Secret HistoryS


Quenelle - Golden

A Secret World War: How the Haitian Revolution Crushed Slavery Worldwide

Hugo Turner
Sott.net
Wed, 08 Mar 2017 19:44 UTC
Haitian Revolution
The Haitian Revolution, which ran from 1791-1804, was one of the most important events in modern history. It was the first successful anti-slavery revolution. Not only did Haiti's slaves manage to liberate themselves, they also inflicted crushing defeats on three empires - the Spanish, French, and British. Each suffered catastrophic losses trying, and failing, to take back the island from its heroic defenders.

I dealt with this glorious moment in human history in my "Revolution in Haiti" based on C.L.R James classic "The Black Jacobins." I also dealt with the enormous importance that slavery held in the global economy and its role in fueling the industrial revolution in "Capitalism and Slavery" based on the classic book of the same title by Eric Williams. Next I tackled the role of slavery as the prime motive behind the launching of the so called "American War for Independence" in the "Counter Revolution of 1776," based on Gerald Horne's instant classic of the same title.

Now I will deal with the part the Haitian revolution played in not only ending slavery on the island but throughout the Americas. I will rely on yet another masterpiece from Gerald Horne, "Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, The Haitian Revolution, and The Origins of the Dominican Republic," which is both a sequel to "The Counter-Revolution of 1776" and a companion to his excellent "Negro Comrades of the Crown" which covers the same time period. Negro Comrades of the Crown is about the alliance between American blacks and the British empire, which hoped to use the issue of slavery to destabilize it's former colony - turned imperial rival - the United States.
Read More...
Info

Aboriginal hair DNA shows 50,000 years connection to country


The University of Adelaide
Wed, 08 Mar 2017 19:18 UTC
Aboriginal Research
© The University of Adelaide Adelaide
DNA in hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia in the early to mid-1900s has revealed that populations have been continuously present in the same regions for up to 50,000 years - soon after the peopling of Australia.

Published today in the journal Nature, the findings reinforce Aboriginal communities' strong connection to country and represent the first detailed genetic map of Aboriginal Australia prior to the arrival of Europeans.

These are the first results from the Aboriginal Heritage Project, led by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) in partnership with the South Australian Museum.

Researchers analysed mitochondrial DNA from 111 hair samples that were collected during a series of remarkable anthropological expeditions across Australia from 1928 to the 1970s and are part of the South Australian Museum's unparalleled collection of hair samples.

Mitochondrial DNA allows tracing of maternal ancestry, and the results show that modern Aboriginal Australians are the descendants of a single founding population that arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, while Australia was still connected to New Guinea. Populations then spread rapidly - within 1500-2000 years - around the east and west coasts of Australia, meeting somewhere in South Australia.

"Amazingly, it seems that from around this time the basic population patterns have persisted for the next 50,000 years -showing that communities have remained in discrete geographical regions," says project leader Professor Alan Cooper, Director of ACAD, University of Adelaide.

"This is unlike people anywhere else in the world and provides compelling support for the remarkable Aboriginal cultural connection to country. We're hoping this project leads to a rewriting of Australia's history texts to include detailed Aboriginal history and what it means to have been on their land for 50,000 years - that's around 10 times as long as all of the European history we're commonly taught."
Read More...
Fire

Massive eruption at Mount Etna in 1669 killed thousands

Daryl Worthington
New Historian
Wed, 08 Mar 2017 18:41 UTC
Mount Etna
Mount Etna
The biggest eruption in Mount Etna's history began on 8th March 1669, causing horrifying devastation to the island of Sicily.

Mount Vesuvius may be Italy's most infamous volcano, thanks in large part to its cataclysmic eruption in 79 CE, yet Etna is the country's most active. Records document eruptions by the massive volcano dating as far back as 1500 BCE. In the last hundred years alone 73 eruptions have been recorded there.

Etna is an ominous sight on the Sicilian skyline, towering above the city of Catania with a peak some 3,300 metres above sea level. The volcano is the result of the meeting of the European and African tectonic plates, stresses of the continents' collision forcing one under the other and causing a subduction zone.

On 8th March 1669 Etna started rumbling. A series of eruptions over the following weeks would see an estimated 20,000 people killed by the volcano.
Read More...
Dig

Stunning 700-year-old giant cave used by Knights Templar found behind a rabbit hole beneath a farmer's field in Britain

Joshua Taylor
The Mirror
Tue, 07 Mar 2017 14:53 UTC
stunning labyrinth
© Michael Scott/ Caters NewsThe stunning labyrinth is lit with candles
The cave, beneath a farmer's field in Shropshire, was used by the medieval religious order that fought in the Crusades and these stunning images were captured by photographer Michael Scott
Read More...
Info

"The salt of the earth": A precious commodity throughout history


The Vintage News
Tue, 22 Aug 2017 00:00 UTC
Salt
All through history the availability of salt has been pivotal to civilization. Humans have always tended to build communities either around sources of salt, or where they can trade for it.

