After Kennedy’s assassination only two years later, the American people and successive presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon refused to let Kennedy’s dream go unaccomplished. In the six years following his death, the United States spent roughly $27 billion on the Apollo program, nearly $300 billion today.

Almost half a million people worked on the Apollo missions. Everyone knows that the race to the Moon was a triumph of rocket science, computer science, physics and engineering. But it was also, in part, a triumph of sewing.

Space Suits

Designing the suits astronauts would wear on the Moon was no easy task. The suits essentially had to be miniature spaceships: airtight, pressurized, but still flexible enough to move in. Because nothing like them had ever been made before, each suit had to be constructed almost entirely by hand, and NASA did not find the people best for the job in the space industry.

When Jeanne Wilson was 19, NASA came calling. At the time, she was working at the International Latex Corporation in Dover, Delaware, sewing bras, girdles, and rubber pants designed to go over baby diapers. Her company was contracted to make the astronauts’ spacesuits, and NASA wanted its best seamstresses. The entire team was made up of women.

Before they could begin, the seamstresses had to study a 1,000-page engineering blueprint and pass a test proving they understood exactly what they were being asked to build. Then they were given extraordinarily expensive, newly designed fabrics and thread that cost more than $3,000 a yard. They were expected to sew the suits by hand.

The process was grueling and heavily scrutinized. Each section of the suit was made up of 21 layers of fabric, and every stitch had to be monitored to within 1/64 of an inch. The needles themselves were a major risk. If one were accidentally left inside a suit, it could become a serious problem, so each woman was assigned a different colored needle. Every night, the suits were X-rayed, and if a seamstress’s needle was found inside, she would be fired immediately.

Jeanne recalled that a single row of stitching could take days to complete and inspect. She spent countless nights worrying that she had accidentally dropped a needle somewhere inside the suit, knowing that tiny mistake could cost her job, the mission to the moon, or the life of an astronaut. A lot to handle for a 19-year-old.

The entire suit was made by these women, from the airtight limbs and boots to the sewn-in name tag at the center of the chest. Their painstaking work paid off: aside from minor discomfort, Apollo 11 experienced zero suit-related issues.

The Apollo Guidance Computer

Sewing was not limited to the astronauts’ clothing. The same unlikely skill found its way into another crucial part of the Apollo mission: its computers.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was one of the most important pieces of technology on the entire mission. It calculated changes to the flight path, navigated the spacecraft using information from the ground, radar, and the stars, and managed steering, stabilization, and engine operations. In the 1960s, a “computer” was typically a machine so large it was a room down the hall. The AGC, however, had to perform all of these tasks inside the Apollo spacecraft, where NASA had only about one cubic foot of space to spare.

The primary form of computer memory at the time was known as magnetic core memory. It consisted of tiny magnetic rings, called cores, with wires threaded through them. Each ring could store a single bit of information, either a 1 or a 0, depending on the direction of its magnetic field.

The problem was, these panels took up valuable space, and the AGC needed to store a significant amount of information. NASA needed to find a way to pack as much memory as possible into a space barely larger than a shoebox.

Little Old Lady Memory

The solution was core rope memory: strands of copper wire threaded through thousands of tiny magnetic rings in a row instead of on a panel. If a wire passed through a ring, it recorded a 1; if it passed around it, it recorded a 0. Strung together, the rope memory was long but could be wrapped around the other computer components, helping it fit into the absurdly tight space.

Rope memory made up the guidance system’s read-only code. Once the wires were in place, they could not be moved. Engineers spent years writing the code, but if a single 0 was accidentally turned into a 1 because a wire was threaded incorrectly, say goodbye to Neil Armstrong. With so much on the line, NASA once again turned to seamstresses.

Skilled women from the local textile industry interpreted the code written by the engineers and threaded the wires through a matrix of tiny holes with pinpoint precision. In the end, they threaded 72 kilobytes of memory, or 576,000 individual 1s and 0s. The meticulous task was incredibly important. The entire AGC had only about 76 kilobytes of memory, with just 4 kilobytes of erasable non-rope memory.

This was an impressive amount of memory at the time. Today it’s laughable. To put it in perspective, if you took a screenshot of this page right now, it would be about 300 kilobytes.

Unfortunately, even though many of the women were young and all were incredibly capable, they were called “little old ladies” by their male coworkers. To this day, core rope memory is remembered as “Little Old Lady Memory,” or LOL memory. The male team leads were known as “rope mothers.”

The “rope mothers’” boss, however, was a woman. Margaret Hamilton was the director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed the AGC. And the software these women painstakingly wove into the rope memory would play a crucial role.

During the Apollo 11 landing, the astronauts accidentally left the rendezvous radar running, overwhelming the computer with data. Hamilton and her team had designed the software to recognize an overload and prioritize the most important tasks. The AGC discarded less important tasks and continued running the software essential to landing the lunar module, which was stored, of course, in the LOL memory.

Further Thoughts

The story of the Apollo seamstresses is remarkable, but it also reveals something much bigger about the way we value work. Once again, women who played essential roles in a historic achievement were given far less credit than the men working alongside them. But I think the Apollo seamstresses also tell us something about how we decide what kinds of work are important in the first place.

In the 1960s, there were clear expectations about what jobs belonged to women and what jobs belonged to men. The baseline assumption was that women would stay home, and if they did work, they were expected to occupy traditionally “feminine” jobs like secretaries, seamstresses, or typists. The Apollo program fit neatly into those categories on paper. Men designed the technology. Women sewed things.

Imagine rewriting the resumes of the women who actually did the work. The women sewing the spacesuits were skilled technicians constructing some of the most advanced aerospace equipment ever made. The women weaving the guidance computers were highly technical computer engineers.

Yet because their work involved sewing and weaving, they were called “little old ladies.”

The distinction between a “masculine” job and a “feminine” job often has very little to do with the actual work being performed. The labels change constantly, and they often determine not only how a job is perceived, but how much the person doing it is paid and respected.

Think about jobs like social media or marketing. Not long ago, both were treated as stereotypically feminine occupations and were consequently undervalued. Today, the same kinds of work appears under titles like “Digital Media Engineer” or “Go-to-Market Specialist,” suddenly sounding much more technical, strategic, important, and underlying all of that, masculine. The work may not have changed nearly as much as the language surrounding it.

The Apollo seamstresses remind us that the gap in opportunity between men and women is not only about who gets which jobs. It is also about who gets credit for doing them, what we choose to call their work, and whether those names make us take them seriously.

The computer certainly did not care. To the AGC, there was no such thing as a “man’s job” or a “woman’s job.” There were only 1s and 0s, and the little old ladies made sure they were wired in exactly the right place.

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Works Cited

Amusing Planet. “That Time When Computer Memory Was Handwoven by Women,” by Kaushik Patowary. February 4, 2020. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/02/that-time-when-computer-memory-was.html.

Hack the Moon. “Core Rope Memory.” Draper. Accessed August 20, 2026. https://wehackthemoon.com/core-rope-memory.html.

“March to the Moon: Apollo Program History.” Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration and NASA Johnson Space Center. Accessed August 20, 2026. https://tothemoon.im-ldi.com/about/apollo_history.

Neal, Valerie, and Diana Turnbow. “Jean Wilson and the Women Who Made the Apollo Spacesuits.” Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. March 5, 2024. https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/jean-wilson-and-women-who-made-apollo-spacesuits.

Nelson, Sue. “The Women Who Sewed the Suits for the Space Race.” BBC Future, December 19, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191219-the-women-who-sewed-the-suits-for-the-space-race.

Souppouris, Aaron. “NASA’s Core Rope Memory and the Apollo Guidance Computer.” The Verge. April 26, 2012. https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/26/2976471/nasa-core-rope-memory-apollo-guidance-computer.

This year’s final four take things even further. The matchups, players, outcomes, and even the way the games played out, eerily line up with the Napoleonic wars and the early nineteenth-century revolutions in South America.

If my theory holds, we should be able to predict the winner of the Argentina–Spain final before kickoff.

Background

In 1516, the Spanish explorer Juan Díaz de Solís reached the Río de la Plata, the wide river and estuary between present-day Uruguay and Argentina, and became the first European to sail it. According to accounts, only a short way into his journey, Solís was hacked to pieces by the Charrúa tribe. The rest of his crew quickly turned around and headed back to Spain, but the land that would become Argentina had been officially discovered by Europeans.

A permanent settlement in Buenos Aires wouldn’t come until later, in 1580, when the city, then succinctly named Ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre, was finally established. Even then, it remained a remote outpost, governed as part of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

It remained a neglected colony for much of its history, lacking the wealth of Spain’s other territories and plagued by high levels of piracy. Socially, it was deeply unequal, with a Spanish elite ruling over a largely subjugated Indigenous and mixed-race population.

In 1776, the Spanish crown feared the power of the ever-growing Brazil and expanded the Río de la Plata into its own viceroyalty with Buenos Aires as its capital. The city quickly became bustling and modern, and the region a much wealthier, more populous, and more powerful colony going into the nineteenth century.

France vs. Spain (Semi-Final)

The Napoleonic Wars were the catalyst for Argentine independence. By 1806, Napoleon had control over much of mainland Europe, including Spain. In 1808, he turned his attention to Madrid and attacked the monarchy, launching one of his most brutal campaigns, rounding up thousands of civilians and executing them in firing squads.

Amid the chaos, popular unrest led the Spanish king, Charles IV, to abdicate in favor of his son, Ferdinand VII. Within a year, Ferdinand was forced by France to give up the throne to Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte.

Joseph’s rule was short-lived and marked by constant uprisings. Combined with Napoleon’s struggles in other parts of Europe, Spain became an afterthought, and by 1813 Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne.

While not a perfect parallel to the Spanish 2-0 semifinal win, it is pretty close. Spain, powerful yet still the underdog, eventually came out on top against the French Empire and its young, world-famous leader, who had recently won a string of major battles. A key difference, of course, is that Napoleon was about four inches shorter than Mbappé.

England vs. Argentina (Semi-Final)

The British had long coveted South American colonies. Combined with the fact that they had just lost their own American colonies, Britain at the start of the nineteenth century was practically foaming at the mouth for new opportunities on the continent.

In 1806, when Spain and its colonies were functionally under the control of Napoleon. Buenos Aires became a valuable target for the British Navy, which now had both the means and the excuse to attempt to seize the new viceroyalty which included Argentina.

The viceroyalty had most of its soldiers in the north suppressing an Indigenous revolt, so the British encountered little resistance and quickly took Buenos Aires. When they later moved on to Montevideo with 15,000 men, a brutal battle followed, and the Argentine colonists were forced to surrender. You could say England had gone up 1–0.

But when the British returned to regroup in Buenos Aires, assuming it remained secure, they found a city in revolt. They faced an organized civilian militia that included Creoles, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans. From rooftops, boiling water was poured onto the invading troops, and in the streets they were attacked from all sides. The already weakened British army couldn’t withstand the resistance and was forced to surrender and withdraw.

Argentina pulled off a last-minute comeback to win it all.

France v. England (Third-Place Match)

Fleeing home, Britain still faced the ever-growing threat of Napoleon and the French Empire. That threat began to unravel when Napoleon’s army suffered a catastrophic defeat during its invasion of Russia, forcing his retreat and eventual exile to the island of Elba. What had once looked like an unstoppable conquest of Europe quickly collapsed, and Britain and its allies moved to fill the void.

But much like Saturday's second-half rally, the French were not done. Napoleon escaped his exile, rallied his forces, and made one last famous charge against the Duke of Wellington's British army at the Battle of Waterloo. The effort fell short, and the French Empire, like its national team, walked away with nothing.

Argentina v. Spain (The Final)

Back in South America, Argentinians took great pride in the fact that they had managed to defeat the British Empire on their own terms. Spain continued to collect taxes, but had failed to uphold its end of the bargain when it came to defense. The message was clear: if the colony could defend itself, why rely on Spain at all?

In May 1810, word reached Buenos Aires that they were to be ruled by Joseph Bonaparte. The locals despised him, mockingly calling him “Pepe Botella” (“Bottle Joe”) because of his reputation for heavy drinking. They rejected his authority and instead formed their own government. The local viceroy was overthrown, and a local governing council, a junta, was established in his place.

From 1810 to 1818, Argentina fought a long and complex war for independence. They faced the French-controlled Spanish Empire, loyalist forces from the very viceroyal government they had just overthrown, and the restored Spanish Empire after Ferdinand VII returned to power.

The Argentine Revolution was led by the seasoned military veteran José de San Martín, an almost perfect historical counterpart to Messi. After spending much of his career in Spain, San Martín relocated to the Americas and fully committed himself to the cause. He was 39 when Argentina declared independence. Messi is 39 today.

The long years of war included three different Argentine governments, battles across the continent between royalists and patriots, and the creation of new nations including Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile. By 1825, with the independence of Bolivia, the Spanish American Wars for Independence were over. Argentina was free, and Spain no longer controlled any colonies in South America.

Full Time

In 1813, Napoleon lost to the Spanish Crown; in 2026, Mbappé lost to the Spanish national team. In 1806, Britain lost to colonial Argentina in a decisive final battle; in 2026, England lost to Argentina in the 92nd minute. In 1815, the French Empire returned from near-certain defeat only to fall to Britain at Waterloo; in 2026, England weathered France’s rally to win the third-place match, 6–4.

So, according to the prevailing winds of history, the outcome has already been written: Argentina will win the 2026 World Cup.

Also, they totally have the refs on their side.

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Works Cited

Beyer, Greg. “Modern Argentina: A Struggle for Independence from Spanish Colonization.” TheCollector, December 1, 2022. https://www.thecollector.com/spanish-colonization-modern-argentina-independence/.

Chimu Adventures. “History of Argentina -- Ancient to Modern.” Chimu Adventures Blog, December 29, 2025. https://www.chimuadventures.com/en-us/blog/history-argentina-ancient-modern.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Juan Díaz de Solís.” Britannica. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Diaz-de-Solis.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Battle of Waterloo.” Britannica. Last modified June 11, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Waterloo.

Minster, Christopher. “Argentina: The May Revolution.” ThoughtCo, May 12, 2017. https://www.thoughtco.com/argentina-the-may-revolution-2136357.

National Army Museum. “Peninsular War.” National Army Museum. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/peninsular-war.

Rodriguez O., Jaime E. The Independence of Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon, but I would love to hear what you want to read about next, whether it’s a general topic or a specific story. Feel free to reach out on Substack or Instagram!

If you haven’t been along for the whole ride, no worries. I’ve made a chronological timeline so you can catch up on what you missed or just read them all over again. I won’t mind, really.

Timeline

Click Image to Read, Use Substack App for Full Timeline

| 324 C.E.

| 536 C.E.

| 897 C.E.

| 1562

| 1607

| 1637

| 1742

| 1789

| 1806

| 1835

| 1850

| 1861

| 1865

| 1875

| 1895

| 1897

| 1898

| 1899

| 1904

| 1911

| 1916

| 1919

| 1931

| 1938

| 1940

| 1944

| 1951

| 1953

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In the nineteenth century, this wasn’t possible. So in the summer of 1835, when millions read that there was life on the moon, who was there to tell them otherwise? What became known as the Great Moon Hoax is an incredible early example of media manipulation, and it raises a broader question about how excitement around new technology can be exploited.

Media Landscape

The 1830s were a moment of rapid technological change. In a single decade, the steam engine, steamboats, canals, revolvers, sewing machines, mechanical reapers, and railroads all rose to prominence. News of these advancements came nonstop, and people read about them in the rapidly expanding newspaper industry.

The most popular papers at the time, like the New York Evening Post (founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801) and The Times of London (founded in 1785), were written for an educated, wealthier audience. They assumed readers had background knowledge, and copies cost a steep six cents.

The “penny press” emerged to capture the rest of the market. As the name suggests, these papers cost just one cent and were aimed at the common man, particularly Irish, Scottish, and German immigrants. Unlike their more elite counterparts, penny papers made most of their money from advertisements.

The industry was growing, but it was still small. Richard Adams Locke, a descendant of philosopher John Locke and a Cambridge graduate, struggled to find his place in it. In the summer of 1835, he was finally given an opportunity: an internship at The Sun. The New York City paper was only a year old, founded by the 25-year-old Benjamin Day.

Locke was eager to make his mark, and Day to grow the paper. That August, the pair published a six-part story that would capture the world’s imagination: the Great Moon Hoax.

The Hoax

Bear with me here, because the story sounds absolutely ridiculous to us. But you have to remember that people at the time had fewer reasons to doubt it. Every day, they were reading about major scientific discoveries, things that had seemed impossible only years before. We bring many preconceived notions about what the moon is like. They didn’t.

