medieval-women:

Christine de Pizan

Author, historian, poet, philosopher

Born 1364 or 1365 – Died 1430 (age 65 – 66)

Claim to fame: An advocate for women’s education, Christine is the first European woman known to have made her living as a writer.

Born the eldest child of the personal physician to King Charles V of France, Christine was well educated and benefited from access to the King’s vast library.

Christine was married at 15 and widowed just 10 years later. After her husband’s death, she turned to writing to support herself and her family, serving as a court writer for several dukes as well as Charles VI of France.

Her 1405 book, ‘La Cité des Dames’ (‘Book of the City of Ladies’), catalogued female accomplishment and helped establish her popularity. This book is considered by many as the inaugural text in the field now known as women’s studies.

Christine completed forty-one works during her career. Her work contradicted negative female stereotypes and countered unjust slander of women within other literary texts. She argued that women have the same aptitudes as men and thus the right to the same education. Christine’s influence in the otherwise male-dominated field of rhetorical discourse lead Simone de Beauvoir to acknowledge her as the first woman to “take up her pen in defence of her sex”.

Boston College Magazine

Wiki

w0wls:

tockthewatchdog:

twunkbanner:

bethanyactually:

link to tweet
link to article in tweet

and here’s snopes verifying this, since no big media outlets are bothering to cover it

The amendment appears on a funding bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. If it remains in the final bill, the amendment would cut 15% of federal adoption funding to states and localities that penalize adoption agencies that refuse to place children in families that conflict with the agency’s “sincerely held religious beliefs or convictions.” 

it hasn’t happened yet, so there’s still time to reach out to your representatives about it

also, i can guarantee you that no big media outlets are ever not bothering to cover huge stories that a lot of people care about

Were literally losing so much progress in such a short time. By 2020 americas gonna be using fucking stone tools

toospoopyformyshirt:

wetwareproblem:

janothar:

thebibliosphere:

clockworkcanary:

drst:

badscienceshenanigans:

firespirited:

thebibliosphere:

thebibliosphere:

People adding Nazi apologist shit onto my posts like “but nazis invented cell phones and space rockets so without them we’d be less technologically advanced VuV” like buddy, if you think for one second we wouldn’t have eventually made it to the moon or made instant communication devices without mass genocide then I dunno what to tell you except to get the fuck away from me.

Your kind aren’t welcome here.

Also would I “trade” my cell phone for a world with no Nazis?

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!

I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.

What the fuck is wrong with you.

??? We’d have probably had cellphones sooner given the amount of inventors, theorists and artists the nazis killed. We’d have been to the moon sooner if we didn’t have segregation. God only knows where we’d be if women were given the opportunity to invent sooner. Disabled people come up with cool stuff too. It’s a whole new world of creation if you value human life equally!

*the sound of a thousand nuclear physicists laughing*

Buckle up kids, today we’re talking about why the Nazis never invented the atom bomb. We’re gonna do this

to white supremacist minds.

Ok. So the Nazis were all about physics … as long as it was with things you could see & touch. Rockets, improved motors, even radio tech (which gives tangible audio and/or visual results) were awesome and very good careers for good German boys.

Theoretical physics, on the other hand, was viewed as made-up Jewish bullshit. The German scientific old guard did NOT like little punks like Einstein. Who did they think they were, running around with their “time is relative” and “the interstellar ether doesn’t exist” and who the shit even cares what’s INSIDE an atom, Albert, it’s not like the INSIDE does anything. JESUS.

The Nazis saw modern physics as being the same thing as Freud’s psychology, Klimt’s modern art, and Kafka’s stories: a decadent waste of time, way too Jewish, and definitely not cool or manly. So to combat uncool Jewish science, pro-Nazi German scientists founded an actual movement– “Deutsche Physik/Aryan Physics”– all about real stuff like engines and bombs and it was gonna serve the SHIT out of the fatherland. No Jews allowed.

“Ugh, GROSS.” -Nazis

Jewish nerds who wanted to study physics & engineering had to settle for theoretical physics. And boy did they ever. Niels Bohr, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Epstein, James Franck, Rudolf Kompfner, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf , Eugene Wigner, Frank and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and some dude named Albert Einstein among others were all turning their lemons into sweet, sticky theoretical physics lemonade in 1920s Germany.

Every single one of them, and more, emigrated to the US in the 1930s. Jewish colleagues from Axis Italy, like Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi– aka the guy who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and married to a Jewish woman– joined the brain drain as Europe hemorrhaged nuclear physicists right into America’s warm, heaving, bloodthirsty bosom. 

*artist’s rendition 

Albert Einstein’s application to become a US citizen. Dated Jan 18th, 1936.

The few Gentile nuclear physicists Germany had managed to produce– Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Arnold Sommerfeld– were persecuted just for being into Jewish stuff. Like, “were called out in the official SS newspaper for being ‘White Jews’” and “Heisenberg’s mom called Himmler’s mom and told her to tell Himmler to make the Nazis stop being mean to her boy”-level persecuted. That’s right, these badass Reich science dudes couldn’t even do their job without their moms running interference. THAT’s how fucking great the Nazis were at science.

