Fixed.
Danke!
The first genocide of the 20th century was committed by German colonial authorities in Namibia. Estimates of deaths range from 20,000 to 100,000:
Many people are familiar with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which burned 3.3 square miles of the city and killed 300 people:
Relatively few people are familiar with the much worse Peshtigo Fire that happened on the same day, but burned a staggering 1875 square miles and killed somewhere around 2000 people:
The Port Huron Fire of 1871 happened THAT day too:
I’m surprised nobody’s mention the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed World War One. It basically fell out of popular memory, at least until the Covid19 pandemic.
I’ll expand this to lighter-than-air craft in general. Manned balloons predate the Wright brothers by over a 100 years. Rigid airships have been around since the late 19th century, were in commercial passenger service before World War I, and in regular trans-Atlantic service during the 1930s. Yet only the Hindenburg get’s remembered and only that one flight. Which is a little odd given how widespread they were in popular imagination in the 1920s and '30s.
This sounds like you might be referring to the Indian Indenture System, which was something we would recognize today as slavery (but was then, for want of a better word, a workaround). Anyways, whether you were referring explicitly to this or not, the Indian Indenture System (and for that matter British Slavers in India in general) are pretty much a forgotten part of history. We choose not to teach this stuff, perhaps? The system ended with the First World War, not the Second - not that that’s exactly something to boast about.
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The Norman occupation of Sicily qualifies I think. Basically a random Norman adventurer conquered all of Sicily, fighting the Byzantines and the Arabs, and founded a diverse multi-ethnic kingdom that lasted more than a century.
Also interesting is the fact that at the time the Byzantines employed the Varangian Guard an elite force of Northern European mercenaries (mainly viking but also other Northern Europeans.) After the defeat of the Anglo Saxons by the Normans in the (much better known) battle of Hastings, many Anglo Saxons fled England and ended up in the Varangian Guard, so there was a “Battle of Hastings part 2” (thousands of miles to the east of Hastings) when Anglo Saxons in the Varganian Guard fought Norman invaders in the Byzantine empire.
I believe that all these 1871 fires were NOT a coincidence - that it was actually a meteorite fall that caused them. Among other things, ore boats on the Great Lakes saw them, and possibly heard them if they exploded in the sky, a la Chelyabinsk.
In other words, a version of the Tunguska Event that happened to strike in a populated area.
ETA: The Tunguska event was this.
Funny you should mention conspiracy theories when this happened earlier today.
So much of America’s race relations have been obscured from history.
For example, it’s only been recently that people have started to become aware of the race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that razed “Black Wall Street”, an area of Black prosperity.
https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre
Other such events remain obscure or unknown, however.
How about when racist terrorists literally overthrew an elected local government to assert racist hegemony? This occurred in North Carolina.
Or the fact that the summer of 1919 was marked by race riots.
Or did you know that there was once consideration in Congress to approve a national monument dedicated to the subservient, happy slave?
Equally interesting to me is the original purpose of the Statute of Liberty. It was an homage to the freed slave (note the broken chains around her feet). The poem about immigrants came years later.
Long forgotten and repressed from common memory in Germany, even long after the genocides committed by Germans in WWII had been acknowledged. Officially recognized as the first genocide by German hands by the Bundestag as late as 2021:
America invaded Russia. About 13,000 American troops occupied portions of revolutionary Russia for a period of nearly two years.
I would not call that an invasion, since we were there at the invite of what was considered the Legit government.
That’s the one I was going to mention.
A bit like Gitmo. We were invited in by the government of the day, then overstayed the non-welcome we got from the subsequent government.
Not necessarily an evil thing to do, but also not real friendly.
You beat me to the 1918 Pandemic (Spanish Flu). It infected ~500 million people (about 1/3 of the world’s population) and killed ~50 million. The United States lost ~675, 000 people, more casualties than World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Life expectancy dropped by 12 years.
It was unique in that the mortality rate was particularly high in healthy young adults, 20-40yo. There was a severe shortage of coffins in many locations. In Philadelphia (one of the worst-hit cities with ~1000 deaths per day at the height of the pandemic), corpses were piled high on death wagons. It killed quickly, many were healthy in the morning and dead by night.
Remarkably, it was largely forgotten shortly after the pandemic subsided. Psychologists say the reason is that it was too horrible to remember.
Camp Funston (now Fort Riley) in Kansas was Ground Zero for the spread of the virus, as thousands of soldiers trained there before shipping out to Europe. My Grandpa was stationed there from November 1918 to February 1919, but fortunately did not contract it or bring it back home.
History has pretty much decided to ignore the eugenics movement. The idea was that part of the general campaign to improve society involved discouraging inferior people from breeding. At its peak, it involved involuntary sterilization programs that were sanctioned by the government.
The American eugenics movement was later cited by the Nazis as a historical predecessor of their own “final solution” which shocked Americans into a belated realization of how wrong the movement had been. But overall, the movement has now been erased from the general historical memory.
This one is weird to me. Both Leverage and the older Numb3rs had episodes that mentioned this (fears of a new, deliberately engineered, strain in those shows). And they were far from the only ones. While it’s not mentioned daily or even weekly, it’s shown up on a significant number of tv shows in this context over the years.