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 First discovered by astronomer and mathematician August Möbius in 1858 (although it had been described in unpublished literature a few years prior by a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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These are the faces of Irish people overjoyed with the passing of the Health Act 2018, allowing abortion in limited cases. The bureaucratic title belies the long history of abortion’a outlawry in Ireland. Two women galvanized the country to change Irish law — and their stories show how ubiquitous abortion debates have been in modern
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Here are the mug shots of some members of the Jane Collective — seven were arrested, but none put on trial, saved because the 1973 Roe v Wade decision was pronounced just in time. The Janes were a group of women who provided safe but underground abortions in the Chicago area before the procedure was
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The United States has a complicated relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, the First Amendment to the US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. On the other hand, the country’s past includes a litany of deeply religious people who frequently have
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This advertisement appeared in _Life_ magazine July 1952. Put out by Conrad Hilton, famous hotel millionaire and ardent anti-Communist, Hilton was one of many Americans who supported a sense of nationalism that entwined Christian religion with patriotism at altogether new levels. In the twentieth century, the drive to portray America as a Christian nation was
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Today Gabby and I got to visit the formerly secret bunker under the famous resort of Greenbrier, West Virginia! The 11,000 acres of this elite hotel/spa/golf course/plastic surgery/horseback riding (etc) resort was also a hidden cover for a nuclear fallout shelter designed to hold 1,000 members of Congress and their staff in case Washington DC
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So much of the preserved natural beauty of the U.S. can be traced back to the FDR Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, and this remote jewel of state park is another example. The Greenbrier State Forest is over 5,000 acres in southeastern West Virginia. Straddling lands to either side of Kate’s Mountain (so named for a
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Winterthur is a jewel of an estate located in northern Delaware; it is the ancestral home of the du Pont family, one of the wealthiest in American history. Although its museum and library are famous for their collection of Americana, it was the gardens that Henry Francis du Pont most cared about on that property.
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See the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign on this tombstone from 1819? It really is, and this isn’t like the History Channel’s claims that aliens built the pyramids. But Spock, rather, borrowed from an actual human custom originating in Jewish tradition. Leonard Nimoy’s hand signal is half of a sacred gesture made by the
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This is George H.W. Bush, U.S. president from 1989-1993, and in 1995 he publically revoked his membership from the N.R.A., stating that the group “deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to my country. I resign as a lifetime member of the N.R.A.”. Context is relevant
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Wanna be a smidge happier? Learn about an extremely rare illness discovered in 1882 by the French neurologist Dr. Jules Cotard — if you can read this post, you almost certainly don’t have it. And for that, you will be gladdened. At his hospital at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University in Paris, the doctor saw a patient
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