I have a good story for this Mother’s Day in the U.S.. It comes from a Hindu myth found in a sacred text called _The Bhagavata Purana_ (8th-10th c), which tells the story of the maternal love of Yasoda for her foster son, the God Krishna.Yasoda had no idea that she was raising a divine […]
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The sculpture you see here shows two decidedly feminine figures, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as they face the sea, their hair whipping in the breeze. It is an utterly modern imagining of two real-life woman pirates from the early 1700’s, and says even more about 2020, when this artwork was unveiled, than it does about the actual
Female Pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read Read More »
I have another person to add to my list of imaginary attendees in my hypothetical dinner party. Might I introduce to you one Margaret Lucas Cavendish (d.1673)?.Margaret’s life shows just how much human potential has been wasted by limiting women’s access to education. She gleaned hers through conversations of the men around her — her
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This is Polly Matzinger, and even though this is a history Instagram post, she is an active scientist. But her discoveries about the way the immune system works have changed how scientists think about the ways living things fight off harmful pathogens, thus ensuring Matzinger a place in humanity’s historical records.Before I say anything about
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Those of us who love travelling to new places enjoy the sensation of adventure and the way it makes us open to learning new things, but few of us today risk our lives for such experiences. However, Maria Sibylla Merian was different. In 1699, this affluent 52-year old divorced mother of two left her affluent
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Scientists with scruples make for some of my favorite heroes. Here is one of them: Frances Oldham Kelsey.In 1960, in her first assignment on the first month at her new job at the United States Food and Drug Administration, Kelsey stood up to powerful corporate interests and demanded scientific studies to demonstrate the safety of
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War is a complex phenomenon riddled with tragic deaths and players with a kaleidescope of myopic perspectives. The Spanish Civil War exemplifies this, as does one of its central figures – the left-wing feminist, supporter of the poor, and propagandist Dolores Ibárruri (1895-1989).Ibárruri, known as “La Pasionaria”, had a mindset shaped by her impoverished background
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In the late 1800s, Victorian values had made many folks worried — VERY WORRIED — about girls and women partaking in a new trend. Medical doctors and many Victorian-influenced bourgeoisie thought this new pastime would make them unhealthy, lusty (a bad thing, in their minds), or even UGLY. The name of the new trend? Bicycle
Bicycle riding, bicycle face, and bicycle fears for Victorian ladies Read More »
Here you see a picture of a most unusual lady — this is one Ruth Belville, right outside the Greenwich Observatory in London in 1908. And Up until her 80s, she made her living selling time.Belville was of a certain moment in history, right on the cusp of the so-called “Second Industrial Revolution,” which was
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This is a post about two Irish songs that deal with memory. 1994 was the release date of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” and Sinead O’Connor’s “Famine,” and both emerged out of The Troubles, a period of about thirty years (late 1960s to 1998), when tension in Northern Ireland between forces that favored independence and those who
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“Worked up to desperation, he applied the wires of the battery and put the apparatus in motion, whilst a demonic laugh of derision appeared to ring in his ears, and the surrounding mummies seemed starting from their places and dancing in unearthly merriment . . . .” These are the first words in English to
Jane Loudon’s “The Mummy” Read More »
This is one of my favorite illustrations from Medieval history, from _The Book of the Queen_, and shows Christine de Pizan (1364-1431) — the first woman professional writer in French — standing in a celestial sphere surrounded by the sun, moon, and stars. The miniature features a scene from an allegorical tale by de Pizan
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This Ancient scientist was championed by intellectuals across time, and by the 1600s was known in Europe as one of the most important alchemists of Ancient history: Cleopatra “Chrysopoeia” the Alchemist (aka not the Pharaoh). Thought to have been active in the third century BCE, Cleopatra was praised in the early 1600s as being one
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Happy Halloween, yunz’ all! In honor of the day, I thought it appropriate to do a post about the Bloody Mary apparition, which terrified many pubescent girls in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s.Trying to see if you could summon Bloody Mary was a genuine folk tradition. Because it was spread by word
Some cultural icons reflect cutting-edge trends, and others cause them to be. This is a photo of the legendary Patti Smith, and she falls into the second category.The list of “firsts” Smith represented is lengthy. As music critic Nick Dohney writes, “She’s called the godmother of punk. _Horses_, her iconic first album, came out in
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One of the biggest questions about our universe had long been just how big it is. Of course the stars we see are far away, but just how far was unknown for most of human history. Figuring out the answer to this question was an enormous challenge: it isn’t the case that the brightest stars
Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the “Standard Candle” Read More »
Here you see an illustration showing the happy and regal-looking figure of an Inca princess named Zilia. Captured from her homeland and torn from her fiancé, Zilia was rescued by a French captain and taken to Europe, where she was exposed to a culture that imagined itself enlightened, but which Zilia found repressive. Zilia
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This post is three days past the memorial day of the person featured here, Saint Agatha of Sicily. She’s one of my favorite regulars in the history of Christian artwork — right along the arrows all over St Sebastian and St Lucy with her eyeballs or Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel or John with
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This is the childhood face of one of the most famous Ukrainians in history, the pro-Zionist, pro-labor, and former Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir. Born Golda Mabovitch in 1898 to a carpenter father in the city of Kyiv, which was then part of the Russian Empire, Golda’s Jewish ancestry put her in company
This lovely ship was one sight you’d not want to have been privy to if you were a French person from the 14th century. The black hulls and the red sails were the mark of ships belonging to Jeanne de Clisson, aka “the Lioness of Brittany,” a noblewoman who became a pirate in the name
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