• The First Olympics

    Our news feeds are filled with gold medal winners and world records broken lately.  However, we are experiencing games that are a part of the resurgence of an ancient tradition.  The modern Olympic games began in the 19th century, but the games as a whole are much older. The original Olympic games were held as part of a religious festival honoring Zeus by the ancient Greeks.  The festival and games were held at the plains of Olympia in the western Peloponnesos near Mt Olympos, and the site lent the games their name.  On the Olympian plain were temples, and shrines as well as athletic facilities.  The landscape was dominated by…

  • Muhammed Ali

    Born in Kentucky, January 1942, Cassius Clay was one of five children of Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr and his wife Odessa O’Grady. Clay Sr was named for the 19thC abolitionist of the same name and passed the name on to his own son. Clay Sr was the descendant of slaves, Odessa however was the grand-daughter of a white Irish immigrant through her paternal line and the great-grand-daughter of a white man and a slave on her maternal side. Cassius would later adopt the name Muhammed Ali, upon his conversion to Islam, and thereafter refusing to answer to what he called his “slave-name”, despite its link with abolition, rather than slavery.…