Adept in the ancient, Well-versed in the arcane

nordic-drifter:

It is well known that Viking explorers used the sun and stars to navigate across open seas, but what did they do when the sun and stars weren’t visible? For centuries legends have told of various tools that Vikings used to help navigate, among them the fabled Sunstone. Now, researchers believe they have finally found one of these stones. 

Until recently, nothing was found among Viking artifacts that matched descriptions from the sagas. However, researchers now believe the mythical sunstone was a calcite-like crystal known as Iceland spar. After extensive tests, researchers now believe that this crystal can be used as an incredibly accurate navigational aid.

Fragments of Iceland spar were first found, or first recognized, in Icelandic Viking settlements only last year.

(via thoughtlessfroth)

inebriatedpony:

talesfromtheend:

narrativepriorities:

justamus:

A rare vintage photograph of an onna-bugeisha, one of the female warriors of the upper social classes in feudal Japan.

Often mistakenly referred to as “female samurai”, female warriors have a long history in Japan, beginning long before samurai emerged as a warrior class.

Hearts in my eeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyes

Holy shit. Brb inventing time travel

Baaaaaaabe!

archiemcphee:

Here’s an awesome little piece of history:

Archaeologists in the Burnt City have discovered what appears to be an ancient prosthetic eye. What makes this discovery exceptionally awesome is the striking description of how the owner and her false eye would have appeared while she was still alive and blinking:

[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE. 

So she was an extraordinarily tall woman walking around wearing an engraved golden eye patterned with rays like a tiny sun. What an awesome sight that must have been.

[via TYWKIWDBI]

(via ritterlied)

While in Chapel Hill, I saw this book and had to have it! Japanese interment during WWII has fascinated and saddened me since finding out about it through my own study as a kid. This is a book filled with photographs taken by Bill Manbo, a prisoner in the camp, with a Kodachrome camera. This gives an exceptionally rare glimpse of life in the camp, in color! I think the Bon Odori festival is my favorite thus far!

coolchicksfromhistory:

In 1818, a large German family fled poverty in Germany and arrived in Louisiana.  Orphaned and separated from their extended family by indentured servitude, two little girls disappeared.  Twenty five years later, a German immigrant woman met a light skinned slave woman she believed to be Salomé Müller, one of the missing girls.  Although Mary Miller has no memory of a German childhood, she is renamed Sally Miller (an Anglicization of Salomé Müller) and a legal team is soon fighting for her freedom as a white woman.

The Lost German Slave Girl follows the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court and traces the history of slavery in Louisiana.  White looking slaves were not unusual in the antebellum South, slave women had born their masters children for generations, but a person of entirely European ancestry could not legally be kept as a slave.  This dichotomy required some serious mental gymnastics, but legally if the mother was a slave, so was the child.  Looking white was irrelevant to Sally Miller’s case, the central issue for the court was the race of Sally’s mother.  Was she the daughter of a German immigrant or the daughter of a slave?

Although the author makes his opinion known, in the end it is left up to the reader to decide whether Sally was a German girl sold into slavery by an opportunist or a woman born into slavery who saw a chance at freedom.  The book is a bit dense, but it was one of the more interesting books I read in 2011 (thought it was published in 2002).  If you’re interested in race as a social construct and the laws governing slavery, I think you’ll enjoy this book.

Buy The Lost German Slave Girl on Amazon

Saw this in the book store a few weeks ago! It looks very interesting! I might have to pick it up once I finish the other 4 history books that are sitting on my shelves, waiting for me to finish!