She enjoyed a distinguished career in public education, remembered for her intelligence, articulate teaching style, and dedication to preserving history and culture. Beyond the classroom, Ms. Boyce was celebrated for her joy in singing and her beautiful operatic voice. She performed widely, bringing to life African American spirituals, operatic arias, Broadway classics, and art songs. Her recitals often included sing-alongs, inviting audiences to share in the music and storytelling traditions she cherished.
Strabo had visited the Egyptian city around 29-25BC and wrote of such boats: These vessels are luxuriously fitted out and used by the royal court for excursions; and the crowd of revellers who go down from Alexandria by the canal to the public festivals; for every day and every night is crowded with people on the boats who play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness.
VisiCorp is better known for VisiCalc. Launched for the Apple II in 1979, this was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers. Later, VisiCalc was supplanted by Lotus 1-2-3, as developed by MIT laureate Mitch Kapor - before 1-2-3 was outcompeted by Excel. It was very rudimentary indeed, but it was transformative and created an entirely new category of software.
"Everybody thought it was the most horrible idea ever, because of the kids," Schmitt told SFGATE. "They thought the kids wouldn't understand many Santas. But I found out later, kids think in 'many.'"
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
Two Bronze Age spearheads decorated with gold have been discovered in Boeslunde, Denmark. There are no known comparable examples of gold ornamented spears from this period in all of Europe, but they would be extraordinary even without the gold because the spearheads are made from iron. Analysis of birch pitch used as a glue from a sheath at the tip of one of the spearheads dates to the approximately 900830 B.C., the oldest iron in Denmark.
Control over Wallachia, now part of present-day Romania, was fiercely contested between powerful noble families, while neighbouring states supported rival claimants. The Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II (1444-46; 1451-81) favoured Vlad II Dracula as Prince of Wallachia. In return, Vlad II sent two of his younger sons, Vlad and Radu, to live at the Sultan's court. In 1456, several years after his father was killed, Vlad returned to Wallachia and, with the Sultan's backing, took over the principality as Vlad III Dracula.
A tiny but exquisitely carved cameo of Medusa has been discovered in Hallstatt, Austria. It is one of only three Roman cameos in Upper Austria, and even at just 1.5 cm (.6 inches) high, the size of a fingernail, it's the largest of the three. It is also the most detailed and finely worked of them. The cameo was carved from a black and white banded agate (onyx)
I stared for a few seconds while Boddice smiled encouragingly, as if he'd just asked me to solve a quadratic equation in my head. "I guess it probably stung, and then his thumb throbbed?" I ventured, remembering actually banging my own thumb a few weeks back while assembling an IKEA desk. Boddice nodded, then said, "Let me ask you again. What did it feel like for him?"
A previously-unknown 14th century wood statue of the Madonna has been restored and gone on display at the Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Prague. Over three years of meticulous work, restorers removed overpaint layers and returned the sculpture to its original subtle palette. Researchers found that during the 19th century, the Madonna was located in the Church of Saint Lawrence in Havran, hence its monicker: the Madonna of Havran.
Governed by strict adherence to fixed times, the daily prayers sung by religious men and women were at the heart of monastic life in the Middle Ages. Each day, religious houses would resonate with the unified voices of their faithful inhabitants, who would sing prayers at different hours throughout the day, beginning in the early morning and continuing into the night.
Also on this date: In 1947, the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway. In 1967, a surgical team in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the donated organ from a 25-year-old woman who had died in a traffic accident.
Painted sometime in the Rameside Period (1292-1075 B.C.E.), the fragments above-called the "Turin Erotic Papyrus" because of their "discovery" in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Italy-only hint at the frank versions of ancient sex they depict (see a graphic partial reconstruction at the bottom of the post-probably NSFW). The number of sexual positions the papyrus illustrates-twelve in all-"fall somewhere between impressively acrobatic and unnervingly ambitious," one even involving a chariot.
"Third World" is often the first term that pops into Westerners' minds when they try to characterize less well-off, troubled countries. Everyone knows what they mean countries that are low in resources, where many people live in poverty, where health care and education systems are weak, where democracy may not be exactly flourishing. Where did this term come from? How is it regarded in the 21st century? And are there any better alternatives?
