The origins of Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos, can be traced back hundreds of years to an Aztec festival that honored the goddess of the dead, Mictecacihuatl. The party lasted a month. With the arrival of European colonists, the Catholic Church shrank it to a couple of days, coinciding with All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, usually the first two days of November. Family and friends decorate altars with offerings such as candles, flowers, photos and meaningful memorabilia.
In 1974, economist and metalworker Harry Braverman wrote Labor and Monopoly Capital, which showed how technology under capitalism shifts knowledge from workers to management-not because automation demands it but because control-seeking managers and capitalists do. Just over a half century later, his insight remains urgent: An invention offers options, but power often determines which are pursued.
Prior to the siege, Bowie and Travis had agreed to co-command the garrison. A letter alleged to have been jointly issued by them on 23 February 1836 to Colonel James W. Fannin at Goliad is included among the Travis letters, although scholar Bill Groneman notes that the letter first appeared in an 1841 work, Texas and the Texians, by Henry Stuart Foote who provided no information on its origin (3).
However, after going to Cambridge's Magdalene College library to borrow a signed Equiano letter for the Black Atlantic exhibition in 2021, Prof Victoria Avery, of the Fitzwilliam Museum, found long-forgotten, unheralded research by Cathy O'Neill. O'Neill had found and photographed the likely location of Anna Maria's plot in the churchyard of St Andrew's, in the Chesterton area of Cambridge, while doing her A-levels in 1977.
Outside his career, Robert's main passion was oral history, which he believed was a way of giving voice to ordinary people who would otherwise have left behind just birth and death certificates. In 1983 he co-founded the Waltham Forest Oral History workshop, whose members interviewed hundreds of local people; it also published books and pamphlets on subjects such as school strikes, childhood health and local pubs.
In the churchyard next to Liverpool Street station is a tomb with a design as interesting as the life of the man buried within. This is the tomb of Sir William Rawlins, the son of a farmer who rose to Sheriff of London, but was imprisoned for fraud and yet recovered enough to leave this impressive stone edifice. Born on 24th July 1753 in Berkshire, he moved to London at 17 to become an apprentice.
For generations, going to school for some Native Americans not only meant doing what they were told but using English names and being unable to speak in their native tongue. Some students were even met with beatings, withholding of food and solitary confinement. The 60-minute Oregon Public Broadcasting documentary Uncovering Boarding Schools: Stories of Resistance and Resilience follows Klamath Tribes member Gabriann "Abby" Hall as she discovers her family's experiences in Native American boarding schools.
Newly appointed captain Robert Stubbs had wagered that he could reach Jamaica in time. The stakes included the lives of everyone on board the Zorg, the profit of the venture, and the futures of men like the incapacitated captain and physician Luke Collingwood, deposed navigator James Kelsall, and Stubbs himself. Stubbs prudently followed the strong northwest trade winds toward his destination. Laughing gulls and tricolored herons accompanied the ship as it glided over the balmy Caribbean waters.
All these years later, here I am to do the same. Bill loved this place, naming it after his daughter and declaring it 'the sweetest hotel that ever was'. Nowadays his legacy is stamped all over town. The Irma sits on the US National Register of Historic Places, and Cody's charming wide streets, nightly rodeo, and excellent shopping proves almost as much a draw as Yellowstone itself.
Mount Holly, NJ -- The Burlington County Prison Museum in Mount Holly, New Jersey, was one of the first prisons of its kind, known for its focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Yet within its historic walls, trauma lingers. Many visitors and investigators report chilling encounters such as apparitions, footsteps, and figures appearing in windows. A child's spirit is said to hide in the old safe, and some have seen full-bodied shadows move across the rooms.
The USS New Jersey is a battleship of superlatives. Fastest battleship ever built? Check. The ship's fastest speed was a record-setting 35.2 knots, or a little over 40 miles per hour, in 1968. Longest battleship ever built? Check. At 887 feet and 7 inches long, the USS New Jersey is almost three football fields long, and 5 feet longer than the Titanic. Most-decorated battleship in US history? Check, again. The USS New Jersey earned 19 battle stars throughout its career.
For the better part of five years, I've been going to a shooting retreat in the foothills near Yosemite to improve my skills and have a bit of fun. These retreats or camps have themes and one overarching theme-proper club attire. Each year (or time I go), the theme changes. One year it was steel-target shooting, another was "Cowboy Action," the next "turn-of-the-century gangsters." While some folks come and go, for the past three years, the same group of men (and a few women) has shown up.
Each weekday, your host, Ray Hamel, concocts a challenging set of unique questions on a specific topic. At the end of the quiz, you'll be able to compare your score with that of the average contestant, and Slate Plus members can see how they stack up on our leaderboard. Share your score with friends and compete to see who's the brainiest.
Between skulls and marigold flowers, here is the significance of the Day of the Dead. This week, houses and streets in Mexico have been decorated with colourful altars, marigold flowers, candles and sugar skulls. This is because Mexicans are gearing up to celebrate El Dia de los Muertos the Day of the Dead the country's most important fiesta, which begins this weekend. Mexican families will gather in homes and cemeteries in memory of their family members who have departed.
