Most of my Ladybird books were published in the more enlightened 80s and cover such important historical figures and events as He-Man, Lion-O and the evacuation of Cybertron.
@@ShastaOrangeMy dumbass should've remembered this. My dad had some of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, as well as Dynasty Warriors 4, while I was growing up. Doing the search on Yellow Turban Rebellion reminded me of Lu Bu again... He used to destroy me all the time in DW4 💀
@@wobkgs For wanting to repeat that "lawful" action of English Christian King Charles with Rachel Reeves' Mrs Thatcher - Twitter banned me - Novara Media / LBC / Labour reported me to the "21st century Gestapo" some time after I was terminated by BMW Porsche JCB with pneumonia - now Andy Burnham has me blacklisted - he is blocking a CSE inquiry in morally bankrupt Oldham - after I was thrown off a self-employment course when they found I wanted to build 250,000 affordable homes
There were other books like that back in those days. In 1952, when I was barely 11, I had just started secondary school. I found a book in the school's library about the indigenous people, 'aborigines', in Australia. The (presumably) white English author was at pains to describe just how 'primitive' they were. One of his examples was how they acquired honey, not by going to a grocery shop, like 'civilized' people, but by catching a bee, painting it white, and following it to its (wild) hive. Upon reading this, I was blown away by such a bloody miraculous tracking skill.
I haven’t heard of this. I believe the majority of the Aboriginal gatherers just found them or followed honey eating birds. Our native bees were stingless, so you could just reach in and collect the honey
@@stopmotionharry8989 You may well be correct. Maybe he made it up. My point was that this was written by some racist jerk who wanted to show just how 'primitive' the 'natives' were.
I actually have heard this one ... and apparently it is/was done. Given that we also have several species of stingless bees, AND that native bees tend to be dark in colour, it does scan.
Colonized countries have done better than those who weren't. India would be an even more savage hellhole than it is if it hadn't been under British rule. In fact, they'd be better off if they still were.
You mean the artifacts they left buried and forgotten about for thousands of years, until a people from another culture in another continent cared more about them than they did and unburied them then put them on display?
I came here to say the same thing. 'Greatest' has evolved in recent decades to almost exclusively be positive but that is not necessarily how the author meant it.
@@kingskelett6265 Unethical trading should not be considered good. If you make a huge profit by doing bad, that doesn't make you a good business. The idea that businesses should be judged on profitability alone has caused and continues to cause enormous harm to humanity and the environment.
I had thought Lawrence du Garde Peach might be a (fabulous) house name that Ladybird staff writers used, but he was an actual author and playwright. Wrote for movies, radio and many plays geared to amateur theatrics. Might make an interesting topic for a short: served in military intelligence in World War I, a Liberal Party candidate in 1929, and earned an OBE (services for literature) in 1972.
To follow up on this with a weird fact, one of the movie screenplays that L. du Garde Peach worked on was Chu Chin Chow. The movie was based on a very popular Arabian Nights style stage show which wikipedia describes as a combination musical and panto. (In the novel Auntie Mame, the title character had been a chorus girl in Chu Chin Chow.) The movie version starred the amazing Anna May Wong and Stan Lee claimed that he got his name for the Marvel character Fin Fang Foom from the movie he had seen as a boy.
I remember these ladybird books. What you have to know here is, this was the squeaky clean history at the time it was taught in British schools in the 1950s and 60s, the time when I was at school. Everything was either bad (nasty natives) or good (British Empire, hurrah!). Nothing in between. A lot of important stuff was even simply ignored. For instance, that Scotland was a country and not part of England was never mentioned. The same for Wales. We, the English, were always the good guys. Everybody else were untrustworthy foreigners.
Also, these were introductory history books - really intended to do no more than provide the basics of a person or topic, to be studied in more depth at a later age. They were well-written (in the grammar, style and vocabulary sense), but didn't do nuance.
@@cacwgm "Introductory" is something else. These books didn't introduce, they cemented false history and also false information in other subjects in malleable young minds who didn't have other alternatives to inform themselves. For instance, these books always portrayed Britain as a rich, comfortable country in which we could be glad to live because the rest of Europe is a desolate poor house. I honestly believed that Dutch children either wore rough wooden clogs or went without footwear because they were so poor. Imagine my surprise when I visited the western European mainland to find that people there had a higher living standard than we in good old Blighty.
@@cacwgmyeah criticism isnt of its brevity, but of the perspective. If I caught a teacher talking to my child like that I'd be appalled, and Im English but even we know better than to describe the Welsh and Scottish as these non existent tribal people instead of just the other cultures in the UK. Its a bit loopy
There was an element of English needed a boost as this was the era if list empire and greatness. Academics at the time knex that the books were decades behind the times . They were a cris between history and fanzine. Supportubg team England
Oh my goodness, you've just unlocked my memories of reading these books at school and in libraries during the 70s and 80s. I hadn't realised where so many of my assumptions about history have come from! I remember the Captain Cook and Easter Island pictures particularly. Because I was so young reading these, there was no question that they held the absolute truth.
As an American born in the early 1960’s, I can confirm this was how history was taught to me as a child, but then I grew up…and learned to read other things besides sanitized textbooks.
I don’t agree. IMO, this is whitewashing history. These books could inspire the creation of another book series. I learned a lot of things not taught at school by reading my uncle's comics. In particular Hergé’s “Tintin”.
@@charlespentrose7834 Indeed. In my mind I was like "If by 'great' we mean great at turning over a huge profit by being highly exploitive and violating every human right under the sun, then I suppose that's technically correct"
I may be wrong but I thought that 'negro' was simply the correct term for dark-skinned Africans at this time, in the same way we say 'black'. After all, all through the civil rights era in the States, black Americans from MLK down referred to themselves as such. It's jarring to our modern ears but was it as offensive at the time?
I think it was pretty much in common use then. I mean, it was no other term for it. Even Agatha Christie titled her book Ten Little.. What appalls me is for a word that is deemed no-no today, it is still very much in use by very people whom the word is used against.
In Spanish negro simply means "black", the colour. I don't like the term "coloured" for black people as us "whities" are much more colourful overall, and especially towards the red spectrum when spent too much time in the sun 😅
Another person growing up in the 60’s, I remember nursery rhymes and terrible slang with offensive words. Because it was seen as inoffensive I simply went along and repeated them. Mostly, it was because I didn’t know what I was saying and I lived in a very white (I don’t think there were any non-white within 100 miles of NE Iowa. In fact, upon visiting Chicago for the 1st time, I didn’t even think of relating those words with non-white people, my thought was they were just people who looked different (not bad) just different…
Goosey goosey gander is about a priest hunter who finds a priest hiding in a priest hole in a bed chamber ls who does not say his English or vernacular prayers who is then thrown down the stairs
White person caught in the sun with no sunscreen........ I managed to get a full body 2nd degree sunburn as a kid, I'd been swimming all day and it had been overcast.... yep, we go RED if we don't protect our skin.
I remember reading these, but the worst shock I had was when I was reading Pippi Longstocking to my children and finding the 'natives' bowing down to the white people because they 'wanted them' to be their rulers! Obviously that had completely gone over my head when I first read it as a child.
2:00 as a African American/Black male from American, I can promise you that's not the worst version of that word. In fact it's probably the best and least offense, at least in my opinion.
You under estimate how fanatical white progressives are when it comes to policing words. Academia has been completely co-opted by such idealogues, to the detriment of truth and rationalism.
It was considered "scientific" and non-offensive at the time; a counterpart to "caucasian" which we still use without issue. Amusingly, I note J Draper is unwilling to say _red_ indian.
At the time, that was considered the polite word to use. On the other hand, calling someone 'black' was considered offensive at the time. The N-word, however, has ALWAYS been a slur.
In a far corner of my school library there was a 1909 book called, roughly translated, “The Triumph of the White Race across the Globe.” Yeah. This was in the 90s. We were a heavily left-leaning hippie school who did themed weeks about Native American culture and spent history class discussing the horrors of colonialism. I choose to believe it ended up in the library by mistake (there wasn’t a database or a real librarian, it was just a book collection stuffed into a room) was only still in the library because I was the only kid nerdy enough to even find it. 😂
Finding those "how the heck did THIS get in here" books was such a joy. Like you won the lottery and discovered Atlantis at the same time. I would hide those books even better, so some other nerd could find it one day, years later.
