Scarred skull reveals cannibalism at Jamestown colony
It sounds like the stuff of a horror movie: cannibalism, and in Jamestown, Virginia, the oldest English settlement in North America.
In 1609, as the colonists were still adjusting to their new home, they were caught in the grip of a brutal winter that has become known as “the starving time”. The recently unearthed bones of a 14-year-old girl sheds light on the unfortunate story of how people survived.
William Kelso, chief archaeologist at the Jamestown Rediscovery Project , found the remains and Douglas Owsley, division head for physical anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, used marks on the girl’s skull and tibia to show that she had been the victim of cannibalism. Her skeleton provides the first tangible evidence of this in Jamestown, corroborating existing written accounts.
Researchers were unable to determine exactly how she died, but her remains did reveal a bit about her life. She was from the south coast of England, and, an analysis of isotopes in her bones suggests, enjoyed a high-protein diet – and so was probably from an upper-class family.
As famine spread in Jamestown, 80 per cent of the residents died. Some turned to leather straps from their clothes and household animals for sustenance. But when even those resources petered out, the colonists were forced to choose between starvation or surviving off the remains of those whom the brutal winter killed.
Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg
Survival Facts: If you were a third class passenger, your chance of survival was 25 percent
First class passengers had a 62 percent survival rate. Second class passengers had a 41 percent survival rate. The crew had a 24 percent survival rate.
Fun Fact: What happened to the iceberg?
Bonus: Images of the Titanic wreck made by stitching together hundreds of optical and sonar images collected by robots via Scientific American Woods Whole Oceanographic Institute, and National Geographic.
Image: April 16, 1912 edition of the New York Times.
Let´s start with the facts: Corsets were a part of everyday Victorian life and they were considered underwear. Thus, they were worn under the dress and no one got to see them. In a time when bras did not yet exist, women needed something to support the upper body. Tada, the corset came along. Soon, tightlacing became a fashion fad: Ladies laced their corsets extra tight to make their waist look small in comparison to curvy hips and a big bosom.
Here´s another secret: Victorians liked curvy women. A misconception is that back in the Victorian era everyone loved “fat” women. This is true to the extent that the ideal Victorian woman was “voluptuous”: She had a round face and round arms, big thighs and a big bosom, but also small feet and a tiny waist - achived by wearing a corset.
In a lot of modern novels and movies Victorian women are portrayed as slender and tall - but this is only today´s beauty standard and it is a false portrayal. Victorian women may seem thin in old photographs but if you look closer you´ll notice that only their waists are thin. Therefore, the only authentic portrayal of a Victorian or Edwardian lady in a movie I have seen is Rose in Titanic.
Back to the corsets. A Victorian woman would not just put on a corset, lace it to eighteen inches and be done with it. It´s not that easy. She would start by reducing her waist only a little bit and lace her corset tighter and tighter over the course of weeks and months. When the corset can´t be laced any tighter, she will have a new one made. Reducing the waist to the legendary eighteen inches of actress and Gibson Girl Camille Clifford (the girl in the white dress) would take a lot of time and it would probably hurt.
Victorian girls started young: Some wore corsets when they were mere children, most started when they were about 14 to 16. Victorian diaries reveal that most girls loved their fashionable corsets but hated the pain they caused them. A lot of them even had night corsets that would not be laced as tight as day corsets. But even so, they wore corsets all the time, even at night. But once the waist was the desired size corsets would not hurt them anymore or even be uncomfortable to wear.
But, and that´s another misconception, not all Victorian women tight-laced. Tight-lacers were soon regarded as fashion victims and considered silly. Though corsets were worn extra tight by the 1890s, not all women laced themselves to 18 inches like Miss Clifford did.
And last but not least the biggest lie of all: There’s a rumour going around that some Victorian ladies had ribs removed to be able to lace their corsets even tighter. Should you come across this story, do not believe it. Back in the 1800s and early 1900s surgery was still very dangerous and the chance of dying was very high. No lady or surgeon would have risked death for a smaller waist. After all what is now considered a minor surgery (appendix removal) killed London´s stage Beauty Gaynor Rowlands (the girl in the black dress) when she was just 23.
Fascinating information!
Huh. As someone who adores Victorian fashion, this is extremely cool.
Portraits of Moroccans by Spanish artist José Tapiro y Baro (1830-1913)
Rabia al-Adawiyya/ رابعة العدوية القيسية
Rābiʿah al-Baṣrī/ رابعة البصري
The Sufi Saint/Mystic
Some fun facts about a female Islamic figure who garners very little recognition.
Rabia was born 713-717 C.E. in Basra, Iraq, the fourth daughter to a poor yet respected family. Due to hardships in her early life and the devastating death of her father, Rabia parted with her other sisters during a time of famine in Basra and was abducted by a man and sold into slavery.
Rabia worked strenuously in the employment of her master but never forgot her service to God. She spent her days fasting and her nights praying. One night her master awoke and looked through a window that overlooked her quarters and witnessed Rabia, head bowed and praying to her Lord. She was entreating in these terms:
“Lord! You know well that my keen desire is to carry out Your commandments and to serve Thee with all my heart, O light of my eyes. If I were free I would pass the whole day and night in prayers. But what should I do when you have made me a slave of a human being?”
