Unruly History in the News #77
Hey friends,
It’s been a quiet week on the news front, so it’s going to be a short one this time. I do want to remind everyone that if you’re in Los Angeles, I’m going to be reading from my book Unruly Figures and signing copies TODAY at Kavat Coffee/Eye For Sound Gallery. Get all the event details here.
There will be copies available for sale if you’re interested!
All right, this week in history being unruly…
Since the US Presidential election is coming up this week, here is the history of the electoral college. What is it? Why does it matter? How can it be reformed?
Speaking of the election, how did Republicans become red and Democrats become blue?
An amateur historian found a lost story by Bram Stoker hiding in the National Library of Ireland!
This is cool: Cities are starting to project their history onto building facades, creating reenactments of historical events in the places where they happened.
The mystery behind the world’s oldest map has finally been solved! The cuneiform writing on the back of this Mesopotamian stone map confirms what historians have thought were ancient Mesopotamian beliefs.
This stone map depicts a paragraph of cuneiform above a map featuring a double ring encircling Mesopotamia, which the ancient scribe called the “bitter river.” Source: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin These early explorers deserve to be a lot more famous than they are today.
Remembering the extreme—and enduring—trauma of Native boarding schools, where children were taken and forced to assimilate to US culture.
Relevant: How to forgive and forget. Spain post-Franco is an example of how to move forward while still condemning a dangerous regime.
More than 800 years ago, raiders threw a dead body into a well outside of a Norwegian castle, ostensibly to poison the water supply. In 1938, archaeologists excavated the well and found a skeleton but left it in place. In 2014, the well was excavated more thoroughly and the connection between the body found and the Norse saga is all but confirmed.
Last week was the anniversary of Orson Welles’s reading of The War of the Worlds that caused a mass panic. The radio-listening public did not understnad that he was reading fiction, and when the “hoax” was revealed people were furious. You can now listen to his broadcast in full:
Inside the ongoing search for 399’s lost cub(s). The oldest known grizzly bear in history raised at least 18 cubs and was the face of the grizzly bear population in Grand Teton National Park.
Who was Germanicus, and why did people in Rome want the golden boy dead?
Was Alexander the Great’s sacred purple tunic just found in a 2,400-year-old Macedonian tomb? Certainly the inhabitants of the nearby tombs are Alexander’s father, step-mother, half-sisters, and his son.
Interested in learning more about Alexander the Great? Read my LA Times review of the most recent biography of him, Alexander at the End of the World.
The ouija board can’t connect us to spirits, but this nineteenth century invention does tell us a lot about pyschology and grief.
The political history of Madison Square Garden is dark—it includes rallies in support of Hitler, and now Neo-Nazis.
Physicists have been searching for dark matter for decades. Are they finally closing in? (Is it in the room with us?)
As Spiritualism grew in popularityin the 19th century, this children’s book was a bulwark of skepticism. Among other things, it proved that ghosts could be an illusion.
Sacro Bosso, Italy’s Park of Monsters, is terrifying to behold—and a complete historical mystery. We know who built them but have no idea why
What these stone statues mean is a mystery. Image credit: Luigi Galperti / REDA&CO / Universal Images Group via Getty Images How did “snake oil” come to mean fraud and too-easy answers?
LIDAR just revealed a 3,000-year-old secret Mayan city in Campeche, Mexico.
Excavations at the Temple of Poseidon in Samikon, Greece just revealed that the complex is larger than initially thought. This comes on the heels of the exciting discovery that hte temple existed; it was mentioned by Strabo but people have been searching for it for over 100 years.
Join me at my reading this afternoon!