The mystery of when, how and perhaps most importantly why a giant naked figure was carved into a dizzyingly steep hillside in the English West Country has been a source of wonder and intrigue for centuries. Future generations may come closer to solving the puzzle of the Cerne Giant after the National Trust stepped in to buy 340 acres of land around the 55-metre (180ft) figure. The planned purchase is expected to clear the way for more archaeological investigations around Britain's largest chalk hill figure, which looms over the rolling Dorset landscape.
The Devil is a pervasive figure in medieval European sacred art. For every extant portrayal of Christ, the saints, angels, or biblical heroes, there also exists a multitude of spine-chilling images depicting the underworld's torments, grotesque demons, or Satan himself. These pictorial renditions of the Devil provide us with a frightening glimpse into the ways in which medieval minds envisioned evil incarnate, which included physical attributes ranging from angelic and humanoid to entirely bestial.
Mark Twain was, in the esti­ma­tion of many, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca's first tru­ly home­grown man of let­ters. And in keep­ing with what would be rec­og­nized as the can-do Amer­i­can spir­it, he could­n't resist putting him­self forth now and again as a man of sci­ence - or, more prac­ti­cal­ly, a man of tech­nol­o­gy. Here on Open Cul­ture, we've pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his patent­ed inven­tions (includ­ing a bet­ter bra strap), the type­writer of which he made pio­neer­ing use to write a book,
One of the most famous figures in Aurora history never actually made it to town. Willie Keil died of malaria in 1855 in Bethel Colony, Missouri, a few days before he was to accompany his father, German immigrant and evangelical leader William Keil, and about 80 colonists on a journey west to establish a new settlement of their communal society near Willapa Bay.
An archaeological investigation before redevelopment of the railway station in Manduria, 20 miles east of Taranto, southeast Italy, has uncovered a large section of a defensive wall built by the pre-Italic Messapian people in the 4th century B.C. The structure is composed of limestone blocks that were precisely worked and laid dry in an alternating pattern. It was built inside a moat that encircled the inner wall of the older Archaic-era defensive walls.
The structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was discovered in 1953 by two molecular biologists, James Dewey Watson (1928-2025) and Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916-2004). Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their pioneering work. This is the accepted version of history. However, Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), an English chemist whose expertise in X-ray crystallography made a significant contribution, may have paved the way for Watson and Crick.
3. And this reader shared some modern context: "Tennessee still has corporal punishment, at least as of a decade ago. A friend's teenage daughter had to get paddled for something extremely minor (her cellphone was in her backpack and not her locker). There is something seriously gross and perverted about a grown man making a young girl bend over his desk to paddle her butt." - blueshark77
Medieval folktales rarely survive, but when they do, they often appear in surprising places-especially in the lives of local saints. The story of St. Prokop of Sázava reveals how ordinary Czech beliefs shaped a miracle-working saint who battled demons, defended the Slavonic rite, and even returned as a ghost to protect his community.
The Castle of Old Wick in northern Scotland has reopened to the public following a round of high-level masonry inspections and minor repairs completed by Historic Environment Scotland (HES). In October, specialist conservation teams carried out tactile inspections of the medieval ruin, examining its stonework by hand while using ropes and scaffolding to safely access difficult areas. These checks form part of HES's nationwide High-Level Masonry Programme, launched in April 2022, which assesses historic structures with masonry over 1.5 metres.
If you've ever wondered how people in the Middle Ages mocked their rivals, medieval chronicles, court records, and literary texts offer a treasure trove of sharp-tongued insults. These historical slights range from witty and poetic to downright vulgar, revealing how medieval men and women used language to defend their honour, challenge enemies, or simply stir up trouble. From battlefield taunts to street-corner jeers, medieval insults tell us far more about daily life, humour, and conflict than you might expect-so prepare
Senon was an important city of the Mediomatrici tribe, documented in Roman sources after the conquest of Gaul (57 B.C.). While pre-Roman Gallic remains had been found before, the excavations were too small in scale to draw any conclusions about the extent and nature of the settlement. The excavation revealed the remains of timber-framed constructions that proved it was a fully developed settlement from the middle of the 2nd century B.C. to the beginning of the Roman period.