I'm a USian, so we didn't get Ladybird books - what we got were very VERY racist depictions of Native Americans in our equivalent. My mom was a history major and thoroughly searched my books for inaccuracies, hence why I got the engineering and cultural history ones with model tipis, medieval European convents with the sides cut out to show the rooms, and showing how the Pyramids were actually built, by enslaved people sliding bricks along with water.
@oldasyouromens. Current archaeological consensus is that the pyramids were not constructed by slave labour. Instead, the evidence points to construction by tens of thousands of highly skilled, well paid artisans supported by a seasonal levy of agricultural workers providing the unskilled labour.
@@mrfitz96 I learned that with my anthropology degree, including that they were paid in salt, but it was in Intro for one day a long time ago. And the book I read did mention highly skilled craftsmen and artisans (as if enslaved people were not also those things while enslaved?) and how they were paid, but in the 90s we still thought a majority of the workers were enslaved on the projects. Now they've even found evidence of workers strikes. When talking about enslaved labor, I meant the engineering used by the unskilled seasonal labor specifically.
Just like the Khajiit, all indigenous people are great thieves 😃(in the elder scrolls that would probably be an except from something like “a short reading on the races of cyrodill”)
You laugh, but the fact that we still discuss the inhabitants of Skyrim and similiar fantasy works in terms of "races" shows that we might not have come as far as we would maybe like.
@@James-ix7xd peoples entire personality and skillset isnt determined by what paint swatch from hombase they resemble. Most things used to describe races apply to most races in general or dont hold up. A good example is 'tribal' peoples. Most of Europe was tribal well until the middle ages whereas supposedly inherently disorganised tribals in Africa or Asia have the oldest continuous civilisations on earth, inventing the basis of humanity while we rubbed rocks in caves. If race theory worked, Europe wouldnt have urbanised, parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas wouldnt have had abandoned cities or developed the oldest citied and empires in the first place. You cant have both immutable characteristics and a real history of changing characteristics
As an Australian I read all these Ladybird books in my childhood and was fascinated by them. However by the time I was 13 years old I'd figured out the Governor Phillip (British) had pulled a fast one with Australian Indigenous (Aboriginals). He never gave them a treaty.
Personally, I don’t find the word Negro to be offensive in the context of pre-1980s. It is a historical way of finding a certain peoples skin tone. I would say it is a defining term for African descendants, but that would be leaving out the aborigines. One cannot simply erase terms of the past. We can only read and interpret such as we would, for other terms, which we no longer have purchase for. However, I do admit that there are many words and context in which they are used that today and the future people who read them should be made aware that they are no longer advisable to be used in such context. However, if we revise all text to eliminate all past transgressions of our mostly held, literature would be full of highlights. Therefore let us not be so delicate as to point out what should be obvious or innocuous.
"Greatest" can also mean largest, particularly in old usage. So the East India Company being the "greatest company in the world" might not be a moral commentary on them, but a simple observation of their scale 🤷🏻♂️
Maybe its use was dramatically different in the UK in 1958, but it is worth noting at 2:00 that, while obviously inappropriate now, "negro" was nuanced in that era as it did see usage among many black Americans as an endonym at the time (though this slowly changed over time with the onset of the Civil Rights movement.) Its use was nuanced to be sure, as alongside being an endonym it was used matter-of-factly by white Americans who weren't be racist and dismissively by white Americans who were racist in place of an outright slur. Given the context of the rest of the paragraph, I could see the use at 2:00 being matter-of-fact and simply a product of its time. The rest of it is pretty rough. Whether someone from an Indigenous group in the US prefers American Indian, just Indian, or Native American varies a lot and is a nuanced topic (so far as I know the only universally agreed upon term is a person's own individual tribe, e.g. being addressed as Cherokee, Blackfoot, Dakota, etc.) but I know for a fact they never appreciated outsiders calling them "red."
I started to reread the Little house on the Prairie series and I was surprised at how much racism towards indigenous people in the book. I don’t think I remembered the book as much as I thought. I wish I could remember which book in particular this was from, but I stopped reading when the mom would exclaim “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”. This was a common book to read when I was in school in Canada.
Rereading the childhood classics to my 6 year old makes me utterly cringe at times. There is barely a book without some questionable language and attitudes on race or class 😬
You could consider the questionable language/attitudes as teaching moments for you to offer your kids at the end of the reading time. That's what I did back in my day.
Used to read these Ladybird books when I was a kid. That was in the 80's, when these books were published in the 50's. Yes the language they used at that time wouldn't be appropriate now, but they did encourage me to read more about these figures (i.e. more books) and this was before the internet was invented.
I have an animal encyclopedia from the early 1900s and the first page is a picture of a chimpanzee next to a young African boy and the caption literally reads "An 'interesting' comparison between two primates".
Lol, before I realized I had to take medical leave, I was taking a Theory and Criticism course this spring semester that took a look at "Heart of Darkness"....we definitely had to take into consideration its colonialist tone and its multiple instances of definitive biases. The fact alone that the "Heart of Darkness" is a metaphor for Africa, in that book... I wish my health hadn't interrupted my studies. We had a great deal of essay readings to go through that sounded fascinating, but things took a drastic turn. I'm hoping during medical leave that I can go over these essays when possible.
Somewhere in a box at my dad's house is my grandad's history book for kids, "A School History of England" co-written in 1911 by CRL Fletcher Rudyard Kipling, and it makes these look positively enlightened
I am an Indian but even I have to admit that East India company was indeed the greatest company of all time. Was it terrible for our people yes but I don't think any other company had such a profound impact on the world as did EIC.
@@birb7353 United States. Even if not pro-slavery or pro-genocide, many of the books I read growing up had a great deal of "the Indians had to move out of the way because the US HAD to progress" or "Slavery wasn't always that bad" or whitewashing of racial violence.
@@pendragon2012 That is unfortunate, but I'm glad you came around. I wish I could say everyone here in the US agrees those sentiments are egregious, but there are to many far right extremists these days for that to be even remotely accurate.
@@pendragon2012 I don’t like putting a political label on myself, I guess most people would consider me right wing though, so I’ll preface this with that. I think there is a tendency in the west to pretend as if western colonialism or imperialism was the historical exception rather than the historical rule, and ideas like self-determination and nationalism are not the new kids on the block. People dressed up manifest destiny in all kinds of high pollutant language, but when you get down to it, it was a more populous, more well organized, more technologically advanced group, taking land from less populous, less well organized, less technologically advanced ones, or essentially what has been happening since forever , and it kind of puts me on a personal level in a weird spot because of course I think that colonial aggression is bad, but a blanket condemnation of my ancestors would be Tantamount to condemning my own existence, which seems stupid because I’m actually rather glad to be here you see. Is this making sense? Of course even that’s a completely inaccurate statement because wile some of my ancestors had been here since before the revolution, a bunch of them just got off a boat around the turn of the 19th century.
Re: that "defend themselves against the Red Indians" part, the sentence immediately before that mentions, "the white man had come to take their land". So the book's not implying that the native Americans were meanies for attacking, but it's actually going to a whole next level of, "Yeah, they were understandably angry, but hey, white folks have a right to take what they want. We're simply superior, after all."
I loved these as a kid. The drawings were fantastic. There were a lot of good history books for kids. Though I did once find one about a prisoner who was found guilty of something and his punishment was being made to sit or stand against a wall while another was built in front of him to seal him up and suffocate him🥴. That stuck with me.
I think that could be thrown in the same bucket as the fairytale effect, sometimes especially as children we read fantastical stories, because in someways they aren’t so fantastic, or as GK Chesterton said “children don’t need fairytales to tell them that dragons exist, they already know that dragons exist, children need fairytales to tell them that dragons can be killed.”
Annoys to no end when people complain about revisions of books as if it was some freedom of speech issue. They become unreadable for most people if you do not adjust language to fit the times. If you are a publisher and want to sell a Pippi Longstocking book it is going to be much easier if her father is not a "negro king." It does not change the message of the book at all when he becomes a "south sea king" it just makes it attractive for more readers. I am also pretty sure the writer did not intend it the way we read those words today, language evolves.
The fear is warranted. A partial rewrite becomes a total rewrite becomes retconning history becomes Ministry of Truth rewriting everything constantly because the Ruling Class Cannot be or have ever been fallible. It is important that things stay as they are or were. Updates for new information is correct. Updates for "Don't like that word' is dangerous.
With the Pippi Longstocking book, the original Swedish version it said something like, "bandit king." The other term, which in the US version was the N-word for a while (not even Negro, the worse one), was chosen by an American translator.
