The Tulsa Race Massacre wasn’t really part of American history as taught. It was highlighted in the Watchmen TV series and brought into the public discourse.
There’s a disconnect in my mind between important historical events that have been glossed over or ignored but brought to light by works of art, versus minor historical events that had little significance but were immortalized by popular entertainment.
Is the assassination of Marat obscure? All I know about it is he died in a bathtub.
Thank you for the reference. I was thinking about the Tulsa Massacre but could not recall what had brought it to public attention.
The Japanese Civil war period (sengoku jidai) had been well popularized by Clavell’s novel Shogun and the TV miniseries based on it, in the 1980s. Everyone in my high school class was watching the show and getting interested in learning Japanese!
The Korean War wasn’t an obscure event, but after the veterans have all died, how many would remember it in the US if not for reruns of MASH?
And he hung out on the other side of a forward slash from Sade.
Speaking about battles and songs, would the battle of Baltimore be more than a footnote in US history without the Star Spangled Banner?
And, on another note, what about Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood immortalizing the Clutter family murders
I remember, must’ve been late 70s early 80s, suddenly being intrigued by the Titanic story. I went to the library and there was almost nothing.
Hardly. One must remember that the Bayeux Tapestry was essentially unknown before its rediscovery in the eighteenth century. Yet, rightly or wrongly, Hastings had always been remembered as the pivotal event in the Norman Conquest.
There’s probably a reason people are told to not use “1066” as their password
Shark Week would have milked that story even if Jaws had never been made.
Actually, I don’t know if we would have had Shark Week without Jaws, so let’s just say that Shark Week would have milked that story even if Jaws didn’t reference it.
Washington’s crossing the Delaware to attack British forces in New Jersey would have been just one more Revolutionary Way battle if not for Emanuel Leutze’s painting
Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851 paintings) - Wikipedia
Ironically the original painting was destroyed by Allied bombings in World War 2.
A big dig at King George was that he hired German mercenaries to stomp the Americans. Trenton was acclaimed as the event where the Continental army prevailed over that outrage.
Any other war, one would expect Hessian heads to be sent back to King George, but Washington was pretty lenient towards them. Like Nazi POWs, a lot of them didn’t want to go back and ended up staying.
The painting is of course famous, and made the crossing famous. I remember the crossing, and I remember them “attacking Hessians”, but I don’t remember learning much about the “Battle of Trenton” per se. So I think that the crossing itself was an obscure historical event made famous by a work of art. If it hadn’t been made, then maybe the Battle of Trenton would have been more famous since reference to it would be needed in order contextualize the defeat of the Hessians. Or perhaps we would have forgotten about all three of them.
Huh. The only person I ever knew was associated with de Sade was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
The actual title is a bit longer:
IMO that remains famous (in a pub quiz answer kinda way) for being fought after the war ended.
Though my dad (who spent 1960 in the states) definitely knows about it because of the song
And Mike Agranoff’s epic retelling:
The Hindenburg disaster is also significant because it effectively ended the use of dirigibles for long-distance air travel.
I kinda consider the painting and the event equally famous. The assassination is an important point in the French revolution and one of the more significant political assassinations in European history, but it’s impossible to talk about it without mentioning the painting. But them again the same is true about the painting, it’s a really important famous painting but it’s impossible to talk about it without mentioning the event that it depicts
