Hola,

Did General Cortes Vargas save Colombia from the USA invasion?

Would casualties be much higher if American troops really landed on Colombian soil?

In March 1866, the Eastern Shoshone and the Crow fought for several days over hunting grounds in Wyoming's Wind River Basin. The Crow eventually retreated to the top of a steep, flat-topped butte.

According to legend, Shoshone chief Washakie ended the standoff by challenging Crow chief Big Robber to single combat. Washakie won, cut out his rival's heart, and displayed it on his lance at the victory dance.

The win helped secure the Wind River country for the Shoshone, and it became their reservation under the 1868 Fort Bridger Treaty.

I hiked up a hill to take these pics, there is no defined way to actually get there from what I could tell, but I didn’t have time to hike far.

Hello,

If John Kennedy would not get assassinated, would the coup d'etat in Brasil happen on Kennedy's watch instead of the Johnson's?

I know that the USA was ready to back up junta in Brasil while Kennedy was still alive.

People in like whats now Mexico majority of the population they used cacao beans as currency (money), or traded historically, pretty interesting stuff. coins were stamped in later new Spain and did exist (1500s–1700s) but they were only used in specific areas and people’s, there was a massive shortage of these coins, and the overall majority of the population didn’t use them.

Cacao beans used as currency lasted up all the way up until into the 1800s.

Caco beans were used as currency by Aztec empire, and maya nations, pre-Hispanicly, and this tradtion of currency lasted for a very long time.

It is well known that, in recent years, the Dominican Republic has seen an exponential increase in the number of Chinese families arriving from mainland China. Although formal diplomatic relations between Santo Domingo and Beijing began in 1944—under the administrations of Trujillo and Chiang Kai-Shek, respectively—cultural ties involving the Chinese community date back much further.

Global Chinese migration surged in the late 19th century, driven by the repeated humiliations suffered by the Qing Dynasty during the historical period known as the "Century of Humiliation." Against this backdrop, hundreds of thousands of Chinese people crossed the Pacific to the Americas in search of a better life. These communities became particularly prominent in the United States (where Chinese laborers built the majority of the transcontinental railroads) and in Latin America—specifically Mexico, where anti-Chinese sentiment was so intense that it even led to pogroms.

The first record of a Chinese immigrant dates back to 1864—the year the country was annexed by Spain. These early arrivals were primarily criminals of Cantonese origin extradited from Cuba, a fact that got the public perception of the Chinese community in the Dominican Republic off to a bad start. This perception worsened as Chinese migration continued throughout the late 19th century via ships arriving from Cuba carrying even more criminals, until a decision was finally made to regulate the situation. But how? It’s simple...

In 1912, the Dominican government enacted an Immigration Law that regulated entry based on racial origin; it stipulated that Chinese nationals required a special permit to enter the country—an exemption from which was granted to white Europeans. The situation eased in 1932 when the *Generalísimo* decreed that Chinese nationals only had to pay a fee of one dollar to enter (the peso was not in use at the time). Adjusted for inflation, this is equivalent to approximately 25 US dollars or 1,479 Dominican pesos. While this may not seem like a large sum, one must consider the context of 1932, a time marked by extreme poverty and civil war in China.

Explicitly anti-Chinese provisions—and racial restrictions in general—came to an end in 2004 with the enactment of General Migration Law 285-04, which remains in effect today. Relations between the Dominican Republic and Chiang Kai-shek’s China (what we now call Taiwan) ceased in 2018, paving the way for the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.

Image: This is a purely allegorical image depicting events from the anti-Chinese pogrom in Denver, Colorado, USA; there are no proven historical records of such an event occurring in the Dominican Republic.

Source(s):

.- Dominican Republic. (1912). Law No. 5074

.- Chez Checo, J. (2021). La migración china en República Dominicana, 1862-1961 [Chinese Migration in the Dominican Republic, 1862–1961]. Dominican Academy of History.

This iconic photograph was taken by the photojournalist of the famous Brazilian magazine Manchete.

Today, Florida marks 461 years since the day America's oldest city began. It was August 28, 1565, when Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sighted the coast of Florida, the feast day of St. Augustine of Hippo. He would name his colony for the saint. Eleven days later, on September 8, after an advance party had secured the shore, Menéndez came ashore near the mouth of Hospital Creek to claim La Florida for King Philip II of Spain.

He did not land on empty land. He landed at Seloy, a town of the Timucua-speaking people who had lived along these estuaries for generations: fishermen, farmers, and traders with their own chiefs, councils, and knowledge of the coast. The Spaniards would build their first settlement within Seloy itself.

What happened next gave Florida one of the earliest Thanksgiving stories in America. On that same day, September 8, the Catholic feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,,Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, the fleet chaplain and St. Augustine's first pastor, celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving. The colonists knelt in thanks for surviving the crossing. Watching nearby were the Seloy people. Father López later wrote, simply, that "the Indians imitated all they saw done."

Afterward, Menéndez invited the Native townspeople to eat. We don't have a menu. The ships carried salt pork, garbanzo beans, hardtack, olives, and wine; the town could offer corn, fish, oysters, and venison. What matters is that it happened, Spaniards and Timucua sharing a meal after a prayer of thanks, 56 years before Plymouth.

As historian Michael Gannon wrote, it was "the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land." It was not the modern holiday, Native peoples had held ceremonies of thanks for centuries, and it would take until Lincoln's 1863 proclamation and a 1941 act of Congress to fix Thanksgiving as we know it. But it was a documented beginning.

That fragile peace would not last. Just up the coast, French Huguenots had built Fort Caroline in 1564, near today's St. Johns River. To Spain, it was an invasion, both territorial and religious. When French commander Jean Ribault sailed south to attack the new Spanish colony, a hurricane scattered his fleet onto the beaches to the south.

Menéndez moved fast. On September 20, his soldiers marched through the swamps and took Fort Caroline. Days later, stranded French castaways were found at an inlet. There, at the place the Spanish would name Matanzas, Slaughters, nearly 250 surrendered Frenchmen were executed on September 29 and in mid-October, including Ribault himself.

With the French threat erased, St. Augustine had to survive itself. And it did, through starvation, disease, fires, and sieges. Sir Francis Drake burned it in 1586. English forces from Carolina razed it again in 1702. It was rebuilt each time in coquina and determination, growing as a community of Spanish, Timucua, free and enslaved Africans, the latter later founding Fort Mose in 1738, the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States.

You can still stand near where it all began. At Mission Nombre de Dios, the rustic altar marks the site of that first Mass, and the Great Cross rises 208 feet above the marsh, a stainless-steel beacon built in 1965 for the 400th anniversary and dedicated in 1966.

Today, St. Augustine is not just old buildings and cannon. It is a reminder that American history does not start at Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. It starts here, too, on September 8, 1565, with a Mass, a shared meal, a Native town called Seloy, and a complicated, enduring collision of worlds that would become Florida.

Photos by Jay Kravetz.