I read those same books in the mid-70s and early 80's and might still have that book on Richard the Lionheart. The English had no problem exporting them to "The colonies of The Caribbean" as they were useful in teaching us our 'place'.
Oh boy. I was taught some pretty cringe stuff in elementary school in the 70s in the US. The one I remember best (because even as a 9-year-old white kid I was apalled) was that Native Americans didn't qualify as a "civilization", because they lacked record keeping. Never mind the ignorance of settlers to their culture (which included record keeping) and the overt efforts by colonizers to genocide them and erase their cultures. But the painting of the Ice Age was awesome 😂
I read those books & the Ladybird series books growing up in the 80s. Plus I was never aware that the author Enid Blyton was a racist until recently, although her :golliwog' characters were always the 'bad guys' in The Noddy book series.
America had a similar series of biographies of famous people in history. I absolutely loved them, until I found the biography of Virgina Dare!!! Then I questioned EVERYTHING!
Oh my goodness I remember these books so well. As a child you don't question it, you think Raleigh and Drake were heroic adventurers - no piracy going on here at all 😂. One thing I clearly remember though when reading the one about Cromwell which basically said they had to execute the king for the good of the country and my grandmother said she had always been taught it was a terrible thing to cut the King's head off. It was my first awareness of bias in history and different interpretations of the same facts. So I thank that little Ladybird book for that.
Worst part is that old, used copies of English children's books from the early/mid-20th century ended up being sold to kids in developing countries so we pick up and internalise these racial stereotypes. I'm from Malaysia and had loads of Ladybird, Enid Blyton, etc. growing up. Of course the bulk of the material is delightful and harmless (Peter and Jane and Pat the dog, etc) but you'll still find lots of Malaysian boomers and some slightly younger people of my generation who've been thoroughly brainwashed by these Anglo colonialist stereotypes.
I have a 1969 book about children's developement and child-rearing around the world. In the section about play it has two white kids, clothed, indoors, playing with a doll and a fire truck. On the opposite page a handful of Black children, completely naked, standing around a turtle, and some text about evaluating it as dinner. The "civilised" kids and the "primitive" ones, yikes!
I grew up in Trinidad, and Ladybird was a huge part of my childhood reading, though I stuck mainly to the fairy tales: those illustrations by Eric Winter still haunt me with their beauty.
The bit that called James 'bigoted' was trying to talk about the motivation behind the Gunpowder Plot- it was talking about his policy towards Catholics. It's arguably true in that respect. Catholics had been horribly repressed under Elizabeth, and many had hoped for more toleration when James became king. Instead, he actually tightened anti-Catholic laws, leading to the assassination plot
@@SpocksCat There was very little acknowledgement that he was gay or bisexual for centuries. I've read Victorian books that hint at it, but it wasn't something that was taught to kids. The Ladybird book called him 'bigoted' because he was aggressively anti-Catholic.
The books definitely seem to be a product of their times. It would be interesting to see how ethnocentric the formal history texts of the same period were. And the lore about Sir Walter Raleigh and the laying of the coat for the queen was presented on both sides of the Atlantic as I learned in Virginia public school history in the 1970s (Given how much of a scoundrel he was, it was probably someone else’s coat).
As an Irishman myself, that depiction was pretty accurate but not because we wanted to look like that, mainly because of the oppression and famine we suffered 😂
Vestiges of Empire 😂 I remember these from my primary school library and the local secondhand bookshop, especially the Florence Nightingale one! Context: Singapore 1970s & 1980s
I have a sizeable collection of these myself. Rereading them I find they are... pretty politically correct for their time, and surprisingly accurate. But the "weirdly edited" comment is spot on, in terms of what they choose to leave in, and what they choose to leave out. They were extremely anglocentric, and very much treat anyone non-English as foreign.
Huh, I definitely remember the aesthetic of the Ladybird books from growing up in Canada, but I don't think we got the super specifically British ones here.
Apparently any not-nice things the Hawaiians did to Cpt. Cook was because he and his men took complete advantage of their hospitality, then returned only to demand they repair his damaged ship. (And then it got even worse of course, but that explains the supposed stealing.)
Ladybird books (for all their shortcomings) were fantastic; I still have several. BTW, how many of them were published with mirror writing and pictures on the left? They must be pretty rare...
"Everything was going swimmingly in the Jewel of the Crown. But some people got all uppity with wanting little things like "rights" and "a representative republic of their own making." This old, skinny bloke named Gandhi even tried staving himself, the cad!"
These were on the shelves in the 90's when I was a child. However they were considered 'the older books' by then. Mad to think of this high and mighty British empire feeling still existing well past the empire having being dissolved. Couldn't help but notice but there wasn't an indigenous population left on Rapa Nui by the time Cook arrived.
My nana was a teacher, and so I has access to a lot of these growing up. I don’t think any I had were on history though. I certainly don’t remember any of this but at the same time I can’t say kid me growing up in the 2000s found these books particularly interesting so it might be that I don’t remember.
Be the change you want to see! We don't need to wait for ladybird to remake them, we could follow a pretty similar format of 1 page of text, 1 page of full illustration, and make some new books.
I contributed a section to a Ladybird book some years ago.... and this made me think, OMG, what did I write? (A section on caves for QI elf Molly Oldfield's book, Everything Under the Sun). Greetings from Kentucky.
That has brought back a few memories, especially the Guy Fawkes one. Around the time I was reading them there were no black people living on our estate, though I can remember we had a visitor to our junior school from Trinidad, he seemed rather exotic at the time and we all drew pictures of him in our schoolbooks, just like we drew pictures of the bishop when he came to visit dressed in his purple cassock looking equally exotic to our eyes. Did I grow up to be a racist? Apparantly not.
Was in US public schools from 2000-2012, and some of our textbooks were like this, with or without racial slurs. And before you ask, I went to school in the Northeast, our school was just poorly funded so our textbooks, maps, equipment, etc, were all really old. My 8th grade world map said USSR on it where Russia should have been and it was 2008. Also we were taught the Civil War was about states rights, Native Americans were cannibals and we never learned about Vietnam because it made the administration uncomfortable and adults didn't want to talk about it.
I feel like king John sucked though. Like, it makes sense they write it that way. Idk, I read books like that when I was a kid, and I loved them just because they write like if someone sat you down and told you. Yeah it has biases which sucks but I still really love them, they’re so much better than boring history textbooks
I'm pretty sure there was an IRL problem of Pacific islanders trying to steal anything made of iron from visiting ships, because metal was so useful. Sailors also tried to use any metal objects as a means to pay for prostitutes.
I went to school during the 90s in the US. The things written here about the natives in America is pretty much the same that was taught in American history books which is so awfully whitewashed to be "good english people" and "bad natives." Especially for thanksgiving, as if everything were happy and peaceful. I'm hoping the text is different for history books nowadays, but I'm really not feeling optimistic about it.
My gosh, this brought back happy memories. Not the racist stuff, obvs, but the HISTORY. The joy of reading about historical people. I think I had that Henry VIII one and the Walter Raleigh one. My love of history stems from these books....and Stig of the Dump.
I have a bunch of Ladybirds inherited from a grandparent, luckily all of them are classic fairtales like Goldilocks and Cinderella, so the more egregiously racist bits are absent. The illustrations for Beauty and the Beast though are proper sus. Rather than a lionlike figure as in Disney, they opted for an apelike one, and the implications are not lost on me. We're keeping that one in the back room when the rest come out for my kid.
There are currently some 'adult' ladybird books which are parodies based on topical issues. Their history is a bit depressing, though. An artist called Miriam Elia made a fake Ladybird book satirising the contemporary art scene in 2014, which unexpectedly became a hit. The Penguin Group, who owned the rights to the real Ladybird books sued her for copyright infringement, then, seeing how popular her book was, hired other people to make their own range of satirical titles. The range of subjects for the history titles wasn't quite as Anglocentric as presented here. I remember having one about Robert the Bruce when I was a kid, and I think there were some about figures from classical history and European history as well (although I'm sure they still managed to be pretty problematic).
I had completely forgotten that I'd read some of these Ladybird books when I was young. I can't remember which ones, but the format in particular triggered memories. Thank you! Of course, as a kid I had no idea how racist they were. I do remember a couple of racist jokes from the Dandy (or maybe it was Beano) comic that are just appalling.
