Curating X: Historicity, Pt 2
Resolutions and reflections, the maps of past and future collide with willpower & narrative (continued).
This is Part 2 of a double issue. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.
January Events from the History Vaults Continued
16 January 1120 • 901 years ago • The Council of Nablus establishes the first written laws of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and permission is given to form the Knights Templar.
900 years Council of Nablus from TemplarsNow
The Kingdom of Jerusalem from WorldHistory.org
17 January 1977 • 45 years ago • After a 10 year delay, capital punishment in the United States resumes with the execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah. Since then, more than 1500 prisoners have been executed and almost 3,000 more have been or currently sit on death row.
Who was Gary Gilmore? from Biography.Com
Trial & Error: Death Penalty in the U.S. from HistoryMatters
18 January 1911 • 111 years ago • The first aircraft to land on a ship, piloted by Eugene Ely, successfully turns the USS Pennsylvania into an impromptu aircraft carrier. The U.S. today has 11 aircraft carriers in 7 carrier fleets, which are the foundation for projecting significant military power to any corner of the globe.
Clear the Deck from Wired
Eugene Ely & the birth of naval aviation from the Smithsonian Museum
19 January 649 • 1,373 years ago • Forces of the Tang dynasty complete their 44 day siege of Aksu, bringing the Kuchean state in the northern Tarim Basin of Xinjiang under their control.
200 years later, the Basin became the home of the nomadic Uyghur people arriving from Mongolia.1The Tang Dynasty from WorldHistory.org
China’s repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang from CFR
East Turkestan from the World Uyghur Congress
20 January 1839 • 183 years ago • The War of the Confederation ends when Chilean forces defeat Peru & Bolivia at the Battle of Yungay. If you are a fan of military history this one is a great strategic study, as well as a peek at a war we rarely hear anything about.
The War of Confederation from GlobalSecurity.org
The Battle of Yungay from Wikipedia
21 January 1968 • 54 years ago • A Boeing B-52 Stratofortress carrying four nuclear weapons crashes near Thule Air Base in Greenland, causing contamination in North Star Bay. One of those nukes was never recovered and is still missing today - and it’s not the only missing nuke…
33 page PDF accident report from the Office of Scientific & Technical Information.
Incident article from Nuclear-Risks.org
22 January 1863 • 159 years ago • A nationalist movement in Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania called the January Uprising breaks out, attempting to regain control from occupying Russian forces. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The January Uprising from In-Your-Pocket.
Lithuania In the Shadows of Poland & Russia, PDF doctoral dissertations from Diva Portal.
23 January 2003 • 19 years ago • The final signal was detected from Pioneer 10, thirty-one years after it was launched. The first ever mission to Jupiter, it went on to become the first spacecraft to reach the velocity needed to leave the solar system.
Pioneer 10’s last signal from NASA
The Pioneer Anomaly from NCBI
24 January 914 • 1,108 years ago • The Fatimid Caliphate launched their first invasion of Egypt. Although unsuccessful, the Fatimids eventually added their empire to the long list of those who have conquered and reigned over the land of the pyramid builders, if only for a short time.
The art of the Fatimid Period from The Met Museum
State & society in Fatimid Egypt from Google Scholar
25 January 1924 • The first Winter Olympics Games opens in the Alps in Chamonix, France.
History of the Chamonix games from the IOC
A look at related headlines from Newspapers.Com
26 January 1837 • 185 years ago • Michigan is admitted as the 26th American state.
This month in Michigan history from Empowering Michigan
How Michigan kind of, sort of, illegitimately became a state from ClickOnDetroit
27 January 1973 • 49 years ago • The Paris Peace Accords officially end the Vietnam War.
PDF copy of the official treaty from the United Nations
The signing the Paris Peace Accords from Fold3
Video from the ABC News archives
28 January 1521 • 501 years ago • One of the most ironically named events of Western history, the Diet of Worms begins. It is the first overt schism between the followers of Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church which led to Luther's condemnation as a heretic.