Headline: “GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES”

DAY 1:

On the first day, a fictitious reporter named Dr. Andrew Grant introduced the newly built telescope of John Herschel, a real astronomer. Grant claimed to have traveled with Herschel and recorded his discoveries. To add to his credibility, “Andrew Grant” also falsely asserted that these findings were being submitted to the Royal Society in London and had appeared in the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

The new telescope was described as far larger than any before it, incorporating a novel lens that could project magnified images of distant objects onto a canvas sheet. To enhance its legitimacy, the report linked it to familiar modern innovations like the train, claiming the telescope was constructed from “parallel circles of railroad iron” and that its movements were powered by a “locomotive apparatus.”

DAY 2 and 3:

Dr. Grant reported that he and Herschel had pointed their telescope at the moon and discovered a world of towering mountains and lush, Earth-like fields. “This precipitous shelf was profusely covered with a dark red flower, precisely similar to the Papaver Rhœas, or rose-poppy of our sublunary cornfields; and this was the first organic production of nature, in a foreign world, ever revealed to the eyes of men.”

From there, the claims only grew more extraordinary. Grant described four-legged, bison-like creatures roaming the landscape, blue goats with a single horn, and flocks of birds with “unreasonably long legs.”

Page after page catalogued these imagined species in meticulous detail, outlining the differences between males and females, their daily habits, and even their diets. Readers were also introduced to hundreds of plant and tree species, as well as a community of bipedal beavers that lived in huts and made fire. Locke wrote as if this impossible lunar ecosystem were simply another corner of the natural world waiting to be classified.

DAY 4:

Finally came the most famous revelation: humanoid bat-men, named Vespertilio-homo, living in organized civilizations across the moon. The report described them as standing about four feet tall, with yellow-toned faces, prominent mouths, and bodies covered in copper-colored hair. Their expansive wings allowed them to glide across the lunar landscape.

According to “Grant,” these beings possessed a complex society, including temples devoted to religious practice. He claimed he would wait to consult anthropologists and religious specialists before offering a deeper analysis of their culture.

DAY 5 and 6:

These articles were dedicated to describing the unfortunate accident that occurred when the setup reflected sunlight backwards and burned down the telescope. This conveniently made any further viewings impossible.

Reactions and Legacy

The story was wildly popular. Almost overnight, The Sun became the premier penny publication, its circulation surging as readers clamored for each new installment. Other newspapers around the world quickly purchased the rights to the story and republished it, spreading the lunar discoveries far beyond New York.

The excitement extended beyond casual readers. Curious crowds flooded academic libraries, searching for the scientific sources and authorities the articles claimed to cite. Many hoped to verify the astonishing reports for themselves, only to find that the evidence was as elusive as the creatures said to inhabit the moon.

Reactions to the story were as varied as they were intense. The real Sir John Herschel, who had nothing to do with the articles, was inundated with inquiries. In a letter to his aunt, he complained in exasperation, “I have been pestered from all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the moon — in English, French, Italian, and German!”

Not everyone was bothered. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley reportedly found the whole affair amusing and even encouraged people to buy the paper, recognizing its power to captivate readers regardless of its truth.

Others were far less entertained. Edgar Allan Poe was outraged and argued that the lunar narrative closely resembled elements of his own earlier work, and resented the widespread acclaim the hoax received while his writing went comparatively unnoticed.

A month later, The Sun revealed the story to be a fabrication. Locke defended himself by claiming he had always intended the series as satire, attempting to cast his work in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Yet unlike Swift’s writing, the Moon Hoax was not obviously fictional. Its authority came from its precision and accumulation of detail.

As Margaret Herschel, wife of John Herschel, later observed, “The whole description is so well clenched with minute details of workmanship and names of individuals boldly referred to, that the New Yorkists were not to be blamed for actually believing it as they did.”

The revelation that the stories were fake did nothing to hamper The Sun’s success. Its circulation surged and maintained these numbers after the hoax blew over, securing the paper’s place as the premier penny newspaper of its time. The publication continued until 1950, thriving on sensational stories of murders, suicides, and divorces designed to capture attention.

Further Thoughts

The Moon Hoax was not an anomaly, but an early example of a media strategy that would endure: blending spectacle with the appearance of truth to captivate a mass audience. We see that every day, from mainstream news sites to the darkest fringes of Instagram Reels. While it’s interesting to note how misinformation has always had a place in our media, it’s not the most pressing topic the Great Moon Hoax brings up.

I want to focus on the hoax as an abuse of scientific advancement. When the hoax came out, everyone knew that science and technology were in a moment of rapid development. You can view The Sun as exploiting this fact for profit, not because their readers were “dumb,” but because they were at a vulnerable moment where they believed new discoveries were always just around the corner. When people wake up every day expecting massive progress, it becomes easier to tell them that you are the one responsible for it.

There are some striking parallels to today. The Sun was essentially a startup: only a year old and run by a 25-year-old. Like most AI companies today, the paper was a small player in a rapidly growing industry that needed to make a splash. We see emerging companies constantly use new AI buzzwords. The Sun used buzzwords of the cutting-edge technology of their time, the railroad, to make their discovery seem more legitimate. To bring in investors, startups today make loose promises of industry-changing advancements. The 1835 newspaper didn’t have prestige, so they relied on the spectacle of bat-winged moon men to cut through the noise and win the penny press race.

Every AI startup is not the future. They are not going to find life on the moon. But in the meantime, their 25-year-old founder really needs you to believe that they will.

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Works Cited

Evans, D. S., et al. Herschel at the Cape. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.

Laddusaw, Sierra. 2025. “Life on the Moon in Two Acts.” THE HEAVENS 61 (Spring/Summer). https://clements.umich.edu/publication/the-heavens/life-on-the-moon/.

Locke, Richard Adams. The Moon Hoax; or, A Discovery That the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings. New York: William Gowans, 1859. Project Gutenberg, 2020. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/62779/62779-h/62779-h.htm.

Vida, István Kornél. “The ‘Great Moon Hoax’ of 1835.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 18, no. 1/2 (2012): 431–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43488485.

Beyond putting heists back in vogue, the episode exposed something arguably more interesting: Even the most famous museum in the world has its vulnerabilities.

There is one room in the museum, however, that is constantly packed and would pose a much greater challenge for any would-be thief—the home of perhaps the most famous painting on Earth: the Mona Lisa.

But why is the Mona Lisa so famous? With her sly smile and tracking glare, she is certainly remarkable, but hardly the only masterpiece of the Renaissance. For more than 400 years, that is more or less how she was treated: a respected work by Leonardo da Vinci. She earned the acclaim she enjoys today in 1911, when she was stolen right off the wall of the Louvre.

In Its Time

The real Mona Lisa was a 24-year-old woman, Lisa del Giocondo, whose wealthy husband commissioned Leonardo da Vinci in 1503 to paint her portrait to celebrate the birth of their fifth child and second son. Realistically, she probably deserved more than just a 77x53-centimeter painting.

Da Vinci was known for turning down portrait commissions from wealthy patrons, so why he accepted this one remains a bit of a mystery. To be fair, he was not the most responsible or timely when it came to fulfilling his contracts. He worked on the painting from 1503 until 1517, moving between Florence, Milan, Rome, and Paris. In the end, he never actually delivered it to the Giocondo family.

The painting was impressive for its time. It illustrated da Vinci’s unique understanding of anatomy and the way light interacts with human skin. It was also unusual in that the subject wears relatively plain, non-noble clothing and looks directly at the viewer rather than turning to the side. The work was admired by devoted followers of da Vinci and by art critics. His apprentice, and future fellow Ninja Turtle, Raphael, even made a sketch of it in admiration.

To the casual viewer, however, it was just another pretty good painting.

400 Years of Obscurity

After da Vinci’s death in 1519, his heir sold the Mona Lisa to King Francis I of France for 4,000 gold coins (roughly $2 million today). The painting then spent nearly 300 years in the private collection of the French kings, including two Francises, three Henries, and five Louises.

During the French Revolution, right after Louis XVI lost his head to the guillotine, the entire royal collection of art was transferred to a newly founded museum for the public: the Louvre. The Mona Lisa certainly gained attention and was even among the works hung in Napoleon’s bedroom during his rule, but with so many great pieces of art finally available to the public, it was just one of many.

The Heist

On August 20, 1911, a Louvre employee would change the fate of the painting forever. The night before, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glasswork contractor for the museum, hid in a closet and waited for the early morning. Right before the exhibits opened, Peruggiua exited the closet, walked up to the Mona Lisa, and simply took it off the wall. He wrapped it in a sheet and walked slowly but confidently towards the exit.

On his first try, the door would not open, so the thief put the 400-year-old masterpiece on the floor and tried to unjam the handle. A janitor saw him struggling and kindly helped, accidentally assisting Peruggia in one of the boldest art heists of all time.

No one noticed for the entire day.

On the second day, a still-life painter planning to capture the gallery for a project asked a museum worker why there was a gap on the wall. The worker assured him that many works were being taken to the roof for photography and that the Mona Lisa was likely among them.

It took another day for the museum to realize that the painting was truly missing. In a public announcement, it made its bewilderment clear: “Thus far, we haven’t a clue as to who might have committed this crime.”

The media ran wild. Newspapers around the world published story after story about the missing Mona Lisa. When the Louvre reopened after a fruitless weeklong investigation, thousands of visitors came each day to stare at the empty wall where the painting had hung.

Wanted posters featuring Lisa del Giocondo’s face covered the streets of Paris. Overnight, she became a celebrity. Berlin even held a lookalike contest.

The investigation went on for months. The up-and-coming artist Pablo Picasso was at one point implicated and brought in for questioning, but he cleared his name. Conspiracies were rampant. An especially popular one claimed that American financier J. P. Morgan had orchestrated the heist for his personal collection. False sightings were reported all around the world, with supposed appearances almost every month in Japan, China, and Russia. After almost a year, it was decided that da Vinci’s masterpiece was most likely lost for all time.

In reality, it was only a few miles away from where it had been taken, hidden in a small one-bedroom apartment. Peruggia seemed to enjoy his plunder, perhaps too much. In a later interview, he claimed he would come home every day from work just to look at her. “I fell victim to her smile and feasted my eyes on my treasure every evening,” he said. “I fell in love with her.”

After 28 months, the thief attempted to sell the Mona Lisa to an Italian museum. The curators pretended to go through with the sale and then immediately turned Peruggia in to the authorities. He went on trial in Italy and made a patriotic defense, claiming that he only wanted to return the painting to his home country, where he believed it rightfully belonged. The argument resonated with many Italians. Peruggia became something of a folk hero and served only seven months in prison.

Post-Heist

The painting’s popularity skyrocketed. Around 120,000 people went to see it in the first two days after it was returned to the Louvre. A popular piece titled Mona Lisa by German composer Max von Schillings was, not surprisingly, written in 1913. And her fame did not just grow with the general public; Many of the most famous artistic analyses of the painting took place after the world-famous heist.

Since then, the Mona Lisa’s legend has only been strengthened by contemporary artists. In 1954, Salvador Dalí painted a self-portrait as the Mona Lisa, and in 1963, Andy Warhol included her in his famous screen print Thirty Are Better Than One.

Today, about 30,000 people see the painting every day. Its fame has made it a target. In 2022, climate protesters threw cake at the now encased work, and in 2024, they threw soup. By the end of the decade, we can probably expect a full four-course meal to have been thrown at it.

According to the Louvre’s research, around 80 percent of visitors are there to see the Mona Lisa. The crowds are so large each day that the experience can be miserable, and the painting has even been voted the “world’s most disappointing attraction.”

Further Thoughts

The immense fame that the Mona Lisa has today is largely because of its story. While the artwork and its creator are undeniably impressive, what truly pushed it to another level was the heist and the media frenzy that followed. For decades, people wanted to see the painting simply because they had heard a wild story about it in the news.

The value of art has always been a tricky subject, especially when paintings consisting of a single blue line can sell for millions at auction. This story makes it clear that people value authenticity, but they also value what others say and believe. This is not to say that everyone who admired the Mona Lisa is a sheep, but it is interesting that many people today do not even know the story of the theft, yet they still flock to the Louvre to see it. In a way, the Mona Lisa’s fame has grown so large that it has eclipsed its own origins.

The heist story also shows that exceptional fame requires talent, luck, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to capture the attention of the masses. That last factor is harder to achieve today with the sheer amount of content people consume every day. The 2025 Louvre heist, for example, only dominated the media cycle for its customary week before being replaced by something else flashy. Therefore, due to fameflation, those seeking to break through today face a paradox: it is easier than ever to be seen, but harder than ever to be remembered. The lengths people go today for attention and shock value make more sense in light of this historical trend: even having a painting stolen right off the wall just isn't going to cut it.

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Works Cited

Anderson, Sonja. 2024. “Climate Activists Throw Soup at the ‘Mona Lisa.’” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/climate-activists-throw-soup-mona-lisa-leonardo-da-vinci-180983677/.

Andrews, Evan. 2016. “The Heist that Made the Mona Lisa Famous.” https://www.history.com/articles/the-heist-that-made-the-mona-lisa-famous.

Farago, Jason. 2019. “It’s Time to Take Down the Mona Lisa.” The New York Times, November 6, 2019.

“Giorgio Vasari.” 2012. The Mona Lisa Foundation. https://monalisa.org/2012/09/09/giorgio-vasari/.

“Mona Lisa: The History of the World's Most Famous Painting | Leonardo da Vinci | Ken Burns.” n.d. PBS. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/leonardo-da-vinci/the-mona-lisa.

“Monday Muse | Theft of the Mona Lisa – Garrett Museum of Art.” n.d. Garrett Museum of Art. Accessed May 28, 2026. https://garrettmuseumofart.org/monday-muse-theft-of-the-mona-lisa/.

In the early hours of July 30, 1916, 2 million pounds of explosives detonated on the small Black Tom Island, just beside what is now Liberty Island. The blast shook New York City, shattered thousands of windows, killed at least four people, and, yes, permanently damaged the structural integrity of the Statue of Liberty.

This was no accident. The explosion was an act of sabotage, carried out by a network of German agents. The response didn’t end with repairs or even prosecution, but it changed how the country saw itself. Black Tom exposed how vulnerable the U.S. was to foreign operations on its own soil and how limited its investigative power was. The idea that America could remain insulated from global conflict didn’t survive the blast.

New York City, 1916

Let’s set the stage: It’s 1916. Europe is two years into World War I, the United States is still officially neutral, thousands of immigrants are pouring into New York every day, ragtime is giving way to jazz, and children are still working in factories.

World War I was, in many ways, one of the best things that could have happened to the United States. While remaining officially “neutral,” the country became a major supplier of weapons and goods to the Allied powers. Almost overnight, industries like manufacturing, steel, and chemicals rapidly expanded. The U.S. shifted from a debtor nation to a creditor, an economic reality that would define much of the twentieth century.

It was also an election year. Both incumbent Woodrow Wilson and Republican challenger Charles Hughes campaigned on keeping the United States out of the war. Blinded by economic gains, Americans convinced themselves they were insulated from the chaos overseas, even as they pumped massive amounts of weapons into it. That illusion bred complacency. There was no CIA, no modern FBI, few safety protocols, and virtually no legal framework for dealing with foreign espionage. Germany, furious at the support this “neutral” nation was giving its enemies, saw an opportunity and planned to exploit it.

The Plot

As early as 1915, German agents attempted to sabotage U.S. shipments to Europe. In the early months of the war, a German spy would board ships carrying a case of small dynamite sticks disguised as cigars. The scheme succeeded multiple times, but the limited size of the explosives meant the damage was relatively minor. While some departments successfully identified individual perpetrators, there was no centralized intelligence system. As a result, local police forces investigated the incidents in isolation and rarely connected them to a coordinated campaign of German espionage.

Moving on from cigar bombs, the German spy network shifted its attention from ships to Black Tom Island. The island stored more than 2 million pounds of munitions destined for England and Russia and had virtually no protection, making it an obvious target.

The network recruited a 23-year-old Austrian immigrant named Michael Kristoff, who worked at the docks in Bayonne, New Jersey, and thus would not raise suspicion if seen near Black Tom. Kristoff was young, impressionable, and eager to see an end to the war that was killing many of his friends back home.

In the early hours of July 30, Kristoff met with two older saboteurs, Lothar Witzke and Kurt Jahnke, on a small raft loaded with roughly 100,000 pounds of dynamite. They set a fire and withdrew. When the Jersey City Fire Department arrived, they quickly recognized the danger and attempted to pull back as the flames spread. About an hour after the fire began, the entire island detonated.

The Explosion

Windows shattered across Lower Manhattan. Entire neighborhoods in New Jersey were damaged or destroyed. People as far away as Philadelphia and Boston were awakened by the blast, which registered a 5.5 on the Richter scale. Shrapnel tore through the harbor and struck the Statue of Liberty itself, leaving visible damage on its structure.

“The shock was so great that I was thrown off my chair into the hall, and the broken glass fell in showers upon me as I lay on the floor,” Owen Fitzpatrick, a telephone operator working on Ellis Island that night, told The New York Times the next day.

