So, I decided to watch Pocahontas last night. It may have been because it was late (it was like 10:30 pm when I started), or because my best friend had already suggested that she might cry at the end (she really loves Pocahontas), or because I've been working so hard, but I totally cried during and after because a) stop it, Disney, and b) roughly 90% of the native population of this continent wiped out from disease after the colonists arrived. This is not normal. Normal would be me getting kind of pissed because this movie is so aggressively historically inaccurate, but still really enjoying all the musical numbers. (You haven't really heard Savages until you've heard it in Polish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgS6AeU0Wf4. "They're devil's hideous lice"?! Wow. Harsh.) But it just got super emotional for me as I thought about that number, 90%, and had these big moments of trying to comprehend the incomprehensible loss of lives, history, and culture. Like, as an animated hummingbird is trying to express emotion, I'm on the brink of tears thinking about peoples' unnamed remains in museum storage and alive people defiling the graves of these dead people to sell their most intimate history on the antiquities market. I'm not saying this reaction is a bad one. I'm all for people, including myself, embracing their humanity and grieving over all the lives and tradition that have been lost unnecessarily throughout history. I just think maybe I could have saved it for a time that wasn't during a Disney movie.
Dirt:
This isn't super light hearted like the other blogs mentioned here are, but it's one of my new favorites so it gets a pass. Terry Brock is an archaeology grad student at Michigan State University with this super sweet blog on "archaeology, cultural heritage, higher education, social media, and Getting Things Done." His writing is very warm and amiable, which makes it easy to enjoy his personal recollections, information about his research, and his advice for other graduate students. In addition to his blog, you can find him on Twitter.
At ArchaeoPop, Daniel Shoup blogs intelligently and irreverently about archaeology and music. He's a great source for big topics like Egypt's current antiquities dilemma, but he supplements his information with a fun, cheeky vibe that never mixes serious with boring.
This is really the best of your typical Tumblr (links, photos, GIFs) combined with lots of cool and useful information. Jennie Carvill is a PhD student in Vienna who blogs about museums and museum studies. The page is updated less frequently lately, but you can also follow her on Twitter.
Not only is it super entertaining to admit to yourself and hundreds of other people that, yeah, Frederick Douglass, Irish political prisoners, and Lewis Thornton Powell (one of the Lincoln assassination conspirators), are all total babes, but this is the kind of thing you could easily share with your moody 14 year old cousin/niece/sister/whatever and be like, "Look, history is fun! Real fun."
This is in a similar vein as the previous blog, but with a much wider historical spectrum, more biographical information, and a tad more raunch.
This is just a series of memes that readers submit, but it's a great laugh. My favorite is, "You know you're a history fan when... You cringe at the Elder Wand being destroyed. That's an artifact, it should be preserved!"
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