Here is the banner from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, one of the two major powers that engaged in China’s civil war between 1851 to 1864. While accurate records of casualties are impossible to tally, the Taiping Rebellion resulted in the worst civil war in terms of deaths: upwards of 20 million people — as many
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Sitting almost 1,400 feet/430 meters above sea level in the Poconos Mountains is this jewel of a 44-acre lake called Sunfish Pond. No roads lead there: you have to hike in to see it. A glacial lake, formed as the last Ice Age was ending, Sunfish Pond is a tranquil and lovely element of the
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If you are reading this post, I hope you can celebrate the fact that your profession is not as wretched as the Resurrectionists of Britain, and your post-mortem reputation as wretchedly public as that of William Burke, a Resurrectionist so desperate that he became a murderer for his career.In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists
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This first photo shows two of the roughly 1,300 specimens of minerals and gems on display in the Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. I had a chance to see the exhibit yesterday. It was wild to see jewels created out of the ash from Mount
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This painted screen by American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing is representative of the Aesthetic movent in art that emerged out of the mid-19th century. Posing itself in opposition to repressive and overbearing strains of the Victorian culture of the age, Aesthetics valued sensuous and beautiful artwork. Conservative Victorians turned their noses up at Aestheticism, but
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Camp followers have been part of military history since soldiers have been deployed, but the French kept up a regulated system of prostitutes to serve their armies well into the 20th century. These were the “BMCs” or “Bordelles Militaires de Champagne,” aka Military Field Bordellos.In fact, they really only got going during the colonial wars
Behold the Wonderwerk cave in South Africa, yet another place on my travel bucket list and also an archaeological site giving evidence for one of the most important inventions humans ever came up with: cooking.Ashes and bone fragments from Wonderwerk have been found from a million years ago, suggesting that our distant relatives, Homo Erectus,
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This sweet painting by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from 1854 is called _Grandmother with Three Grandchildren_. In it , three cheery young girls surround a seated older woman, eyes gazing on some scrap of paper she is holding. All four females are comfortable with each other, and wear relaxed and happy expressions. The image of
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One of the best things about studying history is that it has the potential to make one’s day just a little bit better because The Past had so many shitty components. For instance, there’s a fairly good chance that if you are reading this, you are not dealing with head lice.Lice are just enough of
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Spooky season is almost upon us, and thus it feels appropriate to share this rural legend and roadside attraction near the border of Carbon and Luzerne Counties in the forested mountains of Pennsylvania’s mining communities. I am writing, of course, about the Cursed Stone Couch of Weatherly, PA. Folktales — especially frightening ones — often
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Today Shippensburg University’s history department sponsored a trip to the Eckley Miner’s Village — a restored community built after 1854 when a mining firm called Sharpe, Leisenring and Company began construction on a small community (between 1,000-1,500 people) specifically to house the coal miners who worked for them. The region had hundreds of similar establishments,
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This is Ilya Ivanov, sometime known as the “Red Frankenstein” because of his experiments with inter-species breeding.In the early days of communist Russia, Ivanov earned a reputation for developing artificial insemination techniques that allowed him to develop hybrids of closely-related species: “zeedonks” (zebra with donkey), “zubrons” (European bison with cows) and sundry blends of rabbits,
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Epidemiological studies is a fascinating blend of science and history. There’s a lot of ways we can benefit now from the study of past disease. The pock-marked friars shown here might well have been suffering from an illness that most folks today are blessedly free from: measles.Measles is a human virus (MeV), but, like SARS-COV2,
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This political cartoon of Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) shows him as a circus performer, reaching into the gut of an exotically dressed assistant while masses of people line up to watch the operation. Voronoff detested this sort of depiction, because he took his work extremely seriously. After all, he was considered a leader in organ transplant
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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
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On August 19, 2021, American artist Chuck Close passed away from cardiopulmonary failure. His works appear in museums around the world and are easily recognizable as oversized portraits that take up entire walls. Early in his career he focused on super-realistic faces that cannot be distinguished from photographs even from close up, like the first
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The most notorious surgery of the 20th century is the lobotomy, and the most infamous practicioner of this operation was the neurologist Walter Freeman (d. 1972). For a couple of decades in the mid-20th century, Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies on mentally ill patients, developing a technique of entering the brain through the eye socket
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The gentle and intelligent expression you see on this man’s face runs completely counter to his actual deeds. This is Sidney Gottleib, one of the most powerful CIA officials in history, and he created a vast operation to develop mind-control experiments that involved torture and death — the casualty rates of which remain unknown.In the
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The product you see here turns out to have been ubiquitous and super important in recent world history: Pervitin was a methamphetamine synthesized by Germans in 1937, and the Nazis were addicted to it.In _Blitzed_, Norman Ohler reveals the macabre dependency of both Hitler and the Nazi military on drugs. The trajectory is fascinating: while
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