Unruly History in the News #32
Hey folks,
Hope everyone had a lovely first week of August. I have been running off my feet trying to get a bunch of research and work done that last week or so. I’m excited to see it all come together.
Have you checked out the final episode of season 2 yet? Mekatilili’s story isn’t very well-known, but I think that makes it all the more fascinating.
Episode 31: Mekatilili wa Menza
This week, in history acting unruly…
Today (August 6th) is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Dr. John Hall, US Military Historian, discussed it on the news, saying, the atomic bomb "revolutionized the stakes and scale of armed conflict, making great powers reluctant to engage in direct combat with one another and incentivizing lesser powers to acquire nuclear weapons, which seemed to offer power and security disproportionate to their cost."
13 gorgeous 16th-century tapestries have gone on display after a 24-year restoration project. They were bought by Elizabeth Talbot—better known as Bess of Hardwick—and (incredibly) they had never been moved, cut down, or otherwise changed since they were first hung.
This tapestry, the final in the series of 13, depicts the end of the Old Testament story of Gideon. The image shows what the tapestry looked like before (left) and after restoration. Source: The National Trust. August 2 was the centenary of President Warren G. Harding’s surprising and sudden death in office. He was only 57 and more physically fit than his predecessors, sparking rumors of foul play or suicide that continue to fly.
Are you familiar with the Curse of Tippecanoe? Supposedly, as Chief Tecumseh lay dying on the battlefield at Tippecanoe in 1811, he cursed then-military general William Henry Harrison that if he was elected to office, he would die in office, and that pattern would continue with all presidents who were elected in a year ending in 0… including Harding. Eerily, starting with Harrison after his election in 1840, every president elected in a 0 year did die in office until the election of 1980, when Reagan survived an assassination attempt.
A 100-year-old lesson on how content control in the classroom can completely backfire.
And for a more modern example: A school district in Utah has banned the Bible for being too graphic and violent. Comeuppance? A win for the anti-anti-woke? Or just one more shot in an exhausting culture war?
A facial reconstruction of Zlatý kůň, the oldest modern human to be genetically sequenced, has been released. Her remains were initially discovered in the 1950s.
Remember that falsified Eid Mar coin I wrote about back in March? Well, a real Eid Mar coin is up for auction! This silver one, minted by one of the assassins himself, Brutus, will be sold for an estimated $300,000 by the auction house Stacks Bowers Galleries.
Okay, this is cool: Scientists are using the unique elemental composition of gemstones to trace ancient trading routes.
In archaeologists finding things while looking for something else:
An intact Roman burial ground has been found in Gaza. This is incredibly rare—these burial grounds usually come to us already looted. But this one still had sealed sarcophagi and skeletons with coins still in their mouths.
The first lead sarcophagus buried at the site is decorated with reliefs of grapes and vines. Source: Première Urgence Internationale. While searching for World War II artifacts, archaeologists in the Shetland Islands discovered a 4,000-year-old crematorium. Someone is about to build a rocket launch pad on top, so excavations are underway.
A Scottish man digging for a new pool in his backyard found an 8,000-year-old dolphin skeleton—and a prehistoric tool indicating prehistoric people might have scavenged from the corpse. Scientists think the dolphin died of natural causes and washed up on shore—the area used to be the shore of a massive sea.
While beginning to dig for a new Four Seasons location near the Vatican, a remarkable find was discovered—the lost amphitheater of Roman Emperor Nero. Though they’re not 100% sure, the dig “has turned up stucco walls adorned with gold leaf and rare African marble columns, indicating an imperially commissioned building, as well as stamps on bricks that date the structure to the mid-first century C.E.”
I’m sure you heard that Elon Musk renamed Twitter ‘X’, setting off debates about why you would ever give up brand recognition so strong it changed the meaning of the word tweet. In response, a math historian has written a lovely history of x and how it came to stand for an unknown quantity.
X, of course, also was the name of the X-Garage of Joe Carstairs: heiress, daredevil, ruler of an island, and the first person ever covered here at Unruly Figures.
The collapse of the Beanie Baby market—raise your hand if you had a whole collection of these on the promise that they’d pay for your college tuition someday. 🙋
Does Peter Frankopan’s new book cover the largest period of history to ever be attempted in one book? Quite possibly. It’s a history of global climate change, from Pangea to 2022—4.6 billion years.
20 years ago, this Iron Age warrior’s tomb was discovered. The skeleton had been buried with a mirror and a sword, stumping archaeologists because, apparently, swords are for boys and mirrors are for girls. (Does no one remember that Narcissus was famously male?) Today, modern science has confirmed that the skeleton is of a female warrior. Study co-author Sarah Stark said, "Although we can never know completely about the symbolism of objects found in graves, the combination of a sword and a mirror suggests this woman had high status within her community and may have played a commanding role in local warfare, organizing or leading raids on rival groups… This could suggest that female involvement in raiding and other types of violence was more common in Iron Age society than we've previously thought.”
Detail of the sword—I think this photo was taken when it was unearthed in 1999. (Image credit: Historic England Archive.) A Neolithic beaded necklace from Jordan was recently reassembled and photographed. It is gorgeous. It was made to be buried with an important child, though we don’t know who the child was or why they were important (yet).
Is there an island missing from the Miyako Islands? Scientists have long been stumped by how species of lizards and snakes endemic to the Miyako Islands—but closely related to species in Okinawa—got there. A new theory put forth by Professor Yasufumi Iryu of Tohoku University, suggests that there was once a landmass in between Okinawa and the Miyako Islands which has now been sunk due to tectonic activity and changing water depths. (I don’t know about you but every time I hear ‘sunken island’ my brain goes, ATLANTIS!)
4,000-year-old Y. Pestis DNA has been found in Britain, now the oldest known plague DNA in the British Isles. It was found in corpses buried in mass graves in Somerset and Cumbria.