I grew up with those books - remember the picture of Walter Raleigh laying his cloak over a puddle for QE I. They got me interested in history ( then H.E.Marshall’s “Our Island Story - it’s out of print but interestingly inspired Antonia Fraser).
Some of those illustrations are so familiar. I can't remember which of them I read, but I'm sure I read several. There's got to be an interesting PhD thesis to be written about colonial ideology and children's books.
I learned to read with Ladybird books. On a hot, dry and dusty sheep station in Outback Queensland. I had a pushy mother so at age 3 I’d read one of the simpler books during the day and when my uncle came in from the paddock, smelling of horse sweat and gun oil I’d get a chocolate koala as my reward. This was 1968. Perhaps that’s why I unknowingly became an Anglophile and moved to the UK 26 years ago. Mind you, I realise now it was the EU I had fallen in love with. The UK without Europe is a miserable, fractious place and I’m going back to where I came from.
As a European who's been following the whole Brexit drama for years. I also used to be pro-England/pro-UK. In fact, when I was a kid an my country played a number of football matches against England, I actually supported England. Romania won 2 matches and drew once, but still... I was on England's side. And just like you, Brexit changed my mind over night regarding England and the English, especially since a lot of the campaign rhetoric was anti-European, even specifically anti-Romanian. I mean, ok, if that's what they think of us, since the vote was a formal and official blessing for that rhetoric... I was clearly wrong about England and the English. And yet, despite it all, my favourite 3 all time historical figures, were English. I may have given up on England, but it would be unfair not to acknowledge that they once had 3 people I greatly admire.
@@octavianpopescu4776 Living here, I know the majority of British people aren’t like that. It was 37% of the electorate, about 28% of the population who voted to quit, if you include people too young to vote and people who lived here but couldn’t vote. Some Romanians, in that group, one of whom was a friend of mine at the studio I was working at during that time. Now, I’m not gonna defend the Poms because they changed my life in many negative ways. They stole my EU citizenship, of which I was inordinately proud and they screwed up my retirement plans with my wife, we were going to buy a cottage in the Pyrenees and move between London and the continent at whim. But I do think brexit will be reversed, just not in the time I have left to enjoy it. Maybe 10 years, more like 25 I reckon. If I were European I’d drive a hard bargain and not allow any of the special treatment the UK was given previously. But the UK is going to need the EU and the EU will be stronger with the UK in it. I don’t go for all the economic arguments that dominated the press here, my argument for the EU is that it may well be the last best hope for Western democracy and civilisation. Some might say - so what? But I like European values and civilisation and, without looking down on anyone else (except maybe Russians! 😀) I want it to survive. I like the values Europe has brought us. It’s been a long bloody road, but today Europe is civilisation in the way I see it. The social democratic governments, capitalist but with care for the less fortunate, the decision to get along rather than shoot at one another. That is a set of values I like. Sure, it’s not perfect but compared to anywhere else on the planet at the moment it’s the best we have. I consider Australia to be roughly equal but its infatuation with all things American has changed my beloved society into a less compassionate, more selfish place. Not that different to how the UK now feels, only it has better weather and more money. Hence my decision to return. Don’t get me wrong, I love my country of birth but the UK between 1997 and about 2007 was the sweet spot for me. It felt like heaven to live here, I particularly enjoyed working on the continent and my wife and I went across to as many countries as we could over time to just take the place in. I loved being an EU citizen, to be part of it. Again, I love Australia but when I was growing up it didn’t particularly love me - my Italian last name (not the one here, that’s a nom de plume) singled me out for bullying. That’s changed now, it’s kinda cool to have a southern or Eastern European name in Oz these days. But it was not in the 1970s. Anyway, basically Brexit felt to me like I’d been cheated by a lover. I truly thought I loved the UK and many of its people are still the people I fell in love with in 1997. But it’s not the same place. The UK has become what I, and most Australians, thought it was like. It’s back to the 1970s. At least until the xenophobic and stupid , who were mostly older people, have died. Then it will try to rejoin the EU, tail between its legs (although they will never admit that!). I’ve never been to Romania, but it was on my list as my friend Mike M made it sound interesting and I always love visiting where I have locals to show me around. I may not get there now, which is a shame. Maybe when the war is over, my wife and I plan to visit Ukraine. Maybe I’ll give Mike a call and see if he wants to catch up on Bucharest on the way over or way back. Thx for your comment.
I’m currently studying history and in a textbook about Ancient Greece that we had to read, the author compared the differences of slavery in ancient times to the “n*****slavery of the American south”. The textbook was published in 1997…
And children's rhymes and poems like 'Ten Little N****r Boys', and the lullaby my Nan sung to me about 'time for little picaninnies to go to sleepy-byes' which I've just changed to include my granddaughter's names 😉
Most of my Ladybird books were published in the more enlightened 80s and cover such important historical figures and events as He-Man, Lion-O and the evacuation of Cybertron.
I remember learning about the Deception's Lightning Strike in history lessons in Primary School...
He Man was actually the name of a Chinese general who fought in the Yellow Turban Rebellion circa 200 AD. Not even kidding, look it up.
@@ShastaOrangeMy dumbass should've remembered this. My dad had some of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, as well as Dynasty Warriors 4, while I was growing up. Doing the search on Yellow Turban Rebellion reminded me of Lu Bu again... He used to destroy me all the time in DW4 💀
ah, yes, the Great Energon Blight that saw millions of Cybertronians emigrate to the new world
@@ShastaOrange I think I did see that somewhere
"Cromwell was also a good man. He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor - except in Ireland - cruel"
😅😅
@@wobkgs For wanting to repeat that "lawful" action of English Christian King Charles with Rachel Reeves' Mrs Thatcher - Twitter banned me - Novara Media / LBC / Labour reported me to the "21st century Gestapo" some time after I was terminated by BMW Porsche JCB with pneumonia - now Andy Burnham has me blacklisted - he is blocking a CSE inquiry in morally bankrupt Oldham - after I was thrown off a self-employment course when they found I wanted to build 250,000 affordable homes
@@wobkgs Oh, I know! 😅 I was just offering an excerpt from a Ladybird book on him :)
At least he acknowledged Ireland; I'm pleasantly surprised
Um, do you have any idea of what Cromwell did in Ireland? Look it up.@@R0ssMM
Everyone apparently gets a pass for being cruel to Ireland.
There were other books like that back in those days. In 1952, when I was barely 11, I had just started secondary school. I found a book in the school's library about the indigenous people, 'aborigines', in Australia. The (presumably) white English author was at pains to describe just how 'primitive' they were. One of his examples was how they acquired honey, not by going to a grocery shop, like 'civilized' people, but by catching a bee, painting it white, and following it to its (wild) hive. Upon reading this, I was blown away by such a bloody miraculous tracking skill.
I haven’t heard of this. I believe the majority of the Aboriginal gatherers just found them or followed honey eating birds. Our native bees were stingless, so you could just reach in and collect the honey
@@stopmotionharry8989 You may well be correct. Maybe he made it up. My point was that this was written by some racist jerk who wanted to show just how 'primitive' the 'natives' were.
I actually have heard this one ... and apparently it is/was done.
Given that we also have several species of stingless bees, AND that native bees tend to be dark in colour, it does scan.
"All these cultures were notorious thieves; and you can learn about them at the British Museum"
...where, for some reason, all their artifacts are stored.
@@magnushultgrenhtc , cultural artifacts many of which these cultures had stolen from other cultures during their many wars. Lol
Colonized countries have done better than those who weren't. India would be an even more savage hellhole than it is if it hadn't been under British rule. In fact, they'd be better off if they still were.
You mean the artifacts they left buried and forgotten about for thousands of years, until a people from another culture in another continent cared more about them than they did and unburied them then put them on display?
😆
The stuff about East India Company depends on how you understand "greatest". If you mean "scope, sheer scale", then it could be said unironically
I came here to say the same thing. 'Greatest' has evolved in recent decades to almost exclusively be positive but that is not necessarily how the author meant it.
I'm reminded of Harry Potter. "After all, He-Who-must-Not-Be-Named did great things. Terrible, yes. But great. "
And in trading, they were pretty good.
Ethics and morality? Hehe, noooooo
@@kingskelett6265 Unethical trading should not be considered good. If you make a huge profit by doing bad, that doesn't make you a good business. The idea that businesses should be judged on profitability alone has caused and continues to cause enormous harm to humanity and the environment.
The text read, "Greatest trading company", which is certainly true. It makes no comment about ethics or morality.
