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  • Khutulun – The Wrestling Princess

    The family of Genghis Khan was fearsome.  His sons and grandsons ruled large swaths of Asia, but his fearsome genes didn’t stop with just the men.  Enter Khutulun.  Her name meant “shining moon” or “moonlight”, but she was not all sweetness and light. Born about 1260 to Kaidu Khan, who ruled the Chagatai Khaganate, which stretched from western Mongolia to the Amu Dayra river in the west and from central Siberia in the north to India in the south.  Kaidu preferred the old ways of a nomadic life along the Steppes, so Khutulun could ride and shoot with the best of them.  She was given a traditional Mongol education alongside…

  • Deluge Myths

    High water, gully washer, toad strangler, God willing and the creek don’t rise. These are all terms for a universal weather phenomenon- floods. Even in ancient times, floods were a key part of life. The Nile floods were so important to ancient Egypt they had a god for it- Hapi. In that same vein, there are similar stories about a great flood in most known mythologies. There are enough similarities that researchers believe that these stories could come from a single root. The field of geomythology is the intersection between mythology and geology, and scientists have begun drawing parallels to the multiple “deluge myths”. The most commonly known story is…

  • Théroigne de Méricourt

    Théroigne de Méricourt

    Born Anne-Josèphe Terwagne in Marcourt, Rendeux in the province of Luxembourg, Belgium, Théroigne de Méricourt was far from royalty. She was born in 1767 to peasant parents, the middle child of three. Her mother died when she was five years old and Anne-Josèphe was passed back and forth between a couple of aunts and her father and his new wife. None of these homes were particularly kind to her, through a series of misadventures including being hired as a governess and then ditched at a tavern, young Anne-Josèphe found herself in the employ of a woman named Madame Colbert. Madame Colbert hired Anne-Josèphe to be the governess of her children,…

  • The History of the Filibuster

    (Admin note: Please refrain from discussions of a modern political context regarding this article on the filibuster. You can visit the author’s blog where such is relevant. Discussion of the historical context however is welcome as always. Thank you) If you’ve been watching the news at all, you have probably heard people mention something called the filibuster. We are not going to go into the implications and how it affects modern politics in this article. (If you want to see that discussion, wander over to my blog https://deconstructingus.com/2022/06/slavery-and-the-constitution/) Here we are going to focus on the history of it and how it came to be in our government. Technically speaking,…

  • The Ghost Girls

    From its discovery in 1898, radium was considered a wonder of science.  It glowed with an unearthly beauty.  It delighted its discoverers, Marie Sklodowska Curie and her husband Pierre, who called it “My beautiful radium”.  It was used in spas and clinics as a cure for everything from cancer to constipation.   It was used in makeup, jewelry and paints.   At the height of World War I, it was used to make the hands and dials of wristwatches glow in the dark.  Girls all over the country flocked to make these watches as they paid up to three times what they could have been paid at any other wartime factory.…