dazzling biography of John Adams, with plenty going to fellow Federalist Hamilton on the side.
Numerous other biographies of the Founding Fathers soon followed, as did a 2008 biopic based on McCullough’s Adams biography. Soon after that, Miranda famously conceived the idea for the musical while reading Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography, Alexander Hamilton, which focuses on Hamilton’s early life as a bastard orphan on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, and emphasizes the way his formative years shaped his relationship to the US.
Analyzing the Founders Chic trend in 2003, the Atlantic wrote critically of it: “In revering the Founders we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements — necessary improvements — in the republican experiment they began. Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for.”
But although Hamilton stems from one of the trend’s byproducts, its function as a text is to do exactly what the Atlantic calls for and critique the history the founders began. The real-life Hamilton’s experience, passion, and ambition resonated deeply with Miranda, who is deeply concerned with the American immigrant experience. Miranda immediately recognized a fellow hip-hop artist in Hamilton, in that the founder had all the earmarks of a Tupac or a Biggie Smalls: innate intellect, brashness, unrelenting ambition, and a grand tendency to start drama. (A much-admired piece of recent Hamilton fan art notes he will “fight anyone, including himself.”)
[…]
Like countless fanfic writers before him, Miranda clearly loves his canon, but he expresses that love by tearing the canon to pieces. Like countless fanfic writers before him, he remains as close to the letter of authenticity as possible while also completely deconstructing the worldview he’s been given. Miranda uses his text to not only have fun with and celebrate US history but to critique everything about that history — something his perspective as an American immigrant writing about another American immigrant puts him in a unique position to do.
Miranda’s fanfic interrogates the mythos of the American dream, tearing down the idea that “America” emerged from a single cultural identity that belongs only to white European immigrants and their descendants. This is something Hamilton’s fan base seems to grasp innately. “Do you understand what it’s like to live in a nation where you are made marginal and inconsequential in the historical narrative that you are taught from your first day of school?” writes Tumblr user thequintessentialqueer in a brilliant explication of Hamilton’s function as a text: “Whose rebellion is valued? Who is allowed to be heroic through defiance? … Violence is only acceptable in the hands of white people; revolution is only okay when the people leading the charge are white … Hamilton is not really about the founding fathers. It’s not really about the American Revolution. The revolution, and Hamilton’s life are the narrative subject, but its purpose is not to romanticize real American history: rather, it is to reclaim the narrative of America for people of colour … If you’re watching/listening to Hamilton and then going out and romanticizing the real founding fathers/American revolutionaries, you’re missing the entire point.”
Again and again, Miranda emphasizes that this version of US history is being told by those other immigrants — the ones who, as the show notes, “get the job done,” and the ones who had no choice about whether to immigrate at all.
And just as he emphasizes that “you have no control … who tells your story,” he reminds us that he’s telling the story of American history now — and he’s telling it his way.
[…]
If we rush to defend Hamilton in this instance, we can be forgiven: History is littered with examples of women and writers of color having their work subjected to a higher standard of inquiry and criticism than the work of their white male counterparts. And that is precisely why Hamilton exists as a text: to elevate and celebrate the dismissed and devalued.
As fanfic, Hamilton interrogates the text of American history from the “wrong” perspective to reclaim that narrative for those who were left out of it
Ultimately, critiquing Hamilton for historical accuracy regarding Alexander Hamilton’s actual place in history is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Hamilton is doing as a modern metatext and as fanfic. The entire point of Hamilton is that the real Alexander Hamilton was a man for the 1 percent, not the 99 percent. The act of presenting Hamilton as a man for the people allows Miranda — and by extension, the audience — to feel as though they are actively shaping the future by making the past all about themselves.
The fundamental objective of fanfic, especially when it is written by women, queer and genderqueer people, and people of color, is to insert yourself, aggressively and brazenly, into stories that are not about and were never intended to be about or represent you.
In this way, Miranda’s aggressive over-identification and use of a Federalist Founding Father to represent modern hip-hop and immigrant culture is precisely as subversive, and for many of the same reasons, as the woman-authored fic I read last week about a white male TV character who gets pregnant and gives birth to were-kittens.
Hamilton unites the story of American independence with black, Latino, and Asian actors who were excluded from it, and in doing so allows these excluded citizens to put themselves back into the narrative. Hamilton is not just a story of history — it is the story of the ongoing struggle to make sure that people of color, immigrants, women, and other marginalized citizens are included in the sequel.
Fans of Hamilton don’t flock to the musical because of the way it transforms the Founding Fathers.
They flock to Hamilton because of everything the Founding Fathers never were.
In America, we learn that Hitler and the Nazis committed the Holocaust; in Germany, German children learn that they all participated in it, because the Germans came to believe that acknowledging their collective culpability as individuals was the only way to prevent it from ever happening again.
Americans, meanwhile, continue to debate whether the Civil War was fought to preserve the institution of slavery, as stated by actual Confederates at the time, or to settle a far more abstract and nebulous quarrel over the less morally indefensible concept of “states rights.” History isn’t always written by the victors, especially if there’s a version that makes everyone feel a little less guilty.
So, I can’t find this post again as always, but there was some discussion at some point about Oscar Wilde’s role in this episode.
The short story: I think Wilde is actually very important to this episode and to Sherlock as a whole, not so much for the specific Wilde references as in understanding the evident disconnect between what Mark Gatiss seems to have thought he was doing with queer sexuality in Sherlock and what a lot of Sherlock’s queer fans thought he was doing.
“These two photos…were a couple of my favourites, for their intimacy and for their use of the photobooth, the only place really where photos like this could be both taken and developed safely in the 1950s.”
