Sex sells. Ask any modern advertiser and he or she will be the first one to tell you that making something seem sexual – overtly or subtly – is still seen as the best way to get people to pay attention to a product. Humans, caught as we are between apes and angels, are interested… Read more Happy Lupercalia
One of the most used methods of fat shaming and justification for fat hate is tell fat people you are only mocking and/or insulting them for their health. You’re not participating in the sociocultural punishment of fat because you’ve been culturally conditioned to view fat as a physical manifestation of sloth, gluttony, and lack of… Read more How Dare Fat People Be Healthy
Until a language is written down, and the population that speaks it becomes mostly literate, the way words are used and pronounced experience relatively frequent change. Once a language hits print, it still changes – but more slowly and less drastically. Because Iceland became literate a thousand years before most of Northern Europe, people who… Read more Stobbing Cows and the Great Vowel Shift
The least known, but arguably the best writer among the justly lauded Bronte siblings, was the youngest, Anne, who was born on 17 January 1820. Just as Jane Austen was a seminal writer in the Regency era, Anne Bronte – writing under the male pseudonym, Acton Bell – help shaped Victorian literature. More significantly, Anne… Read more Anne Bronte, Feminist and Favorite
Henry Pole, 1st Baron Montagu. was a living, breathing threat to the Tudor throne. He was the grandson of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence and thus the nephew of the York kings Edward IV and Richard III. In his veins flowed the blood of King Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke… Read more Henry Pole, 1st Baron Montagu
The spark that would become the Rebellion of the Alpujarras hit the powder keg of the Kingdom of Granada, Crown of Castile on 18 December 1499. The Muslims of the Kingdom of Granada, which had been the Emirate of Granada until it was ‘reconquered’ by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I… Read more The Alpujarras Rebellion Begins
One of the best things about the Yuletide in Britain is the opportunity to take your children to see a Christmas panto. We don’t have them in America, because attending a panto became a “Christmas Tradition” in Britain in the Regency era, when all things British were being spurned by Americans with jingoistic fever. Frankly,… Read more A Christmas Panto
(Updated from 2016) There are a lot of myths about Pilgrims and the so-called First Thanksgiving. However, one thing that is certain — without the local Native Americans helping them the English colonists would have been toast. The indigenous people of the area, the Wampanoag (meaning the “People of the First Light”) are the ones… Read more Thanksgiving and Native Americans
New discoveries are regularly made about the human body, and a lot of those discoveries center on how important the microbiota – the bacteria, fungi, viruses and other tiny organisms – that live in our guts are for our health and wellbeing. The ability of those little guys to flourish and procreate is the key… Read more Of Mind and Microbiota
Romans did not like doing the hands-on work of assigning human remains to a final resting place any more than the modern Americans or Europeans do. It was either too heart-breaking, if it was the body of a loved one, or considered too creepy for most people. Thus, Romans had an entire class of funeral… Read more The Libitinarii of Rome