Historical
What Happened to the Children of Marie Antoinette?
Most of us are at least in part familiar with the tragic history of the child queen Marie Antoinette, and her equally young and inexperienced husband Louis VXI of France. That she lived a life of unadulterated luxury and opulence while the people she governed languished in poverty until the Revolution broke out in 1789 is universally understood. And that she was eventually executed with her husband by guillotine is fairly infamous. But what about the four children she had before her execution? What became of them?
By Katie Alafdal4 years ago in FYI
How The Rosetta Stone Revealed The Secrets Of Ancient Civilizations. Top Story - August 2021.
How the Rosetta Stone Revealed the Secrets of Ancient Civilizations When Pierre-François Bouchard’s men discovered the ancient stone slab that was to change the world on July 19, 1799, they were not at an archaeological dig; they were doing a last-minute construction job. The French soldiers occupied a derelict fortress in Rosetta, Egypt, and had only a few days to fortify their defenses for battle with troops from the Ottoman Empire.
By Christopher Harvey4 years ago in FYI
The Perennial Appeal of Rag Dolls
There’s magic in humble scraps of cloth, deer hide, fur, and cornhusks. With a bead or two, a hank of yarn, and a few embroidered stitches, a rag doll can be birthed. The first parent to cobble together bits and bobs into a human shape and hand it to their child will never be known. The British Museum has a Roman rag doll from 1st-5th century A.D. The linen dolly still retains dabs of paint and even one blue bead, felt to have been a hair ornament. Rag dolls have been around for thousands of years and played with by children around the globe.
By Diane Helentjaris4 years ago in FYI
Philip the Arab: Emperor of Rome
Philip the Arab is so named because his family came from Syria. However, this background does not appear to have affected his behavior in office to any extent – there was nothing noticeably “un-Roman” in how he treated the role of Emperor.
By John Welford4 years ago in FYI
History and Memory
Individual and collective memories of historic events are unreliable. Because memories are influenced by internal and external forces, the recollection of events can be rendered incomplete or incorrect by factors such as time, sentiment, circumstance, and even basic human ego.
By Mack Devlin4 years ago in FYI
The World That Came After
Wars are transformative events, but because of the nature of warfare prior to the twentieth century, their consequences were generally localized. The thirty-two years war, for instance, involved many combatants, but Eastern and Central Europe experienced the bulk of the consequences. World War II, on the other hand, was a massive global conflict, a war of such magnitude that the consequences carried worldwide significance and would vastly alter the course of human history.
By Mack Devlin4 years ago in FYI
From the Cave to the Page
Language has been a major part of our social evolution, completely altering the course of human life. We have evolved from a series of grunts and gesticulations to a deeply articulated language. What is even more impressive is that we have taken our myriad vocalizations and learned to transfer them to the page. Writing has come a long way, from the cave wall to the Facebook wall. The evolution of writing is a complex narrative of slow progression: from rudimentary figures drawn on stone with blood and chalk, to lines etched in clay, to complex pictographs carved into temple walls, to fully formed words and sentences being combined into volumes of text, to the complex world-building of binary code.
By Mack Devlin4 years ago in FYI
Old School
Decades ago I came across In The Morning Of My Life, an account of the life, times etcetera of the recently deceased singer entertainer Tom Netherton. What brought this to mind was the part of this fairly thin celebrity autobiography that dealt with Mr. Netherton's time spent in the armed forces before making a career for himself as an entertainer. His description of what it was like to rise to the level of Drill Instructor interested me. Mostly what seemed to ring true was that at the end of the day as a DI he would collapse in exhaustion from expending so much energy outdoing his pupils in every way all day long. Somehow I find this relatable. Of course there was nothing that I recall about Mr. Lou Gossett's Officer And A Gentleman DI struggling in this way.
By P. B. Friedman4 years ago in FYI
What the Black Plague Can Teach Us About the Current Pandemic
In the later Middle Ages, the Black Plague swept across Europe, decimating approximately one-third of its population, although that figure is contested. The mysterious illness was spread by the usual vermin, rats and fleas, and moved amongst the human continent with no regard for rank, or wealth. Death it seemed, was the great equalizer, and morbidity abounded.
By Katie Alafdal4 years ago in FYI
The sinking of the Lusitania, 1915
The sinking of RMS Lusitania on 7th May 1915 – the victim of a torpedo fired from a German U-boat - has long been regarded as a major war crime and a prime cause of the United States entering World War I. However, there are questions that are still unanswered.
By John Welford4 years ago in FYI
The Starry Painting by Vincent Van Gogh
Today Vincent van Gogh is regarded as one of the most famous 19th-century artists, and his 1889 Starry Night painting is not only one of his most famous works, but also one of the world's most famous paintings. This oil painting by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh, painted in June 1889, depicts the view of the sun from the east window of his asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence with the addition of an unimaginable city. Starry Night is an unseen world painting from 1889 with a clear night sky and a small mountain town and is one of the most famous works by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh.
By Tsunami Karki4 years ago in FYI
