Enos Hitchcock

Enos Hitchcock, Who Believed the Youth Are Corrupted by Bad Reading Materials

This is Enos Hitchcock, (1745-1803) a clergyman whose life intersected the U.S. Revolutionary War and who was an ardent champion for the role of religion in the public sphere. He was concerned — *concerned*, I tell you, about the Direction of the Youth in his time. One of his works had the extraordinarily long title […]

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Doris Fleischman keeps her own name

Doris Fleischman, the Lucy Stoners, and the Ability to Keep One’s Name

This is Doris Fleischman, leaving on a ship for France with her adoring husband in 1925. What made this journey unusual wasn’t the destination — nor was it Fleischman’s business abroad (she was a journalist and interviewed many famous people in her career). Rather, it was that her last name didn’t match her husband’s: Fleischman

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British propaganda in India during WWII

British Propaganda in India during World War II

Step on up here for some old-time British propaganda, put out by the Far Eastern Bureau with the purpose of rallying support for the Allies against the Axis powers during the Second World War. The “strength in unity theme” was a common anthem by the Brits toward their colonial subjects — here, young, straight-backed men

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Crabtree Falls one

Crabtree Falls, Virginia

Crabtree Falls, located near the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, is a place of stunning beauty. I got to visit this 1,200-foot waterfall yesterday after a rainstorm and my pictures do not do it justice. With five major cascades, it is one of the tallest waterfalls east of the Mississippi River, with the longest

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The Thirteen Club

The Thirteen Club, Fighting Superstition in Turn-of-the-20th-Century U.S.

“Those of us who are about to die salute you,” runs the caption on the banner of this macabre illustration. The skeleton in the foreground sits upon a grave, its arm bent with hand upon skull in a pensive gesture. This image was the cover for the Twelfth Annual Report of the Thirteen Club, whise

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Sawney Beane Scotland's most famous cannibal

Sawney Beane, Scotland’s Most Famous Cannibal

Murder podcasts are so trendy right now, but horrible gory tales have attracted human attention for centuries. (#grendelwasnothefirst) Take this gent, for instance — the legendary Scottish cannibal, Sawney Beane! (Or Bean, but I like “Beane” better because the spelling invokes Days Of Yore). There are different accounts of when Sawney lived: the earliest put

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Wood Stanway and the heavy plough one

Wood Stanway and How the Black Death Changed England’s Landscape

Looking at the ridges and furrows of fields such as this, one can get a rare glimpse of what Medieval agricultural topography was like. The undulating patterns you see here were made hundreds of years ago above the settlement of Wood Stanway in Medieval England. There are two big reasons why the landscape still looks

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Catoctin Mountain Park one

Catoctin Mountain Park and Cunningham Falls

Catoctin Mountain Park — situated right next to Cunningham Falls State Park, is in north-central Maryland and is run by the US National Park Service. Its 5,120 acres overlook the Monocacy Valley. Back in 1935, the area was put under the CCC to be fostered as a public recreational area. Cunningham Falls State Park has

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Visard One

The Visard, an Early Modern Woman’s Facemask

Masking women’s faces across history has a common denominator — the practice focuses on how society monitors female sexuality, and shows how often a woman’s place in society was equated with her sexuality. The creepy face mask known as a “Visard” in Early Modern Europe is a case in point. This French painting from 1581

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Tobyhanna State Park One

Tobyhanna State Park

Tobyhanna State Park was formed out of state lands that had been on a large artillery range that preceded Tobyhanna Army Depot. It has 5,540 acres of land surrounding Lake Tobyhanna, which is named after an American Indian term meaning “a stream whose banks are fringed with alder.” Today I saw a lot of birch

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Range Trail One

The Range Trail at Tobyhanna State Park

The Range Trail is a winding path that traverses across swampy and rocky forest in the Tobyhanna State Park, established in 1949. As you can see from the third slide, the area was used by the U.S. military as a live-artillery training ground during both World Wars. I didn’t see any shell remains on my

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Inca Blowguns

The Invention of the (Poisoned) Blowgun by South American Peoples

One of the coolest Indigenous American weapons was the blowgun, which was developed well before the Columbian exchange. You can see painted on this ceramic from the modern Guatemalan Highlands from the Late Classic Maya period (CE 600-900) a row of hunters holding their blowguns as they return from a hunt (this image is a

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Peruvian Projectiles and Evidence for Women Hunters

Ancient Peruvian Weapons and Evidence for Early Women Hunters

These projectile points were discovered in a 9,000 year-old grave at Wilamaya Patjxa in southern Peru. Archaeologists immediately diagnosed the burial items as part of a hunter’s toolkit and assumed that the person they were buried with was a high-status male from an ancient hunter-gatherer community. However, DNA analysis revealed that the hunter was actually

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