Category Archives: History

June 18, 2017

When John Wayne Traveled the Sea with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and His Family

Posted on June 18, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on When John Wayne Traveled the Sea with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and His Family

Take a look at some rare photos of the actor’s personal life on his massive yacht, the Wild Goose.

John Wayne liked to live off the land. When the Oscar-winning actor wasn’t making movies—like Stagecoach or True Grit, which cemented his status as a movie star—he liked to head over to areas like Mexico or British Columbia on his boat, the Wild Goose, a 136-foot Navy minesweeper that he refashioned into a sea-bound home away from home. He’d entertain his family and a number of his close, famous friends, like Henry Fonda and director John Ford, finding beaches for them to relax on, or dipping into the water to scoop up fresh abalone for lunch. The boat, anchored in Newport Beach, is so iconic that in 2011, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now, select images of Wayne’s seafaring private life are on display for the public, thanks to son Ethan Wayne (the sixth out of the actor’s seven children), who has curated a series of rare and never-before-seen photos for a special exhibit at the Balboa Island Museum in California, showcasing his father’s “rugged and remote” life on the sea, he tells Vanity Fair.

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Posted in Entertainment, History, John Wayne

June 17, 2017

Chicanos, Aztlán and the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid

Posted on June 17, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Chicanos, Aztlán and the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid

Out of this convention came the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” which called for the liberation of the lands once hailed as Mexico in the Southwest and gave Vasquez a new way to look at life.

From an early age, Chicana activist and author Enriqueta Vasquez knew something was wrong about signs in front of businesses around her hometown in Colorado reading, “No Mexicans or Dogs allowed.” Vasquez also knew something was amiss in her fourth-grade classroom when the teacher said the Southwest belonged to the United States. As a matter of fact, that land was stolen from Mexico, she pointed out to the teacher, just as her mother had pointed it out to her.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Southern Colorado, Vasquez was raised with an acute political conscience, a different way of thinking in a country that considered her as undesirable as a dog.

Vasquez moved from Denver, Colorado, to a little adobe home in San Cristobal, just north of Arroyo Hondo, with her young children in the summer of 1968 – a politically fervent time across the country. The civil rights movement had been rocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King by a sniper in Memphis, Tennessee, earlier that year.

Vasquez came to Northern New Mexico already versed in the budding political and cultural revolution that would eventually call itself the Chicano movement. Her charge was to start a school in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where young Mexican-Americans could learn their history, language, music, mythologies and sense of national identity.

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Posted in Hidden History, History, La Raza, Radicals

May 31, 2017

Scientists Map The Genome Of Ancient Egyptian Kings, And They Weren’t From Africa

Posted on May 31, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Scientists Map The Genome Of Ancient Egyptian Kings, And They Weren’t From Africa

It’s further evidence that ancient Egyptians were genetically different than modern day residents.

The first ever genetic analysis of mummies found that ancient Egyptian kings were more closely related to West Asians than Africans, according to a study published Tuesday by scientists at the Max Planck Institute.

The research found that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to Neolithic Levantine, Anatolian and European populations. The mummies tested did not share strong genetic links to Africa often found in modern Egyptians.

“This suggests that an increase in Sub-Saharan African gene flow into Egypt occurred within the last 1,500 years,” Wolfgang Haak, who led the research team, said in a statement.

“The genetics of the Abusir el-Meleq community did not undergo any major shifts during the 1,300 year timespan we studied, suggesting that the population remained genetically relatively unaffected by foreign conquest and rule,” Haak said.

It’s further evidence that ancient Egyptians were genetically different than modern day residents. Scientists largely agree that ancient Egyptians were indigenous to the Nile area, but a vocal minority of “Afrocentric” scholars claim that the area’s ancient population was entirely African.

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Posted in Hidden History, History, Science

May 20, 2017

What Richmond Has Gotten Right About Interpreting its Confederate History

Posted on May 20, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on What Richmond Has Gotten Right About Interpreting its Confederate History

And why it hasn’t faced the same controversy as New Orleans or Charlottesville.

In the past couple of weeks, how we remember and commemorate the Civil War has undergone seismic shifts. The city of New Orleans is in the process of removing four monuments that celebrate Confederate leaders and an 1874 attempt by white supremacists to topple Louisiana’s biracial Reconstruction government. In Charlottesville, Virginia, a court injunction temporarily halted the city’s plans to sell its Robert E. Lee monument while alt-right leader Richard Spencer led a torchlight protest this past weekend reminiscent of Klan rallies of the past. White supremacist support for the Lee statue will likely strengthen and broaden the call to remove this and other Confederate monuments throughout the city. Curiously, however, the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, has not seen a similar outcry. Why?

The city boasts some of the most significant sites of Confederate commemoration. Its famed Monument Avenue is studded with massive statues of Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart along with the president of the confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Thousands of Confederate soldiers and officers, and Davis himself, are buried in the city’s Hollywood Cemetery—a sacred space for white Southerners grappling with defeat. Veterans’ reunions, battlefields, monument dedications, parades and the opening of the Confederate Museum in 1896 helped solidify the city itself as a shrine to Confederate memory by the beginning of the 20th century. If ever a city was ripe for calls to remove Confederate monuments, it is Richmond.

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Posted in Culture, History

May 14, 2017

Historian reveals facts of MUSLIM slave trade (Video)

Posted on May 14, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Historian reveals facts of MUSLIM slave trade (Video)

Historian Tidiane Ndiaye busts many myths commonly held about the slave trade and talks about the far larger and more lethal Islamic one.

