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John Faber the Elder
On Nee Yeath Tow no Riow, King of Granajah Hore vulgo King John
London, England (1710)
Mezzotint, 200 x 150 mm.
(Portrait of John of Canajoharie, native American leader, half length in an oval, tattoos or marks on face, wearing open collarless shirt and loose gown.)
The British Museum, London
A recipe that was a favorite among soldiers during the Civil War. LuJuana Hood for the Pan African Historical Museum shared a recipe for Applesauce Cookies.
The English, Scotch, and Dutch immigrants originally brought the first cookies to the United States.
Ingredients:
Directions:
ca. 1861-65, [hand-tinted tintype portrait of a Union soldier in uniform with shoulder scales with pearl-handled revolver and saber in front of backdrop showing trees and two Great Star flags]
Building Community: Medieval Technology and American History - Project of Penn State University and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
From the home page: "From the early 16th century onwards, European settlers arriving in the Americas brought not only ideas about religious and political freedom, but also the skills needed to build communities, the ways of daily life in the Old World. The technologies in particular differed little if at all from those their medieval forebears used to construct European civilization after the fall of Rome. The colonial American environment in which these technologies were applied led to a reorganization of industry and society outside the aristocratic control of Europe and provided the basis for the political developments that made a new nation.
This website explores some of the core medieval technologies that built the American colonies into an industrial powerhouse: milling and iron manufacture. In-depth articles, short essays, photo archives, videos, comparative timelines, and class projects all seek to demonstrate the transfer of these technologies to colonial America. The site, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities/We the People Initiative, is designed for school teachers, but we hope it will also be found useful to students or any visitor interested in history, technology, art, or literature."
Why Matthew Brady is one of the best photographers of the 19th century.
Abraham Lincoln is well known for his actions as President, but he was active in politics long before then.
In 1847, he protested President Polk’s handling of the Mexican-American from the House of Representatives. Before the war had been declared, Americans and Mexicans had clashed in contested territory north of the Rio Grande. Polk stated that blood had been spilled on American soil, and therefore, war was required. Lincoln issued the “Spot Resolutions”, demanding to know on what spot American blood was spilled to prove whose soil it had been spilled on.
Sounds a bit petty, but due to the contested nature of the territory, this was a pretty legit question, and as Polk was using it as a main reason for war to grab that territory…well, you get the picture.
Pretty much no one cared at the time, besides Democrats who mocked him and fellow Whigs who told him to back off the issue. You see it a lot in the history books now that he’s one of our more revered presidents.
Digital History Taking Off with the Decoding of the Mayan Script
This article is a few days old now, but it’s just such a cool example of how the digital world can…
Going to Town on Saturday Afternoon.
Greene County, Georgia, May 1941. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Poverty Point culture is an archaeological culture that corresponds to an ancient group of Indigenous peoples who inhabited the area of the lower Mississippi Valley and surrounding Gulf coast from about 2200 BC - 700 BC. Archaeologists have identified more than 100 sites as belonging to this culture, which engaged in a large trading network throughout the eastern part of what is now the United States.
Dating of the Watson Brake site in present-day Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, where eleven earthwork mounds were built beginning about 3500 BC, shows it to be the earliest, dated mound complex in the Americas. It was begun well before the construction of the pyramids in Egypt.
Next oldest is the Poverty Point Culture, which thrived from 2200 BC- 700 BC, during the late Archaic period in the Americas. Evidence of this mound builder culture has been found at more than 100 sites, including the Jaketown Site near Belzoni, Mississippi. The largest and best-known site is at Poverty Point, which lies on the Macon Ridge near present day Epps, Louisiana. The Poverty Point culture may have hit its peak around 1500 BC. It is one of the oldest complex cultures, and possibly the first tribal culture, in the Mississippi Delta and in the present-day United States. The people occupied villages that extended for nearly 100 miles (160 km) on either side of the Mississippi River.
Poverty Point culture was followed by the Tchefuncte and Lake Cormorant cultures of the Tchula period, a local manifestation of the Early Woodland period. These descendant cultures differed from Poverty Point culture in trading over shorter distances, creating less massive public projects, completely adopting ceramics for storage and cooking, and lacking a lapidary (stone-carving) industry.
Although the earthworks at Poverty Point are not the oldest in the United States, (the earthworks at Watson Brake were built about 1900 years earlier) they are notable as the oldest earthworks of this size in the Western Hemisphere. In the centre of the site is a plaza, a constructed and levelled, flat, open area covering about 15 hectares or 37 acres (150,000 m2). Archaeologists believe the plaza was the site of public ceremonies, rituals, dances, games and other major community activities.