The Diet of Worms from WorldHistory.org
The history of Christianity from the schism to the reformation from Britannica
29 January 1907 • 115 years ago • Charles Curtis a member of the Kaw Nation in Kansas becomes the first Native American elected to the U.S. Senate. He later served as Vice President under Herbert Hoover.
Charles Brent Curtis from the Library of Congress
Why is Charles Curtis’ legacy so complicated? from Historians.org
The people of the Kaw Nation from the Kaw Nation
30 January 1703 • 319 years ago • In one of the most legendary tales from Japanese history, Oishi Kuranosuke led a group of 47 ronin to avenge the death of their feudal lord.
Who were the Ronin of feudal Japan? from ThoughtCo
Video: The true story of the 47 Ronin from History Profiles
31 January 1968 • 54 years ago • The tiny island nation of Nauru gained its independence from Australia. Or did it really?
All about Nauru from the Nauru government
A short history of Nauru, Australia’s dumping ground from the Guardian
A dark history of the world’s smallest island nation from MIT Press
I hope that gives you plenty of ideas to help you rediscover our past this month!
The History of the Future
When we’re talking about reconnecting with history, there is nothing more historically personal than genealogy.
Thanks to amazing advances in genetic ancestry research, more people than ever are adding DNA testing to the traditional genealogist’s toolkit for discovering their biological heritage.
Determining one’s genetic origins can have profound implications for some people.
Unsurprisingly, this can result in family oral histories and records being called into question or even revealed as lies. It can also result in your family members who’ve committed crimes being identified, even if they don’t take a DNA test themselves.
Aside from the immediate potential for personal consequences, these genetics advances have gone a long ways towards redefining what we think of about our individual backgrounds.
The way genetic math works our biological ancestry can only be traced back to 8 generations of individual ancestors, starting with our biological parents.2
There are a lot of smart explainers out there that break this down better than I can, but genetics aren’t passed down equally. You aren’t a 50/50 split between your father and mother, or any other pairing across those eight generations.
Suffice it to say this all means you carry the traceable genetics of about 200-300 identifiable individuals, give or take a few dozen. If we could test the DNA of any of those ancestors we could take that back 8 generations from that person, and so forth.
Each time someone living takes a DNA test, they are adding not just their own genetic map, but a portion of those ancestors’ maps as well to the genetics databases. These details merge with others to fill in more pieces of the Human puzzle.
You can see how this increases the accuracy of our family roadmap exponentially as millions of new DNA tests are performed each year, connecting more and more genetic genealogies across many generations.
At some point in the future it is very likely that DNA from every living human will have been sampled, directly or indirectly, and integrated into this data-web. If that ever does happen, we will be able to determine our familial relationship to every other person on the planet.
Assuming we're all members of Homo sapiens sapiens, that is, and not undercover aliens.
We can speculate about it now, but I’m not sure we can truly imagine the impact this will have on humanity. When it happens it could literally be Earth-changing.
What will we do with that knowledge?
We may have to change all our ideas about family discounts and nepotism, much less things like blood purity and race. A period of “genetic acceptance” could soon be upon us within just a few generations.
But we may also be tempted to use the knowledge to be very exacting in how we prune the family tree, deciding instead to eliminate “unwanted” branches with precise prejudice. It’s exactly the kind of dystopian fire we humans like to play with.
I’ve mentioned historical narrative several times in this issue. What will we do when we no longer need to doctor our history to fit a winning narrative?
What will we be if we choose to doctor ourselves instead, forcing the future to become the narrative?
Only our future history will decide.
Until next time,
A.W.
Find me elsewhere online at:
Flipboard: https://flipboard.com/@curiouscurator
Substack: https://awford.substack.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/@awford
Due to the current conflict between the Chinese Communist Party and the Uyghur people, there are two very different versions of Xinjiang regional history going back thousands of years competing very heavily in English language sources right now.
It's a perfect example of ongoing historical propaganda wars.
After 8 generations it is possible to find direct ancestors from whom you have inherited no DNA at all.