This is a mid-19th century North American painting entitled _Indian Women Playing the Game of Plum Stones_, and testifies to the ubiquitous practice of dice gambling that American Indian women played in pre-colonial times. As evidence summarized by Warren DeBoer suggests, gambling was a pastime that American Indian women seemed to have enjoyed across […]
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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 is a story about a ghost story — the legend of Big Liz of Greenbrier swamp. The tale dates to the American Civil War, when, according to a retelling by S.E. Schlosser, a young but powerfully strong woman — her huge arms could carry two sows at once — was suspected of being
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Here you see La Posada, constructed in 1929 in Winslow Arizona — the last of the Fred Harvey Hotels still in operation. The Fred Harvey Company’s restaurants and hotels shaped the architectural landscape and culture of the American Southwest — packaging the American Indian, Spanish Mission Revival, and US cowboy culture for middle-class tourism. And
Martin Luther King famously quipped “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. That arc sure does feel like it’s taking its time, but this man temporarily bent it a little narrower — much like he used to bend iron horseshoes with his hands. This is Joe Greenstein, a
It’s pleasant, from where I write this post in my ice-bitten and wintery grey state of Pennsylvania, to look at this lovely plant. Here is _Indigofera tinctoria_ the most important plant to make the dye colored indigo — a color that meant beauty to some, but misery to many others. Indigo is one of
The purple color of this Victorian dress testifies to the discovery of “mauve,” the world’s first synthetic dye. And it was a really, really big deal. The color was produced serendipitously by a brilliant 18-year old named William Henry Perkin in 1856, who didn’t start out his career path to become the millionaire founder
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In 1980 nearly 200 square miles of subarctic meadow, forest, peat bogs, and mountains were set aside to form the Carpathian National Nature Park. Home for many plants and animals in its Alpine climate, the Carpathian National Nature Park is located in Western Ukraine. The park’s great beauty includes glacial lakes and waterfalls, trees like
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If you’re looking at this on your phone, it’s worth a moment to zoom in for this photo, to check out the texture of this finely woven gown. It’s a rare and valuable sample of a type of cloth called “Dhaka muslin,” and in its heyday, sold for vast sums and was esteemed as the
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Yesterday I got to visit this home — it is where one Jennie Wade was shot and killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. You can actually still see the bullet hole in the doorway, made by the .58 caliber that killed her. Jennie Wade was 20 years old and (remarkably) the only civilian killed at
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
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
M.C. Escher was an amazing surrealist artist whose works were frequently inspired by mathematics. Here is his 1963 work, “Moebius Strip II,” which shows ants crawling along the single-surface loop. First discovered by astronomer and mathematician August Möbius in 1858 (although it had been described in unpublished literature a few years prior by a
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Today in my Early Medieval Europe history class, I had one of the funnest discussions ever that bridged from talking about Medieval ideas about sex (“only okay if done to make a baby”) to a 20th-century pregnancy test my students thought sounded perfectly Medieval. And this would be “the rabbit test,” and it involved
In the beautiful Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia is The Greenbrier — a luxury resort where well-heeled tourists have visited for relaxation and networking since 1778. It is also the location of an enormous underground bunker created during the Cold War that could house the entirety of Congress in the case of a nuclear attack.
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This is a drawing of the prehistoric species Plesiosaurus, discovered by the paleontologist Mary Anning in 1823. Anning was a working-class, uneducated person who became one of England’s premier fossil scholars, but struggled her whole life — financially and professionally — because of her gender and class. Anning grew up on the southern coast
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Yesterday’s post was about a legend of green people who lived in Medieval England. Today I bring to you the true story of blue people who lived in the United States in the 19th-21st centuries. The first group come from a family of Kentucky folks who stemmed from a common ancestor named Martin Fugate. He
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This is the story of a famous Russian woman and author,, Anna Akhmatova. Here she is in 1924 at age 35, looking weary and seductive. By this time, Anna (neé Anna Andreyevna) had lived through fin-de-siecle Europe, the artsy cabaret scene in St Petersburg, the First World War, and the Communist Revolution. Well might she
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India’s textile production was perhaps the most internationally renowned from the Early Modern period through the Age of Industrialization. Here you see a fantastically detailed embroidered section of a woman’s dress from the 19th century. It is made of cotton muslin and gilded silver wire and — wait for it — beetles’ wings! Fan-cy! Sources:
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The ability to control when to have a child has had different histories for women of color and white women in the United States. Then as now, African American women experienced higher levels of poverty and risk of dying in childbirth than their white American sisters. Before Roe v Wade between 1965/67, black maternal death
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