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Posted in Hidden History, History, Islam, Slavery

May 3, 2017

‘White Devils’: Muhammad Ali’s Racist Mosque Speeches Revealed

Posted on May 3, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on ‘White Devils’: Muhammad Ali’s Racist Mosque Speeches Revealed

FBI files detailing speeches delivered by heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in American mosques in the 1960s show a different, more racist and radical face of the famed sportsman. The speeches feature Ali calling whites “crackers” and “white devils,” and telling black congregants that blacks want to be segregated from whites.

The speeches, which were released after a Freedom of Information Act request by Washington watchdog group Judicial Watch, revealed that Ali had far more radical views about race than his more benign public persona might have led people to believe.

Not only did Ali thunder that the 1964 civil rights act was a “swindle” on blacks, he also went on to excoriate whites, calling them “blue-eyed devil white people,” and insisting that “the so-called Negro is the original man and is superior to the white devil.”

The FBI files show that Ali told a crowd at a Washington D.C. mosque that he preferred “dying outright” or going to jail than going into the U.S. Army. In another speech delivered at a Cleveland mosque, Ali said the American flag “represented death and destruction,” but the so-called “Muslim flag” represents “life and prosperity, justice for all black men.”

According to the FBI reports, the groups Ali spoke to were congregations of the Nation of Islam, an extremist hate group the FBI defined as an “all-Negro, quasi-religious organization which espouses a line of violent hatred of the white race, Government, law and law enforcement.” The Nation of Islam is highly anti-Semitic and teaches its followers that whites will all be killed in a coming “War of Armageddon.”

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Posted in Hidden History, History, Islam, Multiculturalism

May 1, 2017

The Truth About Muhammad Ali and the Draft

Posted on May 1, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on The Truth About Muhammad Ali and the Draft

His refusal to serve wasn’t motivated by conscience, but by fear of being killed by the Nation of Islam.

On April 28, 1967, Muhammad Ali —then still known to many by his birth name, Cassius Clay —reported to Local Board No. 61 in Houston for induction into the U.S. armed forces. The 25-year-old heavyweight champion spent the morning filling out forms and receiving a physical exam. In the afternoon, when his name was called, he did not step forward. He wrote down his reason: “I refuse to be inducted into the armed forces of the United States because I claim to be exempt as a minister of the religion of Islam.” He meant the Nation of Islam, the black separatist organization headed by Elijah Muhammad, also known as the Messenger.

Ali was swiftly convicted of draft evasion, a felony. Remaining free while his lawyers pursued appeals, he became a generational flashpoint—a reliable gauge of political views on the Vietnam War.

For every athlete who wishes to “make a statement” today, and plenty do, no exemplar looms larger than Ali. He paid a steep price for his stand: Spurning due process, boxing commissions stripped him of his title and banned him from the sport for 3½ years. This meant losing millions of dollars in the prime of his career.

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Posted in Hidden History, History, Islam

April 29, 2017

Rustled for Hollywood

Posted on April 29, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Rustled for Hollywood

The never-before-published truth behind Francis the Talking Mule.

In the 1950s, Universal Pictures hit on an absurd premise that would delight millions and make millions: the Francis the Talking Mule military comedies. Audiences never guessed that Francis’s true identity was a more guarded secret than the technique that made him appear to talk.

The inspiration for Francis came during WWII, in 1943, when David Stern III was stationed in Hawaii, co-editing a U.S. Army paper, Midpacifican. “To pass the time,

I wrote four pages of dialogue between a second lieutenant and an Army mule,”
he says. “I had no intention of writing
more. But that little runt of a mule kept bothering me.”

Those pages became a short story, then a string of them for Esquire Magazine. The basic premise was that, while at war, an inexperienced soldier is aided by an experienced Army mule.

After Stern combined three of the stories into the book Francis in 1946, Universal snapped up the film rights. Director Arthur Lubin, whose Abbott and Costello comedies had made Universal a fortune, was an ideal talent to direct the series. The studio chose acrobatic star comedian Donald O’Connor to play the soldier. As the gruff, but lovable voice of Francis, former Minsky’s Burlesque comic and George O’Brien sidekick Chill Wills perfectly filled the bill, although without billing, to maintain the illusion.

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Posted in Entertainment, History

April 26, 2017

Lauren Southern – The Destruction of History (Video)

Posted on April 26, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Lauren Southern – The Destruction of History (Video)

In an age of ugliness, a work of beauty is an act of defiance.

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Posted in Culture, History, Lauren Southern

April 22, 2017

America: Built by pioneers, not immigrants

Posted on April 22, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on America: Built by pioneers, not immigrants

Lindy Daniel stresses impact of ‘the builders and founders of this great nation’

I’m sick of hearing it. “America is a nation of immigrants,” they say. Well, they’re wrong. You can’t immigrate to something that isn’t there.

America is not a nation of immigrants. America is a nation of pioneers and builders. They didn’t come to America. They came to a New World. They cleared the forests. They tamed the earth. They built their homes with their bare hands, crafted their government out of their own hearts, and carried law and justice on their backs. They built communities worth crossing the world for – young havens of civilization – but they didn’t stop there. They formed those communities into 13 states, connected them together and built a nation.

The overwhelming majority of the growth of Colonial America leading up to the Revolution and beyond was due to high birth rates, not new arrivals. Higher immigration barely picked up at all until around 1830 and did not truly commence until the latter half of that century. But neither in that time did the new Americans settle as “immigrants.” They arrived in New York, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, but they didn’t stay. “Go west,” they said, and go west they did. They packed up their wagons with meager supplies and plentiful guts, and they pioneered Nebraska. They pioneered Colorado. They pioneered Wyoming Territory, and they pioneered all the way out the Oregon Trail. They braved the mountains, the deserts, the outlaws of the Wild West, the winters, the wilderness and the hostile Indians. They were frontiersmen and frontier women, and they turned a wild and dangerous land into a home for America’s children.

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Posted in Culture, History, Immigration