The Franklin Mountains have seen human activity since at least 12,000 years ago, but their name came from a much more recent source, when a rancher named Benjamin Franklin Coons settled in El Paso in 1849 — he was such a heavyweight in the region that locals used to call the city “Franklin” in the
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Here are photos of a sculpture and the cultural museum outside the Mescalero Apache Tribe on the Mescalero reservation near Tularosa, New Mexico. Ulysses S. Grant formally created the Mescalero reservation, comprising almost half a million acres in 1873, and today three sub-tribes of Apaches live there. The Lipan Apache at the reservation arrived in
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The Robledo Mountains lie to the north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and to the east of the Rio Grande continental rift. Much of the exposed rock is from about 280 million years ago (Paleozoic), and the geological footprint is obvious and amazing. You can see a slot canyon in most of these pictures, when
The Mexican flag flies over the city of Palomas, just over the border from the city of Columbus, New Mexico. Today Palomas is a town frequented by American tourists (like me) who cross over to shop and eat — the Pink House (second image) is its most famous establishment. (It even has its own Wikipedia
In 19th-century German-speaking countries, folktales about horrifying agricultural monsters became widespread. They picked up from even earlier local legends, streamlining beliefs into a general picture of Feldgeister – “field ghosts” and Korndämonen – “corn demons”. (First and second images). These stories involve a range of beasts that are sometimes humanoid, other times beasts, and additionally
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This scene of a man-in-the-moon with thirteen stars might strike a vague familiarity with you. And perhaps if you were alive in the United States during the 1980s, it might evoke a sinister connotation. And if that’s the case, you were tangentially affected by the “Satanic Panic” of that decade. Dungeons and Dragons, various rock
The game of _Monopoly_ has been played by millions for over a century: my own kids learned a bit about adding and subtracting large numbers in their heads from it, while I learned how to only let the game go on until all the properties were sold, so as to prevent in-game death by slow
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These photos taken last weekend show vistas along the Loyalsocks Trail, one of the many stunning forested hiking pathways in Pennsylvania. Taking its name from the Loyalsock Creek (which translates from an American Indian name for “middle” creek), the Loyalsock trail is nearly sixty miles. The portions shown here include Sones Pond, which was built
TIL that there are about 5,000 people in Argentina that speak Welsh. And how that happened is a crazy fascinating story, some of which involves the people featured here in this first photo. In the mid-19th century, the indigenous people of Wales were experiencing great hardships with the English occupation and the process of Industrialization.
The initials “WN” on this board from 1857 stand for “Welsh Not” — this cruel form of student discipline in Welsh schools in the 19th century goes a long way to illustrating why the language has almost died out. The Welsh Not (also called Welsh knot, Welsh note, Welsh ticket, among other terms) was usually
Boo! And happy Halloween, dear readers. This day’s habits and festivities draw from a number of traditions across quite a wide spread of time, but some of the most interesting are from 19th century Europe and North America. Take this picture from the 1860s, for instance, showing a woman having a fright from a ghost.
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The two pictures in this post seem to have nothing to do with each other, but they are connected by a surprising history: “white gold,” aka guano, i.e. bird excrement. This stuff once drove human cultures in these now depopulated areas. The first image shows the Atacama Desert of Chile, the driest non-polar desert in
One evening in New York City in 1917, a woman in her early 30s was helping her mother make dinner when, as she leaned over her oven, she felt a sharp pain in her left breast and saw a three-dimensional crucifix emerging from her body, covered in blood. The woman was named Margaret Reilly, and
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The story of the Harlem Hellfighters (aka 369th Infantry Regiment) is one of the most epic accounts of heroism in wartime that doesn’t get talked about in U.S. history books. In the spring of 1918, two U.S. soldiers fighting on the Western Front successfully took on about 24 German forces in an early morning raid.
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Japanese history has a remarkable record of women who excelled in the martial arts, despite the overall legacy of Medieval patriarchy that co-existed for so long. Many stories of female generals and warriors only appear briefly in the historical sources, and cloud the details of such women’s lives. And this is one of the reasons
In his tragic and comedic novel _The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao,” author Junot Díaz has his narrator say the following about the dictator featured here, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina:. “For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history: Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the
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“Christ with the Adulteress” is one of the most famous forgeries in history. Painted by the 20th-century Dutch artist Han van Meegeren, it was sold to the infamous Nazi Hermann Goring who considered it among his most prized collections. After the Second World War ended, Goring faced both the war trials (which resulted in his
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This is an Edo-period Japanese war fan from the first half of the 1800s, made out of paper and lacquer, and — the active ingredient — iron. Folding fans had been a part of Japanese aristocratic culture since the 600s. The paintings on them, the gold or silver foil that adorned them, and the mannerisms
This is John Tenniel’s famous 1871 illustration of the poem “Jabberwocky,” the most famous nonsense poem in the English language. Linguists have long remarked upon the genius of the way Lewis Carroll’s poem explores questions about language and meaning. But Tenniel’s illustration better shows the new Victorian awareness of Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution and
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“Ostara” by Johannes Gehrts (1884). The word “Easter” comes from the name of a Germanic fertility goddess. Very little is known about her (as is often the case about western European pagan deities), but the English writer Bede recorded in the 8th century that pagans had been partaking in rituals celebrating the goddess during one
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