Скачать или смотреть The Tennessee Farm Boy Who Accidentally Started The 2nd Bloodiest War Ever

This video wasn't intended to make such a perfect double feature with the previous one (about Wallace Fard Muhammad). But they sure do work well back-to-back!

This is another episode researched and mostly written by the great Nick Miller, the same guy who wrote my Dalai Lama episode and helped me with research on the Social Credit episode. There are some inconsistencies in Roberts' story, mostly notably, who was overseeing his missionary work? While he seemed to be independent and adventurous throughout his whole career, the Boston-based Baptist missionary board he'd initially established ties to at the start of his career in Macau must have had some control over his work throughout his whole time in China, since they prevented him from baptizing Hong Xiuquan and condemned him at the end of the Taiping Rebellion.

Also, the 30 million figure is an upper bound; experts' consensus ranges from about 15 to 30 million.

What else should have been illegal under the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?
Turning right on a red light -   / membership  
Ending a tweet with "Hope this helps" - https://x.com/parsons_tor
Eating blood (which is pretty common in China, in the form of rubbery blobs of "blood tofu", but explicitly prohibited in the Bible...actually, this might have been a real rule) -   / mrsluds  
Eating durian on public transit -   / tor.in.oregon  

SOURCES & FURTHER INFO
File of Reverend Issachar J. Roberts, Archives, Foreign Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention, Richmond, Virginia in Yung Chung Teng, ‘Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion.’ Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. 1 (1963): 55
Joseph H. Borum, Biographical Sketches of Tennessee Baptist Ministers (Memphis, 1880), 523.
Walter Durham, ‘A Tennessee Baptist Missionary in China: Issachar Jacox Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion, 1837-1866,’ Tennessee Historical Quarterly 72, no. 2, 2013, 92-93.
I.J. Roberts, ‘Taiping Wang’, Putnams Magazine, 8 (October 1856) 380-382.
Roberts to William C. Buck, 27 March 1847 in Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, 29 July 1847 14, no. 30, 118.
“Untitled article by I.J. Roberts, Canton, October 6, 1852” Chinese and General Missionary Cleaner, (February, 1853), 69 in Yuan Chang Teng, “Reverend Issachar Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion,” Journal of Asian Studies 23, No 1 , 1963, 57-62
  / chinese_imperial_civil_service_exam_ming_d...  
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/socie...
J. Milton Mackie, Life of Taiping-wang, chief of the Chinese Insurrection , (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co, 1857),
http://taipingrebellion.com/visions.htm
https://archive.org/details/lifeoftai...
Thomas Reily, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 139.
‘Tae Ping Wang,’ Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature 8, no. 46 (1856), 383.
Walter Durham, ‘A Tennessee Baptist Missionary in China: Issachar Jacox Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion,
1837-1866,’
Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) 224-226;
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/t...
Rapp, John A. (Autumn 2008). "Clashing Dilemmas: Hong Rengan, Issachar Roberts, and a Taiping "Murder" Mystery" (PDF). Journal of Historical Biography (4): 27–58.

18:06 random fun fact - that opening line doesn’t actually come from the original version of the book (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, from the 14th century). It was added in a revision centuries later. Which is wild since it’s arguably the best-known quote in all of Chinese literature - it’s as if the whole “To be or not to be” monologue was added to Hamlet in a 19th century reprint.

My shirt says "If you must smoke, smoke salmon." I got it last summer when I was working the salmon packing line in Bristol Bay, Alaska, which is the best summer job on Earth.