by Jason Porath
* This rush to canonize her is nowhere more evident than in 2000’s centennial celebrations of the Yaa Asantewaa War, detailed in first-person detail by T. C. McCaskie. As part of that extremely fractured event, the government opened a Yaa Asantewaa museum, which housed many of the surviving artifacts of her life. A scant four years later, the museum burned down in a fire that McCaskie hints was started intentionally. In McCaskie’s estimation, the truth of Yaa Asantewaa’s life and motivations was devoured, quite literally, to further various political ambitions.
* And then talk about themselves using insufferable third-person perspectives.
* Including a four-year trip as a missionary in Liberia. Elizabeth made sure Mary traveled in first-class instead of steerage. They were such besties.
* Also known as the Aba Women’s Riots.
* Also known as Hansen’s disease. Some organizations agitated for the phasing-out of the term “leprosy,” owing to the stigma associated with it, but given that the disease has become rare, easily treatable, and less stigmatized, this book will use the better-known term.
* The couple had a daughter. Age two at the time of Joey’s diagnosis, she was sent away to live with her grandparents so as to not contract leprosy.
* What became of her husband and young daughter is seemingly unknown. Nothing written about her after the 1940s mentions her Philippine family. Her name at the end of her life was Joey Guerrero Leaumax, and her obituary notes no immediate survivors.
* You may at this point be saying to yourself, “Nanny is not a name.” You are correct! But not in the way you might think. In this case, Nanny is probably short for Nanani—a combination of nana (a term of respect) and ni (“first mother,” another term of respect). Nanny’s actual name may be lost to time. See also the entries on Nana Asma’u and Yaa Asantewaa.
* When it came to the Maroons, the British literature characterizes them as bloodthirsty misogynist savages (despite the fact that they were, and are, ruled by women). One particularly notable jerk, Edward Long (1734–1813), wrote that one of their women could marry an orangutan and it would be no dishonor to the simian.
* The Maroons never actually killed the entirety of a platoon. Instead, they would leave one person alive to go back and tell the others what had happened.
* Specifically, some Jamaicans have pointed to the churning caused by two nearby rivers merging as a potential source of the “Nanny’s Pot” legend. She and the other Maroons were known to be gifted herbologists, so the idea of them cooking up some incapacitating agent out of local plants is totally not out of the question.
* Karla Gottleib, one of the primary historians who’s looked into Nanny’s story, supposes that this was because Nanny didn’t trust the British but saw the necessity in a peace treaty. Sure enough, in one of the least shocking plot twists in history, the British walked all over the treaty shortly after ratifying it. They relocated the entirety of the Leeward Maroons to Sierra Leone and in 1842 tried revoking the rights of all remaining Maroons to their land. Jerks.
* An oft-overlooked aspect of the Maroons was that despite being escaped slaves themselves, they kept slaves. They integrated some of the people they freed from British plantations into their community, while others they took as slaves. History is complicated!
* While these may sound like flowery exotic names, in the original language they lose some of the poetry—Xkeban means “sinner,” Utz-Colel means “good woman,” and Xtabay means “female ensnarer.” Mayan books of baby names were apparently not much fun.
* These flowers were called Xtabentún. It’s also the name of a liquor company. Honestly, Xtabay would probably make a pretty good name for a liquor company. Like, Xtabay Microbrewing? Who wouldn’t drink that!
* Yes, he trained bears. For the circus. Where they fought people and other animals. This author hopes it was as cool as it sounds.
* Admittedly, at one gold solidus per girl, she paid dramatically under market value, which was around five times that. According to Procopius, though, this did not go as intended—many of the girls went right back to sex work, and some whom she moved into her Metanoia convent killed themselves. Take this account with a pinch of salt, though: Procopius was a pretty angry guy.
* Possibly very young. Many sources say Lakshmibai (or Manikarnika, as she was named before marriage) was actually born in 1835, which would have placed her around age seven when she married. Rao would have been 29. Other historians think it more likely she was born in 1828, making her a somewhat-more-sensible (but still uncomfortable) 13.
* Rani is a title, like Queen.
* Here “British” should be taken to mean “British East India Company,” the megacompany/nightmarish capitalist endgame that effectively represented the British government in India for most of the century.
* Tope was one of several neighboring leaders who brought their armies and military expertise to Lakshmibai’s David versus Goliath rebellion. Tope himself was apparently quite popular, for reasons that are not at all evident to this author.
* She’d spent some time as a nurse in the military and had served on the Military Wives Council, so it’s also possible she picked up some skills elsewhere.
* To be fair, the Israelites had just gotten back to doing unspecified “evil in the eyes of the Lord” after their last hero bit the dust, so they sort of had it coming? Those Old Testament scamps!
