History Major. Cripple. Vaguely Left-Wing. In pain and constantly irritable.

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Cake day: March 24th, 2025
  • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPMtoHistoryPhotos@piefed.social•Elementary school children in a detention camp for Japanese-Americans, California, USA, WW2, 1942English
    21·
    16 hours ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans

    About 127,000 Japanese Americans then lived in the continental U.S., of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei (‘second generation’; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei (‘third generation’, the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei (‘first generation’) immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship.

    Internment was intended to mitigate a security risk which Japanese Americans were believed to pose. The scale of the incarceration in proportion to the size of the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures undertaken against German and Italian Americans who numbered in the millions and of whom some thousands were interned, most of these non-citizens. Following the executive order, the entire West Coast was designated as a military exclusion area, and all Japanese Americans who were living there were taken to assembly centers before they were sent to concentration camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas. Similar actions were taken against individuals of Japanese descent in Canada. The internees were prohibited from taking more than they could carry into the camps, and many of them were forced to sell either some or all of their property, including their homes and their businesses. Inside the camps, which were surrounded by barbed wire fences and were patrolled by armed guards, the internees frequently lived in overcrowded barracks which contained minimal furnishings.

    On December 17, 1944, the exclusion orders were rescinded, and nine of the ten camps were shut down by the end of 1945. Japanese Americans were initially barred from U.S. military service, but by 1943, they were allowed to join, with 20,000 serving during the war. Over 4,000 students were allowed to leave the camps to attend college. Hospitals in the camps recorded 5,981 births and 1,862 deaths during incarceration.

    By 1992, the U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $4.36 billion in 2025) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated.

    A dark moment of our history often passed over, and only recently begun to be more widely taught.

  • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPMtoHistoryArt@piefed.social•Roman legionary of the 2nd-3rd century AD demonstrating a thrustEnglish
    2·
    16 hours ago

    There appears (unless there’s something specific here I’m missing, which is very possible - even on Rome, my favorite obsession, what I don’t know fills libraries!) to be a minor mistake in this drawing, funny enough - a legionary’s scabbard in this period should be on his right side. Only officers wore their swords on the left.

    While this is unusual in European swordsmanship in general, the Roman Legions of the Mid-Late Republic and Principate era of the Empire preferred it because it kept the shield-hand unimpeded when drawing the sword, especially when in close-order formation. The current two ways of thinking are that it was drawn with a reverse grip, and then shifted to the correct, forward-pointing position (fast, but potential for clumsy fingers is high); or that the scabbard itself was worn somewhat loosely (and the gladius was short enough) so that the scabbard could be pointed forward, and then the blade be pulled out in a ready-to-strike position (useful, but reliant on very good proportions between sword length, belt length, arm length, and, well, soldier length).

    2nd-3rd century AD is suggested by the helmet (note the ridge over the forehead - uparmored helmets like that were only popular in the 2nd-3rd century) and wearing of trousers (while trousers were worn on the Germanic frontier as early as the 1st century AD, they didn’t become widespread until the 2nd). The distinctive body armor, the lorica segmentata, was only in use from the 1st-3rd centuries AD, with a smattering of suspected remnants in the 4th century AD.

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