If you’re looking at this on your phone, it’s worth a moment to zoom in for this photo, to check out the texture of this finely woven gown. It’s a rare and valuable sample of a type of cloth called “Dhaka muslin,” and in its heyday, sold for vast sums and was esteemed as the […]
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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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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:
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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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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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Are you from the US and fancy a trip to Europe — but don’t quite have the funding? Just north of Philadelphia is a small district called Bryn Athyn, which has . . . A Medieval mansion and cathedral. Or, almost. Glencairn Museum falls into the category of “unique homes of the wealthiest business tycoons
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The region of Ardeche in south-eastern France has a long history of exporting its produce. The Chestnut trees that grow here amazed me, because they are practically non-existent in the U.S.. Here I am standing next to a famous Chestnut tree over 300 years old — the trunk was massive. Grapes for wine (second picture)
The game of _Monopoly_ has been played by millions for over a century: my own kids learned a bit about adding and subtracting large numbers in their heads from it, while I learned how to only let the game go on until all the properties were sold, so as to prevent in-game death by slow
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The two pictures in this post seem to have nothing to do with each other, but they are connected by a surprising history: “white gold,” aka guano, i.e. bird excrement. This stuff once drove human cultures in these now depopulated areas. The first image shows the Atacama Desert of Chile, the driest non-polar desert in
If ever you were to consider the history of fabric-making, you are unlikely to have associated it with horror. But that is just what this contemporary rendering of the Norse poem “Darratharljóth” conveys, and it’s really quite sick. In the poem, which appears in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, a man sees a vision of twelve
Viking Women, Weaving, and Power Read More »
In the northern mountains of Spain in the region of Aragon lies the tiny Medieval village of Trasmoz. Once it held 10,000 people, but now there are fewer than 100: except for June, when a festival called “Feria de Brujeria” celebrates the fact that the town is known for its history of witches and being
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Is this a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes or just an apt demonstration that the value of money only has a value that we humans collectively give it? Folks, may I present to you the sole remaining copy of a stamp (that we know of), and the most expensive piece of paper in existence
Treskilling Yellow Read More »
I really enjoyed the Freer Gallery of Art’s small permanent collection dealing with the history of the southwestern part of the Arabian peninsula, or modern Yemen. The area has suffered from horrific warfare since 2014, which has endangered much of its historical heritage. This is tragic, because although the area never boasted the wealth of
This shipwreck puts a new spin on how historians think about the earliest century of Islam. The usual story is that the decades after Muhammad’s death witnessed a real collapse of trade in the former Roman Empire we now call Byzantium. But this wreck, called the Ma’agan Michael B (or MMB) ship, suggests that eastern
Ma’agan Michael B and Byzantine Economy after Muhammad Read More »
