Tag: history

Chain Letter Evolution

Apocryphal letters claiming divine origin circulated for centuries in Europe. After 1900, shorter more secular letters appeared in the US that promised good luck if copies were distributed and bad luck if not. Billions of these “luck chain letters” circulated in the next 100 years. As they replicated through the decades, some accumulated copying errors, offhand comments, and calculated innovations that helped them prevail in the competition with other chain letters.

What the Celts drank

Our analyses confirm that they indeed consumed imported wines, but they also drank local beer from the Greek drinking bowls. In other words, the Celts did not simply adopt foreign traditions in their original form. Instead, they used the imported vessels and products in their own ways and for their own purposes. Moreover, the consumption of imported wine was apparently not confined to the upper echelons of society. Craftsmen too had access to wine, and the evidence suggests that they possibly used it for cooking, while the elites quaffed it in the course of their drinking parties

Serious Eats

In 2006, when the biggest names on the internet still included MySpace and Geocities, a new site burst onto the scene that promised to be bookmarked by food nerds across cyberspace: Ed Levine — perhaps the ultimate food nerd — and his team of happy-go-lucky writers unleashed Serious Eats, and it was, in many ways, the “food blogger” trope made manifest. It didn’t take long before the site became a one-stop destination for the original deep-dive into In-n-Out’s secret menu; an exhaustive guide to Sri Lankan food on Staten Island; a column in which Levine grappled with dieting for 182 weeks; and 5000 words on perfecting chocolate chip cookies. (I interned, for free, and then freelanced for the website, though I try not to think about how little I was paid.) Now, Levine has released a new memoir and, to celebrate the site’s 12 (frequently cash-strapped) years in business, Grub Street talked to the culinary obsessives who toiled away in the site’s dumpling-strewn content mines during its earliest years.

The Secret Of Our Success

Our mouths are the size of the squirrel monkey’s, a species that weighs less than 1.3 kg. Chimpanzees can open their mouths 2x as wide as we can and hold substantial amounts of food compressed between their lips and large teeth. We also have puny jaw muscles that reach up only to just below our ears. Other primates’ jaw muscles stretch to the top of their heads, where they sometimes even latch onto a central bony ridge. Our stomachs are small, having only a third of the surface area that we’d expect for a primate of our size, and our colons are too short, being only 60% of their expected mass. Compared to other animals, we have such atrophied digestive tracts that we shouldn’t be able to live. What saves us? All of our food processing techniques, especially cooking, but also chopping, rinsing, boiling, and soaking. We’ve done much of the work of digestion before food even enters our mouths.

Virtual Angkor

a groundbreaking collaboration between Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life. Built for the classroom, it has been created to take students into a 3D world and to use this simulation to ask questions about Angkor’s place in larger networks of trade and diplomacy, its experience with climate variability and the structure of power and kingship that underpinned the city.

see also

the colossal, densely populated cities would have constituted the largest empire on earth at the time of its peak in the 12th century.

UK Iron Age ritual burials

The Iron Age site at Childrey Warren was particularly fascinating as it provided a glimpse into the beliefs and superstitions of people living in Oxfordshire before the Roman conquest. Evidence elsewhere suggests that burials in pits might have involved human sacrifice. “These findings open a unique window into the lives and deaths of communities we often know only for their monumental buildings, such as hillforts or the Uffington White Horse. The results from the analysis of the artifacts, animal bones, the human skeletons and the soil samples will help us add some important information to the history of the communities that occupied these lands so many years ago.”