Historical Tidbits Archives – Page 43 of 50

March 20, 2018March 26, 2018

Women Inventing the Language of Themselves

Panel symbolic language representing poem to Inanna — Panel from Nancy Castille’s “Hieratica,” an invented symbolic language, photo by kajmeister.

In honor of Women’s History month, I’d like to highlight the work of two women who are linguists. One toiled for years to decipher a baffling script, though her contributions have been treated as nearly invisible. The other is a friend who recently created a symbolic language to encode a sacred Sumerian text. Both are inspirational examples of perseverance and intuition in unpacking the mysteries of ancient languages.

The Language of the Labyrinth

Alice Kober was a teacher at Brooklyn College in the 1930s who conducted a two-decade odyssey into the mysteries of a pre-Greek language called Linear B. A treasure trove of artifacts on the island of Crete were discovered after the Ottoman Empire fell and the last of the Turks left. Archeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a wealth of tablets in 1903 that suggested a robust culture dating back to 1200 BC, a thousand years before Golden Age of Greece. Attempts to translate the tablets had eluded scholars who had tried to link the symbols to Greek or other languages, and Kober was determined to find the secret.

Alice Kobler deciphers Linear B — Alice Kobler and Linear B, photo from BBC.com

Continue reading “Women Inventing the Language of Themselves”

February 6, 2018February 13, 2018

Black American Pioneers on Ice and Snow

1st U.S. black American winter Olympians — Willie Davenport & Jeff Gadley, 1st African-Americans on a Winter Olympics team, courtesy of ESPN

The achievement was a historical footnote at Lake Placid, an asterisk among the ALL CAP raves for the “big” notables like Team USA’s hockey upset of the Soviets and Eric Heiden’s five gold medals. Willie Davenport and Jeff Gadley, push men for the four-man bobsled, were the first black Americans included on a U.S. winter Olympic team. As the 2018 Winter Olympics kick off in two days, the intersection with Black History month provides a perfect opportunity to discuss diversity and to celebrate notable achievements by athletes in the Games.

I was somewhat bewildered immediately in seeking information. First, while data on medal winners came easily, detail about the first Olympic participants was harder to find. Boxer George Poage was cited as the first black medal winner at the summer Olympics in 1904, only the third time the Games had been staged. Whether he was also the first participant is hard to determine. It took quite a bit of digging to ferret out the ESPN analysis that showed Davenport and Gadley as the first winter participants. Secondly, it was a bit shocking to realize that while only eight years passed before African-Americans were added to the summer U.S. teams, a full 56 years occurred before blacks were included on TeamUSA in the winter. Continue reading “Black American Pioneers on Ice and Snow”

December 20, 2017January 19, 2018

Calling Out for Light in the Darkness

A few weeks ago, I highlighted a recent sentiment that Christmas lights make everything better. This is no accident. Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Our body clocks can’t wait for that turning of the tide and, over centuries, our cultures have created one tradition after another to add lights which stave off that darkness. That desire for more light is built into us at the core, even at the cellular levels, within our circadian rhythms.

Fascinatin’ Rhythm

Hall, Rosbash, and Young won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for studying the phenomenon of circadian rhythms. The basic notion of a circadian cycle is one tied to a 24-hour biological clock, a circuit fundamentally tied to the length of a day, split between sun and darkness. Life cycles, for everything from plants to fruit flies to human beings, have adapted to that 24-hour pattern. Scientists have known for years that key processes that regulate sleep, hormone production, metabolism, and behavior are linked to these patterns. The Nobel scientists figured out why.