Brown History

Brown History Historical doses of South Asia. Instagram: www.shopbrownhistory.com

The Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Le**os was widely described by humanitarian organizations and major media ...
09/25/2026

The Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Le**os was widely described by humanitarian organizations and major media outlets as the "worst refugee camp on earth" before it was permanently destroyed by fires in September 2020. Originally built to accommodate roughly 2,000 to 3,000 people, the facility became severely overcrowded, routinely forcing between 12,000 and 20,000 refugees to live in appalling conditions with broken sewage systems, minimal running water, and up to 70 people sharing a single toilet.

Moria was incredibly dangerous, especially after dark. Because thousands of people from different countries were packed together with no security, stabbings, riots, and sexual assaults happened almost every night. There were no lights in many parts of the camp, meaning women and children were terrified to leave their tents to use the bathroom after sunset. This extreme environment led to constant violence, riots, and a devastating mental health crisis where aid groups like Doctors Without Borders documented unprecedented mental health emergency. Children as young as 10 years old were trying to commit su***de or cutting themselves because they felt so hopeless.

The vast majority of the refugees who lived in the Moria refugee camp were from Afghanistan. The rest were primarily from Syria, along with significant groups fleeing violence, persecution, and political instability in Iraq, Somalia, and Pakistan. In total, people from more than 70 different nations lived inside the camp during its peak operations.

What made Moria truly uniquely cruel was that the suffering was a deliberate political choice. The European Union had plenty of money and power to build proper housing, but they intentionally kept the camp in a state of living hell to send a message to other migrants. Families were left to live in filth and danger for years, using human suffering as a visible warning sign to the rest of the world. Pope Francis decribed it as a concentration camp and United Nations advisers called it "hell on Earth."

Source: All photographs taken by Konstantinos Tsakalidis

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For decades, thousands of young Israelis have travelled through the mountain towns of northern India after completing mi...
09/24/2026

For decades, thousands of young Israelis have travelled through the mountain towns of northern India after completing military service, following a backpacking circuit of guesthouses, Hebrew menus, Chabad houses, and psychedelic raves. It is known as the Hummus Trail. The journey is often framed as a chance to decompress, recover, and begin civilian life. But the Hummus Trail has always existed alongside a much longer history of occupation, military violence, and war crimes against Palestinians. In the latest Brown History Newsletter, we ask what it means to build a place of refuge around people whose past does not disappear merely because the landscape has changed.

📩 To read the full story, tap the link in the bio or visit brownhistory.substack.com

For decades, thousands of young Israelis have travelled through the mountain towns of northern India after completing mi...
09/24/2026

For decades, thousands of young Israelis have travelled through the mountain towns of northern India after completing military service, following a backpacking circuit of guesthouses, Hebrew menus, Chabad houses, and psychedelic raves. It is known as the Hummus Trail. The journey is often framed as a chance to decompress, recover, and begin civilian life. But the Hummus Trail has always existed alongside a much longer history of occupation, military violence, and allegations of abuses against Palestinians. And so the question is not simply what these mountains offer those who come to forget, but what it means to build a place of refuge around people whose past does not disappear merely because the landscape has changed.

In the latest Brown History Newsletter, we look at the distance between leaving a war behind and leaving behind what that war has done.

📩 To read the full story, tap the link in the bio or visit brownhistory.substack.com

Most of the world pictures Norway as blonde. Yet for nearly three decades, the country's biggest musical stars have been...
09/23/2026

Most of the world pictures Norway as blonde. Yet for nearly three decades, the country's biggest musical stars have been two Brown men from Oslo. Chirag Rashmikant Patel and Magdi Omar Ytreeide Abdelmaguid—one Gujarati Norwegian and the other of Egyptian and Norwegian heritage, both born and raised in Oslo—are now the biggest musical stars in the country's history.  They sell out stadiums no Norwegian artist has ever sold out - ten times over. They crash ticketmaster each time their sales open. And they somehow achieved mainstream success of unprecedented proportions without ever softening their immigrant identities. Instead, they made that the center of their act. For nearly 30 years, the duo has been vocal about race, colonialism, religion, diaspora, and belonging. Their hits cause hundreds of thousands of Norwegians to fill stadiums regularly, chanting and singing  in Arabic, Hindi, Norwegian, and everything in between.

