Young Oak Kim: soldier, store owner, badass. He was the only Korean-American serving in the 442nd, a segregated Japanese-American regiment serving in World War II. When superiors offered to transfer him he said, “There is no Japanese nor Korean here. We’re all Americans and we’re fighting for the same cause.”

He taught his platoon aggressive small unit tactics and was called Samurai Kim. He took another guy with him and they crawled all night into enemy territory to capture German soldiers and gain intel. When his group got captured, he said “YOLO” and escaped with a medic. He reenlisted after WWII and was the first Asian American ever to command a regular combat battalion in war. He has a school named after him.
 He has like, a billion medals.

BOSS.

faustyflakes:

staysandstories:

madtomedgar:

strawberry-fox:

A pair of green-tinted spectacles is on display in the Monticello Visitors Center. These are believed to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson, although we do not know precisely what he used them for. According to Silvio Bedini, tinted glasses first appeared around 1810. They were not typically used as sunglasses as we might think of them, but “to improve the vision out of doors.”

why is he not depicted wearing these in every portrait

Somebody with art skills please rectify this horrible oversight.

bitchin

a real american sphinx

We all know we love men in fitting suits and pants, but once upon a time, it was more fashionable for men to wear shocking colors and have tons of decorations on their clothes than something that fit halfway decently.

Then, there was this man—Beau Brummell. Born in 1778, he decided that wearing a pink jacket with white lace and white silk breeches and more embroidery was lame (this was actually once worn by the Prince Regent, aka the figure King George IV) and that simpler clothing was a lot better, and flashy colors were better for actors in costume. Boots didn’t have tassels, cravats were starched and stiff, and England became famous for its tailors.

So when you imagine Mr. Darcy wearing a nice dark jacket or someone from a romance novel dressed in all those fine breeches, thank this wonderful man who took the courts of the Regency Period by storm and forever changed the fashion industry, effects that last to this day, not that there weren’t some imperfections to his style—his clothes were so well tailored that it’s said it took him hours to dress because the clothes were so tight.

Don’t imagine how hard it was for men to sit down then; by the time the Victorian age came around, clothes had certainly loosened up.

absentmindedfools:

We all know that Rasputin was one handsome devil. Don’t kid yourself. 

“There’s no disputin, I just love Rasputin. When our teacher told us to turn our books to his chapter, and a big picture of him popper up, I just couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the lesson. I couldn’t take my eyes off his beautiful bearded face. When I heard that he solicited sexual favors from women, I felt an extreme uncontrollable jealousy. That night I went to bed with my history book and read the chapter on Rasputin, curtains drawn, candles lit and a Barry White record playing” 

Yahoo Answers “I feel a strange sexual attraction to Rasputin of Russia?” 

Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), the man Walt Whitman once described as “somehow or other [always looking] as if he were attempting to think out some problem a little too hard for him.” But come on, Walt, he *was* trying to figure out how to solve *all* the evils of the industrializing world.

While he was trying to work it all out, Brisbane witnessed the 1830 revolution in France, travelled Europe during the revolutions of 1848, and was present when Napoleon III established the Second Empire in France in 1852. He also met some pretty cool cats along the way: G.W.F. Hegel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx.

Starting in 1840, America’s first socialist popularized the ideas of Charles Fourier. The French reformer believed he had discovered the laws of human nature, that twelve “passions” dictated human behaviour, that the combinations of passions produced 801 possible personality types, and that if 1602 people lived communally and did only the work to which they were most attracted, everything would work out right. Poverty, misery, and exploitation would all be gone. Under the new system, evolution would grant humans great height, we would grow tails, and the ocean would transform into “a not unpleasant lemonade.” Sounds like an ideology you can get behind, right?

Whoever this hunk is, he’s my history crush. He was in the Jewish Brigade, a segment of the British Army that fought the Germans in Italy in 1944. The rocket says “Hitler’s Gift”.

edit: I’ve been told his name is Joseph Wald!

This hunk, Gavrilo Princip, is known as the man who assassinated Franz Ferdinand, becoming the trigger that pulled the already-loaded gun of WWI.

Terrible, right? Depends on who you ask. Though Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie had not personally wronged Princip, they were the heirs of Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian monarch who had rulled for decades with an iron fist, and did not allow the Slavic majority in the balkin peninsula many rights or any say in how they were to be governed.

A Yugoslav nationalist movement had been stirring. Young Bosnia, of which Gavrilo Princip was an involved member, was a group of radical youth who wished to unite all Yugoslavs, forming a nation independent of Austria-Hungary and free from the tyrant hand of Franz Joseph.

When Franz Ferdinand made it clear that he intended to rule the Serbs more liberally, Princip and Young Bosnia feared that their movement would lose momentum. Something had to be done. The Black Hand was formed; a no-nonsense group who’s emblem consisted of a vial of poison, a daggar, a bomb, and flag featuring the skull & crossbones.

Gavrilo Princip, a tragically passionate nationalist, shot & killed Franz Ferdinand and his newlywed wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

Here he is on trial, seated in the middle of the front row.

He died in prison on April 28, 1918.

This is John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) who was noted for his (excellent) portraits of people like Theodore Roosevelt and one of his most famous (and scandalous) of ‘Madame X’. This painting is his self-portrait. 

Frederick Bates (June 23, 1777 – August 4, 1825), older brother of Edward Bates and James Woodson Bates, was an American attorney and politician. He was elected in 1824 as the second governor of Missouri and died in office in 1825. Before that he had served as a Justice of the Territorial Supreme Court for Michigan Territory, was appointed by Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of the Louisiana Territory and started to build his political base in St. Louis.