Unruly History in the News #53
Hey everyone,
We had a lot of fun at yesterday’s virtual reading and discussion with
from ! If you missed it, there will be a recording soon!If you’re in Los Angeles, I will be doing a reading on April 5 at Booksoup at 7 pm. Come hang out with us!
This week in history acting unruly…
Y’all know that I love a good facial reconstruction, and this one is of a vampire. On the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, researchers were excavating a mass grave of plague victims when they found a skeleton with a brick in its mouth. They believe locals put it there shortly after she died to prevent her from feasting on plague victims—a common myth at the time to explain the plague. Now we know what she looked like.
This sixty-one-year-old woman was buried with a brick in her mouth to keep her from feasting on her fellow plague victims. Source: Arkeonews. (It’s worth noting that there is significant debate about whether the brick was placed there deliberately or by chance.)
Speaking of bodies and archaeology—how are brains naturally preserved? And are they as rare as we originally believed?
Archaeologists have also found the earliest known piercings! In Turkey, men and women were piercing their lips 11,000 years ago. Rock on. 🤘
And finally, the intact bodies of several Catalan nobles from the 13th and 14th centuries have been discovered in that Santes Crues monastery.
Earth’s earliest (known) forest has been revealed through fossils found in Somerset. She was 390 million years old.
How did an English navigator become an advisor to a shogun in Japan?
Into Japanese history? You might like my episode about Yasuke, the first Black samurai!
About 3,000 years ago, a fire raged through the Must Farm settlement in modern-day England. The residents fled, and the bones of the village were preserved in a riverbed for researchers to study. It is an incredible peek into the Bronze Age.
The Vandals and the Visigoths are often blamed for the sack of Rome—but the booming city was attacked earlier than that, by the Gauls.
See the newly-restored portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger that made Henry VIII fall in love with Anne of Cleves from afar.
Long thought lost, these shells from Captain Cook’s final voyage were rescued from a dumpster! They are beautiful specimens—and some are of animals now extinct.
Curator Frances McIntosh cleans some of the shells. Source: English Heritage. Similarly, specimens brought back to the UK by Charles Darwin 200 years ago have rarely been shown—but now they’re going to be on TV.
Once upon a time, the US Treasury was into laundering money—but it’s not what you think.
This 300-year-old thimble is engraved with a lovely sentiment: “LYKE STIL AND LOVE EVER.” It’s just been declared a national treasure.
We’ve lost one of the wonders of the world. This imposing statue stood for 8 centuries and inspired countless artworks, but then it disappeared. And we still don’t know what happened.
Graffiti in the 18th century was political and artistic, much like graffiti today.
I might be tooting my own horn here, but I’m in LitHub this week discussing Aphra Behn: spy for the crown and first woman to make a living writing in English.
Portrait of Aphra Behn. Source. This mysterious Roman statue was just discovered in a parking lot—and the pieces don’t quite fall into place.
