I’ll be pausing the Saturday posts during January in order to prepare enough new ones to keep the blog updated consistently. This will also allow me to do some research on a few topics I don’t want to rush.
Teaser: do you know Pocahontas’ real name?
Friday posts will continue as normal. Thank you for reading.
Lakota Times. 2021. https://www.lakotatimes.com/articles/march-in-lakota-history/
Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa (Tribe) Lakota (Nation) leader born in modern-day Montana. The Lakota are more commonly known as the Sioux. This was a name meaning “snakes,” applied to them by Ojibwe enemies. It was also adopted by Canadian and American colonists. Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota are different dialects of the same language. All these versions of the word mean “friend” or “ally,” referencing the political and cultural bonds of the many tribes (Hunkpapa, Oglala, Yankton, etc.) that made up the Lakota confederacy.
Sitting Bull was famous for defeating General George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. In reality, Sitting Bull did not take part in the fighting. In resistance to being settled on a reservation, he had established a camp for his band on the Little Bighorn River (Greasy Grass River to the Lakota). Other renegade bands joined them over the course of months, swelling their numbers. Sitting Bull, among others, acted as a spiritual leader, performing the Sun Dance, and other cultural rituals to bolster the numerous warriors.
The US Army sent several units to confront the camp and force the Native people back on to reservations. Tellings of the infamous battle vary widely. Some say Custer’s unit, the 7th Cavalry, was ordered to attack, and others insist the general brashly led his soldiers into a situation where they were starkly outnumbered and doomed to slaughter. After wiping out the Americans, the camp disbanded over the next few days. Sitting Bull led his band up into Canada and lived there for 4 years. Most of the bands that remained in the US were hunted down by the Army or surrendered.
Sitting Bull eventually returned to the US and surrendered in 1881. He and his band were confined to the Standing Rock Reservation between North and South Dakota. His time on the reservation was tense. In the late 1880s, a movement called the Ghost Dance spread among western tribes. A Paiute man from Nevada named Wovoka is credited with creating it. He told his followers that if they performed the Ghost Dance their dead would rise, the buffalo would return, and the White people would be driven away. The movement made White westerners paranoid and hostile to its followers. The dance was outlawed on the reservations and many Americans called for the extermination of the remaining western tribes. The authorities of Standing Rock became concerned that Sitting Bull would join this movement and increase its numbers. On December 15, 1890 they ordered his arrest. When he resisted, one of his band fired at the arresting officer, who in turn shot Sitting Bull. A firefight ensued and left 8 men dead from each side.
Sitting Bull. D.F. Barry. 1885.
Many of Sitting Bull’s band fled to the camp of a well known Minneconjou Lakota leader named Spotted Elk on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Fearing conflict with the US Army, Spotted Elk reached out to the Oglala Lakota Chief, Red Cloud, who invited the band to take refuge with him on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The band was intercepted by Major Samuel Whiteside leading a detachment of the 7th Cavalry. Spotted Elk surrendered peacefully and allowed his band to be escorted to a camp by Wounded Knee Creek. That night Colonel James Forsyth arrived and positioned 4 cannons around the camp. The next morning Forsyth and his soldiers ordered the band to disarm. One Lakota man refused, resulting in a gunfight that escalated into a massacre that claimed the lives of over 200 Native people, many of them women, children, and unarmed men.
Initially reported as a battle in which the US Army emerged victorious, more accurate reports soon surfaced and elicited more conflicted reactions from the American public, and even some soldiers. While many view the Wounded Knee massacre as a tragedy born of a communication breakdown, others believe it was a calculated act of vengeance by the 7th Cavalry for the slaughter of Custer’s unit at Little Bighorn. As with so much history of the so-called “Indian Wars,” there is little evidence and many stories.
Sources:
Sioux- Dominican University
A Sioux Chief’s Arrest- Rock Island Auction
Sitting Bull- Canadian Encyclopedia
A Dark Day: Massacre at Wounded Knee- South Dakota Public Broadcasting
Spotted Elk- Aktá Lakota Museum and Cultural Center
Modern is a term to describe something of the present, but modernity is a lot messier.
The word “modern” was first used to describe a time period by a Roman statesman and historian of the 6th century CE named Cassiodorus. Like his father, he was an advisor to the Ostrogoth Kings who had taken over southern Italy as the Western Roman empire slowly fell apart. At the end of his career, Cassiodorus retired to his estate and founded a monastery called the Vivarium in order to preserve Roman culture and texts from ancient scholars. He is cited as the first writer to use the word “modernus” (Latin) to regularly describe his own time.