The explosion was roughly 30 times more powerful than the collapse of the World Trade Center nearly 80 years later, and it remained the most costly act of terrorism on U.S. soil until 9/11.

Initially, most assumed the explosion had been caused by neglect and pointed fingers at the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company, which operated the island. The New York Times even reported the arrest of two Lehigh employees with the following headline, alleging the workers improperly stored a barge:

In the article, the only suspects mentioned are the two arrested workers. It goes on to state with confidence that the blast “cannot be charged to the account of alien plotters,” while also conceding that “the destruction of so large a quantity of allied war material must prove cheering news to Berlin and Vienna.” That contradiction captures the moment well. The article dismisses suspicion of sabotage even while acknowledging the geopolitical implications. This kind of thinking reflects a broader American misunderstanding of its position in a global conflict it still believed it could stand apart from.

The Response

The investigative response dragged on. At the time, the only federal investigative body was the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI. Agents were sent to Black Tom, but the entire agency numbered only about 260 men, so their impact remained limited. In an effort to speed things up, President Woodrow Wilson deployed the Secret Service, which at that point focused almost entirely on protecting the President and had little experience with large-scale investigations.

The most effective leads came from the New York squad that had uncovered the earlier cigar bomb plots, but even they needed three full years to identify the conspirators.

A lot happened in those three years. British intelligence intercepted a telegram from Germany to Mexico proposing an alliance against the United States, multiple American ships were sunk by U-boats, and officials in Washington began to realize that the debts they were owed might never be repaid if Europe fell.

Beginning with the explosion, the naive understanding Americans had about their role in the world began to unravel. In 1917, the United States entered the war and passed the Espionage Act, which finally criminalized the kinds of covert networks that had made Black Tom possible. In the decades that followed, the federal government expanded its intelligence capabilities, leading to the formal creation of the FBI in 1935 and the CIA in 1947.

Delayed Justice

The official death toll from the explosion stands at just four: a dock worker, two firemen, and a young child. That figure almost certainly understates the true cost. Historian Michael Millman noted that “there had been hundreds of people living on barges just northwest of Black Tom, immigrants, vagrants, and the poor, and that dozens of them surely should be counted among the dead.” Many immigrants being processed at Ellis Island that night also experienced the blast, adding to the likely uncounted victims. These people were never named or formally honored.

The conspirators met very different fates. Michael Kristoff died in 1928 of tuberculosis after being arrested and released. Lothar Witzke was sentenced to death but ultimately pardoned, and both he and Kurt Jahnke went on to have political careers in Germany.

The legal aftermath stretched on for decades. A commission did not fully conclude that Germany was to blame until October 1939, unfortunately, just one month after Hitler invaded Poland. It then took until 1953 for the German government to agree to pay 50 million dollars in damages to the victims of the Black Tom explosion, with final payments continuing until 1979.

Further Thoughts

The explosion changed more than just access to the Statue of Liberty’s torch. It marked a rupture in the belief that the United States could remain insulated from global conflict. In hindsight, it sits at the beginning of a century-long transformation in how America sees its security, its power, and its place in the world.

Before World War I, the United States stood out for its democracy and rapidly expanding territory and economy, but it remained just one power among many in a crowded global field. It had limited capacity to project influence or monitor threats abroad.

One of the biggest shifts that followed the Black Tom and World War I was the creation and expansion of international intelligence agencies and, after World War II, a permanent global military presence through overseas bases. Between 1916 and roughly 1950, the United States fundamentally redefined its relationship to the world, moving from relative insulation to deep entanglement in global security, surveillance, and power projection.

Those changes also reshaped domestic politics. Expansions of intelligence authority and executive power were at the heart of many modern controversies. From Cold War surveillance programs to the post-9/11 security state, from Watergate to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” under Bush. Even this year, Donald Trump has directly cited the Espionage Act of 1917, written after the Black Tom Explosion, to justify his attacks on journalists.

Historians discuss how the twentieth century was the American century, where the US relished in its economic and cultural dominance over the world. But the new systems necessary to grant that power also made the country more violent, controlling, and authoritarian. Who knows if the next century will be another American century, but I worry that relying on the proven methods to achieve it will come at the cost of many of the ideals that the nation was founded on.

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Works Cited

“Black Tom 1916 Bombing.” n.d. FBI.gov. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/black-tom-1916-bombing.

Millman, Chad. 2006. The Detonators: The Secret Ploy to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice. Little, Brown and Company, New York.

O'Neill, Brian, David Schulz, Tess Bridgeman, Brian Finucane, Joe Khawam, Noor Hamadeh, Jason Abbott, Jeremy Chin, Margaret Lin, and Ryan Burke. 2025. “What Weaponizing the Espionage Act Means for Whistleblowers and Reporters.” Just Security. https://www.justsecurity.org/122491/weaponizing-espionage-act-what-it-means/.

The New York Times (New York), February 27, 1953.

The New York Times (New York), July 31, 1916.

Weesjes, Elke, and Phil Nerges. 2016. “100 Years of Terror.” Natural Hazards Center. https://hazards.colorado.edu/article/100-years-of-terror-the-black-tom-explosion-and-the-birth-of-u-s-intelligence-services-1.

Wills, Matthew. 2018. “The Unlikely Spy Alliance Behind the 1916 Black Tom Explosion.” JSTOR. https://daily.jstor.org/the-unlikely-spy-alliance-behind-the-1916-black-tom-explosion/.

The most vindictive of these moments came in 897, during what came to be known as the Cadaver Synod, when Pope Stephen VI had the body of his predecessor exhumed, dressed in papal robes, seated on his old throne, and put on trial.

Medieval Europe

Near the turn of the millennium (Y1K, you could call it), Europe’s two dominant powers were the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. The latter was less a unified state than a loose web of feudal relationships, stretching across what is now France and Germany, made up of dozens of small kingdoms, duchies, and principalities, each ruled by its own local authority. Small kingdoms like Luxembourg can be seen as echoes of that medieval political landscape.

The name “Holy Roman Empire” was a contradiction. It did not have its own religion and strictly followed the papacy, had little connection to the ancient Roman Empire, and its constituent kingdoms operated with a high degree of independence. So it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

And yet, there was an emperor. Beginning in 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III, a tradition emerged: the pope held the authority to elevate one of these regional rulers to the status of emperor. In practice, the choice was shaped by the shifting political alliances of the kingdoms themselves, but without papal approval, the title carried little legitimacy.

This arrangement fused secular ambition with divine sanction, creating a volatile system where political power and religious authority were inseparable. The papacy became a contested and often dangerous office. Between 872 and 965, nearly two dozen men occupied the role, and in the particularly chaotic stretch from 896 to 904, the position turned over almost yearly, frequently through force, exile, or assassination.

Pope Formosus

One such pope was Pope Formosus. As an increasingly popular bishop in the 860s, his influence began to draw the attention and suspicion of Pope John VIII.

Formosus ultimately managed to anger John VIII by committing the supposed heinous crime of “corrupting the minds of the Bulgarians” during a diplomatic mission. For this, he was excommunicated — a glimpse of how quickly political rivalry within the Church could be reframed as moral or religious offense.

After the death of Pope John VIII, Formosus returned to prominence through a mix of shifting politics and personal ambition, ultimately winning the conclave in 891. Once in power, his decisions quickly entangled him in the volatile politics of the Holy Roman Empire.

He initially crowned the king of Spoleto (an Italian Kingdom) as emperor, but soon reversed course, inviting Arnulf of Carinthia (a French Kingdom) to invade and claim the title instead. The gamble backfired. In 896, both the aging Formosus and his appointed emperor Arnulf died, leaving behind a double power vacuum.

What followed only deepened the chaos: Formosus’ immediate successor, Pope Boniface VI, lasted just two weeks before dying, after which Spoleto-aligned Pope Stephen VI took the throne.

Possibly to settle a personal score or to prove loyalty to Spoleto, Stephen decided that Formosus had to answer for his betrayal of the newly appointed emperor. He ordered the body, dead for nine months, to be exhumed, dressed in papal robes, and put on trial.

The Trial

The decaying corpse was afforded all the formalities of a living defendant. It was dressed in papal vestments and seated at the front of the courtroom on the papal throne. A lawyer was assigned to its defense, at times even leaning in to whisper into the corpse’s ear. When the body was expected to speak, a deacon answered in its place, supposedly channeling the voice of Pope Formosus.

Across from him, Pope Stephen VI hurled accusations at his dead predecessor, shouting questions at dusty bones and demanding answers that would never come.

According to a tenth-century historian, Pope Stephen VI’s central charge was that Pope Formosus had illegitimately claimed the papacy after his earlier excommunication, that he had “usurped the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition.” Stephen never addressed the more obvious motive behind the trial: his own alignment with the reigning emperor and the need to discredit a predecessor tied to a rival faction. The entire proceeding was less about justice and more about spectacle.

Apparently, even God wasn’t a fan. Multiple witnesses reported that an earthquake shook the room during the trial. One account describes how “the dead Pope fell from the altar to the door, an evil angel striking it.” Stephen, undeterred, simply had the body propped back up, and the trial continued.

The corpse was obviously found guilty, its defense as powerless as its body. As punishment, three fingers, the ones used for ordination, were cut off. Stephen wanted to make sure Formosus would never use his divine powers again — even though it was unlikely he would have tried, given his circumstances. The body was then stripped of its papal garments and cast into the Tiber River.

Post-Mortem

The whole ordeal was meant to politically benefit Pope Stephen VI, but the plan backfired dramatically. Cardinals and Christians across Europe were horrified by the spectacle, and Stephen quickly fell out of favor. Continuing the morbid cycle, he was imprisoned and strangled to death less than a year later. Stephen’s successor, Pope Romanus, lasted only ninety-two days. He was followed by Pope Theodore II, whose reign was even shorter: less than three weeks.

Further Thoughts

Historian William Monroe suggests that while the Cadaver Synod revolved on the surface around excommunications and imperial politics, it was ultimately about legacy. He argues that Pope Stephen VI “hoped to stain the former pope with the damnatio memoriae. But, in case even that failed, they disposed of the body itself, to leave no relics and no tomb around which a cult could be sustained.”

I’d have to agree. Stephen was operating in a moment when the position of pope was dangerously unstable. In that context, the grotesque trial of Pope Formosus makes sense as an attempt to destroy a predecessor’s memory before it could be weaponized against him.

That instinct hasn’t disappeared. Death has a way of clarifying, even elevating. Artists often become more revered after they die, their work stripped of the complications of the living person. Political figures and extremists can become more palatable, or more dangerous, once they exist only as ideas, no longer accountable to reality. When major figures die today, their supporters and opponents quickly fight to define what their memory will be. Those in power today, including the President of the United States, spend time seemingly obsessed with how this fight will play out after they’re gone.

But attempting to “try” the dead, whether literally, as in 897, or today on internet forums, is ultimately counterproductive. When both sides rush to control a narrative, the result is often a kind of alternate history rather than truth. If anything, the Cadaver Synod is a reminder of why historical accuracy matters. History is one of the few tools we have to preserve people as they were, rather than as it is convenient to remember them. While all history is, in some sense, narrative, it still requires the discipline of being grounded in real events, if we want to avoid endlessly digging up and putting the past on trial.

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Works Cited

Bilal M, Tubbs RS. Popes convict dead Pope Twice! The unbelievable Cadaver Synod. Clin Anat. 2016 Mar;29(2):140-3. doi: 10.1002/ca.22678. Epub 2016 Jan 4. PMID: 26678952.

Brook, Lindsay (2003). “Popes and Pornocrats: Rome in the Early Middle Ages” (PDF). Foundations. 1 (1): 5–21 – via Foundations: The Journal of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy.

Monroe, William S. The Trials of Pope Formosus. Columbia University, 2021.

Soth, Amelia. 2019. “The Cadaver Synod: Putting a Dead Pope on Trial.” JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/the-cadaver-synod-putting-a-dead-pope-on-trial/.

It’s a fitting moment to revisit one of history’s strangest seasons, when flowers became fortunes, and a single tulip bulb could command the price of a house. In 1630s Holland, as the ground thawed and tulips pushed up toward the light, this natural cycle collided with something far less predictable: human speculation. Tulip Mania, as the event came to be known, pushed financial systems to their limits and became one of the earliest examples of the now all-too-familiar economic bubble.

The Dutch Tulip Business

It’s somewhat surprising how many plants, fruits, and vegetables we associate with Europe were actually introduced relatively recently. Tomatoes and potatoes, now central to countless iconic European dishes, arrived from South America in the 1500s. Pepper and nutmeg, staples in Spanish and French cooking, were brought from South and Southeast Asia as late as the 1600s. But don’t worry, before then, Europeans had their own native fare: turnips, parsnips, cabbage, and leeks. Yum.

Tulips arrived in Europe in 1554 from the Ottoman Empire, where they grew on the mountain slopes of Central Asia. At first, Vienna and Amsterdam competed to dominate the emerging tulip market. But the alliterative Dutch botanist Carolus Clusius tipped the balance when he cultivated larger, more vividly colored blooms and cemented the flower’s fate as a Dutch staple.

The rise of the tulip coincided with the rise of Holland. After declaring independence from Spain in the late 16th century, the new republic attracted scientific and artistic talent from across the continent. For a roughly one-hundred-year period known as the Dutch Golden Age, this influx of trade, art, culture, and relative religious tolerance helped make the Dutch Republic the most powerful society in the world.

As their country grew more powerful, some in Holland saw their wealth increase immensely, and with it came a desire for status symbols. The new and beautiful tulip filled this role perfectly. The trend began when some of the wealthiest Amsterdammers lined their canal-side homes with tulips each spring. Local shops and eventually national growers capitalized on this demand by marketing new varieties produced through variations in growing techniques. The most valuable were “broken tulips,” prized for their striking, flame-like patterns when fully in bloom. Competition to sell them was fierce: one grower introduced a flower dubbed “the Admiral,” another responded with “the General,” followed by ever more extravagant names like “the Admiral of Admirals” and “the General of Generals.”

The Rise

As the tulips became ingrained in Dutch culture, they also became ingrained in the Dutch economy. Tulips bloomed for only a week or two each spring, and their bulbs could be dug up and moved only between June and September. So, the actual, physical trade in tulips was confined to a narrow window. But as the tulip market grew more profitable, and more speculative, traders wanted a way to keep buying and selling year-round.

Their solution was the futures contract. A grower would agree to deliver a specific tulip bulb at a set price once the next season arrived, and a buyer would sign on to purchase it in advance. Crucially, these contracts didn’t just sit still; they were resold again and again during the off-season, often at higher prices each time, as new buyers bet on further increases. When spring came, the final holder would complete the purchase. The catch was that for most of this process, the tulip didn’t even exist yet: people were trading the idea of a flower.

The vast majority of contract buyers and sellers were not gardeners or wealthy collectors hoping to display tulips on their estates. Instead, they were middlemen, speculators who often never saw a real tulip bloom. By the 1630s, the country was awash with these traders, known as “florists.” Foreign buyers, including the French and Spanish, joined the futures market, eager to share in what seemed like endless gains. Even the cheaper “unbroken” tulips saw their prices skyrocket. A single bulb could double in value from one contract holder to the next. At the peak of Tulip Mania in February 1637, a single “Admiral” bulb contract sold for more than 2,500 guilders, enough to purchase 20,000 pounds of cheese or 250 sheep.

A Scottish historian, Charles Mackay, wrote about the prevailing sentiment of the time:

“Everyone imagined that the passion for tulips would last forever, and that the wealthy from every part of the world would send to Holland, and pay whatever prices were asked for them. They were wrong.”

The Fall

No one knows exactly when the bubble burst. The most common story places it at a charity auction, where the “Semper Augustus,” which could usually command the same price as a canal-side home, was offered initially at a cheap opening bid. No one took it.

Perhaps buyers had begun to realize that sellers now outnumbered them, or that international demand was weaker than expected. Or maybe, at last, they confronted the simple reality that they were spending generational wealth on a single flower. Whatever the reason, no one bid on the bulb. The price was lowered again and again, and still, no one stepped forward.

News spread quickly, and in less than a week, tulip prices collapsed. Contract holders who had paid enormous sums suddenly found themselves with no buyers. They turned to the government for relief, but because many of these contracts were not legally binding, officials were initially reluctant to intervene.

As the crash began to spill into the broader economy, however, the government stepped in. The tulip trade was suspended, and contract holders were offered the option to cancel their agreements by paying a 10% fee to the growers. By spring, when the tulips finally bloomed, almost none of the outstanding contracts were honored.

Alternative Explanations

Some historians have offered evidence that complicates the traditional story of Tulip Mania. In Nature’s Mutiny, Philipp Blom suggests the mania may have been shaped in part by the instability of the Little Ice Age, which disrupted agriculture and heightened uncertainty across Europe. Others point to a relative lull in the Thirty Years’ War during the 1630s, which may have freed up capital and attention for speculative ventures like tulips. Still others argue that Tulip Mania has been overstated altogether, that it was a relatively contained phenomenon, limited to a small circle of wealthy men whose massive losses were real, but whose importance was exaggerated in historical accounts.

