This is a book that of which I am not a fan. _The Alphabet Versus the Goddess_, by Leonard Shlain, argues that the development of the written word allowed patriarchy to flourish. Sigh. Shlain’s background was in surgery, and the premise of his thesis is rooted in physical claims. “Alphabet literacy,” he asserts, gains […]
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You are looking at a tiny opening, maybe three feet wide and two feet high, that peers into a hidden room against a stairwell that served as one of the first stopping points of the northbound path of America’s Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad, of course, was the illegal highway that American enslaved people
This is a drawing of the prehistoric species Plesiosaurus, discovered by the paleontologist Mary Anning in 1823. Anning was a working-class, uneducated person who became one of England’s premier fossil scholars, but struggled her whole life — financially and professionally — because of her gender and class. Anning grew up on the southern coast
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Ah, the poor doomed philosopher Giordano Bruno. Whereas Galileo had been allowed to live after recanting his astronomical views that ran counter to Roman Catholic teachings, Bruno — himself a Dominican friar — was executed by the Church in 1600. His death and his willingness to buck the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on acceptable views about
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Wanna be a smidge happier? Learn about an extremely rare illness discovered in 1882 by the French neurologist Dr. Jules Cotard — if you can read this post, you almost certainly don’t have it. And for that, you will be gladdened. At his hospital at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University in Paris, the doctor saw a patient
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Take a guess as to what this Medieval illustration is a drawing of: upside-down fallopian tubes? Sea-creatures? Mirror-image diagrams of some planetary motion? The answer is below, but before you look — ask yourself how you are arriving at your guesses. The process of investigative inquiry to figure out the nature of reality is something
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This grizzly painting of two polar bears rending apart the remains of human corpses with a shipwreck in the background is the subject of a fascinating urban legend. Called _Man Proposes, God Disposes_, it was painted by artist Edwin Landseer in 1864 to depict the tragic failure of Englishman Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition 19
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I love that as I get ready to write up my syllabi for this coming fall semester, perhaps a wee bit wistful of my fabulous summer coming to an end, I am reading about a time in the early 20th century when teaching college students was a lot more stressful. And that’s where the great
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Flick through these three images, dear readers, and you will observe something that scholars have been looking for for over 2,000 years — finally brought to light via a student class project, the COVID lockdowns, and state-of-the-art multispectral imaging. It is the oldest star map of the universe. The manuscript you see is the _Codex
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The initials “WN” on this board from 1857 stand for “Welsh Not” — this cruel form of student discipline in Welsh schools in the 19th century goes a long way to illustrating why the language has almost died out. The Welsh Not (also called Welsh knot, Welsh note, Welsh ticket, among other terms) was usually
The way cutting-edge technology lets us see into the distant past is so cool. Recently, a technique called “photometric stereo workflow” enabled Medieval historian Jessica Hodgkinson take a fresh appraisal of the pages of a manuscript written in south-east England in the first half of the 700s. The historian discovered that the name of a
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This is a painting of Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, one of the most celebrated Latin American authors of the Colonial period (1651-1695). An essayist, playwright, and poet, Juana Inéz de la Cruz decided to join a convent at an early age because she thought it was the best way “to have no fixed
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This is Sequoyah, a Cherokee American who lived from about 1770-1843 and is a rare example of an illiterate person who created a written language. Sequoyah was born in what is now Tennessee and demonstrated skill in a wide variety of crafts: he made jewelry, invented better dairy farm equipment, and forged iron. Observing the
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If you look hard at the figure in the lower center of this carved standing stone, you can make out the faint outline of a figure riding an animal. It is a donkey, and this man was named Khebeded, and he is the leading contender for one of the most transformational inventions of all time:
