Historians, what’s a devastating event that no one talks about?

r ask reddit historians of reddit what's a devastating event that no one talks about galveston texas was once considered to be one of the most important commercial ports in the united states and was referred to by several fantastical names such as the queen city of the gulf and the wall street of the west all that changed when it suffered a near direct hit from a devastating category 4 hurricane in 1900 the deadliest natural disaster in american history pretty much the entire city was destroyed by a storm surge and anywhere from 8 000 to 12 000 people died galveston was rebuilt but it never truly regained its status houston became the state's commercial center in the storm's wake in addition to other factors there's a great book about this called isaac storm by eric larson also dark water rising baghdad used to be one of the biggest and most vibrant cities in the world in the 1200s until the mongols came baghdad did not recover its year 1200 population until the 1980s it was in fact the most populous city in the world for quite some time during the middle ages it was also the epicenter of intellectual cultural and artistic exchange for scholars and other brilliant thinkers the world over and then of course the mongols came i'm always amazed that people know so little about paul pott and cambodia his regime killed 25 of its population let that sink in one in four if you were educated you were first killed when my mom was in college he had a cambodian classmate who was studying with her while his wife and child stayed in cambodia when [ __ ] started going down he insisted on returning to cambodia to get his family out but my mom begged him not to go and my dad who was dating my mom at the time and had returned from serving at the vietnam war just a few years earlier even offered to go instead to try to get them out he went anyway as soon as my mom heard that they were killing the educated people and folks with glasses she knew she would never see her friend again he wore glasses before he left he gifted my mom charcoal rubbings he took out angkor wat they are treasured by her to this day and the only physical evidence she has that her friend existed i grew up hearing this story we remember him and his family and pray for them we may be the only living people who remember them this was long before i was born but i will carry his story after my mom passes we owe it to each other cambodian genocide they killed so many kids that the life expectancy was 18. they killed people with glasses for being intellectuals too if i recall correctly when you thought somebody had to die because they were an intellectual but they actually just need their glasses to read the menu at mcdonald's from more than five feet away without struggling as someone who is legit blind i still cannot see why glasses are so associated with academia while other health aides are associated with medicine and disability it's a weird distinction like i don't wear my glasses because i'm scholarly i wear them so people have faces and aren't just big head shaped blobs typing heavenly kingdom of hong kong put simply it was an upsurp kingdom in 1850s china that directly and indirectly led to the deaths of millions maybe 10 million plus of people through massacre and famine hong zikan believed he was the younger brother of jesus christ and persuaded enough people to follow along and start a civil war check out god's chinese son by jonathan spence the typing rebellion is one of the most extraordinary events in human history that is virtually unheard of in the west perhaps as many as 70 million people died in the conflict the tapings were truly revolutionary as they demanded absolute equality between women and men when they conquered a city they would give the inhabitants a choice to join them or die those that chose not to join were killed all of them the conflict lasted for 21 years 1850 to 1871 and maybe the second deadliest war in human history literally no one knows about it the bronze age collapse arguably more devastating than the fall of the west roman empire so much knowledge lost truly one of history's great mysteries i recommend reading up on it it's really interesting until i learned about it i had no idea that there was once a whole other dark ages that happened before what we normally think of as the dark ages although that term is a misnomer the bronze age collapse ushered in a centuries-long dark age that lasted until classical greece the antigen massacre of 2005 in uzbekistan it is largest mass shooting in asia since cheyenne square with over 1 000 killed and even more wounded the uzbek government forcefully silenced reform protests by firing into the crowd and then kicked out 90 percent of westerners in the country when the u.s governed un tried to investigate terrible loss of life that rarely gets remembered because the uzbek government tried so hard to cover it up man i'm from kazakhstan and heard about every other thing mentioned in comments but not [ __ ] that happened right in the neighboring country the mind society and the lost scriptures that we still haven't found on top of the scriptures we still can't seem to decipher and basically just how much culture was torched by spain during the conquista and the colonial period frankly i'm amazed the maya language j is still alive and torched quite literally we're lucky the codices that survived did so the disease outbreaks that hit the americas with the arrival of the europeans you hear about a 90 death rate in this sounds made up but whatever the actual number was entire civilizations were literally wiped out cultures that had existed for thousands of years are just gone with barely a record left you have stories of people coming across whole villages or corpses these people died never even having seen the europeans never knowing what was killing them and their loved ones and totally helpless to do anything about it the book 1491 touches on this apparently native americans weren't a bunch of primitive nomadic tribes there were cities and terraformed land and rich cultures but when the europeans arrived diseases spread ahead of their advance so by the time the europeans would arrive in an area it had already been decimated by epidemics and whoever was left was living in post-apocalyptic survival mode china during world war ii the japanese absolutely decimated the areas they occupied during the war not just through rape and murder but through biological warfare that resulted in the slow death of hundreds of thousands of people largely forgotten by history i'm not in any way a supporter of the current chinese government but i feel like we're there at is