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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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
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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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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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This is George H.W. Bush, U.S. president from 1989-1993, and in 1995 he publically revoked his membership from the N.R.A., stating that the group “deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to my country. I resign as a lifetime member of the N.R.A.”. Context is relevant
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This marble bust of the French philosopher Voltaire (né François-Marie Arouet 1694-1778) was crafted by the admiring artist Jean-Antoine Houdin, who rendered the famed thinker multiple times during his artistic career. This bust shows Voltaire vulnerable in his old age, yet with a wry expression of humor that speaks to his legendary intelligence and abrasive
This is a photo of The Cave of Hands in Argentina, which is about 10,000 years old. The crowding of the hands is reflective of the way that humans for a long time have formed large communities. What is fascinating is that many anthropologists think they know just how large these average societies were. And
Here’s the first automated game ever made: the Nimatron. Making its first appearance at the 1940 New York World’s Fair, it pitted a human against a machine which made perfect moves. The _New York Times_ wrote about the “new electric robot 8 feet tall”, that it would “play a variation of an old Chinese game
Birthday celebrations in history have differed across the globe, and historically an annual ritual to recognize the anniversary of a completed lap around the sun wasn’t the norm for most people. In the United States it was the advent of Industrialization — between 1860 and 1880 — that common people began to regularly acknowledge birthdays.
This African mask from the 1500s is on display this fall of 2022 at the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an exhibit on the African origins of civilization. Exquisitely carved from precious ivory, it provides testimony to one of Africa’s more recent civilizations, the Kingdom of Benin. The capital city of Benin
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Here’s a Burning Man party of a completely different nature: this “Bal des Ardents” (Ball of the Burning Men) happened in late January of 1393, and the story encapsulates the place of French Medieval aristocratic culture with all its quirks. The event involved a big party, during which the French king staged a performance with
