The marriage treaty between Queen Mary I and King Phillip of Spain was ratified on 15 January 1554. Mary was thrilled, Philip was resigned, and half the population of England was livid. In fairness, public reaction to Mary’s betrothal on the part of the Protestant English was unjustified by anything Mary had done. She had… Read more Mazeltov to Phillip and Mary
President Richard Nixon was born on January 9, 1913. He was president when I was born. His death in 1994 was the first post-presidential death I really remember and one of the few I actually had an opinion on. I remember being irked that people commented on the Watergate thing. It was rude to speak… Read more Remembering Richard M. Nixon
For Christians, the Epiphany is celebrated on 6 January. It is also known as Three Kings’ Day, in honor of the arrival of “Wise Men from the east” that came to visit the Christ child, as described in Matthew 2:1-2. Although there was no names or any number ascribed to these Magi in the Bible,… Read more Following Yonder Star
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
Renate Schroeder (now Renate Dolphin) clearly considered SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh a friend. She knew him when he was in high school, and she signed a letter vouching for his moral turpitude in an attempt to counteract the accusations that Kavanaugh attempted to rape Dr Christine Blasey Ford (now a professor at Palo Alto University)… Read more Slut Shaming and Gaslighting
For millennia, Western medicine was in thrall to the humoral theory of ancient Greece. It wasn’t until the scientific revolution of the Victorian era that germs were understood to cause illness, but even then medical ideas about a woman’s body had more in common with those espoused by Helenic doctors than modern ones. Germs there… Read more Green Sickness and the Cultural Construction of Women’s Health
On 19 August 1953 the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was a modernizing and secular leader committed to Iranian nationalism and preventing Iran from become a theocracy, was overthrown by a British and CIA backed military coup that replaced him with the Shah Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a totalitarian king. The pertinent… Read more The Iranian Coup of 1953