I had thought Lawrence du Garde Peach might be a (fabulous) house name that Ladybird staff writers used, but he was an actual author and playwright. Wrote for movies, radio and many plays geared to amateur theatrics. Might make an interesting topic for a short: served in military intelligence in World War I, a Liberal Party candidate in 1929, and earned an OBE (services for literature) in 1972.
To follow up on this with a weird fact, one of the movie screenplays that L. du Garde Peach worked on was Chu Chin Chow. The movie was based on a very popular Arabian Nights style stage show which wikipedia describes as a combination musical and panto. (In the novel Auntie Mame, the title character had been a chorus girl in Chu Chin Chow.) The movie version starred the amazing Anna May Wong and Stan Lee claimed that he got his name for the Marvel character Fin Fang Foom from the movie he had seen as a boy.
He does seem a fascinating character - like you, I'd assumed it was a house pen name. To add to the list there's academic doctor too!
I remember these ladybird books. What you have to know here is, this was the squeaky clean history at the time it was taught in British schools in the 1950s and 60s, the time when I was at school. Everything was either bad (nasty natives) or good (British Empire, hurrah!). Nothing in between. A lot of important stuff was even simply ignored. For instance, that Scotland was a country and not part of England was never mentioned. The same for Wales. We, the English, were always the good guys. Everybody else were untrustworthy foreigners.
Also, these were introductory history books - really intended to do no more than provide the basics of a person or topic, to be studied in more depth at a later age. They were well-written (in the grammar, style and vocabulary sense), but didn't do nuance.
@@cacwgm "Introductory" is something else. These books didn't introduce, they cemented false history and also false information in other subjects in malleable young minds who didn't have other alternatives to inform themselves.
For instance, these books always portrayed Britain as a rich, comfortable country in which we could be glad to live because the rest of Europe is a desolate poor house. I honestly believed that Dutch children either wore rough wooden clogs or went without footwear because they were so poor. Imagine my surprise when I visited the western European mainland to find that people there had a higher living standard than we in good old Blighty.
@@cacwgmyeah criticism isnt of its brevity, but of the perspective. If I caught a teacher talking to my child like that I'd be appalled, and Im English but even we know better than to describe the Welsh and Scottish as these non existent tribal people instead of just the other cultures in the UK. Its a bit loopy
Add that to bored apathetic modern youth and it perfectly explains brexit.
There was an element of English needed a boost as this was the era if list empire and greatness.
Academics at the time knex that the books were decades behind the times .
They were a cris between history and fanzine. Supportubg team England
Oh my goodness, you've just unlocked my memories of reading these books at school and in libraries during the 70s and 80s.
I hadn't realised where so many of my assumptions about history have come from! I remember the Captain Cook and Easter Island pictures particularly. Because I was so young reading these, there was no question that they held the absolute truth.
As an American born in the early 1960’s, I can confirm this was how history was taught to me as a child, but then I grew up…and learned to read other things besides sanitized textbooks.
Proper updates for these books would be lovely, much more appealing than the adult aimed parodies that they keep putting out.
That's a good point! They're funny for reading once, but that's about it!
Don't ruin it
@@muzaffer4045ruin what?
Wow, this comment had an english accent of it's own, I didn't even read it with that intention and it just arised on it's own
I don’t agree. IMO, this is whitewashing history. These books could inspire the creation of another book series. I learned a lot of things not taught at school by reading my uncle's comics. In particular Hergé’s “Tintin”.
The east India company being one of the greatest companies ever where great means big true - where great means good not so much.
Oh they were good - good at exploitation and making money
Ehhh, I mean, they had to be nationalised because they were bankrupt. Not really that "great" by any sense of the word
@@charlespentrose7834 Indeed. In my mind I was like "If by 'great' we mean great at turning over a huge profit by being highly exploitive and violating every human right under the sun, then I suppose that's technically correct"
I may be wrong but I thought that 'negro' was simply the correct term for dark-skinned Africans at this time, in the same way we say 'black'. After all, all through the civil rights era in the States, black Americans from MLK down referred to themselves as such.
It's jarring to our modern ears but was it as offensive at the time?
I think it was pretty much in common use then. I mean, it was no other term for it. Even Agatha Christie titled her book Ten Little..
What appalls me is for a word that is deemed no-no today, it is still very much in use by very people whom the word is used against.
In Spanish negro simply means "black", the colour. I don't like the term "coloured" for black people as us "whities" are much more colourful overall, and especially towards the red spectrum when spent too much time in the sun 😅
@@AccAkut1987 suntan doesn't count lol
@@AccAkut1987 I remember a few years ago Americans on social media having a race meltdown over black Crayola crayons having the word negro on them 🤣🤣
Another person growing up in the 60’s, I remember nursery rhymes and terrible slang with offensive words. Because it was seen as inoffensive I simply went along and repeated them. Mostly, it was because I didn’t know what I was saying and I lived in a very white (I don’t think there were any non-white within 100 miles of NE Iowa. In fact, upon visiting Chicago for the 1st time, I didn’t even think of relating those words with non-white people, my thought was they were just people who looked different (not bad) just different…
Some current kids rhymes have extremely dark backgrounds based on torture and outrageous practices, and we wouldn't even expect such connections!
Well Mr. Punch is problematic already.
Like my favourite rhyme - Henry VIII Beating Up Orphans
Super problematic upon second reading :(
Some of them, but many are completely benign and have had dark meanings ascribed to them that were never there, like “ring around the rosie”
Goosey goosey gander is about a priest hunter who finds a priest hiding in a priest hole in a bed chamber ls who does not say his English or vernacular prayers who is then thrown down the stairs
Chuckles at 'Red Indian'. Being Indigenous to the Americas, I don't think I've ever seen a 'red' person in my life.
And neither of the words were capitalized, which makes it even weirder. Why?
White person caught in the sun with no sunscreen........ I managed to get a full body 2nd degree sunburn as a kid, I'd been swimming all day and it had been overcast.... yep, we go RED if we don't protect our skin.
@@mfinchina__117maybe elfdream is a German troll? so be careful
I'm an enrolled member of a Federally recognized tribe. ;)
Come to Ireland especially when sun shines for more than a day.
.
The East India Company was objectively "great," but that isn't synonymous with "good" or "ethical."
I remember reading these, but the worst shock I had was when I was reading Pippi Longstocking to my children and finding the 'natives' bowing down to the white people because they 'wanted them' to be their rulers! Obviously that had completely gone over my head when I first read it as a child.
2:00 as a African American/Black male from American, I can promise you that's not the worst version of that word. In fact it's probably the best and least offense, at least in my opinion.
You under estimate how fanatical white progressives are when it comes to policing words. Academia has been completely co-opted by such idealogues, to the detriment of truth and rationalism.
Hello Romaro Brandon, Black man from American.
It was considered "scientific" and non-offensive at the time; a counterpart to "caucasian" which we still use without issue. Amusingly, I note J Draper is unwilling to say _red_ indian.
Agreed. Born in America in the 60s and Negro is listed as race on my birth certificate. It was the term used even by Dr King and Malcolm X.
At the time, that was considered the polite word to use. On the other hand, calling someone 'black' was considered offensive at the time.
The N-word, however, has ALWAYS been a slur.
In a far corner of my school library there was a 1909 book called, roughly translated, “The Triumph of the White Race across the Globe.”
Yeah.
This was in the 90s. We were a heavily left-leaning hippie school who did themed weeks about Native American culture and spent history class discussing the horrors of colonialism. I choose to believe it ended up in the library by mistake (there wasn’t a database or a real librarian, it was just a book collection stuffed into a room) was only still in the library because I was the only kid nerdy enough to even find it. 😂
An old version of my high school's US history book had a chapter called, "Beating off the Indians."
@@mfinchina__117 racisim aside
wat.
PHRASING
@@mfinchina__117 At least buy them dinner, first.
You know it is true right?
Finding those "how the heck did THIS get in here" books was such a joy. Like you won the lottery and discovered Atlantis at the same time. I would hide those books even better, so some other nerd could find it one day, years later.
Re-reading Robinson Crusoe as an adult was eye-openning to say the least.
I just read a Conan short story called " The vale of lost women" ...yeah, THAT was written in a different time....
I'm a USian, so we didn't get Ladybird books - what we got were very VERY racist depictions of Native Americans in our equivalent. My mom was a history major and thoroughly searched my books for inaccuracies, hence why I got the engineering and cultural history ones with model tipis, medieval European convents with the sides cut out to show the rooms, and showing how the Pyramids were actually built, by enslaved people sliding bricks along with water.