Upon hearing such beautiful prayers and (some historians mention) upon seeing a halo of Saintly light emanating from above her, Rabia’s master chose to set her free, for he could not deny someone so loved by God the freedom to pursue her devotion.
Rabia traveled and grew in her knowledge and understanding of Islam under her mentor or murshid, Hazrat Hassan Basri. With time her fame reached the furthest corners of the empire and she gained many disciples.
Also many many marriage proposals followed her. Rabia chose an ascetic lifestyle turning down man after man in her quest to find the Divine Love. She turned down men such as Abd al-Wahid b. Zayd, who was known as a theologian, preacher and advocate of solitude and …..
Although there are more thirsty wedding proposal stories, I’d rather like to mention her amazing contribution to the Sufi order. Rabia was the first to introduce the idea/concept of Divine Love. She claimed that God should be loved for God’s own sake instead of out of fear.
She prayed: “O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell,
and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
But if I worship You for Your Own sake,
grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.”Many stories are accounted to her but all are written and recorded by others since she left behind no written works. She was an influential figure to many and yet her recognition today does her no justice.
“In the history of Islam, the woman saint made her appearance at a very early period, and in the evolution of the cult of saints by Muslims, the dignity of saintship was conferred on women as much as on men. The goal of the Sufi’s quest was union with the Divine, and the Sufi seeker after God, having renounced this world an its attractions, being purged of self and its desires, inflamed with a passion of love to God, journeyed ever onward, looking towards his final purpose, through the life of illumination, with its ecstasies and raptures, and the higher life of contemplation, until at last he achieved the heavenly gnosis and attained to the Vision of God, in which the lover may become one with the Beloved, and abide in Him forever. Such a conception between the saint and his Lord left no room for the distinction of sex. In the spiritual life there could be neither male nor female.”
from
Rabi’a The Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam
by Margaret Smith
Has your cat ever walked across your keyboard? Well, it’s not a new problem. Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel recently Tweeted this photo of a 15th century book with… you guessed it… cat paw prints in ink on the pages! We’re part of a long and glorious historical movement, friends. (Source: Dr. Marty Becker)
Ah this is the best thing! Those medieval cats!
10 Billion Documents, 1 Day at a Time
The United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has turned to Tumblr in an effort to make its collection of over ten billion historical documents more accessible. Since 1934, the Archives have protected the country’s most precious documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation. As “America’s record keeper,” the agency also keeps track of the American government’s daily business. Every federal office is required to report their activities in detail to the NARA, whose staff is then responsible for deciding which of these materials will be saved and made public. This means the Archives are continually growing. Only about 1-3% of documents submitted annually make the cut, and those that do can affect the shape of contemporary politics as well as historical memory.
Accordingly, the NARA faces the constant threat of politicization as an independent agency responsible for federal oversight. The Archives clashed with the Clinton administration when one of the President’s advisors, Sandy Berger, stole and destroyed NARA documents related to terrorist plots. During the second Bush presidency, the Archives were accused of weakness in their negotiations with the executive branch over access to public records; the New York Times said they could use some “spine-stiffening.” Bush’s administration defended their practices on grounds of national security.
More recently, on his first day in office in 2009, President Obama issued a letter to all federal agencies and departments calling for “transparency and open government.” He urged the use of “new technologies to put information about [goverment] operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.” Proclaiming “[i]nformation maintained by the Federal Government … a national asset,” this transparency memo prompted major internal changes at the National Archives.
A rare vintage photograph of an onna-bugeisha, one of the female warriors of the upper social classes in feudal Japan.
Often mistakenly referred to as “female samurai”, female warriors have a long history in Japan, beginning long before samurai emerged as a warrior class.
There is literally nothing better than a sexy, badass lady.
CHING MOTHERFUCKING SHIH
This lady was such a badass, I can’t count the ways, but let’s try.
She got married to an already successful pirate, Zheng Yi, and took over when he died. She was crazy strict to keep an iron fist over her fleet of pirates, and the punishments for stepping out of line were brutal. If you stole or looted from a town that provided assistance or tribute to the pirate fleet, Ching would chop your fucking head off with a battle axe and dump your lifeless body in the ocean. If you stole from the pirate treasury, or she thought you were stealing from the pirate treasury, Ching would chop your fucking head off dump your lifeless body in the ocean. Raping any captured female prisoners was punishable by immediate death. Fuck, if you had consensual sex while on duty you got your head chopped off and the woman was chucked off the boat no matter where they were at. Ching wasn’t fucking around, and she wanted to make damn sure you weren’t fucking around when you should have been working.
Two years after she took over, she got so notorious for ransacking towns and taking taxes on them that she pissed off the entire Chinese government, and sent out a massive fleet to bring her in line. Most pirates probably would’ve said this was out of their pay grade and taken off to hide out or ransack some other country.
Ching Shih said fuck that.
She not only faced them head on, she wiped the floor with them, killing hundreds and capturing sixty-something ships from the Imperial Fleet. Prisoners were given the choice of joining up or being executed on the spot. The Admiral of the Chinese navy, Kwo Lang, was so afraid of being captured by her or going back to admit he’d been beaten by her that he committed suicide.
