About Underground History

Welcome. You have stumbled into the attic of history — the dusty trunk everyone else locked, labeled “Do Not Open: Complicated”, and shoved to the back of the museum. This is not a polished exhibit. There are no laser-guided timelines, no grant money, and absolutely no interest in making anyone comfortable. It is just me, a pile of primary sources, and a stubborn refusal to let the inconvenient parts of the past rot quietly in a drawer.

Part of my motivation is pure exhaustion — exhaustion from hearing moronic takes like “slavery wasn’t that bad” or the racist, bone jarringly, stupid claim that “the Irish were slaves too.” Let’s be clear: slavery, especially chattel slavery, was bad. Very bad. And no, there was never some Lucky Charms Plantation where Irish “slaves” worked from dusk til dawn because of their high incidences of skin cancer when they worked with the sun was up. That whole story is stupid — historically, factually, insultingly stupid. YOU EVOLUTIONARY CUL-DE-SAC!

What this is (and what it is not)

Underground History is a one-person, operation dedicated to the histories people shove under the rug: the messy, the inconvenient, the officially ignored, and the stories that make institutions squirm. I scan, transcribe, dig up primary documents, and stitch together narratives that the history books politely left out — sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, sometimes because truth is more boring than the myth.

This is not an academic press release. I am not here to impress tenure committees. I am here to tell stories that ought to be told, to question the tidy narratives we use to feel better about ourselves, and to give a voice — however rough and human — to the parts of the past that get cheaper coffee and worse footnotes.

Why I do this

Because history that is convenient for the comfortable is rarely the whole story. Because “we were never taught that” is not the same as “it did not happen.” Because archives are for everyone, not just people with expensive access cards. Because the past is messy, and if we want to understand the present we have to stop pretending it arrived neatly packaged.

I do this out of irritation, curiosity, and a mild moral panic about what happens when comfortable myths are left unchallenged. Also because I love old paper and audio recordings and the near-supernatural thrill of piecing together fragments and finding, against all odds, a better truth.

How I work

This is not your standard “history site.” I am not here to slap a few Wikipedia quotes onto a WordPress template and call it a day. I build the tools myself — the software, the applications, the custom players — so that the history I dig up isn’t just seen but experienced.

If there’s an image of a comic book cover, it is not just a pretty JPEG to scroll past. Click it, and you can actually read the entire comic inside a custom reader I built. If there’s a film, I am not embedding a random low-res YouTube upload. I encode and host the entire movie myself — assuming it’s public domain or I’ve got the original source material — so you’re getting it as it was meant to be seen. Same with audio: I don’t toss you an external link; I give you a custom-built player that streams, loops, downloads, and generally refuses to behave like an ad-choked platform.

Underground History runs on custom built tools: audio players, video players, text document readers — all designed to make these sources easy to access, and, whenever possible, downloadable. Because if you’ve come this far into the forgotten corners of history, you deserve more than pop-ups and broken embeds.

A few necessary disclaimers

• This is one person’s labor of love and stubbornness. Errors may exist; corrections are welcome. I will correct things when shown to be wrong, begrudgingly and with a sense of civic pride.
• I do not speak for the subjects I write about. I tell what I can find. Where voices were missing, I try to listen harder.
• This is not a mouthpiece for conspiracy. It is a mouthpiece for evidence — which sometimes looks like a conspiracy because real life is messy.

Want to help, complain, or yell at me about a typo?

Excellent. Contributions, corrections, and tips are the oxygen of this project. If you have documents, leads, or vast sums of money, send them. If you have a correction, send it with receipts. If you just want to say “this is great,” I will accept praise and put it in my bank of morale points.

Contact:

DOC@HAZZARDLABS.COM