And enraged people are easily manipulated. Americans were enraged after 9/11, and that engagement was quickly weaponized into the Patriot Act and the "War on Terror".
The flip side of all this enragement is a callous apathy. Things that really should concern me (like the eradication of due process) are hidden behind nonsense (like 1930 chimney sweeps) or the exhaustion of being enraged all the time.
This is the first I've heard of the photo or the outrage, so I genuinely don't know
If you want to modernize the analogy you might compare it to "school children identifying as cats and needing litterboxes" or any number of modern contemporary outrage over completely made up things.
People were angry (rightfully so) at children chimney sweeps and they definitely existed, were abused and did die/have horrible problems/etc.
So the outrage is justified. Now, the specific picture isn't true/authentic, but the contents of the picture definitely existed did.
So is it wrong?
It’s like with the witch hunts which are associated with the middle ages but happened later.
For context, by the late '20 programs were running for the elimination of Gypsies and disabled children inside concentration camps. Pieces of burned clothing were found on rooftops. Even Britain had a eugenics program against inferior races.
Not likely therefore made to cause outrage over children's rights, rather to depict established practices.
because, as you'll see in the article, people thought it was cute and funny to dress up very small children as chimney sweeps
> by the late '20 programs were running for the elimination of Gypsies and disabled children inside concentration camps
You've got your timeline mixed up
People think about the tradition of them bringing good omen and how cute they look, not gruesome children labor.
>Another important thing to mention is that the chimney sweep was a good luck symbol at that time, especially in Germany. People dressed up as them and send each other postcards showing children as chimney sweeps.
Not strong enough to do anything useful.
I visited Jerusalem yesterday, and was struck by the fact that there are places in the world where people have been continuously walking for millennia, putting their feet on the same stones. I had a mental image of a historian who specializes in a single paving stone, putting a lifetime of effort into studying just this one large brick.
This part of the article felt like such a weird echo of that thought!
Tucked away in an alcove on Cannon Street is an old block of stone. This is the famous London Stone. So old that nobody knows what it is originally famous for...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildhall,_London
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stone
That sort of oddity and connection with history is one of the fun parts when living in an "old" city (London isn't even that old by global standards).
That ampitheatre shows that street level in ancient times and now might be quite different, so the historical feet might not really have been walking in the same place. London Stone does suggest that you could reasonably invest a lot of effort into the history of a single slab though!
Why do street levels change like this? There seem to be a lot of "buried streets" in old cities.
For a more modern take I can't understand why Daniel Shaver is not the face of police murder in the US. The video is on YouTube, you can find the unedited version with a Google search. There is no benefit of the doubt to give. It was straight up murder done on live cam. The more you read the worse it gets.
But it got buried in a week and no one remembers it.
That doesn't resonate with my experience. People know about the murder, but aren't sure what to do.
The murderer, who clearly had mental health issues (eg, having "you're fucked" on the dust cover of his personal AR-15, which he used to commit the act), was acquitted (in a trial of strange circumstances). It's baffling that none of his colleagues - who saw the message on his weapon - ever pulled him aside to ask if he was OK.
And anyway, what does this have to do with your point of holding up an unlikely / outlying example to demonstrate a phenomenon?
Right?
How is it surprising that people get upset? The photo is a record of a depiction of a practice that existed.
It’s the practice that people don’t like, not the depiction.
It's like if we reenacted it in 2025 and said "look at this toddler chimney sweep in 2025!".
Obviously part of the outrage would be at the practice, part of it would be at the fact that it's in 2025.
Here is Horst Bohnke in Spanish literary/art magazine Blanco y Negro in 1928. It includes one more photo not already in the original Fake History Hunter article. [1]
And here he is in American newspaper photo collages, in a syndicated 1927 Central Press spread "The Day's News in Pictures" : "Starting Early - Horst Bohnke, two and one-half years old, of Berlin, Germany, has just entered the chimney sweeping profession, proving that chimney sweeps are born and not made. He is working as an apprentice to his father" [2].
And in Knickerbocker Press Artgravure Picture Section, March 6, 1927 : "Infant member of an ancient trade. Horst Bohnke, two and a half years old, is apprentice to his father, a Berlin, Germany, chimneysweep" [3]
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Blanco_y_negro/NujrMJPr...
[2] https://fultonhistory.com/highlighter/highlight-for-xml?altU...
[3] https://fultonhistory.com/highlighter/highlight-for-xml?altU...
AndrewSwift•2h ago