@oldasyouromens. Current archaeological consensus is that the pyramids were not constructed by slave labour. Instead, the evidence points to construction by tens of thousands of highly skilled, well paid artisans supported by a seasonal levy of agricultural workers providing the unskilled labour.
denying the existence of aliens is racist - and who else do you think built the pyramids?
@@mrfitz96 I learned that with my anthropology degree, including that they were paid in salt, but it was in Intro for one day a long time ago. And the book I read did mention highly skilled craftsmen and artisans (as if enslaved people were not also those things while enslaved?) and how they were paid, but in the 90s we still thought a majority of the workers were enslaved on the projects. Now they've even found evidence of workers strikes. When talking about enslaved labor, I meant the engineering used by the unskilled seasonal labor specifically.
Being highly skilled and enslaved are not mutually exclusive.
@@reginabillotti Being followed with well paid is.
Nobody 'well paid' bunch of bloody slaves.
I a. Australian. I remember these books in my school library when I was a child in the 1950s and 60s. I loved them. What a blast from the past!
The ignorance of the older times is funny, talking about peoples like they're skyrim races lol.
Just like the Khajiit, all indigenous people are great thieves 😃(in the elder scrolls that would probably be an except from something like “a short reading on the races of cyrodill”)
You laugh, but the fact that we still discuss the inhabitants of Skyrim and similiar fantasy works in terms of "races" shows that we might not have come as far as we would maybe like.
@@jakobmaximilianriedl1013and some people get very vocally upset at the idea of not using 'races' in fantasy
The ignorance of modern time is funny, talking about people like races don't exist or don't matter.
@@James-ix7xd peoples entire personality and skillset isnt determined by what paint swatch from hombase they resemble.
Most things used to describe races apply to most races in general or dont hold up. A good example is 'tribal' peoples. Most of Europe was tribal well until the middle ages whereas supposedly inherently disorganised tribals in Africa or Asia have the oldest continuous civilisations on earth, inventing the basis of humanity while we rubbed rocks in caves.
If race theory worked, Europe wouldnt have urbanised, parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas wouldnt have had abandoned cities or developed the oldest citied and empires in the first place. You cant have both immutable characteristics and a real history of changing characteristics
As an Australian I read all these Ladybird books in my childhood and was fascinated by them. However by the time I was 13 years old I'd figured out the Governor Phillip (British) had pulled a fast one with Australian Indigenous (Aboriginals). He never gave them a treaty.
I grew up 60s/70s, and history was just lists of monarchs and battles. Ladybird books were good in theory, and abysmal in writing, all too often...
Personally, I don’t find the word Negro to be offensive in the context of pre-1980s. It is a historical way of finding a certain peoples skin tone. I would say it is a defining term for African descendants, but that would be leaving out the aborigines. One cannot simply erase terms of the past. We can only read and interpret such as we would, for other terms, which we no longer have purchase for. However, I do admit that there are many words and context in which they are used that today and the future people who read them should be made aware that they are no longer advisable to be used in such context. However, if we revise all text to eliminate all past transgressions of our mostly held, literature would be full of highlights. Therefore let us not be so delicate as to point out what should be obvious or innocuous.
"Greatest" can also mean largest, particularly in old usage. So the East India Company being the "greatest company in the world" might not be a moral commentary on them, but a simple observation of their scale 🤷🏻♂️
What baffles me about 2:00 is that they had “Arabs and Africans” perfect alliteration handed to them on a silver platter and chose not to use it
Maybe its use was dramatically different in the UK in 1958, but it is worth noting at 2:00 that, while obviously inappropriate now, "negro" was nuanced in that era as it did see usage among many black Americans as an endonym at the time (though this slowly changed over time with the onset of the Civil Rights movement.) Its use was nuanced to be sure, as alongside being an endonym it was used matter-of-factly by white Americans who weren't be racist and dismissively by white Americans who were racist in place of an outright slur. Given the context of the rest of the paragraph, I could see the use at 2:00 being matter-of-fact and simply a product of its time.
The rest of it is pretty rough. Whether someone from an Indigenous group in the US prefers American Indian, just Indian, or Native American varies a lot and is a nuanced topic (so far as I know the only universally agreed upon term is a person's own individual tribe, e.g. being addressed as Cherokee, Blackfoot, Dakota, etc.) but I know for a fact they never appreciated outsiders calling them "red."
I started to reread the Little house on the Prairie series and I was surprised at how much racism towards indigenous people in the book. I don’t think I remembered the book as much as I thought. I wish I could remember which book in particular this was from, but I stopped reading when the mom would exclaim “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”. This was a common book to read when I was in school in Canada.
Rereading the childhood classics to my 6 year old makes me utterly cringe at times. There is barely a book without some questionable language and attitudes on race or class 😬
Just remember that in 50-100 years people will say the same about books written now 😅
Well, times change. In the future, they might say the same thing for today's books.
Unquestionably true.@@chrislyne377
You could consider the questionable language/attitudes as teaching moments for you to offer your kids at the end of the reading time. That's what I did back in my day.
@@chrislyne377 I certainly hope so!
Used to read these Ladybird books when I was a kid. That was in the 80's, when these books were published in the 50's. Yes the language they used at that time wouldn't be appropriate now, but they did encourage me to read more about these figures (i.e. more books) and this was before the internet was invented.
I have an animal encyclopedia from the early 1900s and the first page is a picture of a chimpanzee next to a young African boy and the caption literally reads "An 'interesting' comparison between two primates".
💀💀💀💀💀
That isn’t racist, all humans are primates so that caption is literally true.
Lol, before I realized I had to take medical leave, I was taking a Theory and Criticism course this spring semester that took a look at "Heart of Darkness"....we definitely had to take into consideration its colonialist tone and its multiple instances of definitive biases. The fact alone that the "Heart of Darkness" is a metaphor for Africa, in that book...
I wish my health hadn't interrupted my studies. We had a great deal of essay readings to go through that sounded fascinating, but things took a drastic turn.
I'm hoping during medical leave that I can go over these essays when possible.
Somewhere in a box at my dad's house is my grandad's history book for kids, "A School History of England" co-written in 1911 by CRL Fletcher Rudyard Kipling, and it makes these look positively enlightened
i feel like these are the exact books horrible histories aimed to correct or at least thats the immediate connection i jump to
I am an Indian but even I have to admit that East India company was indeed the greatest company of all time. Was it terrible for our people yes but I don't think any other company had such a profound impact on the world as did EIC.
Here in the US, I definitely had to unlearn a lot of perspectives.
Out of curiosity, what did you have to unlearn? Where were you from?
@@birb7353 United States. Even if not pro-slavery or pro-genocide, many of the books I read growing up had a great deal of "the Indians had to move out of the way because the US HAD to progress" or "Slavery wasn't always that bad" or whitewashing of racial violence.
@@pendragon2012 That is unfortunate, but I'm glad you came around. I wish I could say everyone here in the US agrees those sentiments are egregious, but there are to many far right extremists these days for that to be even remotely accurate.
@@birb7353 Sad but true.
@@pendragon2012
I don’t like putting a political label on myself, I guess most people would consider me right wing though, so I’ll preface this with that.
I think there is a tendency in the west to pretend as if western colonialism or imperialism was the historical exception rather than the historical rule, and ideas like self-determination and nationalism are not the new kids on the block.
People dressed up manifest destiny in all kinds of high pollutant language, but when you get down to it, it was a more populous, more well organized, more technologically advanced group, taking land from less populous, less well organized, less technologically advanced ones, or essentially what has been happening since forever , and it kind of puts me on a personal level in a weird spot because of course I think that colonial aggression is bad, but a blanket condemnation of my ancestors would be Tantamount to condemning my own existence, which seems stupid because I’m actually rather glad to be here you see.
Is this making sense?
Of course even that’s a completely inaccurate statement because wile some of my ancestors had been here since before the revolution, a bunch of them just got off a boat around the turn of the 19th century.
Re: that "defend themselves against the Red Indians" part, the sentence immediately before that mentions, "the white man had come to take their land". So the book's not implying that the native Americans were meanies for attacking, but it's actually going to a whole next level of, "Yeah, they were understandably angry, but hey, white folks have a right to take what they want. We're simply superior, after all."