In a country known for its resistance to changing social norms, Karpe somehow managed to shape the mainstream from the inside. In the process, they transformed the way Norway thinks about race, identity, and belonging. Their reach extends across generations, class, and ethnicity with a breadth of appeal almost impossible to fathom. Their fans range from average teenagers to the Prime Minister and even the new King of Norway.

Now the duo known professionally as Karpe is walking away. And the extraordinary show of collective grief that has followed, Norway is seeing just how much of itself these two men have been carrying and shaping for nearly three decades. In the latest Brown History Newsletter, Kari Nixon explores how Karpe provides a rare case study in the transformative potential of immigrant identity to shape collective identity in majority culture. For the rest of the world, Karpe demonstrates that immigrants are not simply people who enter a majority culture; they help create it.

📩 To read the full story, tap the link in the bio or visit brownhistory.substack.com

Happy Belated Labor Day! Cabs carry more than people from point A to point B. Cabbies carry secrets, memories, histories...
09/22/2026

Happy Belated Labor Day! Cabs carry more than people from point A to point B. Cabbies carry secrets, memories, histories, and the stories of a city. They are oral historians; witnesses to a New York City that once was.

We’re launching “Cab Stories” - an initiative to collect and celebrate the the moments unfold inside New York City’s taxis.

DM taxidriverdoc your favorite memory or craziest story from a cab ride, along with a photo from that cab journey or NYC trip, for a chance to be featured on our Instagram. It could be as simple as a meaningful convo with a cabbie or a memorable view from the backseat.

Help us tell the stories of New York, one cab ride at a time. ❤️🚕

The internet has just discovered what your grandmother’s kitchen has known all along: the humble thali is having a desig...
09/22/2026

The internet has just discovered what your grandmother’s kitchen has known all along: the humble thali is having a design moment. Now celebrated as chic, modern and worthy of display, it has taken on a new life far beyond the dining table. In the latest Brown History Newsletter, Divya Goyal explores the history of the thali and what happens when something deeply familiar is rediscovered, renamed, and presented as a new trend.

📩 To read the full story, tap the link in the bio or visit brownhistory.substack.com

In 1953, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first people confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest...
09/21/2026

In 1953, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first people confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest, but this is often retold as the triumph of a British expedition and a New Zealand climber, with Tenzing reduced to the “Sherpa guide” beside Hillary.

“Sherpa” is an ethnic identity, not a synonym for porter, yet Western mountaineering often treated it as a job title that erased individual climbers. A new film, Tenzing, could help change that by portraying him as a husband, father, accomplished mountaineer and, above all, a dreamer who refused to give up.

By the time Tenzing was recruited as the lead Sherpa for the 1953 British expedition, the ninth British-led attempt to summit Everest, he had already taken part in six expeditions to the mountain, more than any other living person. In fact, the previous year, he and Swiss climber Raymond Lambert had reached approximately 8,600 metres, higher than anyone then known to have climbed, making him one of the world’s most experienced high-altitude mountaineers.

On May 29, 1953, Tenzing and Hillary reached the summit at around 11:30am. They remained there for only 15 minutes. Hillary photographed Tenzing holding an ice axe bearing the flags of Britain, Nepal, India, and the United Nations.

A core philosophical difference lay in how each side viewed Mount Everest. For the West, Everest was something to “conquer’ but to Tenzing and Sherpa community,  it was not a lifeless mass of rock and ice to be defeated, but Chomolungma, the Tibetan name commonly translated as “Goddess Mother of the World.”  When Tenzing and Hillary finally reached the summit, Tenzing didn't plant a flag. As a devout Buddhist, he instead buried a food offering, including biscuits and chocolate, in the snow as a gesture of gratitude to the gods of the mountain.