Meanwhile the bright lights over in Deutsche Physik were talking about how there’s actually been a bunch of moons and when of the last ones fell down it buried Atlantis and also the sun’s gravity suddenly stops at 3x the orbital radius of Neptune. Like… thank God for those Nazi scientific advances, amirite?

Nationalist German scientists cheerfully joined the persecution of their Jewish colleagues, because Nazi scientists just really wanted Jewish physicists’ jobs. But the bummer was, the Nazi scientists couldn’t handle the mathematics that made relativity work. They were too dumb to do that science. Look– we’ve all been there. But the nationalist German scientists’ approach was– instead of leveling up their game, just discredit everything their rivals did. Declare it dumb, and made-up, and all the good parts of this stuff we just said was dumb and made-up were already invented by Aryans anyway, so why keep Jewish scientists around? Just forget about this atomic physics crap and keep giving us money to talk shit about Neptune, it’ll be great.

“Hahaha wut?” -Nazis

Eventually the Third Reich figured out that atom bombs were a thing and they should probably make one. They put Heisenberg– who, if you’ll recall, just had to have his mom call in an anti-bullying PSA to the Fuhrer’s secretary three short paragraphs ago– in charge. With every single other person who knew about nuclear fission having left Germany years ago, Heisenberg was pretty much on his own. The Nazi bomb project went nowhere.

A Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons would been able to do whatever the fuck they wanted.

The only thing that stood in their way? Their own. goddamn. antisemitism.

Director of Los Alamos weapons lab and Jewish American, J. Robert Oppenheimer, seen in profile as he oversees final assembly of the Trinity test bomb. Trinity was the first test detonation in the US nuclear weapons program. (x)

Is this a post in support of atom bombs? No.

This is a post about how being so high on your own inferiority complex that you’re down to murder people smarter than you, will fuck you in assholes you didn’t even know you had. 

Thank you, Science Tumblr, for that deconstruction of Nazi bullshit.

This is excellent as is, but, I need to point out that the USA political situation is in many ways falling into this same hole now. We are becoming xenophobic and anti science at our top political level. The GOP is practically anti reality at this point. We need to fix this.

Holy shit, this is the best addition to any of my posts. 

I don’t remember if I’ve reblogged this with the small correction before, but Fermi wasn’t Jewish. He DID flee persecution of Jews, though, because he was a lapsed Catholic who married a Jewish woman.

Otherwise, yeah, this is 100%

“Nazis invented cell phones!”

Funny, I seem to remember the spread-spectrum frequency-hopping radio technology that modern wireless telecomms depend on being invented by a Jewish woman.

Yet another level of basic fact-checking these bootlickers fail.

Fact: it’s impossible to be smart and a nazi
“smart” and “nazi” are mutually exclusive

bemusedlybespectacled:

vague-humanoid:

trcunning:

tweet from Wikipedia brown (verified, @eveewing): 

I just thought about this today and dug through my pictures to find it: a letter from a black soldier in the Civil War to the person who owns his daughter. “The longer you keep my child from me the longer you will have to burn in Hell and the quicker you will get there.“ 

photo text (with corrected spelling and broken into sentences, paragraphs): 

Letter from a Black Soldier to the Owner of His Daughter

Spotswood Ric, a former slave, writes to Kittey Diggs, 1864: 

I received a letter from Cariline telling me that you say I tried to steal, to plunder, my child away from you. Not I want you to understand that Mary is my Child and she is a God given rite of my own. 

And you may hold on to her as long as you can. But I want you to remember this one thing, that the longer you keep my Child from me the longer you will have to burn in hell and the quicker you’ll get there. 

For we are now making up about one thousand black troops to come up thorough, and want to come through, Glasgow. And when we come woe be to Copperhood rebels and to the Slaveholding rebels. For we don’t expect to leave them there. Root nor branch. But we think however that we (that have children in the hands of you devils), we will try your the day that we enter Glasgow. 

I want you to understand Kittey Diggs that where ever you and I meet we are enemies to each other. I offered once to pay you forty dollars for my own Child but I am glad now that you did not accept it. Just hold on now as long as you can and the worse it will be for you. 

You never in you life before I came down hear did you give children anything, not anything whatever, not even a dollars worth of expenses. Now you call my children your property. Not so with me. 

My children is my own and I expect to get them. And when I get ready to come after Mary I will have both a power and authority to bring her away and to exact vengeances on them that holds my Child. 

You will then know how to talk to me. I will assure that. And you will know how to talk right too. I want you now to just hold on; to hear if you want to. If your conscience tells that’s the road, go that road and what it will bring you to Kittey Diggs. 

I have no fears about getting Mary out of your hands. This whole Government gives cheer to me and you cannot help yourself.

Source: Ira Berlin, ed. Freedom, A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982, 690.

@meanmisscharles @rootbeergoddess @zamzamafterzina

I wanted to find out what happened (DID HE GET HIS DAUGHTER BACK?) and the answer is that not only was he reunited with his family, but went on to be a successful minister and his daughter was interviewed in the 30s for the Slave Narratives Project.