a response not only to communist government tyranny of the moa era but to the horrific japanese atrocities that allowed it to happen in the first place the number of people i've met to literally deny that the nanjing massacre happened is insane ridiculous not just the rape of nanking there's people who literally worked in japanese biological weapons facilities that are responsible for direct torture and murder of subjects referred to colloquially as maruta logs that still to this day deny any wrongdoing scores of people were abducted tortured and eventually killed to fuel imperial japan's warfare endeavors and yet so many war criminals were allowed to basically just walk away at the end of it all just because of the growing fear of communism ask my history studying friend about this she said there's a lot of events that people don't talk about for example there was a lot of countries involved in the balkan conflict who knew about the massacre of srebrenica but still allowed it to happen so many historical events are just so grim and depressing when you read about it we knew bad things were happening but didn't stop until it was too late for many people the role of the netherlands in the massacre is often heavily overlooked when this massacre is taught honestly the rwandan genocide has got to be one of these events i watched shake hands with a devil here a while ago and highly recommend it unspeakable acts of brutality inflicted still gives me chills the assassination of james garfield he was a known advocate for racial equality he appointed black men into his cabinet and tried expanding public education into the south to get more african americans in education he tried to fight for racial equality but died four months into his presidency which ducked it up candice miller's destiny of the republic not only does an excellent job of recounting these events but postulates that garfield had potential to be one of america's best presidents instead he died at half rotten husk all because his doctors refused to practice sanitation also not a historian but learning about the beslin school siege in russia was heartbreaking as kids were settling down for the first day of the class the school was attacked by chechen terrorists i think over 300 people half of whom were kids died over the course of three days most of those kids died during the assault on the school by russian military forces if you look at previous resolutions of hostage crisis by russian military and security forces you'll see why so many people died at beslin the milan conference back in 1880 a bunch of educators of the deaf all decided to meet in milan to determine how best to teach deaf people 164 delegates were in attendance only one of whom was deaf at the time there was a conflict among educators of deaf people about whether an oralism or manualism-based approach was better proponents of oralism argued that deaf people would never succeed in society if they could not speak and hold a conversation in the same way a hearing person would to this end anyone who attempted to sign would be punished and deaf people were forced to lip read at the end of the conference sign language was banned in all educational institutions and deaf people were not allowed to teach for fear that it would encourage the use of sign language as a result for roughly 100 years deaf people were essentially isolated from communication and unable to form communities to this day amongst older generations of deaf people many still have never learned to sign in addition deaf culture as a whole was and is profoundly affected by this event because it essentially stole stories that had been passed down from generation to generation erasing the history of deaf people in the deaf community the blinding of 15 000 soldiers the bulgarians and byzantines would clash every couple of years and after one battle the byzantine leader just snapped and cut out the eyes of the soldiers that surrendered then sent them back home the bulgarian leader died upon hearing the news no this is wildly over exaggerated and the emperor didn't just snap basil ii or basil the bulgar slayer was the emperor of the roman empire in the early 1080 and is largely considered one of the greatest roman emperors he is largely famous for his completion of the reconquest of the bulgarian empire a difficult campaign that took up most of his life due to the mountainous macedonian country he was fighting in during one of these campaign he captured a contingent of bulgarian troops size unknown he then proceeded to blind 99 out of 100 of them and left the last man with one eye to guide the rest back home no one is sure if this story is true or not but we can say for sure that 15 000 troops is a huge overstatement it was unlikely that the bulgarians were even able to muster 5 000 troops at the end of the day this is just a myth maybe based in some truth that has been over exaggerated throughout the years the armenian greek assyrian genocide 1915 by the ottomans around 1 5 million people died either from the genocide itself or the concentration camps an eel tubulary it's not yet officially recognized contemporary turkey denies it happened the kadinka tragedy was supposed to be a celebration of the crowning of nicholas 2 as emperor around 500 000 people gathered in a field where they would receive free food rumors spread that there wouldn't be enough food for everyone leading to a panic and everyone rushing the field 1318 people were trampled to death nicholas too responded by going to her party that night he and his wife didn't want to go to the ball but his advisors and his powerful uncles insisted so they went anyway apparently both spent the ball with red rim dives not that this excuses their behavior but their initial reactions were to mourn the loss of their people we talk a lot about columbine and sandy hook but few people nowadays remember the 1927 bombing of the school in bath michigan or the explosion of a school in new london texas in 1937 that in addition to killing almost 300 people launched the career of a cub reporter named walter cronkite the bath massacre was mostly done with dynamite wired into the school by a disgruntled janitor who also killed his wife and some of his livestock and the new london disaster is why natural gas which is odorless has an unpleasant smelling gas added to it some people who went to parts of the school in the days preceding the blast complained of headaches and dizziness but nobody could figure out why whoa you made it to the end you're a ducking beast i'll cuss you a deal smash like and subscribe for more curated content bruh it's free and that's a great price [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021