Further Thoughts

The Dutch Golden Age produced many of the financial institutions we still recognize today: stock exchanges, credit markets, and, as Tulip Mania makes clear, economic bubbles. The most obvious modern comparisons are cryptocurrencies and NFTs: assets built on the promise of future value, detached from anything tangible.

Additionally, it’s hard not to see echoes of Tulip Mania in today’s surge of AI investment. Money poured in from across the world on the promise of more beautiful tulips next spring, year after year, until it all fell apart. Today, trillions of dollars flow into half-formed AI products with no guaranteed outcomes. A single tulip bulb may seem like the sillier investment, but at least, if worse came to worst, it would still look good outside your house.

There’s also something to be said about the fact that the mania was largely confined to a small group of wealthy traders whose reckless speculation led to their own financial ruin. But because their fortunes were significant enough to ripple through the broader economy, the government stepped in to soften the blow. Their status also amplified their story to dominate how the event was remembered.

This pattern has repeated itself in modern history, from the role of major banks in the 2008 financial crisis to massive economic interventions during COVID, and it will likely happen again when the current AI bubble finally pops. Tulip Mania hints at one of capitalism’s original flaws: the system allows the wealthy and powerful to take outsized risks, often with the implicit backing of entire economies, while those with the least remain afterthoughts.

The “greater fool” theory states that an overvalued asset can keep rising in price as long as there’s someone dumber willing to pay more. But the theory implies an ending: a greatest fool left holding a million-dollar tulip.

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Works Cited

Boissoneault, Lorraine. 2018. “There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/.

Dash, Mike (2011). “Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused.” New York: Three Rivers Press. ISBN 978-0-307-56082-7.

Fogarty, Erin. 2024. “A Brief History of Tulips.” Massachusetts Horticultural Society. https://www.masshort.org/blog/tulips.

“Holland and Tulipmania.” n.d. Amsterdam Tulip Museum. Accessed March 20, 2026. https://amsterdamtulipmuseum.com/pages/tulip-history-tulipmania-netherlands.

Mackay, Charles (1841), “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,’ London: Richard Bentley.

Mark, Joshua. 2022. “Eighty Years' War.” World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Eighty_Years'_War/.

Philipp Blom, “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present,” New York: Liveright, 2019.

At the dawn of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, this was not the case. In the 85 years since the American Revolution, most military violence had taken place on the distant frontiers of the country. Without widespread visual media, many Americans had never seen warfare firsthand and had encountered it only through occasional ink-press illustrations in newspapers.

As the war approached, Northerners and Southerners alike cheered for a conflict they scarcely understood. At the first major battle, spectators arrived with picnic baskets, expecting to witness an exciting spectacle. Instead, they watched thousands die, and learned, suddenly and brutally, the reality of war.

Slow Beginnings

In the months before the Civil War, many in the South believed that Abraham Lincoln, who had taken no official stance on abolishing slavery during his campaign, was a radical and an existential threat to the Southern way of life. During the few months between Lincoln’s election and inauguration, Southern “fire-eaters” called for secession and, if necessary, war. As states illegally left the Union one at a time, Northern media began pressing President-elect Lincoln to declare that secession would be met with military force. The New York Tribune summed up the sentiment with repeated headlines demanding, “Forward to Richmond!” which was the capital of the Confederacy. Hundreds of senators and representatives joined the call for war. On both sides, the clamor grew for a war with a scale of violence that almost no one could truly comprehend.

The siege of Fort Sumter in the Spring of 1861 was the immediate incitement of the conflict and seemed to confirm the beliefs of those who thought the war would be short and chivalrous. During the month-long siege of the Union’s military outpost in Charleston, South Carolina, Northern and Southern leaders communicated cordially and regularly by boat. Before the South finally fired the first shots, it offered ample warning to its Northern adversaries.

During the entire 34-hour bombardment, no one died. The only fatality occurred after the fighting had ended, when Union soldier Private Daniel Hough accidentally set off gunpowder while packing up to evacuate. The siege was tense and difficult for the Union soldiers, who nearly ran out of food, but it was not bloody. It reinforced the image in the minds of both sides that the war could be fought honorably and did little to reveal the true realities of military violence.

After Sumter, most believed that the two sides, now officially at war, would let calmer heads prevail. Even President Lincoln believed the conflict would last only a few months and offered recruits 90-day enlistments.

Entering the summer of 1861, Americans on both sides were oblivious to the impeding horrors.

The Picnic

After months of inaction, Lincoln was running out of time to use his ninety-day recruits. Combined with pressure from Northern media and politicians to end the rebellion before the fall, the president ordered an invasion of Virginia to crush the opposing army in July. The Union army, 35,000 strong, planned to engage a Confederate force of similar size in the small town of Manassas, only 30 miles from Washington. The battle would be known in the South as “Manassas” and in the North as “Bull Run,” after a creek that coursed through the battlefield.

On July 21, Union recruits, many of them between 17 and 19 years old, marched from Washington. But they did not come alone: Hundreds of spectators followed behind them.

Women, children, businesspeople, politicians, and even soldiers’ families traveled just behind the army. They were there to support the Northern cause, of course, but they also wanted to make a day of it. People brought blankets and picnic baskets filled with sandwiches, cakes, pies, and champagne. They set up on a hill overlooking the battlefield, and many even brought opera glasses to make sure they had the perfect view. One attendee, Elnathan Tyler, who later wrote a book about Bull Run, recalled seeing a woman arguing with officers who would not allow her to sell liquor to soldiers and spectators.

Without any real idea what they were about to witness, these Americans had turned war into a spectacle.

Reality

The Battle of Manassas was brutal. At the start, the Union believed it had superior numbers and launched an initially successful all-out frontal assault. It seemed that the battle might be short and easy after all. Then, Confederate reinforcements arrived by railroad. As the Union army continued to push forward, they ran into the fresh force of General Thomas Jackson, who refused to retreat no matter the losses among his men. His stand earned him the infamous nickname “Stonewall Jackson.”

Jackson’s stand allowed time for the rest of the Confederate army to surround the tiring Union forces and launch a counterattack. An excerpt from the New York Tribune gave a detailed description of what one of the picnickers saw:

“I peered with my glasses [and saw] a poor little fellow struck by a cannonball which took him just below the arm-pits and literally cut him in two, his childish shriek of pain mingling with the whistling of the rifled shot as his life went with it down the wind.”

Seeing these horrors up close, the soldiers turned and fled. Picnicking spectators finally realized that the battle would not be a joyous spectacle and abandoned their provisions as they hastily fled back to the city. Among the spectators were senators and representatives, many of whom had only days earlier stood in Congress passionately arguing for this battle and this war.

The politicians who witnessed the rout reacted in very different ways. Senator Ben Wade of Ohio picked up a discarded rifle and threatened to shoot any soldier who continued to flee. Iowa Senator James Grimes, meanwhile, barely escaped capture and later vowed never to go near another battlefield again.

In the end, there were 2,700 Union casualties and about 2,000 Confederate casualties. The spectators fled home, shaken, and spread the realization across the country that the war was not what people had expected. It would not be quick, and it would not be chivalrous; it would be long and brutally violent. Tyler, seemingly referencing the Washington picnickers, later summed up how the battle changed the country’s understanding of the conflict it now faced:

“[Americans] seemed to think the whole thing was a grand military picnic, those dead and dying soldiers was a dispiriting reality, and [their] enthusiasm which had been at a boiling point was chilled by a doubt.”

Further Thoughts

A modern-day internet user will be exposed to hundreds of images and videos of violence and war, whether they seek it out or not. Replace the TikTok For You Page with a picnic blanket, and we are basically sitting right next to the Civil War picnickers, enjoying our sandwiches. But there is one major difference. Most of the attendees at Bull Run had never seen violence before, and when they were finally confronted with it, they ran away in horror. Today, we see images of violence to the point that it has become normalized.

It raises an unsettling question: If a real battle were fought on American soil today, would people show up to watch? And if they did, would they react the same way?

I imagine three possibilities:

1. People arrive expecting war to look like action movies and the short clips they scroll past online. When the reality of chaos, suffering, and death becomes clear, they flee just as the spectators at Bull Run did.

2. People arrive just the same, but this time they don’t run. After years of exposure to violence on screens, they remain, cheering and watching the battle unfold to its bloody conclusion.

3. People don’t attend, but still watch the war on Instagram Stories.

All three scenarios support that war voyeurism is not new, and is unlikely to disappear.

This history suggests that when war becomes distant, something we no longer remember directly and experience only through images, we begin to forget its real cost. That forgetfulness is dangerous. When wars are fought far away, we experience them only as spectators, safely separated from the suffering they cause. The shock the picnickers at Bull Run felt when they suddenly saw war just feet away will never reach us. As technology continues to make warfare more distant and less personal, the human cost becomes easier to ignore, and wars become easier to prolong.

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Works Cited

Burlingame, Michael. n.d. “Abraham Lincoln: Domestic Affairs.” Miller Center. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/domestic-affairs.

Dorsey, Erin Y. “A Resolution Strong and Deep: the First Battle of Bull Run and its Impact on Connecticut.” (2012).

Larson, Erik. 2024. The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. New York: Crown.

Nix, Elizabeth. 2017. “The Worst Picnic in History Was Interrupted by a War | HISTORY.” History.com. https://www.history.com/articles/worst-picnic-in-history-was-interrupted-by-war.

“Senators Witness the First Battle of Bull Run.” n.d. Senate.gov. Accessed March 10, 2026. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Witness_Bull_Run.htm.

New York Tribune. August 3, 1861. vol XX 1038.

Tyler, Elnathan. 1872. "Wooden Nutmegs" At Bull Run: A Humorous Account of Some of the Exploits And Experiences of the Three Months Connecticut Brigade, And the Part They Bore In the National Stampede. Hartford, Connecticut: G. L. Coburn.

1. 1931 China Floods: 4,000,000 dead

2. 1887 China Floods: 2,000,000 dead

3. 1970 Pakistan Cyclones: 500,000 dead

This list is missing the 1938 Yellow River flood, which occurred during the height of conflict between China and Japan that would bleed into World War II. The flood killed nearly 900,000 people, but it wasn’t entirely a natural disaster. It was caused by the intentional breaching of levees by China’s own military, which flooded vast areas and killed many of its own civilians.

This rarely discussed event resulted not only in massive loss of life, but also in profound ecological destruction, and it continues to shape global politics to this day.

The Real Start of World War II

World War II began and ended in Asia. From a Western perspective, we are often taught that the war began with Germany’s invasion of Poland or even the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In fact, large-scale fighting had already begun between China and Japan in what has been named the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The origins of the war were based on false flags. First, in 1931, undercover soldiers of the Japanese Empire detonated dynamite on their own train lines. The explosion only slightly damaged one rail and delayed trains by a few hours, but it was used as justification for a full-scale invasion of the Chinese region of Manchuria. The war officially began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937. The Japanese accused the Chinese of kidnapping a soldier, who was actually asleep in his barracks. This escalated into three days of fighting and left nearly 1,000 people dead.

The war raged between the Japanese Imperial Army and the National Revolutionary Army of China. The latter was led by Chiang Kai-shek, who had united the country just ten years earlier. Although the Japanese had fewer men, their empire was at its peak, and their army was far superior to the young, inexperienced Chinese forces. In the first few months of the war, it became clear that the Chinese were outmatched, as their invaders marched easily through the countryside, devastating local towns.

The brutality of the Japanese invasion culminated in the infamous Rape of Nanjing. In December 1937, fearing the complete destruction of his army, Chiang Kai-shek withdrew his forces from Nanjing, then the capital of China and a city of about one million people. Left largely undefended, the city fell to the Japanese, who massacred its residents. Firsthand accounts describe streets littered with bodies for months, public executions, torture, and the rape of thousands of women. In total, historians believe that more than 300,000 people were killed.1

News of this devastation spread quickly through China and caused terror in both the general population and the leadership of the country. As the Japanese army began marching towards Wuhan, the new wartime capital, military leadership decided they would not make the same mistake twice.

The Flood

Knowing his army was not strong enough, Chiang Kai-shek devised a plan he called “yishui daibing,” or using water as a replacement for soldiers. He would intentionally break the levees of the Yellow River and flood thousands of square miles to slow the Japanese advance. No warning was given to Chinese citizens.

On June 9, 1938, Chinese soldiers used shovels and pickaxes to breach the dikes of the Yellow River, unleashing environmental warfare. The waters spread rapidly across the countryside.

An onlooker described the immediate impacts of the flooding:

“The flood suddenly rushed out like ten thousand horses galloping forth. . . . Looking ahead was a vast expanse of water; from the west to the north, towns all became submerged.”

As a defensive plan, the flood was a success. The rushing waters destroyed essential railroad lines the Japanese were using to push deeper into the country, and large areas became inaccessible to the invaders. The ultimate sign of the plan’s success was that Wuhan was never captured.

Impacts

The impacts of the flood were as far-reaching as the tributaries of the river itself. An estimated 400,000 people drowned in the muddy waters. Another 400,000 died in the following months from mosquito-borne illnesses worsened by the vast expanses of standing water. More than five million were displaced from towns that remained underwater for years. It was the single greatest refugee-generating event of World War II, and there were many grim competitors.

The flood caused extensive environmental damage. Farmland was saturated and saw reduced yields for a generation. The loss of arable land, combined with a drought in 1942, led to a massive famine that killed millions. In total, up to 12 million people were killed or displaced because of the Chinese government’s decision to break the levees.

Political Impacts

Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government initially lied about their involvement in the flood and blamed Japanese bombers. They eventually shifted to promoting the idea that the flood was absolutely necessary to prevent a Nanjing-level massacre in other major cities. As the war waged on, the government was slow and unhelpful in cleaning up and managing the devastation their actions left behind.

In China, World War II eventually gave way to civil war. A once small faction, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gained a larger following as the war dragged on. While the Nationalists bore the brunt of the fighting against Japan, the CCP steadily expanded its power under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The psychological impact of the Yellow River flood, committed by the Nationalists, fueled many citizens’ growing support for the Communists.

The civil war reached its conclusion in 1949. The CCP defeated the Nationalists, and two million people fled to the island of Taiwan under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. The new Communist government in China never accepted the retreat as permanent. That war, shaped in part by the consequences of the Yellow River flood, is the origin of the modern China–Taiwan conflict.

Further Thoughts

The flood and the justifications offered for it represent a shift in warfare that occurred during World War II. In previous wars, it was considered shameful to deliberately involve civilians in combat. In World War I, the fighting was largely confined to battlefields and trenches. When Germany sank the Lusitania, it even issued an expression of regret.

But during the Second World War, that restraint collapsed. Germany bombed London. The United States firebombed Dresden and dropped nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. Japan devastated large swaths of Southeast Asia. And in 1938, China drowned its own countryside.

It is not groundbreaking to say World War II made war more cruel than many had thought possible. What the Yellow River flood highlights, though, is a deeper and more enduring shift. The logic behind the decision was competitive and defensive: If we do not take every available measure, our enemy will gain the advantage. If we refuse to cross a certain line, they will not hesitate to do so. With that framework, morality becomes a liability.

This logic is profoundly dangerous because it pulls everyone down. When victory depends on abandoning restraint, maintaining moral superiority ensures defeat. Once one side justifies extreme measures as necessary, the other feels compelled to match or exceed them. The result is a race to the bottom, a mindset that did not end in 1945. It remains embedded in modern conflicts, and even in everyday competition — wherever people convince themselves that if they do not compromise their principles, someone else will and gain the upper hand.

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Works Cited

Diana Lary, “The Waters Covered the Earth: China’s War-Induced Natural Disasters,” In War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, edited by Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So. War and Peace Library, Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004.

Eastman, Lloyd E. (1986). "Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945". In Twitchett, Denis; Fairbank, John (eds.). The Cambridge History of China, Volume 13: Republican China 1912-1949, part 2. Cambridge University Press.

Mantle, Ryan, “The Forgotten Floods: Examining the Consequences of the Yellow River Disaster, 1938-1947” (2022). History Undergraduate Theses. 54.

https://www.history.com/articles/nanjing-massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll

https://macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/colloqpapers/18edgerton.pdf

This now-ubiquitous system has its roots in the late 1800s, invented by an eccentric twenty-something with extreme organizational habits named Melvil Dewey. To this day, the Library of Congress refers to Dewey as “the father of the modern library,” “a pioneer in library education,” and “a pioneer in the creation of career opportunities for women.”

That last title is especially concerning. While Dewey did employ women, he also had a dark side: he was a serial sexual harasser, a racist, and an open antisemite. These dispositions were so prominent in Dewey’s life that remnants of them still linger in his library system.

