By the end of this post, you are likely to know more than you ever thought you would about an extremely coveted medical treatment popularized in Early Modern Europe: Human Skull Moss, aka “usnea”.It was made up of exactly what it sounds like — you can see an example here from the Berlin Botanical Museum. […]
Human Skull Moss – “Usnea” Read More »
We’ve all heard about the toxic use of lead in cosmetics in history: it whitened the skin, which aristocrats from Ancient Roman times well into the 1800s thought was a good look. Of course, it also poisoned the users. The Early Modern employment of “Venetian Ceruse” was particularly popular, and was a combination of lead,
Venetian Ceruse in European Aristocratic Life Read More »
This isn’t my first history post dealing with farting, and it probably won’t be my last, but it’s going to be a good one. Ripe for the times, one might say . . . .The famed satirical writer Jonathan Swift (d 1745), most known today for his essay “A Modest Proposal”, also penned an essay
The Benefit of Farting Read More »
We who have been raised in a culture with microscopes and electronic microscopes take for granted the existence of a universe of minutiae that shape our surroundings (SARS-COV2, to pick an example we are all exhausted about). Before Antony van Leeuwenhoek developed his microscope around 1668, however, this was impossible.And so it was that a
William Ramesey’s Illustrations of Parasites Read More »
This fascinating weapon is a parrying dagger from Italy dating to 1600. Today it is in Britain’s Wallace Collection, a museum with an extensive armor and sword collection, but back in the day it would have been used by a duelist who fought with a rapier in the other hand.This dagger is unusual for several
Parrying Dagger from Italy Read More »
“They will see that there is in it nothing more than Natural, and nomore than the necessary result of the Motions of the Sun and Moon.” — so wrote astronomer Edmond Halley about the solar eclipse that he predicted for 1715. For millennia, eclipses – especially solar eclipses — had been considered frightening events that
Pictured here is a circular plaque, commemorating the location of Fort Duquesne in 1774. Today not even ruins remain, but the location is memorable, lying at the tip of a spit of land called “the Point,” right at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in downtown Pittsburgh. As can be surmised from
History geek that I am, I unsurprisingly find athletic activities with antique lineages highly compelling. But getting a handle on what many early sports were like is difficult because evidence is lacking, and this is certainly the case with capoeira. The painting you see here is “Capoeira or the Dance of War,” by Johann
Capoeira or the Dance of War Read More »
This painting documents one of the oldest stories ever recorded, and it’s all about how evil entered the world. And the blame goes straight onto women, and frankly it’s exhausting. _Eva Prima Pandora_, or “Eve the First Pandora”, done by Jean Cousins around 1550, conflates the stories of the Ancient Greek first mortal woman,
“The pishtacos would kidnap people and change them into tallow to sell them for soap,” reads this ghastly modern cartoon. Legends about the pishtacos as boogeymen have been around the Andean cultures of Peru and Bolivia since the 1600s. Traditionally depicted as a white man with a beard and blue or green eyes, the pishtaco
No, this isn’t what you think it is, readers: I know it *looks* like a penis, but really it’s not. Rather, what you see is a 16th-century woodcut illustration of the dissected genitals of a woman. Er, if that’s not obvious to you, don’t worry. Commissioned for Andreus Vesalius’s famous _De humani corporis fabrica_
De humani corporis fabrica Read More »
What could be more fun on a Friday than stories about travel and tawdry Popes? How about the Baroque-era Vatican in 17th-century Rome and a pope from the ridiculously wealthy Italian family, who went to war for Papal territory and drove the apostolic see into great debt? Pictured here is the Baldacchino, the enormous
Bernini’s Baldacchino Read More »
Non-verbal communication is a scholarly subject usually studied by academics looking at modern human behavior. Physical gestures of course existed in past times too, but often there is little written evidence — whole catalogues of affective conversations that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone are closed off to historians, because they were so rarely
Communication Through Portraiture Read More »
In their momentous book — _The Dawn of Everything_ (it’s got the entire field of history all a-tizzy right now) authors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that the Enlightenment ideas of freedom, equality, and tolerance didn’t arise out of the minds of European political philosophers as much as from Native North American Indian intellectuals.
The Origins of Enlightenment Read More »
Do readers here have any examples of people in history who were reviled in their own time but now you sort of root for them? Elizabeth Cresswell (shown here from a contemporary engraving) is one of those people for me. Throughout much of the 17th century, she was the subject of public distain, ridiculed in
Elizabeth Cresswell Read More »
You are looking at a tiny opening, maybe three feet wide and two feet high, that peers into a hidden room against a stairwell that served as one of the first stopping points of the northbound path of America’s Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad, of course, was the illegal highway that American enslaved people
Let’s talk about apotheoses in domes in art, shall we? This term comes from Ancient Greek and means “to make into a God.” Some heroes of Classical myths ended up ascending into the heavens to be with the other Olympians, such as Hercules. In Ancient Rome, emperors beloved by the Senate could be given the
Apotheoses in Domes Read More »
What do all three of the women in these three images have in common? A: they each depict the American Revolutionary war heroine Molly Pitcher, and B: none of them are real. Real, as in, there was no OG Molly Pitcher historians can trace. Stories about about a woman called “Captain Molly” who served
Henry Avery was one of the most influential pirates in history, even if you’ve never heard of him until now. This Englishman led a raid in 1695 that hauled in £600,000 of treasure from a Mughal Indian ship on its return voyage from the Hajj (worth about $122,169,000 in U.S. dollars today). But it enraged
Henry Avery, Englishman Pirate Read More »
You’re looking at an 18th-century illustration from one Marie-Jeanne Valet, aka “the Amazon”, aka “the Maid of Gévandan”, showing her getting attacked by a monstrous creature. The 19- or 20- year old Marie got these creds for having successfully fought off the enormous and bloodthirsty animal, which was something that as many as 100 people
The Woman and the Beast of Gévandan Read More »
