It’s my tradition each year to celebrate the season with historically themed Christmas carols — and so here you go: “Baldwin, it’s cold outside!” Set to the tune of “Baby it’s cold outside,” by Frank Loesser, this cover deals with the first super bad Viking raid in Western Europe. In 793, the pagan Norsemen attacked […]
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The Pantheon of Ancient Rome is one of my favorite buildings because its architecture is so distinct. The late second-century historian Cassius Dio attributed the dedication of the temple to “all the Gods,” but he was speculating — ‘pantheus” might have referred to one deity (albeit a superlative one). Why is that important? Well,
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The Ancient Greek art that most of us know features able-bodied people up-front: athletes with six-pack abs and fit and trim muscular physiques. But these images skew what we know to be the reality for many Ancient Greeks, and recent work by Dr. Debby Sneed aims to show that disabled people were not only commonplace,
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No, this isn’t what you think it is, readers: I know it *looks* like a penis, but really it’s not. Rather, what you see is a 16th-century woodcut illustration of the dissected genitals of a woman. Er, if that’s not obvious to you, don’t worry. Commissioned for Andreus Vesalius’s famous _De humani corporis fabrica_
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What could be more fun on a Friday than stories about travel and tawdry Popes? How about the Baroque-era Vatican in 17th-century Rome and a pope from the ridiculously wealthy Italian family, who went to war for Papal territory and drove the apostolic see into great debt? Pictured here is the Baldacchino, the enormous
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The magnificent ruins shown here are only some of the thousands of Ancient Puebloan structures found in southwestern Colorado’s Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. This particular site, found along the 6.5 mile Sand Canyon (loop) Trail, is similar to many of the region, with remarkable masonry that includes cliff dwellings, towers, public roofed
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This is Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, ending the childhood disease that had killed or crippled so many Americans — especially children — in the mid-20th century. But Salk was important for other reasons. His approach to designing the vaccine was innovative, using a denatured version of the virus rather than
History crosses the discipline of Political Science in the figure of John Rawls (1921-2002), arguably the most important American political philosopher of the 20th century. His book, _A Theory of Justice_, has ideas about how to structure society which have been of immeasurable importance far outside the towers of academia, ideas worth knowing about.
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Non-verbal communication is a scholarly subject usually studied by academics looking at modern human behavior. Physical gestures of course existed in past times too, but often there is little written evidence — whole catalogues of affective conversations that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone are closed off to historians, because they were so rarely
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Many of us have had need to wrap presents in the last few weeks, but maybe only some of us waited until early this morning on December 25 to start wrapping their children’s gifts. (Yours truly, ahem). The discipline of intentionally folding paper into different shapes is known as origami because this practiced flourished
We take for granted the ways we exchange greetings, but these ways are laden with hidden meanings that tell a lot about the culture they develop in. And when greetings change, something about the culture changes too. This is the Chinese character for “li,” an ancient concept developed in some of the oldest Confucian
Here are four different species of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Although they look similar, their differences include their beaks — each one takes advantage of a different type of seed. Natural selection shaped the trajectory of these birds’ appearance, and one of the scientists who first figured out how this worked passed away yesterday
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One of the eeriest Medieval practices was the ceremonial burial of the anchorite, or the “Servicium Recludendi” as one litany calls it. Imagine being in the head-space of an anchorite, in which you were so concerned about devoting your life to prayer and abjuration of this world that you willingly entombed yourself in a prayer
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The root system you see here isn’t just part of the plant: it’s joined by fungi, making it a mycorrhiza — a symbiosis of plant and fungi. Most plants rely on mycorrhizae — the fungi elements give the roots better access to precious nutrients like phosphorous and water, and the plant bits give the fungus
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TIL that 30 million years ago a species of mound-building termites evolved with next-level techniques that we humans could learn from in order to deal with our environmental challenges. These are the Macrotermes, and what makes them particularly special is the very ancient relationship they co-created with the fungus Termitomyces. Neither survives without the
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This is a mid-19th century North American painting entitled _Indian Women Playing the Game of Plum Stones_, and testifies to the ubiquitous practice of dice gambling that American Indian women played in pre-colonial times. As evidence summarized by Warren DeBoer suggests, gambling was a pastime that American Indian women seemed to have enjoyed across
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In their momentous book — _The Dawn of Everything_ (it’s got the entire field of history all a-tizzy right now) authors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that the Enlightenment ideas of freedom, equality, and tolerance didn’t arise out of the minds of European political philosophers as much as from Native North American Indian intellectuals.
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Here you see an illustration showing the happy and regal-looking figure of an Inca princess named Zilia. Captured from her homeland and torn from her fiancé, Zilia was rescued by a French captain and taken to Europe, where she was exposed to a culture that imagined itself enlightened, but which Zilia found repressive. Zilia
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This unusual garment is called a “Bishop’s Mantle,” because of its similarity to the robes worn by such clergymen, but if you look closely, you’ll see it’s made up of linked chains — and is actually armor. In fact, it probably was only dubbed a “Bishop’s Mantle” by 19th-century antiquarians, and we might think
To the northwest of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey, lie the ruins of one of the most important archaeological sites in human history: the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Only discovered in the 1990s (earlier archaeologists has thought the remains medieval), Göbekli Tepe sprawls over twenty acres