* Named Barak, after the United States president. Okay, maybe not.
* According to professor of Jewish studies Marla Segol, this was a direct attack on the Qur’an’s claim that women were “one degree lower than men.”
* Most seem to agree that this was a rhetorical device rather than a reorientation of her gender identity.
* Christine was, in fact, one of Joan of Arc’s biggest fans. Christine’s last work was an ecstatic poem praising Joan. This poem is one of the only surviving reactions by a contemporary woman to Joan’s life!
* This would be Jean de Meun’s contribution to the Romance of the Rose, where he portrays women as deceptive cheats and gives men advice on how to outwit them. It had all the progressive views on gender you’d expect from a 14th-century pickup artist manual.
* All except two of her sisters, whom she was never able to save, and her husband, John. He, having been born free, refused to go. In the year between her escape and her first return to smuggle out family members, he remarried. The two never had children (well, kind of—see the next footnote) during their relationship and ostensibly had a difficult marriage. Harriet nonetheless kept his name and remained faithful to him until his death.
* Officially, Harriet never had any children, but there is some murkiness surrounding her “niece,” Margaret Tubman. Margaret’s daughter would in later years claim that Harriet had actually kidnapped her mother from a happy family. However, the two apparently had a very happy and close relationship, and many contemporary accounts remark on their physical similarities. This has led some historians to put forward the idea that Margaret was, in fact, Harriet’s daughter and had been raised, for reasons unknown, by others for the first part of her life. In this hypothesis, Margaret’s father is presumed to be either John (in which case, Harriet would have been pregnant during her escape) or a white slave owner, who presumably forced himself on Harriet (Margaret was described as having light skin).
* One of whom brought onboard two pigs contemptuously named “Jefferson Davis” and “Beauregard” (after Confederate general P. G. T Beauregard).
* Well, best beloved after the death of Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife. Khadija is the only one with whom he had children.
* In fact, let’s call the pro-Bakr folks “Sunnis” and the anti-Bakr folks “Shiites.” Because that’s what they’re called. Now those news reports about the Middle East make a little more sense, right?
* This could also be translated as “The Incident of the Slander.” (Or is it libel now that it’s being written down in this book?)
* To be fair, A’isha t
otally played this game too. When one of the other wives got hold of some honey that the Prophet liked, A’isha and yet another wife pretended it smelled horrible so that the Prophet wouldn’t spend so much time with the honey-dispensing wife. Things occasionally got very catty in the Prophet’s household.
* With 80 lashes, ouch. Allah: not cool with gossip.
* The particulars are way more complicated. While A’isha was on a spiritual journey to clear her head, Uthman, the third Islamic leader after Muhammad, was assassinated and ‘Ali was put in charge. Already not much of a supporter of ‘Ali, and further incensed that he didn’t execute Uthman’s killers, A’isha eventually declared him unfit to rule and led an army against him. Again: massive simplification, but that’s the gist.
* According to one source, the Drevlians bent over two birch trees and tied Igor’s legs to them. The killers then let the trees spring back to their normal state, tearing him in half.
* A Slavic tribe, now either extinct or subsumed into other ethnicities, courtesy of Olga.
* According to legend, Khutulun’s great-great-granddad Genghis Khan used the same tactic when sacking the fortress of Volohai centuries later.
* “Amazons” as a term is virtually the only word we have to describe this corps of women—the European observers who wrote of them apparently never asked them what they called themselves.
* And to be fair, there were a lot of things to dislike the Dahomeans for. As previously mentioned, they were ruthless, bloodthirsty, and heavy into slavery. By the standards of conventional morality, even if you only believe a small amount of the historical record on them, they are borderline indefensible.
* This is not much of an exaggeration. She attempted to divorce him, but the case was thrown out. Over three years, he would on various occasions beat her, wave a gun in her face, spit on her, and tell her, “Go to hell, bitch,” while frequently sneaking out to see prostitutes. After she left, he took out a newspaper ad telling merchants to not sell anything to her. His name was Rudolf MacLeod, and regardless of his other possible merits, it is the position of this author that he was a real crap sandwich.
* Having been harassed by the military for being a spy at virtually every step in her travels—to the point where she slapped an officer across the face hard enough to draw blood—she opined thus to Ladoux upon meeting him: “Now this idiotic game has to end. Either I am dangerous, and in that case, you must expel me from France, or I am just a nice little woman who, having danced a winter, would like . . . some peace of mind.”
* Typical examples have her seducing her headmaster at 16 years old, receiving chocolates and flowers in her jail cell from admirers, and, of course, virtually any slanderous sex act one could assign to a woman.