In Britain, the suffix "-wich" in a placename means it was once a source of salt, as in Sandwich and Norwich.

The Natron Valley was a key region that supported the Egyptian Empire to its north, because it supplied it with a kind of salt that came to be called by its name, natron.

What is now thought to have been the first city in Europe is Solnitsata, in Bulgaria, which was a salt mine, providing the area now known as the Balkans with salt since 5400 BC.

Even the name Solnisata means "salt works".

Comment: See also:
Salt has been an integral part of civilization dating back as far as 6050 B.C. It has been such an important element of life that it has been the subject of many stories, fables and folktales and is frequently referenced in fairy tales.

It served as currency at various times and places, and it has even been the cause of bitter warfare. Offering bread and salt to visitors, in many cultures, is traditional etiquette.

Aside from all of the uses that salt performs in terms of baking, food flavor and food preservation, salt has a number of other uses that you may never have thought of.


Read More...
Radar

Before radar, Britain used giant concrete "sound mirrors" to detect incoming enemy aircraft during World War II


The Vintage News
Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00 UTC
Radar system
Scottish physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt invented the first practical radar system back in 1935. The system used pulsed radio waves, and it could detect airplanes up to 100 miles away.

A few years later, a chain of radar stations was established throughout England, which helped defend the British and played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II. It was a huge discovery and the inventor Sir Robert Watson-Watt was knighted for it in 1942.

But what about the period before the radar was invented? What was the forerunner of radar and how the British defended themselves from the German Zeppelins during World War I?
Read More...
Dig

More rare ingots from sunken ship found off the coast of Sicily

Mark Miller
Ancient Origins
Thu, 02 Mar 2017 21:08 UTC
ancient helmets
Researchers have recovered yet more ingots, possibly of the fabled metal orichalcum, from a ship that sank off the coast of Sicily around 2,600 years ago. The find has led some to ponder whether the mythical island of Atlantis, where the legendary alloy was supposed to have been created, was real. The shipwreck, however, dates to about seven millennia later than the legend of Atlantis.

In 2015, researchers diving near the shipwreck found 39 ingots of a copper, zinc, and charcoal alloy that resembles brass. They believe it may be the ancient metal orichalcum. The new cache of the same metal consists of 47 ingots.

While the metal is rare, it is not as precious as researchers expected from reading ancient Greek philosopher Plato's description of it in the Critias dialogue. Plato said only gold was a more precious substance than orichalcum.
Read More...
Info

Utah's Nine Mile Canyon: World's longest & oldest 'art gallery' filled with tens of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs

Paul Revere
Outdoor Revival
Mon, 03 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
Nine Mile Canyon
The Nine Mile Canyon is located deep in the Utah desert in the Western United States. It is known as "the world's longest art gallery" because is filled with tens of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs, some over a thousand years old.

Most of the art was created by the Fremont culture and the Ute people. This unique canyon is an international treasure.
Read More...
Dig

Researchers discover ancient skulls that may belong to Deniso­vans

Ann Gibbons
Science
Fri, 03 Mar 2017 18:36 UTC
skulls
© Z. Li et al.Fossil fragments (yellow) were put together with their mirror-image pieces (purple) to visualize the skull of an archaic human who lived in eastern China.
Since their discovery in 2010, the ex­tinct ice age humans called Deniso­vans have been known only from bits of DNA, taken from a sliver of bone in the Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia. Now, two partial skulls from eastern China are emerging as prime candidates for showing what these shadowy people may have looked like.

In a paper published this week in Science, a Chinese-U.S. team presents 105,000- to 125,000-year-old fossils they call "archaic Homo." They note that the bones could be a new type of human or an eastern variant of Neandertals. But although the team avoids the word, "everyone else would wonder whether these might be Denisovans," which are close cousins to Neandertals, says paleo­anthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

The new skulls "definitely" fit what you'd expect from a Denisovan, adds paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres of the University College London—"something with an Asian flavor but closely related to Neandertals." But because the investigators have not extracted DNA from the skulls, "the possibility remains a speculation."
Read More...
Sherlock

It's time for UK children to learn the very ugly truth about British Empire

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
International Business Times
Fri, 03 Mar 2017 16:39 UTC
India Viceroy Linlithgow British Empire
© Getty Images24th June 1939: The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow (1887 - 1952), with his wife Lady Linlithgow
Millions were displaced and countless murdered in India, as folk - who had lived peacefully - turned on each other.

The Viceroy's House, a feature film by Gurinder Chadha, director of the joyous Bend it like Beckham, is out on general release in March. It is a beautifully made, devastating expose of Winston Churchill's dirty tricks as India gained independence in August 1947.

The country was partitioned, millions displaced, and countless murdered, as folk, who had lived peacefully, turned on each other. Ever since then our historians and film and TV programme makers have framed this savagery in religious terms: Intemperate Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims slaughtered each other because they could not share the land.
Read More...