Unruly History in the News #29
Whew, she's a doozy
Hey everyone,
As I mentioned yesterday, I am out of the hospital and getting back to work. This short week has been something of a blessing since it’s allowed me to catch up without too much pressure.
How was your week?
To make up for the short installment last week, this week is a doozy. Buckle up! This week, in history acting unruly…
Details of the recent military uprising in Russia are murky. But according to this BBC report from Thursday, the controversial leader of Belarus who brokered the peace deal, Alexander Lukashenko, has said that “no-one came out of that situation a hero.”
Turns out early hominins—not humans—were smarter than we thought. Recent discoveries deep in the Rising Star Cave System of South Africa show that Homo naledi buried their dead and marked their graves. ABC News called them “the first non-human species in history known to do so,” but we know that elephants bury their dead and return to their graves so I think something has gotten lost in translation here.
Archaeologists have discovered new evidence suggesting that the Roman annexation of the Nabataean kingdom might not have been as peaceful as they suggested. The remnants of three temporary military camps in the Jordanian desert were found using Google Earth.
And speaking of sinking ships, the story of the Endurance and its miraculous recovery last year is quickly becoming the stuff of legends.
Endurance stuck in Antarctic ice. Source: Frank Hurley/Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. The fort of the historic city of St. Mary’s in Maryland eluded archaeologists for generations. (The city is considered a sister landing site to the infamous Jamestown.) The fort was finally discovered just 2 years ago. Even more recently, the 400-year-old skeleton of a teenage boy was discovered at the site. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he was buried with much respect, indicating he might have been a criminal or an indentured servant; archaeologists hope his skeleton will tell us more about early colonial life.
Doodles from Henry VIII’s prayer book from late in his life reveal a depressed and anxious man. Who could have guessed that the man who beheaded two of his wives might suffer from mental health troubles?
Angelina Jolie has acquired the building that Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol worked in together. She plans to use it to showcase artists from her Atelier Jolie collection but is keeping the street art already extant as a tribute to Basquiat.
Like today, sportsmen of Ancient Greece were celebrities who were paid to play, traveled internationally, and had adoring fans. They even unionized!
For decades, Nazi targeting of trans people was left unmentioned in the official histories. But after a critical court case in 2022, that history is being reexamined. This paves the way for a better understanding of what happened to the queer inhabitants of the relatively liberal Weimar Republic after Hitler’s election.
Take a moment to learn about Ivor Cummings: The forgotten mentor of the Windrush Generation, a group of nearly 500 people who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean.
Speaking of the UK, we have a new dinosaur alert, people! Vectipelta barretti wandered the Isle of Wight with blade-like spikes coming off his sides. I believe the scientific term for how he looks is cool as hell.
Computer-generated rendering of what the Vectipelta barretti’s skeleton may have looked like when all put together. Credit: Stu Pond. A new English dialect, born of dual English/Spanish speakers in Florida, is being born! Linguists have broken down how the longstanding interactions of Spanish speakers in a predominantly English-speaking country are developing this new dialect, much like how modern English developed out of the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
The hazy story of how the Liberty Bell—one of the United States’ most famous artifacts—got its famous crack.
Do you know about the real-life witch-hunt behind Arthur Miller’s The Crucible?
London’s Hunterian Museum of surgery has reopened, this time with a focus on the ethical questions its collection poses. As I mentioned in a previous post, this museum houses the remains of Charles Byrne, a 7-foot-7 man known as the “Irish Giant.” Though Byrne had requested to be buried at sea to keep surgeons from dissecting his remains, his body was stolen by anatomist John Hunter to be displayed in his home/museum. Today Byrne’s remains are not on display, though they have not yet been buried at sea per his request.
We’re learning more about the days immediately preceding the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii. Two bodies were recently uncovered that showed signs of being killed by a building collapse in an earthquake.
Helen of Troy is one of the rare figures that has never been forgotten and resurrected. She has been remembered by every single generation since her birth into literary canon 2,700 years ago. And how each generation portrays her allows us to map their attitudes toward women.
Helen at the Scaean Gate, Gustave Moreau, 1888 Archaeologists have uncovered a new “Stonehenge-like” burial mound/solar calendar in the Netherlands! Over six years of excavation and analysis, they’ve discovered 80 bodies buried over 800 years and more than one million artifacts!
At Vindolanda (Northern England), volunteer archaeologists found a 1900-year-old Roman military decoration awarded to troops. It features Medusa’s head, which functioned as protection for the soldier who wore it.
Switzerland is returning a 3,400-year-old fragment of a statue of Ramesses II to Egypt. The fragment was apparently stolen from the Temple of Ramesses II in the 1980s or 1990s before ending up displayed in Switzerland.
Pits dating to the Mesolithic Era (roughly 8,000 years ago) were recently discovered in England. This is an incredible and important find because of how little evidence from this time we have!
What do you know about the fascinating history of the typewriter? Did you know that it was invented in Milwaukee?
Take a second to learn how proteomics—the study of the body’s proteins—is upending things we thought we knew about gender roles, leadership, and more across history.
Kanaljorden, Sweden is a “curious archaeological site where, sometime around 6,000 B.C., animal and human bones had been deliberately arranged on a submerged stone platform in the center of a small lake. Kanaljorden made international headlines in 2018 when researchers published a report on the excavation, noting that wood preserved inside two of the skulls indicated that at least some of the skulls had been mounted on stakes. It was like nothing the scientists had seen before.” Read more.