* Ladoux was never definitively proven to be a German spy, but he did run afoul of the law multiple times in the years following. He never returned to a position of prominence.
* Nobody was sure who her father was. Given Josephine’s notably light skin, many biographies assume her father was a white man. Baker, never having had a totally cordial relationship with her mother, was unsure herself. Josephine had issues with family.
* This was Willie Wells, whose marriage to Baker is rarely counted in official tallies, as it was illegal—she was 13 and he was 25. She hit him with a beer bottle after an argument over her being pregnant (she maintained she was, although she wasn’t). Josephine had issues with boundaries.
* Caroline Reagan, the woman who had brought her from the States to France, was especially badly burned. When Josephine left her show mid-tour, she ended up stranding Reagan and all her fellow performers in Europe with no way to get back home. Josephine had issues with friendships.
* Officially there were four. In reality, she had closer to seven, due to her often marrying one before divorcing the previous one. Josephine had issues with commitment.
* The Rainbow Tribe kids would have been one of the star attractions. She wanted them to be a symbol of the peace possible from the partnership of all races, but she vacillated wildly between mothering them far too much and not mothering them at all. Josephine had issues with her children.
* While the first three lines of this dialogue are paraphrased, this last one is too hysterical to change. Ancient texts have a hilariously understated approach to murder.
* “Himyar and Tubba’s daughters are we / For us to kill you is quite easy / For we are the flames of war / We have for you great trouble in store.” Old school diss tracks are just the best.
* Khawlah’s sassy reaction to their appearance: “Took you long enough! Thank God we didn’t actually need your help.”
* Quite literally unforgettable—in modern times, she’s become the namesake of many schools and military groups, including an all-female unit in the Iraqi military.
* It’s worth pointing out that Cyrus (and, obliquely, Croesus) had already been defeated by a woman. Years earlier, Cyrus had invaded the Amyrgians and taken their king hostage. In response, the Amyrgian queen, Sparethra, raised an army of 500,000 people (40 percent of them women), crushed Cyrus, and rescued her husband. She later swore fealty to Cyrus (for unclear reasons) and helped Cyrus defeat Croesus in battle. Sometime after that defeat, Croesus and Cyrus became friendly—but not before Cyrus set Croesus on fire for a little bit.
* This is one of several accounts of Cyrus’s death—others claim he died under totally different circumstances. To this day, nobody is sure which one is correct. History is complicated!
* The god of the ancient Jews. This write-up uses “Yahweh” because when you start tossing in other gods, like the Baals, things get confusing. Rightly it should probably be “YHWH,” since written Hebrew doesn’t have vowels and nobody knows how it’s actually pronounced. Popular guesses include “YAH-weh,” “Je-HOV-ah,” and “Ye-HOV-ih.” Try freestyling your own!
* To be fair, Yahweh showed plenty of charity and grace, too! It must be admitted, however, that the biblical level of divine mercy was, let’s say, wildly inconsistent.
* At least, not most of the time. King Solomon built a bunch of temples to other gods when he married foreign brides, and nobody seemed to really care.
* The Bible also tosses out that she “cut off” the Yahweh priests—which means she either killed them or exiled them. It’s tossed in with almost no details, as opposed to the lurid exposés of her other supposed schemes.
* Qiu was her surname, and Jin her given name.
* This wasn’t a small task. Most papers of the time were written in an impenetrably academic tone. By writing on a more accessible level, she made the news of the day and her ideas much more widely available.
* The story continued: said colonel found out her identity when he cut open her clothing with a samurai sword and then “conducted a thorough investigation” to determine that he hadn’t scratched “any part of her white skin.” Yeah. Most of the stories about Kawashima are tinged with this sort of sexual undertone.
* Her claim at her trial that this was fashion for Japanese women at the time seems to be half-true at best.
* The Mukden incident is the best-known example. In 1931, Japanese agents, posing as Chinese provocateurs, bombed train tracks—though without causing any fatalities—and thus gave Japan a pretext to invade. This maneuver was apparently quite flagrant—almost the entire international community condemned it, and Japan soon thereafter withdrew from the League of Nations.
* A somewhat silly moniker, given that Mata Hari’s cover story was that she was herself Asian.
* See the sidebar for a long discussion about this terminology.
* Later they became the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, one of the most elite divisions of the entire Soviet military.
* Raskova’s main claim to fame came from 1938, when she was 26. Attempting to set a long-distance flying record along with two friends, she ran into trouble when their plane began to ice over. In order to save her friends, Raskova ejected all the plane’s spare weight, and then hers
elf. She landed in backwoods forest, where she survived for 10 days before being found by a hunter. When she arrived back in Moscow, she was hailed as a hero.