This cruel object is a Cat-O-Nine-Tails whip, dating from about 1860. Slave owners from the American South used whips like these against the people they had enslaved. Notice the metal spurs at the end of each rope. Millions of people experienced this inhumane treatment, and the “peculiar institution” of slavery of course became a motivating […]
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Here you see a physical manifestation of the phrase “bite the bullet.” These two lead bullets came from a hospital serving soldiers wounded in the U.S. Civil War’s famous Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863). In an age preceding anesthetics, patients were told to bite down on these so-called “Hospital” or “Pain Bullets” before surgery was
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In 1862, the port city of Charleston, South Carolina, witnessed one of the most impressive feats in the Civil War. An African-American named Robert Smalls stole an entire ship from the Confederacy and escaped to freedom with his wife, two young children, and several other enslaved people. He did this right under the noses
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In 1353, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio completed one of the most important works of fiction in history, _The Decameron_. The book tells the story of ten young aristocrats – seven women and three men – who spend ten days together, passing the time by taking turns telling different stories. The occasion for their gathering
“The Decameron” and Escaping the Bubonic Plague Read More »
Well dear readers, now that we’re all settled in for a while, we can hunker down and enjoy a strange Medieval love story that might better fit around Halloween. May I present to you the macabre tale of the life-and-afterlife relationship of Ines and Peter of Portugal.In 1339, Peter was a young Prince whose father
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In the north-central region of Maryland, the Catoctin Park has some of the oldest layers of the earth’s exposed mountains. The Appalachians rose out of a collision between plates in North America and Africa 200 million years ago, and parts of the convergence appear here, where the quartzite rocks you see are part of a
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The social distancing requirements of today are stressful, but are much less deadly than measures of combating disease in the Middle Ages. Our word “quarantine” comes from the Italian words “quaranta giorni” for forty days, which was a standard length of time that sick and infected people would be shut off from the healthy population.The
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The Ancient Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet has a fascinating double role as both a vengegeful deity of destruction — especially bringing plague — but also a force that was thought to ward off disease. Her name can mean “The Mighty One” but she was also called the “Mistress of Dread.”. A particularly entertaining myth associated with
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Scientists are enabling us to save lives and hopefully prevent disaster in this COVID-19 pandemic — and coming up with big solutions to health problems is one of the main reasons their profession is so valuable. But for me there is another equally praiseworthy aspect: their contributions to unveiling the forces that shape our universe.
The First-Lady of Physics – Chien-Shiung Wu Read More »
This Ancient Roman wall painting shows an opulent domicile, and adorned a bedroom of a first-century BCE aristocrat. The plants in the scenery show a love of the natural world common in elite decor. We know that Romans of means took great thought in how they situated their estate homes, considering matters like which way
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We humans are innately social creatures, and even the introverts among us long to feel included in a community we consider our own. Feelings of isolation cause grief and sadness, both now and in ages across time. The Old English poem known as “The Wanderer” evokes these emotions, telling the story of a man far
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In the Medieval and Early Modern periods, natural science blended with occult studies, and this is why the modern subject of chemistry arose out of the ancient practice of alchemy. This intermixing of the mysterious and the concrete can be illustrated by the concept of a Diana’s Tree.Diana was the Ancient Roman Goddess of the
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This Medieval map shows the northern and southern hemispheres, with the constellations drawn to represent the stars’ positions. Although it is likely ordinary Europeans could point out different patterns in the sky, you had to have elite training to be able to pass yourself off as a real star-gazer: it was totally normal for people
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What better way to divert our attention from present maladies than an article about Medieval farts? Passing gas had medical and social components, but the documentation on this subject turns out to be ripe in all directions.Holding farts in was considered unhealthy. For instance, the _Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum_ is a 12th-century Latin poem that warns
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In the centuries before China was unified as an empire, petty kingdoms and warlords struggled for influence in a centuries-long diplomatic chess game. The bells shown here from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BCE) might have been owned by wealthy aristocrats engaged in such manuvers, and used for ceremonial importance, which would have
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Here you see the image of Mary holding her infant son . . . The first of its kind in Western Europe, it appears in the_Book of Kells_, the most famous manuscript of Medieval Ireland, and it dates to about 800 CE. The centuries that proceeded its composition were chaotic ones indeed, with warlords in
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As the days of quarantine add up, many of us have expressed a strange sense of time becoming blurred — the hours we used to divide with our old routines have been upended, and our unchanging surroundings can sometimes make the feeling of time feel less progressive. In fact, of course, the external physical world
Wells Cathedral Clock in England Read More »
This beautiful site is the rocky island of Skellig Michael off the coast of western Ireland. It is a lonely and barren place now, as it was in the Early Middle Ages, when sometime between 500-700 CE hermits built a monastery there. These Christian monks wanted to spend their lives with as much solitude as
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This image of the famous ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi (aka Lao Tzu) dates to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and shows the semi-legendary Lao Tzu as an old man, peacefully riding atop a bull. It is a fitting image for one of the most famous figures in the history of Doaism/Taoism, which emphasizes cultivating an ability
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This plague doctor mask from the Deutsches Historisches Museum was developed in the 17th century, and the prototype is usually attributed to the French physician Charles de Lorne. It was not worn during the infamous Black Death pandemic of the 14th century, but rather a couple centuries afterward: for instance, during an outbreak in 1656
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