“The door to the dining area of the Alcobaça Monastery in Portugal was made narrow so that monks who got too fat were forced to go into fasting.”
Category: History
Categories
The Republican Choice
How a party spent decades making itself white
“At key moments in history, Republicans considered greater outreach to minority voters but ultimately didn’t take that path.”
“The GOP’s whitewashed political reality is no accident — the party has repeatedly chosen to pursue white voters at the cost of others decade after decade. Since the mid-20th century, the Republican Party has flirted with both the morality of greater racial inclusion and its strategic benefits. But time and again, the party’s appeals to white voters have overridden voices calling for a more racially diverse coalition, and Republicans’ relative indifference to the interests of voters of color evolved into outright antagonism.”
Listen to the podcast here:
(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-how-the-gop-chose-to-be-a-white-party)
And read the article here:
(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-republican-choice)
Categories
Roman dodecahedrons
“The Mysterious Bronze Objects That Have Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries”
“Although dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of explanations have been offered to account for the dodecahedrons, no one is certain just what they were used for.”
(https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/514246/are-roman-dodecahedrons-worlds-most-mysterious-artifact)
Categories
Wampanoag wetu
This claim was easy to fact-check: There are zero black governors for the 50 states. But there are two governors who’ve apologized for wearing blackface.
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Out of 50 sitting governors, 47 are white, and the remaining three are Hispanic, Asian American and Native American.
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Only two African Americans have been elected governor, with the most recent being Democrat Deval Patrick, who was voted into office in Massachusetts in 2006. Democrat Douglas Wilder had previously been elected as Virginia’s governor, a post he held from 1990 to 1994.
Before Wilder’s election, the only black governor had been P. B. S. Pinchback, who stepped in as Louisiana’s governor for 34 days in 1872 while the incumbent faced impeachment.
Categories
The Home for Aged Men in Worcester, MA
“Until the Home for Aged Men was built, elders who couldn’t be cared for by their families ended up in the poorhouse with the indigent, the insane, and criminals. In the mid 19th century, Massachusetts established boards to oversee what had become Dickensian homes of horror, and improvements were the result.”
The Home for Aged Men was replaced by the Goddard House, serving the same needs of men and women.
(http://www.telegram.com/article/20151207/NEWS/151209470/-1/topic)
Categories
How Turkey Got Its Name
“As far as we can tell, the first European explorers to discover (and eat) turkey were those in Hernan Cortez’s expedition in Mexico in 1519. This new delicacy was brought back to Europe by Spanish Conquistadors and by 1524, had reached England.”
“But the birds did not come directly from the New World to England; rather, they came via merchant ships from the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Those merchants were called “Turkey merchant” as much the area was part of the Turkish Empire at the time. Purchasers of the birds back home in England thought the fowl came from the area, hence the name “Turkey birds” or, soon thereafter, “turkeys.”
“Not all languages follow this misconception. Others, such as Hebrew get the origin just as wrong, but in the other direction. The Hebrew term for turkey, transliterated as tarnagol hodu, literally translates to “chicken of India,” furthering the Elizabethan-era myth that New World explorers had found a route to the Orient. This nomenclature for the bird is so wide-spread that it self-defeats the historical basis for the term “turkey” in English, as the Turkish word for turkey is “hindi.”
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