The site has six concentric earthworks separated by ditches, or swales, where dirt was removed to build the ridges. The ends of the outermost ridge are 1,204 metres (3,950 ft) apart, which is nearly 3/4 of a mile. The ends of the interior embankment are 594 metres (1,949 ft) apart. If the ridges were straightened and laid end to end, they would comprise an embankment of 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) long. Originally, the ridges stood 4 feet (1.2 m) to 6 feet (1.8 m) high and 140 feet (43 m) to 200 feet (61 m) apart. Many years of plowing have reduced some to only 1 foot (0.30 m) in height. Archaeologists believe that the homes of 500 to 1,000 inhabitants were located on these ridges.
This was the largest settlement at that time in North America. The site also had a 50 feet (15 m) high, 500 feet (150 m) long earthen pyramid, which was aligned east to west. A large bird effigy mound, measuring 70 feet (21 m) high and 640 feet (200 m) across, is also located on the Poverty Point site.
On the western side of the plaza, archaeologists have found some unusually deep pits. One explanation is these holes once held huge wooden posts, which served as calendar markers. Using the sun’s shadows, the inhabitants could have predicted the changing of the seasons. This great building project demanded a sustained investment of human labour, the organized skill and the cultural will to sustain the effort over many centuries. One authority calculated that it would take more than 1,236,007 cubic feet (34,999.8 m3) of basket-loaded soil to complete the earthworks. That would mean 1,350 adults labouring 70 days a year for three years.
Archaeological excavation has revealed a wealth of artefacts, including animal effigy figures; hand-moulded, baked-clay cooking objects; simple thick-walled pottery; stone vessels, spear points, adzes, hoes, drills, edge-retouched flakes, and blades. Stone cooking balls were used to prepare meals. Scholars believe dozens of the cooking balls were heated in a bonfire and dropped in pits along with food. Different-shaped balls controlled cooking temperatures and cooking time.
Another type of artefact, crude human figures, are thought to have been used for magical purposes. Points made of imported grey Midwestern flint were also found. In addition, plummets were fashioned out of heavy iron ore imported from Hot Springs, Arkansas; they served as weights for fish nets. Many of the raw materials used, such as slate, copper, galena, jasper, quartz, and soapstone, were from as far as 620 miles (1,000 km) away, attesting to the distant reach of the trading culture.
The Poverty Point culture developed a tradition of making high-quality, stylized, carved and polished miniature stone beads. Other early cultures in eastern North America rarely used stone to make their beads, opting for softer materials such as shell or bone. The fine cutting, engraving and polishing lapidary work done by these people resulted in refined and unique art forms. They made the beads in the images of many different animals that were common to their environment, such as an owl, dog, locust, and turkey vulture.
Rare photos from America’s WWII-era Japanese internment camps. From a new book, reviewed on NPR.
A copy of a rare 16th century map known as “the birth certificate of America” has been discovered in Germany.
The map, by the famous cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, is credited with being the first to document and name the newly-discovered land of America.
It had been thought that Waldseemueller had only made four copies, but researchers at a Munich university have now discovered a fifth version.
This new map was found in the pages of an unrelated 19th century book.
Sven Kuttner, head of old books at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, said: “It seems to be a second edition and this is a unique map. Until now, we have no signs for a further map like this.” Read more.
By noon on July 7th, 1865, the temperature was in the 90s and the humidity was high. Mary Surratt was being comforted be her daughter, Anna. They were in a prison courtyard, where Mary was being held. Mary was to be hanged for her part in the Lincoln assassination — nowadays, many question she had any part at all.
At 12:30 pm, the prison told all guests to leave. Anna was dragged away from her mother, screaming and proclaiming her mother’s innocence. Anna’s screams could be heard throughout the entire prison.
More than 1,000 people gathered at the gallows in the courtyard to watch four “Lincoln conspirators” to be hanged. From left to right: Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt. At 1:15 pm, the condemned were led to the gallows, and were binded and blinded with white cloth covering their heads and tying their feet and hands together.
Mary complained about the cloth being to tight, to which a soldier told her, “Well, it wont hurt long.” Lewis Powell’s final words were, “Mary Surratt is innocent. She doesn’t deserve to die like the rest of us!” The plea was ignored.
The signal was given, and the four “conspirators” suddenly dropped. Surratt’s death was quick. George Atzerodt struggled, but quickly hung still. Lewis Powell and David Herold struggled for five minutes, before dying.
On this day, in 1865, Mary Surratt was the first women to be executed by the United States government.