A Life of Compulsion

Melvil Dewey, born in upstate New York in 1851, was obsessed with the number ten. As a young child, he organized his mother’s spices into groups of ten based on their scents. In high school, he even led a campaign to convert his town to the metric system, whose base-ten logic he strongly preferred to the irregular ounces and pounds he was forced to deal with. Dewey believed this fixation stemmed from being born on December 10; a biographer, Joshua Kendall, has suggested it may instead have been the result of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Other evidence was his passion for language reform. Dewey changed his first name from Melville to Melvil and tried to change Dewey to Dui, all in the name of efficiency.

When he was only twenty-one, Dewey brought this compulsive organization and efficiency to libraries. He invented the Decimal System, which organized books into ten main categories of knowledge represented by three-digit numbers, then further narrowed their subjects using decimals. He presented his system to the faculty at Amherst College, where he was a third-year student. They were so impressed that they allowed him to reorganize the school’s entire collection. By graduation, Dewey was acting librarian of the college.

He presented the system at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 to resounding praise and founded the American Library Association (ALA) that same year. The project was an incredible success: Dewey’s system was widely adopted, first across New York and then nationwide. In 1886, Theodore Roosevelt endorsed the system, claiming it “has more than doubled its efficiency within the past ten years.”

In 1887, Dewey founded the School of Library Economy at Columbia University and recruited a founding class without discriminating by gender. Because educational opportunities for women were scarce, hundreds applied, and women ultimately made up ninety percent of the students. Columbia was reluctant to provide building space for this mostly female operation, but allowed Dewey to operate under its name out of a rented loft above a church.

This school would begin the enduring tradition of women having prominent and successful careers in librarianship. So, while it is technically true that Dewey created opportunity for women, he had ulterior motives. His compulsions did not stop with organizational systems.

Serial Harassment and Bigotry

This somewhat nonchalant news story pretty accurately captured the kind of guy Dewey was:

Dewey was a certifiable creep. On applications to his library school, he required prospective students to disclose their bust size. He was known to favor women with larger breasts both for admission and during instruction. At home, he employed two live-in assistants, both of whom accused him of sexual harassment. Later, during just a two-week ALA trip to Alaska, four women accused him of assault.

In 1906, his behavior finally caught up with him, and he was forced to resign from the ALA. But his sexual compulsions did not stop there. In 1920, Dewey’s son moved to another state because of Dewey’s repeated advances toward his wife. Even in 1930, at seventy-nine years old, Dewey paid $2,000 to settle a harassment claim brought by a stenographer he had groped.

Dewey never denied his heinous habit. He claimed, “I have been very unconventional … as men [are] always who frankly show and speak of their liking for women.”

Dewey’s bigotry and compulsions were also on full display at his Lake Placid Club, the New York resort he owned and operated with his wife. His obsession with the number ten continued there: he charged a ten-dollar annual membership fee and required guests to turn off their lights at exactly ten o’clock each night. More troublingly, the club explicitly banned Jewish and Black people, a policy openly advertised in its promotional materials. Dewey went so far as to purchase all the land surrounding the club out of fear that Jewish families might buy nearby property. These discriminatory practices eventually had professional consequences: Dewey was forced to resign from his position as New York State Librarian because of his conduct.

While Dewey faced minor consequences in his own time, his harassment and bigoted behavior were largely omitted from early biographies. His most famous biography, Melvil Dewey: Seer, Inspirer, Doer, never mentions any of his controversies. It was not until 2019 that the American Library Association changed the name of its top honor, removing Dewey’s name entirely. The decision passed unanimously and without debate.

Discrimination by Design

Many of the biases Melvil Dewey held were built directly into the organizational system we still use today. “Black history” is not filed under “American history,” “women’s work” appears in a separate category from “jobs,” and nine out of ten religion decimals are devoted to Christianity, with Judaism and Islam relegated, for over a century, to “mythology.” LGBTQ-related books were classified under “neurological disorders” until 1989.

While modern librarians have worked to address these biases, they have proven difficult to completely eliminate from a system created by a racist, misogynistic creep.

Further Thoughts

Melvil Dewey was obsessed with efficiency in every aspect of his life. From organizing his mother’s spices to designing libraries, and even shortening his own name, he wanted everything to work as quickly and easily as possible. But this obsession, especially as embodied in the Dewey Decimal System, reflects his version of efficiency. Dewey’s legacy, and the biases he built into his system, reveal that it is not perfectly efficient at all; instead, it leaves much behind in favor of its inventor’s exclusionary and creepy ideology.

We often hear modern organizations claim that the most efficient system is automatically the most desirable, yet Dewey’s example shows that efficiency is never entirely objective. It is defined by who is doing the organizing and whose needs are prioritized. It is important to be aware of this misconception so that we do not need another 150 years to fix “efficient” systems that were broken from the start.

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Works Cited

“Dewey Proposes Library Classification System.” n.d. Mass Moments. Accessed February 5, 2026. https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/dewey-proposes-library-classification-system.html.

Ford, Anne. 2018. “Bringing Harassment Out of the History Books.” American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/06/01/melvil-dewey-bringing-harassment-out-of-the-history-books/.

Katz, Brigit, and Tina Brown. 2019. “Melvil Dewey’s Name Stripped From Top Library Award.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/melvil-deweys-name-stripped-top-library-award-180972514/.

Kendall, Joshua. 2014. “Melvil Dewey, Compulsive Innovator.” American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2014/03/24/melvil-dewey-compulsive-innovator/.

“LibGuides: Dewey Decimal System: We Need to Talk About Melvil Dewey.” 2023. Pratt LibGuides. https://libguides.pratt.edu/dewey-decimal-system/melvil-dewey.

The nature of these laws tells us a lot about daily life in the early settlement. But it also reveals something more unsettling: America’s relationship with authoritarianism is not an imported anomaly or a later deviation. It is woven into the nation’s earliest legal foundations and a part of its inheritance from the very beginning.

The Jamestown Colony

In May 1607, 104 Englishmen and boys landed on a small peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay. Their six-month voyage across the Atlantic had been chartered by the Virginia Company and sanctioned by King James I. Those who made the journey included well-off men in search of fortune, indentured boys bound to years of service, and laborers in need of work. The site of the colony was chosen for its access to water on three sides, its deep harbor, and its inland position, which was thought to offer protection against Spanish attack. The settlement was named accordingly for the king: Jamestown.

During their first summer, the men built shelters and a triangular fort to ward off invaders. They elected their first government in the form of a council that included John Martin, John Ratcliffe, John Smith, and Bartholomew Gosnold. (Looks like someone didn’t get the memo.)

The bickering council was ineffective. That winter, food and supplies ran out, and the colonists, unaccustomed to the land, struggled to survive. Many died after drinking the brackish waters of the Chesapeake, while others starved to death. Witnessing the newcomers’ desperation, members of the Powhatan tribe brought food to Jamestown. Historians are nearly certain that without the assistance of Native peoples, the English colony would not have survived its first year.

If the first winter tested the colony, the second nearly broke it. That year, the settlers demanded too much from their Powhatan neighbors, shattering the fragile alliance that had sustained them. During what became known as the Starving Time, colonists ate their belts and shoes, and, in some cases, the bodies of their dead companions. By the end of the winter, an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the colony had perished.

Seeing that their investment was becoming a tragic mess, the Virginia Company made a critical change. In 1611, they sent Sir Thomas Dale, a former soldier famous for winning wars against the Netherlands, with a new title: Marshall of Virginia.

A collection of state papers from the 1620s was uncovered in 1860 with the following unattributed quote:

“In 1611 arrived Sir Thos. Dale, with three ships, 300 persons, and provisions. He immediately published the most tyrannous and cruel laws we have seen.”

Dale’s Laws

The new rules, officially titled Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, have come to be known as Dale’s Laws. Their introduction states that the laws “establish a single ruling group” to “hold tight control of the colony,” and that they were a “necessitie of the present State of the Colonie.”

While the original laws were written in dense colonial English, I have summarized their contents below.

1. Blasphemy of God’s name

   • Offense 1 & 2: Bodkin (dagger) thrust through the tongue

   • Offense 3: Death

2. Speaking ill of King James I

   • Punishment: Tied head and feet together for one month at night

3. Conspiring against the Marshall

   • Punishment: Death

4. Taking anything from the Powhatans

   • Punishment: Death

5. Running away to the Powhatans

   • Punishment: Death

6. Killing or destroying livestock or animals without approval

   • Punishment: Burning of hands and loss of ears

7. Intentionally losing or breaking spades, shovels, hatchets, axes

   • Punishment: Whipping

8. Leaving work before the drum is sounded

   • 1st Offense: Heels tied together for a night

   • 2nd Offense: Whipping

   • 3rd Offense: Galleys for a year

9. Bakers, cooks, and fishermen failing to give equal portions to all colonists

   • Punishment: Loss of ears

The laws remained in place from 1611 until 1619, when Dale was called back to England. During that time, countless punishments were carried out, but only two are documented. One involved an oatmeal thief who was chained to a tree and left to starve. The other involved a pregnant woman who was whipped, a punishment that reportedly led to a miscarriage.

Life at Jamestown

Dale’s Laws provide insight into the life and priorities of the original settlers. The first thing to notice is the clear hierarchy it creates. The first three laws make it clear that everyone in the colony is meant to serve God, the King, and the Marshall, in that order. Combined with strict and somewhat unusual punishments (I don’t even know how you would tie someone’s head to their feet), these laws established authoritarian rule.

Beyond those, only three crimes carried an automatic death sentence: attempting to overthrow the Marshal, provoking the Native population, and fleeing to join them.

Each of these punishments, brutal as they were, followed a grim logic. Any conspiracy against the Marshal threatened to collapse the entire legal system, placing the colony at immediate risk. Likewise, angering the Powhatan could easily lead to the destruction of the small, weak settlement. Finally, running away to join the Native population was unacceptable, as the struggling colony could not afford to lose its scarce manpower. That this offense carried such a severe punishment also suggests just how tempting escape must have been.

The remainder of the laws make clear just how essential each individual was to the colony’s survival. Most offenses, ranging from killing animals to losing tools to leaving work early, were punished severely, but in ways that generally preserved a person’s long-term ability to labor. Hands were burned rather than cut off, offenders were sentenced to the galleys but still expected to work, and a lot of ears were cut off, a punishment leading to no permanent disability. Survival depended not only on work, but on an authoritarian system willing to impose harsh, calculated punishments to ensure it.

Dale’s Laws were successful in one sense: they contributed to the colony’s growth and eventual permanence. Dale and the Virginia Company believed that such a cruel regime was necessary to make the settlement function. Whether that claim is true is impossible to know. What is worth considering is what this draconian moment in American history represents.

Many historians argue that these laws were an extreme departure from the democratic and common-law traditions that later defined the Virginia colony and, eventually, the United States. However, in 1982, Professor David Konig argued that “Dale’s Laws were not an aberration, but instead fit squarely within the context of common law and the seventeenth century.” He suggested that authoritarianism was not incompatible with America’s democratic ideals, but rather that it occupied an uneasy and overlooked place within them.

Further Thoughts

Dale’s Laws demonstrate that authoritarianism is not a foreign or accidental feature of American history. From the draconian regime of Dale’s Laws to the rule of English monarchs before the Revolution, the colonies were governed under absolute authority. Even after independence, racism and xenophobia subjected entire groups of people in the United States to extrajudicial oppression.

Dale’s Laws were created during a period of extreme suffering and instability. They were justified as necessary to control sin and crime, but also as responses to what leaders claimed was a unique and extraordinarily dangerous situation. This pattern can be seen throughout American history: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War; the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; and the expansion of surveillance policies after September 11, 2001. Americans are willing to forgo rights in times of major crisis.

The implication is not that authoritarianism defines America, but that Americans are willing to forgo rights in times of major crisis.

Today, the rise of misinformation has given those in power more leverage to unilaterally decide when that threshold of “crisis” has been crossed. Conservative politicians have invoked exaggerated claims of border insecurity, economic decline, and rising crime rates to justify new authoritarian-style control.

I think that we can use Dale’s laws as an example and let history guide us a bit here. If people aren’t drinking brackish water and eating each other’s shoes, we shouldn’t be so quick to give up our rights.

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Works Cited

America and West Indies: July 1624. Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 1, 1574-1660. Ed. W Noel Sainsbury (London, 1860), British History Online. Web. 30 October 2024.

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Dale, Sir Thomas". Encyclopedia Britannica. Vol. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 763–764.

David Thomas Konig, “Dale’s Laws” and the Non-Common Law Origins of Criminal Justice in Virginia, American Journal of Legal History, Volume 26, Issue 4, October 1982, Pages 354–375, https://doi.org/10.2307/844941

Hunnicutt, Wendell. n.d. “Dales’s Laws.” University of Texas Arlington. https://websites.uta.edu/hunnicut/reading-list/readings-u-s-legal-constitutional-history/dales-laws/.

https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/martial-law.htm

But this map says otherwise:

In 1916, there were 72 electric charging stations spread across the greater Chicago area; 100 years later, there were only 55. Electric cars are not new — they are having a resurgence.

Electric and gasoline-powered cars were invented at roughly the same time, and for years they competed head-to-head. Much of that rivalry played out in the mundane terrain of pricing, infrastructure, and business decisions. But in 1895, that competition spilled onto the streets in the form of a road race.

The Times-Herald Race

At the end of the 19th century, cars were an exciting new invention. When Herman H. Kohlsaat, owner of the Chicago Times-Herald, announced that his paper would host a Thanksgiving Day race in 1895, he also asked readers a more basic question: what should these new vehicles even be called?

Here were the top submissions:

• Horseless Carriage

• Vehicle Motor

• Automobile

• Automobile Carriage

• Motocycle (Winner)

The idea for the race was borrowed from France, where a 300-mile competition from Paris to Bordeaux had captured international attention. Kohlsaat, who had made his fortune by popularizing the to-go lunch before becoming a Midwest media mogul, wanted to bring that same excitement to Chicago, his newspaper, and the fledgling American automobile industry.

The Times-Herald advertisement called for “inventors who can construct practicable, self-propelling road carriages,” offering a $5,000 prize (nearly $200,000 today) to the winner. The race was originally envisioned as a Chicago-to-Milwaukee run, but Kohlsaat quickly realized the technology wasn’t up to the task. Instead, the course was shortened to a 54-mile route from Jackson Park, the site of the recent World’s Fair, to the northern suburb of Evanston and back. Each vehicle had to carry not only a driver, but also a race umpire, seated in the vehicle to ensure every rule was followed and every mile was properly accounted for. Other than that, there were basically no rules: any kind of self-powered vehicle was allowed.

The Race

Eighty-nine inventors signed up to prove their machine’s dominance and vie for the $5,000 prize — but only six made it to the starting line. A brutal winter storm the night before had brought freezing temperatures and nearly a foot of snow, leaving most vehicles stuck in snowbanks and ditches as they made their way to Jackson Park.

Of the six who did make it, four were gasoline-powered, and two were electric.

Three of the gasoline vehicles were built by Karl Benz, whose name would later become immortalized in Mercedes-Benz, while the fourth came from the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, which would have a bit less commercial success. The two electrics were owned by less prominent companies, but one had the incredibly compelling name, Electrobat.

The racers took off at 9 a.m. (“Took off” is generous here, given that the vehicles averaged about seven miles per hour). For the first hour, things went smoothly. Electric and gasoline motocycles lumbered up the snowy road, neck and neck as 10,000 eager spectators cheered them on. Then it all went to shit.

The Chicago Chronicle recorded a cascading series of mishaps. First, the Duryea faced trouble after it “lost one of its big rubber tires, and the attendants stopped to tie the big circular tube onto the wheel with ropes.” Officially, this was the first car crash in U.S. history. Soon after, a frightened horse ran down another vehicle, sending “the driver and umpire tossed into a snow pile.” Next, “a machine ran away and was crushed in the rear of a streetcar.” Finally, the cold claimed its most decisive victory: both electric vehicles ground to a halt as freezing temperatures killed their batteries.

After 10 hours of driving, an hour for repairs, and 3.5 gallons of gasoline, the Duryea motocycle pushed across the finish line, victorious.

A Motorized Future

The race did exactly what Kohlsaat hoped: it generated widespread excitement for the American automobile industry. Kohlsaat used his newspaper to amplify that excitement at every opportunity.

Immediately after the Duryea won, he assured his readers, “With good roads, every car would have crossed the finish line.” He went further by noting that fresh horses had to be kept along the race course for journalists because “the teams could not keep the pace.” The next day, he ran this awesome headline:

While only thirteen Duryeas were made the following year, it was clear that motocycles/horseless carriages/whatever you wanted to call them were the future.

Automobiles

Regardless of the outcome of the race, at the dawn of the automobile age, electric cars had a slight advantage over their gas-powered counterparts. From 1890 to 1920, often considered the golden age of electric cars, over 40 percent of automobiles were electric, outpacing gasoline vehicles, which made up roughly 25 percent of the market. While this may seem surprising today, it was not to people at the time: streetcars and subways, the primary alternatives to horses and trains, were already electric.

