Europeans practiced cannibalism well into the 19th century, and one of the favored ways to consume their own kind happened with beheadings. Here you see close-ups of a 1649 painting by artist John Weesop called “An Eyewitness Representation of the Execution of King Charles I”. Notice in the second image the rush of people collecting […]
Cannibalism in Medieval to 19th-Century Europe Read More »
We all know that our society creates ideas about gender, and that what we consider masculine or feminine today are transitive concepts. So it goes with how culture has treated babies’ and children’s clothing. This picture of a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt taken in 1884 is a case in point: he is wearing a white
The Color War of Gender Read More »
In the second century of the Common Era, China’s Han Dynasty oversaw an unusually long period of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, military conflicts punctuated the era, and often the elite aristocratic families were involved. The Wu Family Shrines document such events, and featured prominently in one of the stone chambers there, amidst many other bas-relief
The Battle on the Bridge Read More »
How we treat the dead reflects much about what the living believe. In the Ancient Mediterranean, pagan cultures considered the proper burial of the deceased to be of critical importance: otherwise, the dead person’s spirit would have a restless afterlife. On the other hand, the world of the living was to be kept separate from
Death in the Mediterranean Read More »
Chariot-racing was one of the most popular sporting events in Ancient Rome. Throngs of people (up to 250,000 in Rome’s Circus Maximus) would crowd the stands, supporting their favorite teams (marked by the colors blue, green, red, and white) with fervorous shouting and cheers. The charioteers were much admired, and although some drivers could make
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,
The Bodies of Ancient Greeks Read More »
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.
The Veil of Ignorance Read More »
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
Communication Through Portraiture Read More »
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 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
“Letters of a Peruvian Woman” Read More »
This is a story about a ghost story — the legend of Big Liz of Greenbrier swamp. The tale dates to the American Civil War, when, according to a retelling by S.E. Schlosser, a young but powerfully strong woman — her huge arms could carry two sows at once — was suspected of being
Big Liz of Greenbriar Swamp Read More »
This skeleton is a photo montage of a very decorated burial. The man was between 35-45 years old when he died, but his remains date back to about 34,000 years ago — one of the earliest human interments in the historical record. This man’s grave, found in the region of Sunghir, Russia, reflects a vastly
The Paleolithic Burial in Sunghir Read More »
Martin Luther King famously quipped “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. That arc sure does feel like it’s taking its time, but this man temporarily bent it a little narrower — much like he used to bend iron horseshoes with his hands. This is Joe Greenstein, a
This is a Late Roman mosaic of a peacock, probably from north Africa. When the Roman state withdrew its armies and state apparatus from Britain in the late fourth century, the peacocks that had dotted the wealthy estates of the Roman aristocracy went away as well. But we would be grossly mislead to imagine that
Roman Britain’s Ecological Changes Read More »
It’s pleasant, from where I write this post in my ice-bitten and wintery grey state of Pennsylvania, to look at this lovely plant. Here is _Indigofera tinctoria_ the most important plant to make the dye colored indigo — a color that meant beauty to some, but misery to many others. Indigo is one of
The purple color of this Victorian dress testifies to the discovery of “mauve,” the world’s first synthetic dye. And it was a really, really big deal. The color was produced serendipitously by a brilliant 18-year old named William Henry Perkin in 1856, who didn’t start out his career path to become the millionaire founder
The Discovery of Mauve Read More »
Might I introduce to you Monsieurs and/or Madames skulls “D 111” and “D 112”? For such boring names, these heads – carefully plastered, tended to (de-mantibled), and decorated (check out the eye shells) — are some of the best evidence we have for how some early cultures thought about death, ancestor worship, and property.
Neolithic Death Rights Read More »
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
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess Read More »
This statuette of a nursing mother having her hair done captures an ordinary moment of a civilization long gone by. Dating between 1981-1500 BCE, it comes from the world’s oldest urban civilizations in Ancient Mesopotamia. It was in among peoples in this era that slavery was first documented. And among the first types of people
The Slaves of Mesopotamia Read More »
The way Ancient Romans treated their dogs mirrored the social relationships among Roman people, and this was at times horrific, and at times truly creepy. As Robin Fleming presents in her recent lecture “Dogsbodies and Dogs’ Bodies: A Social and Cultural History of Roman Britain’s Dogs and People,” Ancient Roman elites kept pet dogs,
Roman Children and Roman Dogs Read More »
