Unruly History in the News #61
Hey everyone,
June Gloom is well underway here in Los Angeles, and it’s got me feeling a bit blue. I’m doing a garage sale at my house this weekend though, so hopefully interacting with the neighborhood will cheer me up a little.
Did you see this week’s episode abotu Dr. Margaret “Mom” Chung? She was the first American-born Chinese woman to become a physician and led a pretty rebellious life too. Check it out:
#45: Dr. Margaret "Mom" Chung
Without further ado, this week in history acting unruly…
It’s not in your head! Bath’s waters might really be good for you: A bacteria that fights E. coli was just found in the Roman Baths there.
I’m very excited about this: A cache of Medieval games has just been found in a castle in Germany! Among the trove are a well-preserved chessman, gaming pieces, and dice, dating from the 11th to 12th centuries CE.
Three Medieval game pieces found in Germany. (Doesn’t the guy in the back look shockingly similar to the Reverand Lionel Preacherbot from Futurama?) Source: Victor Brigola - University of Tübingen Yikes—the tradition of running with the Olympic torch didn’t start in Ancient Greece. It started in Nazi Germany.
Yesterday (June 8) was the 75th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s 1984. It argued against totalitarianism in favor of the proletariat and invidividuality.
Most people believe history is based entirely on words, so they struggle to see how pre-history can be documented. In fact, material culture is an important aspect of historical research.
Here’s a question I never thought to ask: Who took to cocain out of Coca-Cola?
Filed in people (and their things) who were buried:
An ancient necropolis dedicated to infants and very young children was just found in Auxerre, France. The people who once lived there, the Gallic Senones people, buried their children with ceramics to protect them. The find is important because it allows us to study how infant burials different from adult burials in the 1st-3rd centuries.
You know about the terracotta army. Now a major treasure chamber has been found hidden among them.
Dragon stones (or serpent stones) are upright basalt staele found in Armenia. They’ve been somewhat unexplained for years, but now a burial site has been found under one: A woman and two infants.
A submerged Roman structure has been found off the coast of Campo di Mare in Italy. It is made of concentric circles and experts believe it might have been part of a villa before changing coastline flooded it.
In Wales, dragons are especially popular in lore. Now a source of inspiration for them has been found: The first study has been published with evidence of dinosaurs in Wales.
Interested in Welsh history? Check out my coverage of Owain Glyndwr, sometimes called the Welsh Braveheart.
For millenia, Egyptian doctors were considered trailblazers in their field. They made advances in cancer care, obstetrics, prosthetics, and dentistry while the rest of the world was still struggling with such science.
Interested in WWI history? Here are 11 essential objects each infantryman carried.
WWI Mess Kit. There wasn’t a dining hall in the trenches: Soldiers carried their plate and utensils with them. Photo by Philippe Lissac. Dith Pran was a photojournalist in Cambodia who exposed the horrors of Khmer Rouge after endring 4 years of forced labor. He was the subject of the movie Killing Fields.
Zine libraries highlight marginalized voices that the archive doesn’t want to record.
Today fans identify themselves as part of the Beyhive, Swifties, Stans, Fanilows, Potterheads, Whovians, Sherlockians, and more. Groups of fans have always had names: from Kranks to Rooters to Bugs, here are some old terms for fans.
