We’ve probably all seen pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry at some point, that amazing almost 70-meter /230 foot-long embroidery from the 1070s showing in cartoon-panel format how the English were vanquished by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. But few of us have had the opportunity to examine the embroidered figures up
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This is a picture of Hvalsey Church, a Norse ruin from a settlement in Greenland that was abandoned in the 1400s. Scientists and historians have recently amended their ideas about what caused the collapse of this culture. In the late 900s, some Vikings from Iceland migrated to Greenland, setting up small communities that lasted
Today is April 20, aka 4/20, which has been associated in the US since the 1970s with marijuana. Here, we are in a transition phase regarding weed’s medical and recreational legalization, with some states allowing and others forbidding. But in the Middle Ages no regulation or moral questioning of the plant existed. Medieval Europeans
My world history class today looked at the Mongols, and Jared Diehl brought in his actual Mongolian Composite Bow to show the class! It was really cool — I was surprised how lightweight it was. The fabric wrappings and the lines of the wood were also very elegant. Thanks, Jared!!
Jared Diehl and their Mongolian Composite Bow Read More »
In the Khentii Mountains of Mongolia, the almost 8,000 ft-peak Burkhan Khaldun lies: it is the legendary burial place of Genghis Khan, one of Eurasia’s most ambitious and brutal rulers. From a distance of 800 years, it is easy to allow awe rather than horror to surface as the primary estimation of the Mongolian warlord.
The Khentii Mountains, Resting Place of Genghis Khan Read More »
Everyone knows that the Medieval aristocracy was famed for the way they promoted the military prowess of knights on horseback. Gargantuan sums of money were spent selecting, breeding, and caring for war horses that could show off the status of their aristocratic riders. There is, therefore, a certain amount of glee to be taken by
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This is a post about a Medieval folktale that has come to be known as “the Green Children of Woolpit”. It’s also about how sources from the different past can be interpreted in such wildly different ways.Here is what the two Medieval sources dating from about 1189 and 1220 roughly agree upon about what happened:.Sometime
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Yesterday’s post was about a legend of green people who lived in Medieval England. Today I bring to you the true story of blue people who lived in the United States in the 19th-21st centuries. The first group come from a family of Kentucky folks who stemmed from a common ancestor named Martin Fugate. He
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VIKING HOARD ALERT! Not, like, the immanent threat of hoards of Vikings coming to invade, but the other sort of hoard — as in, the stashed treasures from Viking-age Scandinavia and Britain, buried for safekeeping but never reclaimed by their owners. Hundreds of such hoards have been discovered in modern times, many by amateur treasure-seekers
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This is a set of bone sewing needles found in the Cave of Courbet near Toulouse, France, dating to around 13,000 years ago. Trace the history of the sewing needle and you will trace one of the key technologies that enabled Homo sapiens to migrate around the planet, and to outlast our closest human relatives,
The History of Sewing Read More »
This is the story of a famous Russian woman and author,, Anna Akhmatova. Here she is in 1924 at age 35, looking weary and seductive. By this time, Anna (neé Anna Andreyevna) had lived through fin-de-siecle Europe, the artsy cabaret scene in St Petersburg, the First World War, and the Communist Revolution. Well might she
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India’s textile production was perhaps the most internationally renowned from the Early Modern period through the Age of Industrialization. Here you see a fantastically detailed embroidered section of a woman’s dress from the 19th century. It is made of cotton muslin and gilded silver wire and — wait for it — beetles’ wings! Fan-cy! Sources:
Details of Indian Textiles Read More »
The ability to control when to have a child has had different histories for women of color and white women in the United States. Then as now, African American women experienced higher levels of poverty and risk of dying in childbirth than their white American sisters. Before Roe v Wade between 1965/67, black maternal death
Black Reproductive Health Read More »
These are the faces of Irish people overjoyed with the passing of the Health Act 2018, allowing abortion in limited cases. The bureaucratic title belies the long history of abortion’a outlawry in Ireland. Two women galvanized the country to change Irish law — and their stories show how ubiquitous abortion debates have been in modern
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Here are the mug shots of some members of the Jane Collective — seven were arrested, but none put on trial, saved because the 1973 Roe v Wade decision was pronounced just in time. The Janes were a group of women who provided safe but underground abortions in the Chicago area before the procedure was
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The United States has a complicated relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, the First Amendment to the US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. On the other hand, the country’s past includes a litany of deeply religious people who frequently have
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The Ancient Greeks were right to have the story of how Prometheus brought fire to the human race front-and-center in their mythology. Fire is an amazing thing — most vertebrates flee from it when it happens in the natural world. But we humans learned to control it, and that revolutionized our existence. The control of
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This advertisement appeared in _Life_ magazine July 1952. Put out by Conrad Hilton, famous hotel millionaire and ardent anti-Communist, Hilton was one of many Americans who supported a sense of nationalism that entwined Christian religion with patriotism at altogether new levels. In the twentieth century, the drive to portray America as a Christian nation was
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Here’s a humongous Hellmouth harvesting hardened humans! This 15th-century depiction of tortured souls was a common artistic motif and gets at the real fear that permiated Medieval society about what one’s place in the afterlife would be. Notably missing from the damned, here, were children. And yet, folks did worry. The general view was that
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Today Gabby and I got to visit the formerly secret bunker under the famous resort of Greenbrier, West Virginia! The 11,000 acres of this elite hotel/spa/golf course/plastic surgery/horseback riding (etc) resort was also a hidden cover for a nuclear fallout shelter designed to hold 1,000 members of Congress and their staff in case Washington DC
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