history
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Ladies, here’s your new tough biker chick mascot
Have you been looking for a new role model for mixing biker-chick toughness with button-boots style? If you have, comics genius Kate Beaton has you covered, and if you haven't, now you know why you should have been. This badass velocipedestrienne (no, seriously, velocipedestrienne) is based on a 19th-century cartoon about "The Awful Effects of […]
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Lights, camera, activism: Filming the story of environmentalism
This OnEarth story was written by Bruce Barcott. In a creaky wood-floor office overlooking San Francisco Bay, the documentary filmmaker Mark Kitchell removes his glasses, runs his hand through his hair, and glares at a computer screen filled with thumbnail images of film clips. Kitchell, 59, is in the throes of a dilemma. He’s spent […]
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Electric car ad from 1912
Matt Novak of the always worthwhile blog PaleoFuture just stumbled across this ad for an electric car — from 1912. The Columbus Buggy Company once employed 1,000 people in a factory that produced horse-drawn carriages, and at the dawn of the automobile it attempted to make the leap to motorized versions. At the time, there was nothing odd about […]
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When the levees broke: the flood that made rock 'n' roll
An epic flood on the Mississippi River in 1927 spurred the northward migration that transformed Delta Blues into Chicago Blues.
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Ask Umbra Book Club: The history of ‘adulterated’ food and gross-food urban legends
Give us this day our daily bread, as long as we know what went into it.Photo: LaCheryl PorterDearest readers, Last week, we kicked off our discussion of Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life. You can catch up here. Let’s move our conversation into what is perhaps the heart of a house: […]
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Genghis Khan — not that green after all
A new study highlights the supposed green benefits of Genghis Khan's mass slaughter -- but neglects his not-so-green sex life.
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Climate change helped end the Roman empire, says study
If you thought the fall of the Roman Empire was caused by lead poisoning or that old standby, the gays, you're terribly mistaken! It turns out that agricultural societies are (surprise!) highly dependent on a cooperative climate.
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Americans need to stop multitasking while eating alone, argues French sociologist Claude Fischler
You're not alone in eating alone -- at least in America. It's what most of us do: in front of computers and TVs, or in cars. But as the preëminent French food sociologist Claude Fischler explained, we represent one extreme end of the social-eating spectrum, and the French another -- and in getting there, we've also strayed quite far from the ways that humans have consumed food for thousands of years.
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What’s driving our favorite fruit into decline?
The Calville Blanc d’Hiver, an heirloom variety dating from 15th-century France, will not be showing up in your supermarket, nor will the others in the slideshow below. Photo: Michaela/The Gardener’s EdenYou’ve heard the hackneyed phrase “as American as apple pie.” But America is not taking care of the apples — or the orchard-keepers — that […]