I loved these as a kid. The drawings were fantastic. There were a lot of good history books for kids. Though I did once find one about a prisoner who was found guilty of something and his punishment was being made to sit or stand against a wall while another was built in front of him to seal him up and suffocate him🥴. That stuck with me.
I think that could be thrown in the same bucket as the fairytale effect, sometimes especially as children we read fantastical stories, because in someways they aren’t so fantastic, or as GK Chesterton said “children don’t need fairytales to tell them that dragons exist, they already know that dragons exist, children need fairytales to tell them that dragons can be killed.”
Annoys to no end when people complain about revisions of books as if it was some freedom of speech issue. They become unreadable for most people if you do not adjust language to fit the times. If you are a publisher and want to sell a Pippi Longstocking book it is going to be much easier if her father is not a "negro king." It does not change the message of the book at all when he becomes a "south sea king" it just makes it attractive for more readers. I am also pretty sure the writer did not intend it the way we read those words today, language evolves.
The fear is warranted. A partial rewrite becomes a total rewrite becomes retconning history becomes Ministry of Truth rewriting everything constantly because the Ruling Class Cannot be or have ever been fallible. It is important that things stay as they are or were. Updates for new information is correct. Updates for "Don't like that word' is dangerous.
With the Pippi Longstocking book, the original Swedish version it said something like, "bandit king." The other term, which in the US version was the N-word for a while (not even Negro, the worse one), was chosen by an American translator.
@@mfinchina__117 Yeah, I vaguly remember a english TV show where he was some kinda pirate king?
I read those same books in the mid-70s and early 80's and might still have that book on Richard the Lionheart. The English had no problem exporting them to "The colonies of The Caribbean" as they were useful in teaching us our 'place'.
Agreed. An updated text, further histories and personalities, but keeping the 1950s quality and standard of illustrations.
My mother used Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories to teach me about racism
Oh boy. I was taught some pretty cringe stuff in elementary school in the 70s in the US. The one I remember best (because even as a 9-year-old white kid I was apalled) was that Native Americans didn't qualify as a "civilization", because they lacked record keeping. Never mind the ignorance of settlers to their culture (which included record keeping) and the overt efforts by colonizers to genocide them and erase their cultures.
But the painting of the Ice Age was awesome 😂
Im Scottish and i approve the the description 🗡️
I read those books & the Ladybird series books growing up in the 80s. Plus I was never aware that the author Enid Blyton was a racist until recently, although her :golliwog' characters were always the 'bad guys' in The Noddy book series.
America had a similar series of biographies of famous people in history. I absolutely loved them, until I found the biography of Virgina Dare!!! Then I questioned EVERYTHING!
Literally every colonial: "We are *defending ourselves* from the mean natives. "
Modern day also has it.
They beheaded people. Why are we pretending they didn't?
Oh my goodness I remember these books so well. As a child you don't question it, you think Raleigh and Drake were heroic adventurers - no piracy going on here at all 😂. One thing I clearly remember though when reading the one about Cromwell which basically said they had to execute the king for the good of the country and my grandmother said she had always been taught it was a terrible thing to cut the King's head off. It was my first awareness of bias in history and different interpretations of the same facts. So I thank that little Ladybird book for that.
I love your way of telling stories
Worst part is that old, used copies of English children's books from the early/mid-20th century ended up being sold to kids in developing countries so we pick up and internalise these racial stereotypes. I'm from Malaysia and had loads of Ladybird, Enid Blyton, etc. growing up. Of course the bulk of the material is delightful and harmless (Peter and Jane and Pat the dog, etc) but you'll still find lots of Malaysian boomers and some slightly younger people of my generation who've been thoroughly brainwashed by these Anglo colonialist stereotypes.
I have a 1969 book about children's developement and child-rearing around the world.
In the section about play it has two white kids, clothed, indoors, playing with a doll and a fire truck. On the opposite page a handful of Black children, completely naked, standing around a turtle, and some text about evaluating it as dinner.
The "civilised" kids and the "primitive" ones, yikes!
Thank you for covering this my fellow Draper 🤝
I still own most of the ones about kings and queens of England. Now I'm tempted to reread them.
That East India Company quote was a big "Yikes!" moment 😬
I had completely forgotten these books! Thanks for the walk down memory lane.
Well, I would say most sociopaths are treading the line of pure evil... So king john being pure evil isn't that far of a stretch.
I grew up in Trinidad, and Ladybird was a huge part of my childhood reading, though I stuck mainly to the fairy tales: those illustrations by Eric Winter still haunt me with their beauty.
Of course James I was bad news, he was Scottish! (Or did they still say Scotch back then?)
Scotch for liquor, Scots for people.
@@Spearca "But we're both rather tasty!" (old SNL sketch)
The bit that called James 'bigoted' was trying to talk about the motivation behind the Gunpowder Plot- it was talking about his policy towards Catholics. It's arguably true in that respect. Catholics had been horribly repressed under Elizabeth, and many had hoped for more toleration when James became king. Instead, he actually tightened anti-Catholic laws, leading to the assassination plot
I was assuming the Ladybird book hated on him like that because he was gay.
@@SpocksCat There was very little acknowledgement that he was gay or bisexual for centuries. I've read Victorian books that hint at it, but it wasn't something that was taught to kids. The Ladybird book called him 'bigoted' because he was aggressively anti-Catholic.
The books definitely seem to be a product of their times. It would be interesting to see how ethnocentric the formal history texts of the same period were. And the lore about Sir Walter Raleigh and the laying of the coat for the queen was presented on both sides of the Atlantic as I learned in Virginia public school history in the 1970s (Given how much of a scoundrel he was, it was probably someone else’s coat).
As an Irishman myself, that depiction was pretty accurate but not because we wanted to look like that, mainly because of the oppression and famine we suffered 😂
Vestiges of Empire 😂 I remember these from my primary school library and the local secondhand bookshop, especially the Florence Nightingale one! Context: Singapore 1970s & 1980s
I have a sizeable collection of these myself. Rereading them I find they are... pretty politically correct for their time, and surprisingly accurate. But the "weirdly edited" comment is spot on, in terms of what they choose to leave in, and what they choose to leave out. They were extremely anglocentric, and very much treat anyone non-English as foreign.
Huh, I definitely remember the aesthetic of the Ladybird books from growing up in Canada, but I don't think we got the super specifically British ones here.
Apparently any not-nice things the Hawaiians did to Cpt. Cook was because he and his men took complete advantage of their hospitality, then returned only to demand they repair his damaged ship.
(And then it got even worse of course, but that explains the supposed stealing.)
I love their recent satirical ones. IE "The Husband and How he Works". You could take a look at Blue Peter's sanitised histories too.
I think I only had Ladybird fairystories - Sleeping Beauty comes to mind.
Ladybird books (for all their shortcomings) were fantastic; I still have several. BTW, how many of them were published with mirror writing and pictures on the left? They must be pretty rare...
"Everything was going swimmingly in the Jewel of the Crown. But some people got all uppity with wanting little things like "rights" and "a representative republic of their own making." This old, skinny bloke named Gandhi even tried staving himself, the cad!"
These were on the shelves in the 90's when I was a child. However they were considered 'the older books' by then. Mad to think of this high and mighty British empire feeling still existing well past the empire having being dissolved.
Couldn't help but notice but there wasn't an indigenous population left on Rapa Nui by the time Cook arrived.
I had some of those books as a child. The pictures you showed brought back memories.
My nana was a teacher, and so I has access to a lot of these growing up. I don’t think any I had were on history though. I certainly don’t remember any of this but at the same time I can’t say kid me growing up in the 2000s found these books particularly interesting so it might be that I don’t remember.
Be the change you want to see! We don't need to wait for ladybird to remake them, we could follow a pretty similar format of 1 page of text, 1 page of full illustration, and make some new books.
I contributed a section to a Ladybird book some years ago.... and this made me think, OMG, what did I write? (A section on caves for QI elf Molly Oldfield's book, Everything Under the Sun). Greetings from Kentucky.
That has brought back a few memories, especially the Guy Fawkes one. Around the time I was reading them there were no black people living on our estate, though I can remember we had a visitor to our junior school from Trinidad, he seemed rather exotic at the time and we all drew pictures of him in our schoolbooks, just like we drew pictures of the bishop when he came to visit dressed in his purple cassock looking equally exotic to our eyes. Did I grow up to be a racist? Apparantly not.