The term was used on and off by different European writers to describe their times throughout subsequent centuries. The Italian Renaissance was a movement in which Europeans began to distinguish their cultures from the standards and structures of the Middle Ages, which were defined by feudalism and religious domination of education and politics. Renaissance scholars translated and circulated texts about ethics and arts from ancient Romans, Greeks, and others, that did not rely on Christian works.
This dynamic played out around Europe in various locales over the following centuries and it largely defined the Enlightenment. Between roughly 1700-1800 this movement fueled secularism, nationalism, and capitalism.
In history the Early Modern era is roughly 1490-1780, and the Modern Era is roughly 1780-1960. But this is not the same as Modernism, a literary and artistic movement of the 1900s wherein writers and artists, again largely in Europe and nations founded through European colonialism, broke with cultural traditions as their societies industrialized and urbanized. The term “modernity” is used in all these contexts, sometimes to mean very specific things, or just as often, wildly vague phenomena.
Modern
Modernity
Modernism
Clear as mud, right?
Just wait for Postmodernism.
Sources:
Modernity- Wikipedia
Introduction to the Renaissance- M.A.R. Habib, Rutgers University
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. 1965. Public Domain.
William Tecumseh Sherman was a Union general in the American Civil War. He is most famous for “Sherman’s March to the Sea.” In 1864, after capturing Atlanta, Georgia’s capital, he ordered his army to march to Savannah, on the coast. This took roughly a month’s time, and involved destroying any infrastructure that might be of use to the Confederate army along the way.
On December 22, Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln the following:
“I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25.000 bales of cotton.
W. T. Sherman
Major Gen”
Sources:
Telegram- Library of Congress
Sherman’s March to the Sea- New Georgia Encyclopedia
China’s last dynasty was the Qing Dynasty. It was overthrown in 1911 by a coalition of nationalist forces that established the Republic of China.
From 1927 to 1937 the Nationalists fought a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party for control of the country. The conflict was mostly put on hold in order to defend against a Japanese invasion that lasted from 1937-45. After Japan’s defeat by the “Allied Powers” in World War 2, the civil war resumed. By 1948, it became clear the Communists had gained the advantage and the Nationalists began a systematic retreat to the island of Taiwan.
Chiang Kai-shek, first president of the Republic of China/Taiwain. Public Domain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chiang_Kai-shek%EF%BC%88%E8%94%A3%E4%B8%AD%E6%AD%A3%EF%BC%89_%289to12%29.jpg
On December 8, 1949 the Nationalists officially moved their capital to Taipei, Taiwan. 1.2 million Chinese people fled the mainland to join them throughout the following year. The country was ruled under martial law until 1987.
Taiwan has a long history of invasion featuring the Dutch, the Portuguese, The Chinese, the Japanese, and others. The Taiwanese government currently recognizes 16 indigenous peoples as the original inhabitants of the island. A number of other peoples continue to struggle for official recognition.
Sources:
History- Tawain.gov
The Great Retreat- Taipei Times
Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan- IWGIA
As Taiwan Embraces its Indigenous people, it rebuffs China- CNN
Rosa Parks fingerprinted by a deputy sheriff in Montgomery, Alabama on February 22, 1956, when she was arrested again, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and others, for boycotting public transportation.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-90145] https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2020/02/rosa-parks-in-newspapers-and-comic-books/
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1913. She joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church in her youth and remained a member her whole life.
She joined the NAACP in 1943 and served as the chapter’s secretary for many years. Through this work, Parks investigated many cases of discrimination and violence around the country.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus for a White person, resulting in her arrest.
Since the 1940s, similar incidents had occurred all over the US with increasing frequency. Sometimes this was the result of conscious organizing. Other times they were spontaneous actions Black people undertook because they were, in Parks’ words, “tired of giving in.”
The NAACP and other civil rights organizations collaborated on making Rosa Parks’ case a major flashpoint in the fight against Jim Crow, resulting in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Numerous lawsuits around the country had ruled against segregation laws and practices, but had failed to result in concrete change. However, these earlier fights were critical in building the momentum that would lead to more radical changes. Thanks to collaborative activism among many organizations and individuals, the Montgomery Boycott became a sustained and visible campaign that helped the anti-segregation lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle, make its way to the US Supreme Court. The court found for the 4 Black female plaintiffs, ruled against American “Separate But Equal” policies, and marked the beginning of widespread integration on local, state, and federal levels. Brown v. Board of Education had only addressed integration in public schools.
Sources:
Rosa Parks: My Story- Internet Archive
Nonviolence vs. Jim Crow 1942: Bayard Rustin- Civil Rights Teaching
Irene Morgan 1944- Equal Justice Initiative
Lillie Mae Bradford 1951- Wikipedia
Claudete Colvin 1955- Smithsonian Magazine
Browder v. Gayle- Stanford University