In October, we costume up for Halloween, once a sacred day, Samhain, celebrated by the ancient Celts to mark the end of summer and the harvest season. The boundary between the living and the dead was thought to grow thin at this time. Celebrants then dressed in costumes as a disguise to confuse the spirits of the dead, who were said to return to the living. Later, the Catholic Church absorbed some of the ideas of the pagan ritual, transforming it into All Saints' Day to honor its saints.
Typical of Roman funerary practices of the time, only cremation burials have been found there. They consisted of pyres built over rectangular pits. The deceased's body was placed on the pyre with pottery and grave goods arranged around them. The hot fire burned the logs of the pyre, whitened and cracked the bones, melted glass bottles and bronze artifacts, and everything collapsed into the pit.
As the nights get longer and spookier, there's one thing that's guaranteed to make our hair stand on end: corpses that just won't stay dead. Especially the ones interested in eating us. This week, Danièle speaks with John Blair about who refused to rest in peace in the Middle Ages, how medieval people attempted to keep the dead buried, and why some hauntings reached epidemic proportions.
William Barret Travis (1809 to 1836) is best-known as the commander of the Alamo during the 13-day siege (23 February to 6 March 1836), dying in the Battle of the Alamo on 6 March at the age of 26. Arguably, however, Travis should receive greater recognition as the man who almost single-handedly started the Texas Revolution with theof 1832 and 1835.
Do you want to spin tales and trick men out of their money? Do you want to impersonate all kinds of people and characters? Do you want your deceptions to get you past guards and judges? If you want to learn to be a Rogue, then you can find no better teacher than Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī. This Abū Zayd is actually a literary character - he is the con man who appears throughout the pages of Maqamat al-Hariri,
Clava Cairns is an early Bronze Age site in Scotland, located east of the city of Inverness, consisting of three well-preserved cairns (two of which are passage graves) and a number of free-standing stones strategically placed for astronomical purposes. The full name of the site is the Prehistoric Burial Cairns of the Balnuaran of Clava which is usually shortened to The Balnuaran of Clava and, informally, Clava Cairns.
The J. Paul Getty Museum has announced the acquisition of a life-size glazed terracotta sculpture by Andrea della Robbia, one of the foremost sculptors of the Italian Renaissance. The work depicts Saint Anthony the Abbot, a third- and fourth-century Christian hermit famed for his asceticism and role as a model for monastic life. Created between 1510 and 1515, the sculpture likely originated in Tuscany.
An excavation earlier this year of the Pertosa-Auletta Caves in the province of Salerno, southern Italy, unearthed thousands of artifacts, including an extremely rare Bronze Age chisel with its wooden handle still intact and attached. The Pertosa-Auletta Caves is the only cave system in Italy with a navigable river, and visitors are taken on guided tours by boat to an underground waterfall and the Great Hall, an enormous chamber 80 feet high.
Set on the North African coast, Tunisia is home to some of the finest Roman ruins in the Mediterranean. After the fall of Carthage, Rome transformed the region into the prosperous province of Africa, enriched by its fertile plains and bustling cities. This land, shaped by dramatic events that influenced ancient history, has left behind an extraordinary archaeological legacy with ruins scattered across the rolling countryside, largely untouched by mass tourism.
John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) was a 19th-century American stage actor who assassinated US President Abraham Lincoln on 14 April 1865. Born to a family of famous actors, Booth was a rising star on stages across the United States, known for his leading roles in William Shakespeare's plays. He sympathized with the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and denounced Lincoln as a tyrant who sought to subjugate the South.
Frogs appear frequently in medieval medical writings as useful ingredients. Dinkova-Bruun traces their presence in De medicamentis liber, a fifth-century collection of remedies by the Gallo-Roman physician Marcellus Empiricus. His manual catalogues hundreds of treatments from head to toe, combining herbs, animal parts, and ritual actions in equal measure. Among the many creatures pressed into service, the frog features in eleven recipes, often for ailments that were both common and mysterious: earache, ulcers, dysentery, and toothache.
When most people today hear the word Grail, they picture a glittering chalice, the Holy Grail of Christian legend, often imagined as the cup of Christ at the Last Supper or the vessel that caught his blood at the Crucifixion. Yet in its earliest literary appearances the graal was nothing of the sort. Far from being a holy chalice, it was a large, ordinary serving dish - a domestic object brought at mealtime in the court of the mysterious Fisher King.
Discover the famous Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) who lived in this 1690s townhouse when he wrote his Dictionary of the English Language. The son of a bookseller from Lichfield, Johnson walked to London in 1737 in search of fame and fortune. While fortune evaded him, Johnson's fame was assured with the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, from which he became known as 'Dictionary Johnson'.
It is said by historians that Henry VII was a secretive and wary person, but also patient and vigilant, as well as having a love for all sorts games. Juan de Lepe was supposedly Henry VII's favourite opponent, but one day while playing a hand of cards (some sources say it was a game of chess), the English King decided to wager his crown, saying that if his Andalusian rival won the game, he would make him King of England for a day.