For the next two years, Ching Shih not only kept on pirating, she fought off Chinese forces as well as Dutch and British warships that the navy called in to help. Finally the government gave up and offered her amnesty as well as amnesty for her then SEVENTEEN THOUSAND crewman. Ching Shih got to keep all her plunder, so she retired to the countryside where she opened up a brothel and lived until she was 69.
tldr: I’ve come to terms with the reality that I’ll never be as terrifyingly badass as this woman was.
Shakespeare plays and sonnets performed using 400-year-old Original Pronunciation.
This video demonstrates why historically informed performance can be so illuminating. Puns and lewd jokes, hidden in RP, leap out when performed in certain versions of OP. Rhymes that don’t work in RP, do in OP: love vs. prove, speak vs. break, etc. The ca. 1600 OP is so rich sounding; I would love to hear a production using it!
HBBO asked about unexpected “classics”. Here’s one.
YIIIIS. I use this in class and lost the video and now here that motherfucker is!
We were always taught by our literature lecturers to read Shakespeare in our local accent (Geordie) as our pronunciations are closer to OP than reading it in the classic “high art” style that you often hear in performances. Which helped a lot in understanding the text and jokes - though I suspect a performance in genuine OP would be even more enlightening.
A Persian astrolabe (from the Greek: ἀστρολάβον astrolabon, “star-taker”), made in Hafiz.
Exhibition or Presentation Russian Kastane
- Dated: 1850
- Provenance: Comte de Nesselrode, Château de Tzarevtchina (Governement de Saratov, Russia)
- Goldsmith: Ignatii Pavlovitch Sazikov
- More on the Kastane Sword
Mounted in heavily cast and chased silver-gilt, the hilt in traditional Sinhalese style elaborately decorated with guilloche, fluting and panels of engraved foliage and florets, with the pommel and quillon formed as the stylised heads of lions and the ogee-shaped knucklebow emerging at the quillon from the mouth of a beast and terminating at the pommel in the stylised head of a dragon.
The eyes of all the beasts on the hilt formed of cabochon-cut garnets or rubies – that on the nearside of the pommel replaced; below the quillon block the hilt widens to form a stepped collar into which are struck the maker’s mark of the St Petersburg court goldsmith Ignatii Pavlovitch Sazikov, the standard mark for 84 zolotniki and the assay master’s mark for Dmitri Tverskoy with the date 1850.
The wide blade of reduced Ottoman kiliç form in Damascus steel of Kirk Narduban pattern, with residual openwork panels of gilding either side of its back edge and a raised forte terminating in chiselled mihrab-style points. The scabbard of heavily cast and chased silver-gilt, decorated overall with foliage and guilloche.
The near- and off-sides set with blue and green cabochon-cut turquoises, the chape formed as a stylised dragon’s head, the back edge decorated with a pattern of overlapping scales and fitted with two loose rings in multifaceted mounts and the upper part formed of two bands of elongated hexagons.
Source & Copyright: Peter Finer
carecub | xekstrin | wrathofprawn:
for those not in the know, night witches were russian lady bombers who bombed the shit out of german lines in WW2. Thing is though, they had the oldest, noisiest, crappest planes in the entire world. The engines used to conk out halfway through their missions, so they had to climb out on the wings mid flight to restart the props. the planes were also so noisy that to stop germans from hearing them combing and starting up their anti aircraft guns, they’d climb up to a certain height, coast down to german positions, drop their bombs, restart their engines in midair, and get the fuck out of dodge.
their leader flew over 200 missions and was never captured.
how the fuck is this not taught in every single history class ever
pretty sure I’ve reblogged this before but it can happen again
This is laughably incorrect.
Although technologically obsolete as of WWII, the Polikarpov Po-2 “Kukuruznik” biplanes flown by the 588th Night Bomber Regiment were in no way ” the oldest, noisiest, crappest planes in the entire world.”
Fact 1: The Po-2 was first flown in 1929 and remained in production until 1953 due to its low cost and extreme reliability. It is, in fact, the second most produced aircraft in history, and the most produced biplane in history. The night bombers flew brand new, specially modified Po-2s fitted with bomb racks and machine guns.
Fact 2: The Po-2 was extremely quiet; Germans nicknamed it the Nähmaschine (“sewing machine”) due to the muted rattling sound its tiny little 99-horsepower radial engine made. The night bombers would fly these quiet, sneaky little planes just a few meters off the ground, then climb to higher altitude, cut the engine, and glide to the attack point so that the Germans would have no warning of an incoming attack other than the ghostly whistle of wind through the wing bracing-wires.
Fact 3: Saying “their leader flew over 200 missions” is both inaccurate and damning with faint praise. All of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment pilots flew multiple missions every night, with the record being eighteen missions flown back-to-back-to-back-to-back in a single night. By the end of the war, most of the “Night Witches” had around a thousand combat sorties under their belts.
The Night Witches were THAT fucking badass, and it pisses me off when people get it all wrong because they’re too damn lazy to do their homework.
