The Native American Code Talkers Helped Win World War Two and Were Told to Keep It Secret for Decades

 By 1942 the United States military had a serious problem in the Pacific.

The Japanese had proven extraordinarily skilled at intercepting and breaking American military communications codes. Almost every code the US used was being cracked. Tactical communications could not be trusted.

The solution came from an unusual source.

Philip Johnston was a civil engineer who had grown up on the Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary. He was one of a handful of non-Navajo people who spoke the language fluently. He knew that Navajo was a language of extraordinary complexity, with tonal elements and grammatical structures that had never been written down in any formal system, and was almost completely unknown outside the Navajo people.

He proposed using Navajo speakers as military communicators.

What the Code Talkers Did

The Marine Corps accepted the proposal. Navajo recruits were trained not just to communicate in their native language but to use a specialized code built on top of it. Military terms were assigned Navajo words that described them in indirect ways. Submarines became iron fish. Bombs became eggs. Fighter planes became hummingbirds. Commanding generals became war chiefs.

The code was never broken. Not once during the entire war. Japanese cryptanalysts who had broken nearly every other American code system were unable to make sense of what they were hearing.

Code talkers served across the Pacific theater transmitting orders, coordinates, and tactical information in real time during some of the most intense battles of the war. Major General Howard Connor, who served at Iwo Jima, reportedly said that without the Navajo code talkers the Marines never could have taken Iwo Jima.

What Happened Afterward

When the war ended the Navajo code talkers were ordered not to talk about what they had done. Their contribution was classified. The code was considered too valuable to reveal. The US government wanted to keep it available in case it was needed again.

The code talkers returned home and could not tell anyone what they had done. They could not explain why they had joined the Marines or what they had contributed to the war effort.

The program was not declassified until 1968. It was not until 2001 that the original 29 Navajo code talkers received the Congressional Gold Medal, America's highest civilian honor. By that time most of them were very old. Many had already died without formal recognition.

The code talkers came from a people that the United States government had spent generations trying to destroy. Their language, which the government had banned in Indian schools and tried to eliminate, turned out to be one of the most important military assets of the Second World War.

That is a story that deserves to be told much louder than it has been.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Plague of Justinian Killed Half the Population of the Byzantine Empire and History Barely Covers It

 Most people know about the Black Death. The plague that swept through Europe in the mid 14th century and killed somewhere between a third and half of the European population. It is one of the most covered events in medieval history.

What most people do not know is that a very similar pandemic hit the world eight centuries earlier and may have been just as deadly.

It is called the Plague of Justinian. And it is one of the most significant events in ancient history that almost nobody learns about.

What It Was

The Plague of Justinian was the first recorded pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the same organism responsible for the Black Death. It began in 541 AD during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, from whom it takes its name.

The plague likely originated in central or east Africa and spread along trade routes through Egypt into the Byzantine Empire and beyond. It reached Constantinople in 541 and spread across the Mediterranean world.

At its peak in Constantinople the plague was reportedly killing 10,000 people per day. Emperor Justinian himself contracted the disease and survived but barely. By some estimates the city lost 40 percent of its population.

The pandemic spread throughout the Byzantine Empire, into Persia, across North Africa, into western Europe. It persisted in recurring waves for roughly two centuries, flaring up every few years until around 750 AD.

Total deaths are estimated at somewhere between 25 and 50 million people. In a world with a much smaller total population than today that represented an enormous fraction of all living humans.

What It Changed

Justinian had been on the verge of reuniting the old Roman Empire. He had already reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and was making significant progress in Italy and Spain. The Plague of Justinian killed the soldiers, the farmers, and the tax payers that made those campaigns possible.

The reconquest of the western Roman Empire was abandoned. The Byzantine Empire contracted. The power vacuum in the west allowed new kingdoms and peoples to establish themselves permanently.

The Arab expansion of the 7th century, which transformed the entire Mediterranean world, happened in part because the Byzantine and Persian empires had both been severely weakened by the plague. Populations that had been devastated were less able to resist conquest.

The Plague of Justinian is not just a historical curiosity. It fundamentally shaped the world that came after it. The reason Europe in the medieval period looked the way it did, the reason the Byzantine Empire was what it was, the reason the Arab expansion succeeded as quickly as it did, all trace back in part to the pandemic of 541 AD.

And it is barely in any history curriculum in the western world.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Forgotten Empire That Was Larger Than Rome and Nobody Taught You About It

 In 1324 the Emperor of Mali set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

His name was Mansa Musa. He traveled with a caravan of approximately 60,000 people. He brought 12,000 personal servants. He brought 500 heralds each carrying a golden staff. He brought 80 to 100 camels each loaded with between 300 and 400 pounds of gold dust.

Along the way he gave away so much gold to people he met, to cities he passed through, to mosques and shrines, that he crashed the gold economies of Egypt and the entire Mediterranean region. The price of gold fell so dramatically that it took more than a decade for the markets to recover.

This is documented history recorded by contemporaries in Egypt and the Arab world who witnessed it firsthand.

Mansa Musa is widely considered the wealthiest individual in human history.

Most American students have never heard his name.

What the Mali Empire Was

The Mali Empire rose to prominence in West Africa in the 13th century and reached its peak in the early 14th century under Mansa Musa's reign from 1312 to 1337.

At its peak the Mali Empire covered roughly 1.26 million square kilometers. It was one of the largest empires in the world at that time. It controlled the most important gold and salt trade routes in West Africa. The gold fields of the Mali Empire supplied a significant portion of the gold in circulation across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The empire's capital Niani was a major city. Timbuktu, a city in the Mali Empire, was one of the most important centers of Islamic scholarship in the world at the time. The Sankore mosque in Timbuktu functioned as a university with an estimated 25,000 students and a library holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

When Mansa Musa returned from his pilgrimage he brought architects from across the Islamic world who built new mosques and buildings throughout his empire. He commissioned a mosque in every city he passed through.

Why This Is Not Taught

The Mali Empire and Mansa Musa's extraordinary wealth are not part of the standard curriculum in most American schools. African history south of Egypt is largely absent from standard history education.

The reasons for that absence reflect the same biases that shaped most western historical education. The civilizations that got attention were the ones that colonizers encountered and wrote about or the ones that were part of the European and Mediterranean world. African empires that were not part of those stories were treated as though they did not exist or were not significant.

Mansa Musa was one of the most powerful rulers of his era. His empire was larger than most European kingdoms of the time. His wealth was genuinely without historical parallel. And he is still largely unknown to most people in the western world.

That is not a gap in the history. That is a choice about whose history gets taught.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.