Electric vehicles had many advantages.1 They didn’t have a loud, vibrating motor, they didn’t give off fumes or fill cities with smog, and you didn’t have to hand-crank the engine to get them started. Also, those 72 electric charging stations didn’t operate the way modern ones do, and they were only marginally slower than gas pumps. Rather than recharging a battery inside the vehicle, attendants used cranes to remove depleted batteries and replace them with ones that had been charging overnight. Here’s how they did it:

Still, there were downsides. The vehicles had short ranges, their recharging infrastructure was limited, and as the Chicago race made clear, they did not perform well in the cold.

Downfall

The decline of the electric car began gradually as gas-powered vehicles became more attractive. More roads were built, and people wanted to drive further than an electric car could take them. The handcrank was replaced in 1912, and the muffler was perfected, making gas cars simpler and quieter. Large deposits of petroleum were discovered and refined, driving down gas prices, while Henry Ford put his assembly lines to work mass-producing gasoline cars, further lowering their cost. At the same time, oil companies lobbied local governments to prevent the construction of new battery-charging infrastructure.

By the mid-1920s, it was clear that electric cars would not define the 20th century. They remained novelties, but the technology generally fell into obsolescence for the next 80 years.

Further Thoughts

When the Chicago Times-Herald race launched the rapid rise of cars, electric or otherwise, there was no consideration for the environment. Beyond a general frustration that these new machines filled cities with smog, the main concerns in the battle between electric and gasoline vehicles were usability, cost, and profits. Today, the resurgence of electric vehicles is driven directly by our modern understanding of environmental impacts.

The story of the electric car is a reminder that solutions to modern problems can sometimes be found in the past. In this case, the solution is literally being resurrected from history. For other challenges, whether equality, labor rights, or fixing our political system, the answer may not be a long-forgotten invention, but rather the forgotten ideas, mindsets, and optimism that once helped societies move forward. There is, of course, plenty in the past we are right to condemn, and “not letting history repeat itself” is often good advice. Still, dismissing generations of human progress is pretty irresponsible too.

Even so, I’m glad those six drivers lined up that snowy morning to literally drive our world forward. I’m also glad I don’t have to ride horses. That said, Kohlsaat was wrong about one thing: the horse wasn’t doomed. If anything, it finally got a break.

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Works Cited

Allen, William. 2025. “On this day in 1895: The motor-car race that changed history and paid off big.” AS USA. https://en.as.com/other_sports/on-this-day-in-1895-the-motor-car-race-that-changed-history-and-paid-off-big-f202511-n/.

Peek, Jeff. 2020. “The first-ever U.S. car race in 1895 was survival of the fittest - Hagerty Media.” Hagerty Insurance. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/the-first-ever-u-s-car-race-in-1885-was-survival-of-the-fittest/.

Printz, Larry. 2022. “The First Auto Race in America.” LarryPrintz.com. https://www.larryprintz.com/history/the-first-auto-race-in-america.

Scharff, Virginia (1992). Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. Univ. New Mexico Press.

“The First Automobile Race in America.” 1991. Remember Road. https://rememberroad.com/the-first-automobile-race-in-america-chicago-november-28-1895/.

Wizevich, Eli. 2024. “Six Cars Raced to the Finish Line of the U.S.’s First Automobile Race.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/six-cars-raced-to-the-finish-line-of-the-uss-first-automobile-raceat-speeds-of-seven-miles-per-hour-180985385/.

126 years ago, almost to the day, my great-great-grandmother boarded a ship in Hamburg Harbor and set sail for the United States. She was forced to flee a town her family was forced to live in, which was shaped by corporate interests, and she was saved, in part, by an extramarital affair.

The story is unbelievable, and if any part of it had gone differently, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

The Pale of Settlement

Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews in Eastern Europe had little-to-no say in where they lived. Catherine the Great created what Russian officials called a “Jewish Problem” beginning in 1780, when she expanded her empire and inadvertently brought several million Jews under Russian rule. Conservative elites found this influx intolerable and pressured the empress to impose restrictions. In 1781, she complied.

Her decree stated:

“We hereby rule that Jews have no right whatsoever … in the internal harbors of Russia, and may enjoy civil and urban rights only in White Russia”—limited areas of present-day western Ukraine, eastern Poland, and Belarus.

Catherine’s decree explicitly curtailed Jewish rights and forced communities into undesirable borderlands. The effects of this policy, known as the Pale of Settlement, persisted for centuries.

Borysław

Even though it was a primary reason for her life circumstances, my great-great-grandmother Annie Schneider probably wasn’t concerned with Catherine the Great or the Pale of Settlement when she was born in 1882. Then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today part of western Ukraine, Annie grew up in the ghetto of a town called Borysław (bore-ih-slav).

In the 1890s, American Journalist William Lay visited Borysław and recorded what he saw.

“It contained one schoolhouse, but no church nor printing office. None of its streets were paved, and, in the main road through the town, the mud came up to the hubs of the wagon wheels for over a mile of its length. In places, planks had to be set up on edge to keep the mud out of the houses, which were lower than the road. It contained numerous shops, where potato whiskey was sold to men, women and children. It depends on a dirty, muddy creek for its supply of water. … I saw in the marketplace of Borislau women, standing ankle deep in the mud, selling vegetables. One woman really had to build a platform of straw, on which to place a bushel of potatoes; if the straw foundation had not been there, the potatoes would have sunk out of sight.”

Annie grew up in this muddy world. She and her family spoke only Yiddish, and based on their surname, Schneider, meaning “to cut,” they most likely worked in the garment trade. By the time she was 10 years old, there is a chance Annie stood beside the potato vendor Lay described, selling clothes knee-deep in mud.

But there was another side of Borysław that Annie never truly experienced. It was known as Oil City. Lay contrasted the two places, noting that Oil City had eight schools, twelve churches, two printing offices, and paved streets. Borysław had not always been so starkly divided between wealth and poverty. That divide had hardened after a large corporation bought and consolidated nearly all of the town’s industry.

Mining Country

After oil was discovered beneath the city in 1860, mining operations quickly sprang up. Because Borysław lay within the Pale of Settlement and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was generally less hostile to Jews than neighboring Russia, many Jewish families were able to capitalize on the oil boom. Along with Austrian and foreign mines, at least nine Jewish-run mines were in operation from the 1860s into the 1890s.

Across the board, mining conditions were horrendous, with one journalist dramatically claiming they “defied civilization.” Yet despite the brutal reality of the work, the industry offered rare opportunities for upward mobility. Hundreds of Jewish families found success in mining, earning enough to lift themselves out of poverty and relocate to Vienna. For a time, Jews in the surrounding regions even expressed jealousy toward those in Borysław, whose fortunes had shifted almost accidentally with the discovery of black gold beneath their feet. Besides brutal jobs working in the mines, Annie’s family was never able to truly benefit from the oil rush before the system fell apart.

In 1895, the Austrian Ministry doubled the required minimum depth of mine shafts from 30 meters to 60 meters. Only one company had the capital to meet the new standard: the Galician Credit Bank. The bank quickly upgraded its own mines and made aggressive offers to neighboring operations, purchasing entire businesses outright. Within two years, it had bought every Jewish-owned mine in the region.

The antisemitic attitudes of the new mine owners were no secret, and in order to dismantle years of successful Jewish-run enterprise, they had to get creative. The bank introduced education requirements and other credentials that Jewish workers were largely unable to access. In 1897, 500 Jewish overseers were required to take a Polish literacy test; three passed, and the rest were dismissed. Soon after, seven hundred day laborers were let go without explanation.

The economic impact was devastating. Living conditions for the unemployed deteriorated, and the gap between Borysław and Oil City widened further. Annie’s family was one of hundreds suddenly facing impossible living conditions, with no clear way out.

Baroness de Hirsch

The situation in Borysław became so dire that word reached charitable organizations across Europe. At the Second Zionist Congress, Theodor Herzl cited Borysław as a primary example of the economic oppression faced by Jews, and wealthy donors took notice.

One of those donors was Clara de Hirsch. She and her husband, Maurice, rose to extraordinary wealth and status in Vienna through a combination of timing and luck. When Maurice began his banking career, the Austro-Hungarian emperor, Franz Joseph I, was involved in an affair with a Jewish woman, making him more sympathetic to Jewish advancement than any other European ruler. Clara and Maurice capitalized on this rare tolerance and the economic freedom granted by the crown to build a vast financial and philanthropic empire. Eventually, they were ennobled as Baron and Baroness de Hirsch.

After hearing the pleas from Borysław, the baroness pledged to fund the relocation of 1,200 families; 700 to Palestine and 500 to New York City. Families were assigned destinations at random. Annie was luckily given New York, as the ships bound for Palestine never departed. In December 1898, Annie left her life in Europe and boarded a ship in Hamburg, bound for the New World.

Journey to New York

18-year-old Annie arrived at Ellis Island on January 1, 1899, almost exactly 127 years ago.

She got off the ship, recorded her information, and was immediately let out into the streets of the city. At the time, there were no immigration quotas from Europe and very little enforcement at all. If you could make it to the U.S., you could start a new life.

Annie had one year to accomplish two things before the rest of her family could follow: find housing and secure work. Speaking only Yiddish, Annie connected with the established Jewish community on the Lower East Side, obtained a tenement room at 158 Ludlow Street, and arranged a job at a dairy store for her future husband, Samuel, upon his arrival.

Exactly one year later, on January 7, 1900, the rest of the family joined her.

Life in New York was relentlessly difficult. Samuel worked 18-hour days at the dairy store, and Annie gave birth to six children, one of whom died from poisoning at two years old. From the age of 13, her surviving children labored in garment factories six days a week, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., with only a thirty-minute lunch break, followed by night school and Americanization classes that stretched until 10 p.m. or later. As everyone’s work began to pay off, the family moved to better and better apartments in the Lower East Side, usually just a few blocks away from their last. In 1925, Annie and Sam became naturalized citizens and moved to a pricier apartment in the Bronx, paying $100 a month (today, it costs $3,700 a month). Both Annie and Sam died in the 1960s.

Annie was survived by a daughter, who had a daughter, who had another daughter, who had a son who started this silly little Substack.

Further Thoughts

Because this is, in some ways, my own story, I can’t stop thinking of all the somewhat random things that had to happen to ensure I existed:

• If the Schneiders had been financially successful early on and made it to Vienna, they most likely would have been murdered in the Holocaust.

• If they had been able to pass the mining company’s literacy tests, they also wouldn’t have left.

• If Franz Joseph didn’t have a Jewish mistress, Baroness de Hirsch wouldn’t have had the money to pay for their journey.

• They could have been selected for the ill-fated Palestine journey and never made it.

• Annie could have not found housing or work in New York.

• The whole thing could have happened two decades later, after the Immigration Act of 1924 cut Eastern European immigration by 98%.

It’s difficult to hear this story without thinking about immigration today. The 1924 act restricted European immigration, and it entirely barred immigrants from Asia. Since then, immigration laws, especially those affecting people from regions targeted by xenophobia and racism, have only grown more stringent and complex. In the United States today, we are confronted daily with evidence of the cruelty immigrants face at the hands of our own government. 125 years ago, the world was far less organized and far less connected. Yet, in some ways, modern connectedness, bureaucracy, surveillance, and exclusionary ideas of citizenship have made escaping hardship and beginning again more difficult than it was for my family in the 19th century.

What would later be remembered as “luck” felt, to my distant relatives, like catastrophe. They experienced an overwhelming economic crisis, the upheaval of their lives, and the challenge of starting anew in a country they knew nothing about. They could not have known that this disruption would ultimately make it possible for their great-great-great-grandchildren to live better lives.

I think a lot about the timing; how the majority of the family was midway through their three-week journey across the Atlantic when the clock struck midnight and the 19th century became the 20th. What were they thinking as they looked up at the stars?

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Works Cited

1882 address by William L. Lay to the New York Academy of Sciences

Grossman, Vasiliĭ. 1985. Life and Fate. N.p.: Harper & Row. pp 84-87.

Klier, John. n.d. “Pale of Settlement.” YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/246.

https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/drohobycz/shtetls/history-of-boryslaw.html

https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/pinkas_poland/pol2_00092.html#:~:text=The%20central%20Jewish%20aid%20organizations,240%20families%20in%20the%20town

• Ping-Pong: Table Tennis

• Kleenex: Tissue

• Chapstick: Lip Balm

• Tupperware: Food Storage Container

• Zipper: I have no clue what it’s called other than zipper, but it’s a brand name, I promise

These are called proprietary eponyms, and they only happen when a company’s product becomes so popular it overtakes its own entire category. Today, we’re going to talk about Tupperware: a 90 year old product that was so successful it’s used today to mean basically anything that stores food.

In the 1950s, you might have had another association with Tupperware: a party.

Tupperware

Tupperware was invented in 1937 by Earl Silas Tupper, who worked at an industrial plastics factory that would go on to make gas masks for the war effort. Plastics was one of the fastest growing industries in the world, but it had not yet permeated into a regular consumer’s home. Tupper was told that polyethylene was too brittle to make anything useful with, but after stealing a basket of pellets, he developed a proprietary molding method. His first ever container was a milky white container dubbed “The Wonder Bowl.”

Tupper made the claim “Poly-t is the material of the future” so many times that he eventually trademarked the phrase. His plastic promotion worked because, as Tupperware gained popularity, consumers thought it was innovative and genuinely beautiful. A design magazine in 1939 called the Wonder Bowl “A good piece of sculpture” and “Fine art for 39 cents.” By 1955, there was a MOMA exhibit about Tupperware that described the kitchen product as “marvelously free of that vulgarity which characterizes so much household equipment.” For his first advertisements, Tupper capitalized on this momentum and highlighted the beauty of his products.

Focusing on aesthetics worked, and Tupperware sold hundreds of thousands of products in department stores and through mail-order catalogues. They were novel and impressive, but they were still just another food container. It would take something, and someone, else to take Tupperware to the next level.

Brownie Wise

Brownie Wise was the woman for the job. In the early 1940s, Wise was a single mother in Detroit with only an eighth-grade education. She worked multiple jobs as an advice columnist and secretary at Stanley Home Products. She saw greater potential for a small section of Stanley’s advertising department, which ran sales directly in people’s homes. According to her biography, when Wise asked the CEO for more responsibility, he responded that management was “No place for a woman.”

Wise quit and took a gamble, bringing a similar marketing strategy to Tupperware. Without getting an official job at the company, Wise ordered Tupperware in bulk from distributors and started her own company named Patio Parties, which specialized in Tupperware Parties. After a few years, Wise and her network of 19 dealers, all women, had made $150,000 ($1.7 million today) selling Tupperware. That was more than any store or catalogue.

Earl Tupper had no choice but to take notice. In 1951, he made Wise the vice president of Tupperware Home Parties Incorporated. By the next year, Tupperware was exclusively sold at Tupperware Parties.

The Parties

Here’s how the parties worked. A “dealer,” almost always a woman, would meet with a Tupperware representative, pick up several product sets, and get coached on the perfect sales pitch. Then she’d spread the word however she could, drumming up excitement around town for her upcoming party.

When the big day arrived, guests crowded into the host’s living room, tastefully decorated for the occasion, where they sipped wine and cocktails poured into, of course, Tupperware. Once everyone was settled and slightly buzzed, the host launched into the pitch, using a series of party games designed to show off the product’s versatility.

I couldn’t track down detailed descriptions of the games, so it’s hard to say exactly how they promoted plastic containers, but we can certainly guess from the names. There was “Clothes Pin,” “Waist Measurement,” “Game of Gossip,” and the not-so-mysterious “Tupperware Toss.”

Dealers received a stipend and some free Tupperware, but they were also encouraged to nudge their most enthusiastic guests into hosting parties themselves. Was it a pyramid scheme? Probably. Did it work? Without question. By the time the evening wrapped up, most attendees were signing order forms for entire collections.

Party or Empowerment?

The parties were wildly successful. Not only did they help make Tupperware the household name it is today, but they also created an early pathway for women to run their own businesses. Many women had taken on substantial work during World War II, only to be pushed out of those roles when men returned home. Tupperware parties offered a rare opportunity post-war for women to engage with corporate America both as consumers and as sellers.

Becoming a dealer meant gaining wider social networks, having income that was entirely their own, and earning new status within their communities. Because parties were rooted in a host’s own social networks, they took on the character of those individual circles. In practice, this meant that women across a wide range of communities, urban and rural, Black and white, participated in the Tupperware party model. As historian Allison Clarke wrote in her essay “Parties are the Answer,” the role functioned as a kind of “promotion” for women who had long been confined to domestic life.

At the center of this story stands Brownie Wise, its most striking example. She came from little and used Tupperware parties to become one of the most successful businesswomen of her time. Wise understood the empowering role of the parties. At public events, she famously repeated, “You build the people, and they’ll build the business.”

