Congratulations to William Hayes and Mickey Houchen for winning last week’s DVD giveaway of America: The Story of Us! This week’s DVD giveaway is a copy of Instant Expert: The Mayflower, courtesy of A&E Home Entertainment: The epic saga of the pilgrims and their journey to and colonization of the New World is one of the fundamental narratives [...]
The original rules of basketball, written by James Naismith 119 years ago, are expected to fetch millions at auction. It’s been nearly 119 years since James Naismith wrote down 13 rules for a new game he devised as a way to give youths at a Massachusetts YMCA an athletic activity to keep them busy in [...]
I thought this was particularly cool. A cross-section of a dinosaur skull has been found in a marble slab in the Cathedral of Vigevano in Italy. [Thx Catherine!] “The rock contains what appears to be a horizontal section of a dinosaur’s skull. The image looks like a CT scan, and clearly shows the cranium, the [...]
The remains of a young Carthaginian has been brought to life by way of dermoplastic reconstruction. An anthropological study of the skeleton showed that the man died between the age of 19 and 24, had a pretty robust physique and was 1.7 metres (five feet six inches) tall, according to a description by Jean Paul [...]
National Geographic has compiled a list of 12 ancient places that are in danger of disappearing forever. Damaged frescoes in the Church of St. Gregory of Tigran Honents tell a story of neglect in the medieval city of Ani, now part of Turkey. Sitting in a militarized zone near the current Turkish-Armenian border, the city [...]
Fossils of four ancient lemur-like creatures have been found in Libya, suggesting primates arose in Asia, not Africa. The conventional narrative of primate development places the origins of anthropoids — monkeys and apes, including humans — in Africa. Some paleontologists, however, think Asia is the more likely cradle for that ur-primate, or what Christopher Beard [...]
A new online database of 20,000 works of art seized by the Nazis show that half of them have yet to be returned. The database, a joint project between the U.S.-based Claims Conference and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is based on records the Nazis produced in Paris, and is designed to help families [...]
A Bolivian woman has been arrested after attempting to send a Peruvian mummy by post. The archaeological piece, probably from the Inca culture, was discovered during a routine inspection at the time it was being shipped through the Post Office of Bolivia in La Paz bound for the French town of Compiegne addressed to a [...]
Check out the above image. It is the first photograph of a human, taken in 1838. This is a Daguerreotype taken by the inventor of the process, Louis Daguerre, in 1838. It is a view of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. To achieve this image (one of his earliest attempts), he exposed a chemically [...]
A reed skirt which dating back 5,900 years has been found in a cave in Armenia. Pavel Avetisian, the head of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography in Yerevan, said a fragment of skirt made of reed was found during recent digging in the Areni-1 cave in southeastern Armenia. Avetisian told Tuesday’s news conference in [...]
Scientists have developed a new, high-tech way to protect silver from tarnish, a huge threat to many museum artifacts. To protect these objects for generations to come, scientists from the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, have teamed up with conservators from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, [...]
A mummified goat, 1000-1500 years older than Egyptian mummies, has been found in Areni cave in Armenia. An expedition excavating Areni cave discovered a mummified goat – head, part of body, perhaps, also brain, head of the Armenian party in the expedition, Boris Gasparyan told reporters. He supposes the mummified goat is 1000-1500 years older [...]
An academic is claiming that Jane Austen’s elegant writing style may actually be the work of her editor. Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University reached her conclusion while studying 1,100 original handwritten pages of Austen’s unpublished writings. The manuscripts, she states, feature blots, crossing outs and “a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing”. She adds: “The [...]
A fossilized human jawbone is the oldest modern human remains found outside of Africa. The mandible, unearthed by paleontologists in China’s Zhiren Cave in 2007, sports a distinctly modern feature: a prominent chin. But the bone is undeniably 60,000 years older than the next oldest Homo sapiens remains in China, scientists say. In fact, at [...]
Neolithic tombs containing the bodies of adults and children have been found in a cave in Armenia. He said that the specialists have found the bodies of adults and children in clay tombs. Children’s bodies are intact, whereas the adults were dismembered. The find is a unique opportunity to find out the children’s genetic code [...]
A pair of swords found underneath the Great Buddha of Todaljl temple in Japan have undergone x-ray analysis, identifying them as two sacred weapons dedicated to the temple around 760 A.D. by the Empress Komyo. The swords, decorated with gold, silver and lacquer, appear on the top of about 100 swords in the weapon list [...]
An oil boom working on the Perdido River in Alabama has snagged a 19th century anchor. Maritime archaeologists, he said, determined it was a 19th century folding stock anchor that probably predated the Civil War. Because of its size, Wilson said it was probably on a smaller ship, like a schooner. The anchor was turned [...]
A 1,000-year-old inscribed stone slad has been found at the future site of a cricket stadium in Sri Lanka. The inscribed stone slab has a large perforation at the centre reminding of anchors and sluice-gates. Academics are concerned about the safe custody of the inscription with the Department of Archaeology. As there are no Tamil [...]
A Native American burial ground dating back to the 1300s has been found in Mississippi, delaying a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction project. Chris Koeppel, a Corps environmental section team leader and archaeologist, said he and his team, which includes the archaeology firm Panamerican Consultants, found preserved remains, stone tools and pottery that date [...]
The story that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis back to Europe from the New World has been proven false. It’s been popularly theorized among experts in tropical diseases that the explorer brought back one too many treasures from the New World, including the potentially fatal sexually transmitted infection. Soon after his return in the mid-1490s, a [...]
The church where Pocahontas was married has been found in Jamestown, Virginia. The 60-foot-long walls and thatch roof are all gone now, but a row of graves was subsequently found in what would have been the church’s chancel— an area near the altar where prominent Anglicans were traditionally buried. “That’s when we started high-fiving,” said, [...]
An 8,000-year-old skeleton of a young boy has been unearthed at a construction site in Bulgaria. The remains were found while land was being cleared for the construction of the Maritsa motorway, en route to Turkey, near the village of Kroum, municipality of Dimitrovgrad. Experts say that the skeleton, was from the Neolithic age, dates [...]
A decorated gourd which dates back to 1793 may contain the blood of Louis XVI. The gourd, originally used to store gunpowder, was extensively decorated on the outside with a flame tool. Burned into its surface is the text: “Maximilien Bourdaloue on January 21st, dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his [...]
British museums have been closing coffins and covering ancient mummies to placate offended protesters. Small groups such as the Pagan Organisation Honouring the Ancient Dead claim that it is against the religious beliefs of our ancestors to put bodies on show. Museums are becoming increasingly nervous about displaying human remains. Seventeen have drawn up guidelines [...]
America The Story of Us is a series (12 hours) of docudramas that aired over six days on the History Channel last year. The national educational initiative covers the 400 years of American history. I asked for and received a review copy and spent the last two weeks taking time to view the series and [...]
Is this real or not and was it published by Lincoln?
UPDATE: It is not by Lincoln and in fact the fake business card of Abraham Lincoln was “probably printed by the Democratic committee in 1864.” [Source]