#MemeHistory
Part of a series on Black Twitter. [View Related Entries]
About
#MemeHistory is a popular hashtag, which uses Black Twitter jokes to explain large events in history, in often a humorous manner. The jokes are suprisingly often related to Christianity
Origin
On March 9th, 2016, Twitter user @ThatGweilo[1] shared a photograph of a slide from his classmate's history powerpoint presentation on the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, which asks the question "how did Hitler feel about territory?" followed by an image macro of the "I Need Dis" Otter reaching for an ice cream sandwich (shown below). Within the first week, the tweet garnered over 2,900 retweets and 4,100 likes.
On March 10th, Twitter user @TylerIAm[2] came across @ThatGwello's photograph of the slideshow presentation and tweeted how incorporating memes into powerpoint slideshows would make school projects more fun (shown below), which prompted dozens of responses from other Twitter users doing exactly just that.
Spread
A few hours after his first tweet, @TylerIam came up with #MemeHistory[4] as the official hashtag for the trend of "meme-splaining" history, along with one of the first compilation articles highlighting the best of #MemeHistory tweets posted on his blog Looking Up From the Floor.[5] Throughout the day, the phenomenon of "meme-splaining" history continued to spread across the grapevines of Black Twitter and beyond, resulting in the creation of hundreds of humorous tweets under the hashtag #MemeHistory, which ultimately became a trending topic of the day on the microblogging platform.
News Media Coverage
That same day, the trending hashtag was first picked up by pop music and entertainment magazine Vibe in an article titled "#MemeHistory Explains World History Better Than Your Teachers," followed by additional coverage from viral news media sites like Smosh, Bossip and The Huffington Post on the next day. Throughout the weekend, Houston Chronicle, Bustle and The Daily Dot also ran compilation articles highlighting the most notable examples of #MemeHistory tweets.
Various Examples
Search Interest
External Reference
[1] Twitter – @ThatGweilo's Tweet
[2] Twitter – @TylerIam's Tweet
[3] Twitter – Learning history through memes
[4] Twitter – Hashtag Results for #MemeHistory
[5] Looking Up From the Floor – Meme-splaining History
[6] The Daily Dot – #MemeHistory is here to teach you about the history of the world
[7] Smosh – 33 Tweets That Prove #MemeHistory Is The Best Way To Learn History
[8] Bustle – #MemeHistory Combines Historical Events With Internet Culture, And The Results Are Hilarious
[9] The Huffington Post – #MemeHistory Is Twitter's Way Of Teaching Us All About History
[10] Houston Chronicle – #MemeHistory hashtag takes over the internet
[11] Vibe – #MemeHistory Explains World History Better Than Your Teachers
[12] Bossip – 28 #MemeHistory Tweets That Show How Black Twitter Makes Everything Funny
Top Comments
Electric Dictator Bedebao
Mar 15, 2016 at 05:56PM EDT
Derpen
Mar 15, 2016 at 05:47PM EDT