As the years went on, Wise and Tupper fought often about the management of the company. In the late 1950s, the board wanted to sell the company, and Tupper fired Wise under the pretext that “his gut told him it would be less attractive to sell with an outspoken woman at the helm of the sales end.” Facing discrimination until the end, Wise successfully sued for $30,000. As Smithsonian Magazine wrote, “[she] really has no contemporaries.”

Further Thoughts

While Tupperware parties were a great example of women’s economic empowerment, Clarke also noted possible tensions, calling them “a symptom of a secularized, alienated society” and suggesting that “the separation of economic from home life is parodied in the Tupperware party’s blatant commoditization of the domestic sphere.”

But the truth is that commercialization has been in the home for decades. From radio to daytime television to today’s social-media feeds, our domestic spaces have long mingled with the marketplace.

I understand Clarke’s criticism—no one wants to see ads in their bedroom. But I also think the benefits reflected in the Tupperware party model are still visible today. Just as women once built networks and income through living-room sales, people can now create, buy, and sell from almost anywhere with far fewer barriers. While this shift brings plenty of new problems, it also opens the door to more equitable opportunities.

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Works Cited

Clarke, Alison J. “” Parties Are the Answer”: Gender, Modernity and Material Culture.” UCLA Historical Journal 14 (1994).

Eschner, Kat. 2018. “The Story of Brownie Wise, the Ingenious Marketer Behind the Tupperware Party.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/story-brownie-wise-ingenious-marketer-behind-tupperware-party-180968658/.

Kealing, Bob (2016). Life of the party: the remarkable story of how Brownie Wise built, and lost, a Tupperware party empire. New York.

“The Story of Tupperware Parties in Historical Pictures from the 1950s.” 2025. Rare Historical Photos. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/tupperware-parties-pictures-history/.

“Tupperware Home Parties | American Experience | Official Site.” n.d. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tupperware-parties/

“Tupperware: The Party’s Over? | Hagley.” 2024. Hagley Museum. https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/tupperware-partys-over.

In America, we learn that the Second World War was fought in far away continents and, besides the attack on Pearl Harbor, never touched U.S. soil. It’s a nice story that definitely feeds the American exceptionalism mindset, but it’s wrong. In fact, one of the largest battles of the war, which lasted two months and involved millions of combatants, was fought on U.S. land and actually resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of U.S. nationals. The 1945 battle took place in the 5th most populous city in the U.S. at the time: Manila. During the war, the Philippines and its 17 million inhabitants were under the complete colonial control of the United States of America.

How did the United States, which fought in the Pacific against an aggressive colonial power, come to rule over these millions of people, and how did the government get the American people to support this?

To figure it out we have to go back to a time of horses, buggies, and forgotten wars: the turn of the 20th century.

The Wars

In 1898, America was inching towards war. As violence from the Cuban Revolution against Spain spread, politicians became increasingly convinced that this was in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 political warning that Europeans can’t interfere in the Americas. Everything came to a head in February when the U.S.S. Maine exploded in the Havana harbor, killing more than 200 Americans. Although to this day there is no evidence that a Spanish mine destroyed the ship, newly popular “yellow journalism”, a style of reporting that relied on exaggeration to stir public outrage, spun the event into a war fervor.

The Spanish-American War lasted less than a year. Teddy Roosevelt, who led his famous rough riders to a key victory wrote in a letter: “[It] has been a splendid little war.” It was far less splendid for the hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos who died as the violence unfolded on their land. Spain granted Cuban independence and ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the highly populated Philippines to the United States.

Benevolent Assimilation

President William McKinley was torn on what to do. In a November 1899 interview with the newspaper The Christian Advocate, the president told reporters:

“I did not want the Philippines when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them. … I walked the floors of the White House night after night. But I knew it was cowardly and dishonorable to give them back to Spain.”

Eventually he decided that it was the United States’ moral obligation to take over, and help the Philippines. In his famous Benevolent Assimilation speech, McKinley said God told him to “uplift” and “civilize” the islands. Another idea historian Susan Brewer has argued is that, as the last veteran of the Civil War to serve as president, McKinley wanted to create a united venture for the still fractured country.

Regardless of his true purpose, the president’s struggle to weigh America’s international role mirrored the internal conflict that the entire country would undergo in the following years.

The “Non-Colonial” U.S.

The United States, famously once a colony of Britain, had long defined itself in opposition to imperial rule, and Americans throughout the early republic rejected the idea of governing other peoples. The Monroe Doctrine further signaled an early commitment to distancing the young nation from European-style colonialism.

Of course, throughout the 19th century the United States expanded thousands of miles westward, seizing the lands of countless Indigenous nations. Historian Stuart Miller argues that this ideological conflict rested on Americans’ belief in their “natural right” to the entire continent, leading most to view expansion in the West as inevitable, not colonial. This was an act of profound cognitive dissonance, but the point remains: Americans did not see themselves as colonizers.

The colonization of the Philippines marked a stark departure from the nation’s self-perceived tradition of anti-imperialism. By 1900, McKinley even ran his reelection campaign on the idea that “the people expect the U.S. to keep all of the Philippines.” How did such a dramatic shift happen so fast?

Justifications

Religion

From the start, the conflict was wrapped in religious context. One newspaper described American ships as “God’s own trumpet-tones,” while another claimed that “the Spanish fleet went down as miraculously as the walls of Jericho.” In 1899, the Christian Democratic League claimed that bringing civilization to foreign lands was the “divine purpose of every American” while the Presbyterian Interior published, “The church will stand solidly against abandoning the islands.” Politicians began to echo the same sentiment with Minnesota Senator Knute Nelson declaring, “Providence has given the US the duty of extending Christian civilization.”

This bombardment of religious messaging, all within just a few years, led many Americans to view colonization as a moral necessity.

Media

The colonization of the Philippines coincided with the rise in sensationalist journalism. Dramatized stories of violence and unrest in the Philippines surrounded the American public nonstop. Without much specific evidence, the San Francisco Chronicle published about the Philippine leader: “Aguinaldo Plans To Become Dictator.” Similarly, when accounts of Americans torturing Filipino captives broke in smaller publications, The New York Times refused to publish the story nationally.

The news of the time exclusively portrayed the Philippines as violent and in need of civilization by printing inaccurate and dramatized stories. As one of the only sources of news for most Americans at the time, newspapers had a powerful impact in helping Americans accept the necessity of ruling over the far away islands.

Propaganda

One of America’s darker moments, the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis featured a Philippines exhibit that displayed Filipinos in confined settings and reinforced narratives of the United States’ supposed benevolent role. The exhibit involved over 1,200 Filipinos staged in loincloths, performing manual labor; 99% of the fair’s visitors attended this exhibit.

Every hour, the captives were forced to sing an intentionally mistranslated version of the Star Spangled Banner for an engrossed audience. The performance was intended to inspire the audience to imagine an Americanized civilization the Philippines could achieve through assimilation. Propaganda like this made colonization palatable.

Colonized

Over just a few years, Americans abandoned the idea that they were part of a non-imperial country and decided to support the colonization of millions of people across the Pacific. What followed was exactly what you would expect from a colonial regime.

When the U.S. army first entered the Philippines, it was met with fierce resistance. There was brutal fighting which killed 5,000 Americans and up to 250,000 Filipinos. In the U.S., the conflict was known as the Philippine Insurrection; in the Philippines it was known as the Philippine War for Independence.

When the fighting ended, Christianity and English were imposed on the population, and vast tracts of Filipino land were exploited for the economic benefit of the United States. In the early years of the occupation, the judicial system was barely functional. Gen. Jacob H. Smith infamously ordered his troops to kill any criminal deemed capable of bearing arms—a category he interpreted as including boys over the age of ten. Although the United States promised eventual independence, it repeatedly postponed it while drafting more than 250,000 colonial troops to fight in World War I and World War II.

Finally, after the Second World War, when global empires were no longer chic, the U.S. granted the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946.

Further Thoughts

The colonization of the Philippines set a powerful precedent. Today, the United States still controls Guam, Puerto Rico, and several Pacific islands, and maintains roughly 750 military bases in more than 80 countries. There is no denying that the American empire, born in the Philippines, remains alive and thriving. What is most striking is that, even now, we accept it. There is no longer any need for religious justifications or inhumane World’s Fair exhibitions to persuade Americans to support our influence abroad.

But this history points to another precedent, one even more alarming to me: America’s ability to abandon its own ideals. We have always struggled to live up to our principles. The Declaration of Independence famously proclaims that “all men are created equal,” while the Constitution directly references slavery at least four times. Yet the fact that Americans were able to relinquish a core belief like anti-imperialism, the foundation of our own revolution, because of forces like religious fervor, media sensationalism, and propaganda raises troubling questions about what we truly stand for.

Today, we can already see core tenets of American identity, like the First Amendment and welcoming immigration, being chipped away in the court of public opinion even without official legislation. Upholding the principles we value requires more than politics alone; it requires that we actually continue to believe in them.

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Works Cited

Ablett, Phillip. Colonialism in Denial: US Propaganda in the Philippine-American War. Social Alternatives 23, no. 3 (2004): 22–28.

Brewer, Susan A. Selling Empire: American Propaganda and War in the Philippines. The Asia- Pacific Journal 11, no. 40 (2013): 1-26.

Byars, W. Vincent. 1899. “Imperialism or self-government?.” Speech, St. Louis, MO, November 14, 1899. Hathi Trust. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007958197

Delmendo, Sharon. The Star-entangled banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines. Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2005.

Ileto, Reynaldo C. Philippine Wars and the Politics of Memory. Positions: Asia Critique 13, no. 1 (2005): 215–34.

McKinley, William. 1899. “Benevolent Assimilation in the Philippines.” Speech, Washington, DC, December 21, 1898. MSC Institute of Technology. https://www.msc.edu.ph/centennial/benevolent.html

Miller, Stuart Cerighton. Benevolent Assimilation. Yale University Press, 1982.

Silva, John L. “Little Brown Brothers” St. Louis Blues: The Philippine Exposition, 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.” Positively Filipino: Online Magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora, June 7, 2013. http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/2013/6/little-brown-brothers- st-louis-blues-the-philippine-exposition-1904-st-louis-worlds-fair.

We know what to do on that day: buy things. But where did this event get its name?

Black Friday, 1869

The first use of the term Black Friday had nothing to do with Thanksgiving. Instead, it referred to one of the largest stock market scams in U.S. history.

In the summer of 1869, railroad barons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk met multiple times with President Ulysses S. Grant to pitch a suspicious economic theory. Their idea, which they called “crop movement,” claimed that all major business interests in the country required a rise in the price of gold. The logic was this: If gold prices went up, the value of greenbacks (unbacked paper currency issued after the Civil War) would fall. Cheaper greenbacks would make American goods more affordable overseas and, in theory, stimulate the struggling postwar economy.

Grant, a far better general than president and likely drunk during these meetings, was persuaded. He wrote to his Secretary of the Treasury instructing him to stop selling gold in exchange for greenbacks. Without federal intervention, the price of gold would soar. What Grant failed to grasp was that Gould and Fisk had already been quietly buying up enormous reserves of gold. As prices rose, the barons would profit immediately and then again when foreign markets, drawn by cheaper American goods, shipped their products on railroads they owned.

As regular investors began to catch wind of the scheme and tried to jump in themselves, President Grant finally realized what was happening. On the night of Thursday, September 23, he ordered the Treasury to sell off roughly one-third of its entire gold reserve.

By Friday morning, Wall Street was in pandemonium. Traders flooded the exchange: some desperately trying to buy, others scrambling to sell, while almost no one understood the full picture. On this first Black Friday, the price of gold opened at $145, shot up to $160, and then crashed to $133 within hours. Investors sold off other securities to cover their losses, triggering a broader collapse. By the end of the day, the stock market had fallen nearly 20%.

It’s not entirely clear whether this event directly influenced the naming of our modern shopping holiday, but the similarities are hard to ignore: crowds and sales. Today, a massive swarm of people might pack into a mall for a 20% discount on sweaters. Back then, an enormous crowd packed the floor of the stock exchange for a 20% discount on the entire U.S. economy.

Black Friday, 1950

While holiday sales had existed for years, the first time they were actually called Black Friday was in the 1950s. The term was coined by the Philadelphia Police Department to describe the chaos that erupted when suburbanite masses poured into the city the day after Thanksgiving, drawn by shopping, family outings, and the annual Army-Navy football game held that Saturday.

The entire police force was required to work overtime, and many officers spent the day dealing with absurd amounts of shoplifting. The nickname was not meant to be friendly.

By 1961, the spectacle had grown so enormous that Philadelphia businesses decided the day needed a new name, preferably one that didn’t villainize their customers. They tried rebranding it as “Big Friday,” but the public didn’t buy it.

Black Friday, 1980

In the 1980s, retailers tried once again to reinvent Black Friday by promoting a new, entirely false origin story. They claimed the name came from stores that operated at a loss (in the red) hoping to finish the year with a profit (in the black). Since accountants used red ink for losses and black ink for profits, the explanation sounded plausible, but it was nothing more than a marketing ploy designed to make the day’s shopping seem more palatable to those who feared large, unruly crowds.

Black Friday, Today

Today Black Friday traditions continue: there are sales, there are crowds, and there is government fraud and market manipulation.

We also get to keep the party going. Now we have Small Business Saturday for supporting local vendors, Secondhand Sunday for thrift stores, Cyber Monday for online shopping, and Giving Tuesday for charitable donations.

Maybe soon every day in America will just be dedicated to spending money…

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Works Cited

Garfield, James A. (March 1, 1870). Investigation Into the Causes of the Gold Panic: Report of the Majority of the Committee on Banking and Currency. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Gold, Jim. 2017. “A Brief History of Black Friday: How the Mega-Shopping Day Came to Be.” Money Talks News. https://www.moneytalksnews.com/slideshows/a-brief-history-of-black-friday-how-the-mega-shopping-day-came-to-be/.

Morgan, Donald P., and James Narron. 2016. “Crisis Chronicles: The Gold Panic of 1869, America’s First Black Friday - Liberty Street Economics.” Liberty Street Economics. https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/01/crisis-chronicles-the-gold-panic-of-1869-americas-first-black-friday/.

Pruitt, Sarah. 2015. “What’s the Real History of Black Friday?” History.com. https://www.history.com/articles/black-friday-thanksgiving-origins-history.

Martha’s Vineyard, the better of Massachusetts’ two offshore islands, has a long and storied history.

If you’d arrived 10,000 years ago, you would have encountered the Wampanoag, a people who farmed, fished, whaled, and told of a benevolent giant named Moshup who carved their island of Noepe into being.

If you visited in 1602, you would have met English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, and he would have explained that he was naming the island after his daughter Martha.

If you had shown up in 1778, you would have seen 5,000 British troops invading and forcing colonial islanders to surrender thousands of sheep.

But if you landed on Martha’s Vineyard in the mid-1800s, you would have found a surprising sight: almost everyone on the island was speaking in sign language.

The Deaf on Martha’s Vineyard

The first recorded deaf islander was Jonathan Lambert, who, according to a judge’s 1714 records, came to the island in the 1690s. Lambert had seven children, two of whom were deaf. As the number of Lambert descendants grew, so did this hereditary deafness on the island.

At the time, the island’s population was remarkably small and insular. Very few Vineyarders ever left except for maritime work, and by the 19th century, the island was producing some of the world’s finest whalers. One local claim even joked that more Vineyard men had sailed to China than had ever visited Boston, despite being less than 100 miles away from the city.

Because of this isolation, by 1850, 1 out of every 155 on the island was deaf, compared to 1 out of every 6,000 on the mainland.

MVSL

Deaf vineyarders created their own language. Predating modern American Sign Language (ASL) by 100 years, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) was almost entirely unique. While it was based on Old Kentish Sign Language, its most distinctive features came from the Indigenous Eastern Woodlands Algonquian Sign Language.

Deaf residents learned the language from a young age, but so did hearing people. Because sign language was so ubiquitous, newcomers had to learn it too or risk never fitting in. With nearly the entire island using MVSL, the deaf lived completely unaffected lives and were fully integrated into the tight-knit community. They worked as fishermen, farmers, and business owners, and were regarded as beloved friends and neighbors by deaf and hearing islanders alike.

A Culture Without Hearing

Over the course of a decade, anthropologist Nora Groce interviewed hundreds of islanders for her landmark study Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language. Their recollections revealed just how seamlessly deafness was woven into Vineyard life.

The deaf were fully involved at church:

“[Pastors] would get up in front of the audience and stand there and give a whole lecture in sign. No one translated it to the audience because everyone knew what they were saying.”

At social events:

“People would start off a joke in speaking and then finish it off in sign language. Especially if they were saying something dirty the punch line was always in sign language…[The deaf] always had a part in it, they were never excluded.”

And at businesses:

“We would sit around and wait for the mail to come in and just talk. Oftentimes people would tell stories and make signs at the same time so everyone could follow together. Of course, sometimes, if there were more Deaf than hearing there, everyone would speak sign language – just to be polite, you know.”