Was in US public schools from 2000-2012, and some of our textbooks were like this, with or without racial slurs. And before you ask, I went to school in the Northeast, our school was just poorly funded so our textbooks, maps, equipment, etc, were all really old. My 8th grade world map said USSR on it where Russia should have been and it was 2008. Also we were taught the Civil War was about states rights, Native Americans were cannibals and we never learned about Vietnam because it made the administration uncomfortable and adults didn't want to talk about it.
I feel like king John sucked though. Like, it makes sense they write it that way. Idk, I read books like that when I was a kid, and I loved them just because they write like if someone sat you down and told you. Yeah it has biases which sucks but I still really love them, they’re so much better than boring history textbooks
GOD I love your videos and humour. Bring em back.
I'm pretty sure there was an IRL problem of Pacific islanders trying to steal anything made of iron from visiting ships, because metal was so useful. Sailors also tried to use any metal objects as a means to pay for prostitutes.
The layout and illustration of these books is outstanding.
As an Indian I thank the East India Company for bringing true democracy and uniting India into one nation
Check out pre-WW2 Children’s Encyclopaedias. They can be extraordinary…
For Americans, your opening statement could be, “So, how do some people think history should be taught?”
I went to school during the 90s in the US. The things written here about the natives in America is pretty much the same that was taught in American history books which is so awfully whitewashed to be "good english people" and "bad natives." Especially for thanksgiving, as if everything were happy and peaceful. I'm hoping the text is different for history books nowadays, but I'm really not feeling optimistic about it.
My gosh, this brought back happy memories. Not the racist stuff, obvs, but the HISTORY. The joy of reading about historical people. I think I had that Henry VIII one and the Walter Raleigh one.
My love of history stems from these books....and Stig of the Dump.
Let's not rewrite how people in the past viewed history.
A new set of books instead with new illustrations would be my choice.
They should write a book about Mary Seacole, she deserves as much recognition as Florence Nightingale.
I have a bunch of Ladybirds inherited from a grandparent, luckily all of them are classic fairtales like Goldilocks and Cinderella, so the more egregiously racist bits are absent. The illustrations for Beauty and the Beast though are proper sus. Rather than a lionlike figure as in Disney, they opted for an apelike one, and the implications are not lost on me. We're keeping that one in the back room when the rest come out for my kid.
Renember them well - the issue is not having read them, it's if you haven't understood the reason you need to learn from them.
1:48 But who were the people on the island?
And I better not get a response like "The people that lived there."
The Rapa Nui people
@@stopmotionharry8989 👍
There are currently some 'adult' ladybird books which are parodies based on topical issues. Their history is a bit depressing, though. An artist called Miriam Elia made a fake Ladybird book satirising the contemporary art scene in 2014, which unexpectedly became a hit. The Penguin Group, who owned the rights to the real Ladybird books sued her for copyright infringement, then, seeing how popular her book was, hired other people to make their own range of satirical titles.
The range of subjects for the history titles wasn't quite as Anglocentric as presented here. I remember having one about Robert the Bruce when I was a kid, and I think there were some about figures from classical history and European history as well (although I'm sure they still managed to be pretty problematic).
Corbie Press in the 90s copied the old Ladybird formula as close as copyright law allowed, but for Scotland - could it have been one of theirs?
I had completely forgotten that I'd read some of these Ladybird books when I was young. I can't remember which ones, but the format in particular triggered memories. Thank you! Of course, as a kid I had no idea how racist they were. I do remember a couple of racist jokes from the Dandy (or maybe it was Beano) comic that are just appalling.
I'm glad that Horrible Histories came out when I was in school. Made me realise just how accurate the movie Jabberwocky is.
that show was a lot less horrible than it claimed, especially when it came to presenting Bri'ish history.
The Samuel Pepys book gave me nightmares. There was a picture of people with the plague
I loved Lady Bird here in India. Heidi and such fairy tales were all lady bird for mine.
I grew up with those books - remember the picture of Walter Raleigh laying his cloak over a puddle for QE I. They got me interested in history ( then H.E.Marshall’s “Our Island Story - it’s out of print but interestingly inspired Antonia Fraser).
Some of those illustrations are so familiar. I can't remember which of them I read, but I'm sure I read several. There's got to be an interesting PhD thesis to be written about colonial ideology and children's books.
I learned to read with Ladybird books. On a hot, dry and dusty sheep station in Outback Queensland. I had a pushy mother so at age 3 I’d read one of the simpler books during the day and when my uncle came in from the paddock, smelling of horse sweat and gun oil I’d get a chocolate koala as my reward. This was 1968.
Perhaps that’s why I unknowingly became an Anglophile and moved to the UK 26 years ago. Mind you, I realise now it was the EU I had fallen in love with. The UK without Europe is a miserable, fractious place and I’m going back to where I came from.
As a European who's been following the whole Brexit drama for years. I also used to be pro-England/pro-UK. In fact, when I was a kid an my country played a number of football matches against England, I actually supported England. Romania won 2 matches and drew once, but still... I was on England's side. And just like you, Brexit changed my mind over night regarding England and the English, especially since a lot of the campaign rhetoric was anti-European, even specifically anti-Romanian. I mean, ok, if that's what they think of us, since the vote was a formal and official blessing for that rhetoric... I was clearly wrong about England and the English. And yet, despite it all, my favourite 3 all time historical figures, were English. I may have given up on England, but it would be unfair not to acknowledge that they once had 3 people I greatly admire.
@@octavianpopescu4776 Living here, I know the majority of British people aren’t like that. It was 37% of the electorate, about 28% of the population who voted to quit, if you include people too young to vote and people who lived here but couldn’t vote. Some Romanians, in that group, one of whom was a friend of mine at the studio I was working at during that time. Now, I’m not gonna defend the Poms because they changed my life in many negative ways. They stole my EU citizenship, of which I was inordinately proud and they screwed up my retirement plans with my wife, we were going to buy a cottage in the Pyrenees and move between London and the continent at whim. But I do think brexit will be reversed, just not in the time I have left to enjoy it. Maybe 10 years, more like 25 I reckon. If I were European I’d drive a hard bargain and not allow any of the special treatment the UK was given previously. But the UK is going to need the EU and the EU will be stronger with the UK in it. I don’t go for all the economic arguments that dominated the press here, my argument for the EU is that it may well be the last best hope for Western democracy and civilisation. Some might say - so what? But I like European values and civilisation and, without looking down on anyone else (except maybe Russians! 😀) I want it to survive. I like the values Europe has brought us. It’s been a long bloody road, but today Europe is civilisation in the way I see it. The social democratic governments, capitalist but with care for the less fortunate, the decision to get along rather than shoot at one another. That is a set of values I like. Sure, it’s not perfect but compared to anywhere else on the planet at the moment it’s the best we have. I consider Australia to be roughly equal but its infatuation with all things American has changed my beloved society into a less compassionate, more selfish place. Not that different to how the UK now feels, only it has better weather and more money. Hence my decision to return. Don’t get me wrong, I love my country of birth but the UK between 1997 and about 2007 was the sweet spot for me. It felt like heaven to live here, I particularly enjoyed working on the continent and my wife and I went across to as many countries as we could over time to just take the place in. I loved being an EU citizen, to be part of it. Again, I love Australia but when I was growing up it didn’t particularly love me - my Italian last name (not the one here, that’s a nom de plume) singled me out for bullying. That’s changed now, it’s kinda cool to have a southern or Eastern European name in Oz these days. But it was not in the 1970s.
Anyway, basically Brexit felt to me like I’d been cheated by a lover. I truly thought I loved the UK and many of its people are still the people I fell in love with in 1997. But it’s not the same place. The UK has become what I, and most Australians, thought it was like. It’s back to the 1970s. At least until the xenophobic and stupid , who were mostly older people, have died. Then it will try to rejoin the EU, tail between its legs (although they will never admit that!).
I’ve never been to Romania, but it was on my list as my friend Mike M made it sound interesting and I always love visiting where I have locals to show me around. I may not get there now, which is a shame. Maybe when the war is over, my wife and I plan to visit Ukraine. Maybe I’ll give Mike a call and see if he wants to catch up on Bucharest on the way over or way back. Thx for your comment.
I’m currently studying history and in a textbook about Ancient Greece that we had to read, the author compared the differences of slavery in ancient times to the “n*****slavery of the American south”. The textbook was published in 1997…
And children's rhymes and poems like 'Ten Little N****r Boys', and the lullaby my Nan sung to me about 'time for little picaninnies to go to sleepy-byes' which I've just changed to include my granddaughter's names 😉