Tweet

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @ZachWeiner

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

15 Oct

Some interesting history:

So, there's a story often told that the German Army invested in rockets post-WWI because the Versailles Treaty didn't anticipate rockets and thus didn't forbid them.

According to one of the leading scholars on German spaceflight history, Michael Neufeld, this probably isn't true. In fact, the Germans regularly violated the treaty by finding loopholes.

Neufeld: “The degree to which violation of the treaty was taken for granted in secret rearmament projects, and the intimate relationship between illegal chemical weapons and the early army rocket program, casts much doubt on the oft-repeated cliche that Ordnance’s interest in

Read 4 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

13 Oct

From Chuck Yeager's autobiography:

Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall [1944] our fighter group received orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort.

Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population.

Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort. We weren't asked how we felt zapping people.

Read 9 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

27 Sep

Here's Yves, Béon, survivor of Dora labor camp, where the death rate was 1 in 3, and the V-1s and V-2s were built. From his book, Planet Dora, 1985, originally in French.

“But these men at Dora, Ellrich, Harzungen, in the small kommandos or during the evacuation, had held on.

Even dead, burned, or thrown upon a pile of human trash, they were victors. They had shown and proved with their martyred bodies that human beings must never give in, never surrender, never submit to tyranny.

They had proved it our after hour through agonized weeks, months, and centuries.

Read 7 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

23 Sep

Literary Fun Fact: Before he was a famous author, Arthur Conan Doyle had formative experiences as a doctor on a whaling ship. Here's a particularly funny passage from his memoirs "Memories and Adventures."

To appreciate a woman one has to be out of sight of one for six months. I can well remember that as we rounded the north of Scotland on our return we dipped our flag to the lighthouse, being only some hundreds of yards from the shore.

A figure emerged to answer our salute, and the excited whisper ran through the ship, "It's a wumman!" The captain was on the bridge with his telescope. I had the binoculars in the bows. Every one was staring.

Read 5 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

21 Sep

So, for the foreseeable future, Republicans have an advantage due to the electoral college system. If you're a billionaire Democrat or a well-funded PAC, taking the long view, why not do the following:

Find concentrations of Democrats nearest to red states. Then, set universities and inexpensive across the border to draw left leaning voters. Wyoming, for instance, has a very small population and is nextdoor to CO.

OR, find reddish-purple states with left-leaning urban centers and just pump up the university towns. E.g. Texas, Georgia.

Read 6 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

20 Sep

One thing I've come to think of as a hallmark of mediocre history writing:

1) Narrow factual statements "e.g. this speech was spoken on this date" get citations.
2) Broad statements of the sort "this generation believed in [X]" have no citation.

I think what bugs me about (2) is almost invariably what it ends up being is a stereotype. Because if it just seems right to your gut, it's going to be founded in whatever you think you've heard, and thus probably a melange of whatever media you've been exposed to.

Put another way: If you don't know the source, the source may be trash. Like, if God could tell you WHY you think e.g. 1950s women were like X, you might be shocked at how idiotic your data source is - TV shows, Internet posts, etc.

Read 4 tweets

Share this page!

Zach Weinersmith

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @ZachWeiner

Zach Weinersmith

Zach Weinersmith

Zach Weinersmith

Zach Weinersmith

Zach Weinersmith

Zach Weinersmith

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?