In which I totally miss the point of the Olympics

[sunnyskywalker]

So, while watching the speed skaters and... really fast skiers, whatever their sport is called... I started wondering about their sports outfit technology. Specifically, if you're wearing a skin-tight bodysuit for skating or skiiing, what kind of underwear do you wear? "None" doesn't seem like a comfortable option the way it might for swimming, but I didn't see any panty lines on those guys. Maybe if I were a sports person I would know these things.

In other random news, my mom got me what looks like a normal wooden ruler, until you turn it over and find a list of Great Women Rulers. Hee! I'm going to have to look some of them up, too - I know Hatshepsut and Elizabeth I, but Mbande Nzinga of Angola is new to me.

Comments

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Huh - hadn't heard of her either. *checks Wikipedia*

WHY HAVE I NOT HEARD OF THIS PERSON?!

Damn, she loses her kingdom to the Portugese, allies with the local nomadic marauders, uses their forces to gain control of another kingdom, then as queen of that kingdom begins a decades-long gurilla campaign against Portugal, leading her armies into battle well into her sixties...

[sunnyskywalker]

Writes famous letters, uses the church as a diplomatic tool, her sister turns being captive to their advantage and becomes a spy...

The story we always got in school about the Atlantic slave trade was a one-sided snatch-and-grab operation. Local rulers dealing with the Europeans on almost equal footing is totally different. (There's a book about another part of this, Servants of Allah, which is mostly about Muslim African slaves in the Americas but also covers how they got there, which involved a lot of internal African and African/European politics.)

Also of interest: Amina of Nigeria (16th c) and Liliuokalani of Hawaii.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

I think it's also often forgotten that the African kingdoms that interacted with Europe were expanding nations of their own - the standard narrative tends to be "Europeans came and took over native kingdoms" rather than "European and African nations encounter each other as both expand into the same region."

For that matter, the Aztec and Inca Empires were both founded after the Spanish Reconquesta...

[sunnyskywalker]

But if you mention all that, they you have to come up with new reasons why you aren't spending time on these influential kingdoms in history class, and that's work.

Another relevant book: Before European Hegemony, about the interwtined economies of medieval Europe, North Africa/Middle East, and Asia. My history textbooks again left ou the bit where Marco Polo got to China and went, "Oh, and there were a bunch of Muslim merchants who've been coming here for ages and have their own quarter in the city and everything, but they don't count because Italians are the bestest."