What do all three of the women in these three images have in common? A: they each depict the American Revolutionary war heroine Molly Pitcher, and B: none of them are real. Real, as in, there was no OG Molly Pitcher historians can trace. Stories about about a woman called “Captain Molly” who served […]
I adore Medieval flora and fauna mistakes! When they got things wrong, they were so extra about it. So here’s an example of a made-up species that Medieval people thought existed, called the “Barnacle Goose,” or “Branta leucopsis”. Much like the “Lamb of Tartary,” which I did a different post about, the Barnacle Geese
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 First discovered by astronomer and mathematician August Möbius in 1858 (although it had been described in unpublished literature a few years prior by a
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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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The grumpy faces you see here belong to invaders captured by the Pharaoh Ramses III (about 1186-1154 BCE). Many scholars have interpreted these men as the infamous “Sea Peoples,” about whom little is known for certain, but to whom historians have attributed the collapse of many civilizations in the Bronze Age. The Sea Peoples
This lovely iron sword with its wood- and lacquer- decorated scabbard comes from the 2nd century BCE Han Dynasty, and well symbolizes its founding leader, Liu Bang, posthumously named Emperor Gaozu, “the High Founder”. The man who started a Chinese Dynasty that lasted over 400 years was born from a peasant lineage, making his success
This is a late 12th-century illustration of “the Witch of Endor,” a prophetess from the Bible who could raise the spirits of the dead and talk to them. Artists have enjoyed illustrating her almost as much as religious people have enjoyed debating about her powers. In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament First Book of Samuel
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Henry Avery was one of the most influential pirates in history, even if you’ve never heard of him until now. This Englishman led a raid in 1695 that hauled in £600,000 of treasure from a Mughal Indian ship on its return voyage from the Hajj (worth about $122,169,000 in U.S. dollars today). But it enraged
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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
Moses Maimonides is not only fun to say (alliteration!), but also the name of one of the most important philosophers of the Middle Ages. Born around 1135 in Spain, Maimonides was influenced by the great mix of religious cultures that made the Medieval Iberian peninsula unique. And this brings me to one of his most
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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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In the late 1400s, Japanese Zen monks brought a particular style of splashed-ink painting to its acme. Here, you see a scene that looks like an embankment with trees, a fence, and a building: or is it just a random oddly arranged page of smudges? The Zen monk who painted this, Josui Sōen, was a
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This is a statue in the Smithsonian Museum’s Freer Gallery of the Buddha Vairochana: a.k.a. The Cosmic Buddha. It really is a fantastic piece, with the artful designs on the Buddha’s clothing depicting various “Realms of Existence” — different planes that made up the cosmos of the Mahayana Buddhist universe. Created in the
My favorite time period in Japan (and there are many) is the Muromachi era, when a militarized aristocracy ruled in a de-centralized state. The shōgun were just coming on the scene, and they had aspersions of refinement but lacked the intellectual legacy of the ruling class they had usurped. Into this world entered Zen Buddhism,
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This is a statue in the Smithsonian Museum’s Freer Gallery of the Buddha Vairochana: a.k.a. The Cosmic Buddha. It really is a fantastic piece, with the artful designs on the Buddha’s clothing depicting various “Realms of Existence” — different planes that made up the cosmos of the Mahayana Buddhist universe. Created in the
You’re looking at an 18th-century illustration from one Marie-Jeanne Valet, aka “the Amazon”, aka “the Maid of Gévandan”, showing her getting attacked by a monstrous creature. The 19- or 20- year old Marie got these creds for having successfully fought off the enormous and bloodthirsty animal, which was something that as many as 100 people
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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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This lovely creature was a Dinogorgon, one of many types of animals known as “Gorgonopsia,” the apex predators in the Permian Period. When I learned about how boss these creatures were, the nine-year-old paleontologist in me felt cheated because of all the front stage play that dinosaurs get. But these animals were amazing and thrived
After the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the literature that had flourished went into abeyance. For instance, the entire genre of playwriting just went out of existence. It was finally a tenth-century woman named Roswitha of Gandersheim who revived this art. Her plays today read charmingly clunky, like fourth-grade presentations. As with much about
“Dulcitius” and the Revival of Playwriting Read More »
This is a colorized photograph of an unusual geographic formation that no longer exists — but for hundreds of years, it marked a major river system in the southern part of the U.S.. Known as “the Great Raft”, it was a terrific log jam, made up of season upon season of washed-away trees. Cedar, cottonwood,