In her analysis, Groce concluded, “hearing islanders respected their deaf neighbors and thought of their deafness as secondary to their personalities and skills.”

At its peak, deafness was simply not a disability on Martha’s Vineyard. It was understood, respected, and island society reshaped itself around those who couldn’t hear, not the other way around.

Decline

The first schools for the deaf were founded in Europe in the 1760s, and they spread to America in the mid-1800s. They taught regular educational subjects in a mix of sign language and spoken language and focused heavily on societal integration. It was popular for these schools to teach Oralism, a movement promoting the use of lip-reading and speaking over sign language.

Alexander Graham Bell, famous for auditory inventions, was understandably obsessed with hearing loss. He spent years personally researching hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard by tracking islander’s family trees. Unfortunately, he was a eugenicist, and he used his findings to claim that deafness isolated populations and promoted intermarriage and the production of more deaf people. He supported banning sign language and supported oralism in deaf schools.

In the late 1800s, many on Martha’s Vineyard left the island to pursue education at the popular American School for the Deaf in Hartford; many decided not to come home. This pilgrimage, mixed with a new influx of summer tourists, fractured the community. In one of Groce’s interviews, a woman recalled,

“Somebody came from off-island and wanted to see if my kid was deaf and dumb. I said ‘Go to Heck.’”

By the 1920s, the island’s culture was unrecognizable. An interviewee remembered:

“People from New York came and said ‘Those people ought not be allowed to marry and bring forth Children’…They made fun of them! They didn’t even try to learn sign language.”

The schools on the mainland offered the promise of opportunity, but those in power at these institutions didn’t necessarily understand the best interests of deaf students. Figures like Alexander Graham Bell only accelerated the demonization of sign language and the deaf community.

By the end of the decade, there were only a few aging, deaf vineyarders left. Their language and unique culture, faded with them.

Further Thoughts

As the world has become increasingly global, we’ve lost some of the quirks and textures that defined smaller, more isolated communities. Regional accents are one example; they have flattened out as mobility has increased. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language was in some ways a regional accent, born from geography and history, shaped by community, and profoundly expressive of a place and its people.

The idea of disability is deeply shaped by surroundings. When enough people share a trait, culture can naturally adapt to accommodate them. Life on Martha’s Vineyard wasn’t simply more progressive and understanding than the rest of 19th-century America. It had evolved over 150 years in a context where deafness was common. The result was a society that functioned not by “helping” people with disabilities, but by integrating them so thoroughly that the line between disabled and non-disabled lost much of its meaning.

This unique piece of Martha’s Vineyard history offers an alternative vision to the treatment of those with disabilities: where all people, disabled or not, share the responsibility of understanding and adapting.

Martha’s Vineyard has continued to be a safe place for people with disabilities. Although it recently closed, Chilmark Chocolates was founded in 1984 with the purpose of training and employing disabled people. This last year, Camp Jabberwocky, a camp for those with learning disabilities, celebrated its 75th summer.

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Works Cited

Elvin, Alex. 2016. “Connecting the Vineyard to the Arctic, Whaling Family Tree Is Familiar.” The Vineyard Gazette, September 22, 2016. https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2016/09/22/connecting-vineyard-arctic-whaling-family-tree-very-familiar.

Groce, Nora Ellen. Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Harvard University Press, 1985.

Nović, Sara. 2024. “A Road Trip into the Deaf History of Martha’s Vineyard.” AFAR. https://www.afar.com/magazine/a-road-trip-into-the-deaf-history-of-marthas-vineyard.

Ricketson, Daniel. The History of New Bedford, Bristol County, Massachusetts. New Bedford, MA: self-published. OCLC 3768267.

“Wampanoag History — Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).” n.d. Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). Accessed November 17, 2025. https://wampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/wampanoag-history.

On May 10, 1940, the Nazis stormed across the Belgian border, overrunning the small nation in just days, before pushing into France. By June, the German war machine had seized control of nearly all of Western Europe.

Belgium and France were caught off guard by a rapid assault of tanks, aircraft, and infantry that the Germans called Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” This new style of warfare was fueled by the technological innovations of the interwar period: faster tanks, more reliable off-road vehicles, and long-range bombers and fighters. France’s outdated defensive strategy turned these advances into a recipe for disaster.

But there was another, overlooked factor. The French described their invaders as tireless, ruthless soldiers who marched for days without sleep. Their endurance wasn’t driven by discipline, patriotism, or training, but by methamphetamine.

Drugs in the Third Reich

Advances in chemistry during the early 20th century brought a flood of new drugs, some life-changing, others far more dangerous. Medications like Tylenol, penicillin, insulin, and vitamin supplements were hailed as breakthroughs that vastly extended life expectancy. But alongside these came tranquilizers, opiates, marijuana, and methamphetamine.

Hitler’s Third Reich promoted the belief that Aryan Germans were a master race, superior both physically and mentally. Substances like marijuana, opiates, alcohol, and even nicotine were considered indulgent and corrupting, and were banned. Methamphetamine, however, was different. Its energizing and confidence-boosting effects seemed to embody the Nazi ideal of the industrious German citizen and, above all, the tireless superhuman German soldier.

Pervitin

The government didn’t support people smoking meth out of pipes on the street. Instead, it was produced and packaged neatly by a pharmaceutical company. Beginning in 1937, Temmler-Werke Pharmaceuticals manufactured Pervitin, an over-the-counter pill intended to be taken several times a day. Each tablet contained three milligrams of about 80% pure methamphetamine. For context, regular meth users today use about 10 milligrams per day. Fueled by an aggressive advertising campaign, Pervitin became one of the most popular drugs in Germany, available in every corner pharmacy and even mixed into chocolate bars and chewing gum.

Although Temmler made millions from Pervitin’s commercial success, the real beneficiary was the German military. Dr. Otto Ranke, the Reich’s Defense Physiologist (and a daily Pervitin user himself) praised the drug as “an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad.” Honestly, Ranke was understating the effects of the meth pill. On Pervitin, soldiers could stay awake for more than fifty hours and march over forty miles without showing signs of fatigue. Even at low doses, the drug increased aggression and confidence while dulling empathy and emotion.

Hitler and Ranke agreed: Pervitin was a super-soldier serum. By 1940, the Nazi factories were pressing more than 800,000 pills a day.

Blitzkrieg

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, using Blitzkrieg tactics to seize the country in just over a month, killing roughly 100,000 people in the process. By May 1940, the Nazis turned their focus westward and invaded Belgium, which fell in only three days. Paris surrendered on June 10, and France soon followed. The German army, comprising more than a million soldiers and thousands of tanks and planes, advanced at an astonishing pace of nearly twenty-two miles per day.

This was the first fully mechanized invasion in history, and advancements in tanks, cars, and planes left human soldiers as the obvious weakest link. Pervitin was the solution. Historian Shelby Stanton wrote about the role of the drug:

“[Pervitin] was more important for them to keep punching during the Blitzkrieg than to get a good night’s sleep. The whole damn army was hopped up. It was one of the secrets of Blitzkrieg.”

A German bomber described a feeling of alert dissociation after taking Pervitin:

“I am wide awake, my heartbeat thunders in my ears. Why is the sky suddenly so bright, my eyes hurt in the harsh light… It’s almost like silence up here. Everything becomes immaterial and abstract. Remote, as if I were flying above my plane.”

Blitzkrieg could not have happened without methamphetamine. It kept German soldiers awake, alert, and marching far longer than Belgian or French defenders could endure. But its emotionally numbing side effects also stripped the invading forces of any possible empathy, fueling atrocities.

The Chasselay Massacre

In June 1940, near Lyon, France, German forces encountered a regiment of French colonial soldiers from Senegal known as the Tirailleurs Sénégalais. After fighting to their last bullet, the regiment was overrun by the Nazis. In a horrifying act of brutality, the Germans ordered the captured soldiers to line up in front of tanks and then run. They opened fire with machine guns and drove their tanks over the survivors, leaving the bodies deliberately unburied.

This unspeakable massacre was driven by several factors. During the invasion, German high command encouraged a reputation for terror, giving Blitzkrieg units near-total freedom to act as they wished. Nazi racial ideology also taught that Black soldiers were subhuman and undeserving of mercy. But the fact that these soldiers were taking multiple Pervitin a day may have played a role. According to the National WWII Museum, photographs taken before the massacre show “German soldiers totally calm and relaxed as they prepared to murder.” It in no way justifies the monstrous actions of these men, but by dulling empathy and heightening aggression, the drug may have accelerated their capacity for cruelty.

By the end of 1940, reports of German soldiers addicted to methamphetamine were becoming widespread—unsurprisingly. Soon after, the Nazi government stopped recommending Pervitin. But did they truly fear the dangers of addiction, or had the drug simply served its purpose for that phase of the war? Five years later, when Germany’s defeat was inevitable, the government urged its remaining soldiers to chew gum laced with 20 milligrams of cocaine to endure the final battles. Always a means to an end.

Further Thoughts

What interests me most is how the Nazis decided that all other drugs were dangerous, yet methamphetamine was acceptable. It fit neatly into their ideal social order where Aryan Germans were physically and mentally superior to all other races: able to stay awake longer, think faster, and work harder. To them, even alcohol and nicotine symbolized weakness, and so they were discouraged.

In the United States today, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine are not just legal but celebrated and woven into everyday life, while marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms remain stigmatized or struggle to shed their old reputations. I would argue that this is because alcohol and stimulants, like Pervitin in Nazi Germany, amplify the values of our own culture: mindless indulgence and an endless chase for productivity. Weed and mushrooms, by contrast, encourage relaxation and introspection, traits our society doesn’t want to reward. The United States fought fiercely against drug-centered counterculture movements in the 1960s and has continued to criminalize many of these substances from the late twentieth century to today. As much as these efforts targeted the drugs themselves, they were equally an attempt to preserve the status quo.

A cup of coffee won’t make us invade France, but we should think twice about what the drugs we normalize reveal about the society we’ve built.

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Works Cited

Andreas, Peter. 2020. “How Methamphetamine Became a Key Part of Nazi Military Strategy.” Time Magazine. https://time.com/5752114/nazi-military-drugs/.

Isenberg, Madison, “Volksdrogen: The Third Reich Powered by Methamphetamine” (2023). Senior Projects. Paper 2.

“Murdered Warriors: The Chasselay Massacre, June 1940.” 2020. The National WWII Museum. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/chasselay-massacre-june-1940.

Puder, David. 2021. “Blitzed: How Methamphetamine and Drugs Fueled Nazi Germany’s War Efforts | Podcast.” Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast. https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-podcast/episode-133-blitzed-hitler-nazigermany-pervitin.

Roos, Dave. n.d. “How Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Tactic Shocked the Allies in WWII.” History | HowStuffWorks. Accessed November 12, 2025. https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-war-ii/blitzkrieg-tactic.htm.

Sanders, Jay O. 2019. “World War Speed | About the Episode | Secrets of the Dead.” PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/preview-world-war-speed/4337/.

So when the second most powerful person in the world, Philip’s son, fell down a staircase and cracked his head open, the world took notice.

On His Deathbed

At first, royal physicians thought the young heir, Don Carlos, was completely fine, but after a few hours, fever set in, his head swelled up, he became delirious, and he fell into a coma. No cure the 16th century could offer was withheld. The dying prince was drenched in holy water, besieged by the prayers of friars, and subjected to the era’s traditional treatment for comas: the removal of part of his skull. Shockingly, Don Carlos’s situation did not improve.

Word spread throughout the empire. Churches held processions, pilgrimages were promised, and Spaniards inflicted self-harm in an attempt to repent and avoid the wrath of God. King Philip rushed to his son’s bedside at the University of Alcalá. According to legend, upon seeing the ghastly state of his son, the King looked to the Heavens and promised God a miracle if his son survived.

In a last-ditch effort, the friars decided to call upon Diego de Alcalá, later canonized as San Diego, who was known for almost magical healing abilities. The only problem was that Diego had died a century earlier.

There are two different stories about what happened next. In one account, the friars unearthed Diego’s body and carried it into Don Carlos’s room. At King Philip’s command, they pried open the prince’s swollen eyes and guided his hand to touch the saint’s corpse. In another, they placed Diego’s body beside the boy in bed and left the two together until morning. Story two is a little more insane, but either way, they definitely brought a 100-year-dead body into a dying teenager’s room.

The King left that night, believing his son’s chances were slim and no longer wishing to watch him slowly die. However, Don Carlos slept well. A week later, his fever broke and his eyes opened. A month later, the young prince was back to his old self.

His recovery had been inexplicable; the Spanish Empire rejoiced, and King Philip owed God a miracle.

The Automaton

In the immediate aftermath of his recovery, many of the attending physicians tried to claim credit for healing Don Carlos. All of this was put to rest when the prince himself declared that an apparition, dressed in Franciscan robes and carrying a cross, had appeared to him in his coma and assured him of recovery. Now, at risk of being put to death for heresy, no one could deny that Diego de Alcalá had saved the royal line. Here was King Philip’s inspiration for his miracle.

The king summoned Europe’s most famous clockmaker, Juanelo Turriano, to his court. He gave the Italian master engineer a very specific request and sent him away to his workshop. A year later, Turriano returned with a 16-inch-tall figurine. It wore brown Franciscan robes, carried a cross, and bore a feature every Spaniard would recognize: the prominent nose of Friar Diego de Alcalá.1 Turriano inserted a key into its back and turned it over and over before releasing the figure and…

King Philip had fulfilled his promise to God: he had brought Diego de Alcalá back from the dead, in robot form. The automaton is still functional at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The museum describes exactly what the relic is doing:

“The friar’s eyes move from side to side, while one arm raises a rosary’s cross for an automated kiss and the other arm strikes the chest in the “mea culpa” gesture from the Catholic Latin Mass.”

Why?

Our story, a mix of history and legend, ends here, but that leaves us with one question: Why make a robot of Diego de Alcalá?

At this point in Spanish history, the nation was in the midst of the Counter-Reformation. Most Spaniards rejected the ideas of Martin Luther’s 1517 Ninety-Five Theses and instead embraced medieval Catholicism in its entirety. Whereas Protestant reformers emphasized a personal relationship with God through study, reflection, and prayer, Spanish Catholicism stressed the importance of ritual devotion, believing that the more one prayed, and the more perfectly one did so, the closer one came to God. It also upheld the practice of indulgences, through which believers could pay money to the Church for expedited forgiveness of sins or even to have others pray on their behalf.

The Automaton performed ritual acts of prayer over and over, so, for the time, it was truly the perfect Catholic. There are two ways to understand why the king would want such a device for his miracle. One interpretation is collective: since the automaton walked in a circle, it could feasibly have offered its connection to God and healing abilities en masse. The other is more personal: it could pray for anyone too tired, too busy, or otherwise unable to do so themselves: the ultimate indulgence.

More Thoughts

King Philip had automated prayer.

Religion is, at its core, a human act. Regardless of belief, it is humans performing religion, through prayer, ritual, or reflection, that gives it form and meaning. Automating prayer feels uncanny because it doesn’t replace something necessary to human life, but something deeply tied to the human experience.

Today, we are automating more than ever with AI. Some use cases are undeniably helpful: repetitive coding tasks, sorting through information, managing schedules. These are practical and efficient, like automating a factory line, and they go towards maintaining the systems we need to keep our society running. But increasingly, we are automating things whose value lies precisely in the doing: art, music, writing. While they can make money, we shouldn’t reduce these activities to just their industries; they are natural behaviors of our species and expressions of being human.

We look back on that moment in Spanish history and marvel that people once believed they could pay their way into heaven. That they thought a glorified wind-up toy could offer spiritual relief. Perhaps one day, people will look back on us now with the same disbelief, wondering how we convinced ourselves that AI could satisfy the expression of the very things that make us human.

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Works Cited

Andrews, Evan. 2014. “7 Early Robots and Automatons | HISTORY.” History.com. https://www.history.com/articles/7-early-robots-and-automatons.

“Automaton of a Friar | National Museum of American History.” n.d. National Museum of American History. Accessed November 5, 2025. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_855351.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kie96iRTq5M

King, Elizabeth. 2002. “Clockwork Prayer: A Sixteenth-Century Mechanical Monk.” Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and Arts 1, no. 1 (Spring). https://blackbird-archive.vcu.edu/v1n1/nonfiction/king_e/prayer_print.htm.

L. J. Andrew Villalon. “Putting Don Carlos Together Again: Treatment of a Head Injury in Sixteenth- Century Spain.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 26, no. 2 (1995): 347–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/2542795.

Nasser, Latif, host. “A Clockwork Miracle.” Produced by WNYC Studios. Radiolab. December 27, 2018. Podcast, 25:32. https://radiolab.org/podcast/radiolab-clockwork-miracle.

Norman, Jeremy. n.d. “Juanelo Turriano Creates a Working Automaton of a Monk.” History of Information. Accessed November 5, 2025. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3078.