After Everest, Tenzing dedicated much of his life to training the next generation of mountaineers at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling. He died in 1986 at the age of 71, more than three decades after his historic ascent. By then, his name had become inseparable from Everest, yet his life was far greater than those fifteen minutes at its summit.

09/20/2026

Fish head curry is now one of Singapore’s most famous dishes. It is made by cooking a large fish head in a spiced curry, usually with vegetables, and serving it with rice or bread. Although the dish is unique to Singapore, its widely credited to a migrant from Kerala named Marian Jacob Gomez, better known as M. J. Gomez.

Gomez ran an Indian restaurant called Gomez Curry. Sometime in the late 1940s or 1950s, he started serving fish head curry. Fish curry was already well established in Kerala, while fish head was particularly valued by many Chinese diners in Singapore so Gomez brought the two preferences together by cooking a fish head in a South Indian-style curry.

He was not the first person to ever cook fish head in curry, similar dishes already existed in India and other parts of Asia but what Gomez did was create and popularize a distinctly Singaporean version that crossed communal boundaries and became widely recognized across the country.

Fish head curry became so popular that, by the 1970s and 1980s, restaurants and stalls across Singapore were advertising their own versions as “Gomez fish head curry” or “original Gomez curry.” Over time, different communities created their own versions of the dish. Unfortunately Gomez had returned to India in 1964 and died in 1974, never really knowing just how popular his creation would become in Singapore.

Today, fish head curry can be found in Indian, Chinese, Malay, and Peranakan restaurants. Recipes differ in their spices, vegetables, souring ingredients, and use of coconut milk. The dish has become a good example of how Singaporean food was shaped by different communities sharing and adapting each other’s food traditions.

Source: Footage from Mike Wiens

*Check out our newsletter and podcast for untold South Asian stories, and check out our shop Brown History Shop

Fish head curry is now one of Singapore’s most famous dishes. It's made by cooking a large fish head in a spiced curry, ...
09/20/2026

Fish head curry is now one of Singapore’s most famous dishes. It's made by cooking a large fish head in a spiced curry, usually with vegetables, and serving it with rice or bread. Although the dish is unique to Singapore, its widely credited to a migrant from Kerala named Marian Jacob Gomez, better known as M. J. Gomez.

Gomez ran an Indian restaurant called Gomez Curry. Sometime in the late 1940s or 1950s, he started serving fish head curry. Fish curry was already well established in Kerala, while fish head was particularly valued by many Chinese diners in Singapore so Gomez brought the two preferences together by cooking a fish head in a South Indian-style curry.

He was not the first person to ever cook fish head in curry, similar dishes already existed in India and other parts of Asia, but what Gomez did was create and popularize a distinctly Singaporean version that crossed communal boundaries and became widely recognized across the country.

Fish head curry became so popular that, by the 1970s and 1980s, restaurants and stalls across Singapore were advertising their own versions as “Gomez fish head curry” or “original Gomez curry.” Over time, different communities created their own versions of the dish. Unfortunately Gomez had returned to India in 1964 and died in 1974, never really knowing just how popular his creation would become in Singapore.

Today, fish head curry can be found in Indian, Chinese, Malay, and Peranakan restaurants. Recipes differ in their spices, vegetables, souring ingredients, and use of coconut milk. The dish has become a good example of how Singaporean food was shaped by different communities sharing and adapting each other’s food traditions.

*Check out our newsletter and podcast for untold South Asian stories, and check out our shop Brown History Shop

Just days after 9/11, a white supremacist went on a violent revenge-killing spree. A decade later, to everyone's surpris...
09/15/2026

Just days after 9/11, a white supremacist went on a violent revenge-killing spree. A decade later, to everyone's surprise, his only surviving victim, a Bangladeshi immigrant, tries everything he can to stop his ex*****on. In the latest Brown History Newsletter, Angel Bista tells the riveting story of an unlikely friendship forged between a death row inmate and one of his surviving victims.

📩 To read the full story, tap the link in the bio or visit brownhistory.substack.com

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