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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the ‘Olympics of Hula’

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Hawaiʻi's Merrie Monarch Festival is arguably the most prestigious event of its kind.

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Every spring, thousands of hula fans descend upon the Hawaiian town of Hilo and line the bleacher seats at Edith Kanaka’ole stadium. Thousands more across the islands—those unable to make it to Hilo themselves—watch live broadcasts on their televisions or computer screens. All these people are showing up and tuning in for the beloved Merrie Monarch Festival, sometimes referred to as "the Olympics of hula." It is arguably the world’s most prestigious (and consistently sold out) hula competition.

The three-day competition is part of several week-long events held throughout Hilo, home of Merrie Monarch since 1963. They include exhibition hula performances, a Hawaiian arts fair, an individual hula competition for the Miss Aloha Hula title, and a royal parade through downtown. In 2019, 23 halau (hula groups) will compete for a panel of seven judges. Upwards of 29 groups have competed in previous years.

Much credit is given to King Kalākaua, the last of Hawaiʻi’s kings, for reclaiming hula’s place in Hawaiian society. He was elected to the throne in the 1870s by the Hawaiian legislature, and often hosted hula-filled celebrations, including at his coronation. Merrie Monarch was Kalākaua’s endearing nickname and it is his contribution to hula that the competition honors every year.

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“It’s electrifying,” says Robert Ke’ano Ka’upu IV, who grew up in Hilo. Ka’upu has participated in the invitation-only competition for the last 30 years as a spectator, dancer, chanter, costumer, and now as kumu hula. In short, a kumu hula, sometimes abbreviated as just kumu, is a hula instructor, but they are also part historian and cultural guide, responsible for passing down Hawaiian traditions to their students from the kumus that came before them. His halau, Hālau Hi'iakaināmakalehua, will return to Merrie Monarch this year. “I don’t get excited like this for any other competition,” he says.

During the festival, every inch of a performance is scrutinized. Dancers are evaluated and earn points for the way they enter and exit the stage, their facial expressions, posture, costume, lei, and adornment, says Ka’upu. However, the bulk of scoring is placed on the kumu’s interpretation of a song, known as a mele, and how well dancers interpret their kumu’s vision of the performance.

To assist in deliberations, every competing group provides judges with a fact sheet that corresponds to each performance. These fact sheets, which are due before the competition, explain everything from a mele’s background to the meaning of the lei that dancers wear “so [the judges] get a better understanding of what each halau is doing,” says Ka’upu. He adds that his halau will submit more than 70 pages of fact sheets to the judging panel for the competition this year. Judges bestow high scores to those who best personify technical excellence, and ultimately the expression of Hawaiian identity through chant and dance.

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Individual and group performances fall into two categories: hula kahiko and hula ‘auana. Hula kahiko, or ancient hula, is hula before missionaries from New England arrived. Hula ‘auana is its contemporary counterpart and the type of hula visitors to Hawaiʻi typically see at a luau or shopping mall performance. While footwork in ancient and modern hula remains largely consistent, hula kahiko and hula ‘auana—in general—can be parsed by the instruments used and by dancers’ attire, notes Dr. Taupouri Tangarō, director of Hawaiian culture and protocols at University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, in an email. Dancers competing in the ancient hula category might use ‘Ili ‘ili, pairs of smooth pebbles arranged in each dancer’s hands to create percussive sounds. Alternately, the ‘ukulele commonly accompanies contemporary hula, along with the guitar or piano. The ‘ukulele has remained an inextricable part of Hawaiʻi’s identity since Portuguese immigrants brought it to the islands in the 19th century.

Hawaiian culture existed without the written word until western contact, so Hawaiians passed down knowledge orally and through dance. Through chant and movement, hula narrates place; honors goddesses and gods, such as Pele, goddess of fire; celebrates nature’s surroundings, from birds to waterfalls; and records genealogy and human emotion. “Kaulilua,” for example, is one of Merrie Monarch’s most performed ancient hulas. The mele likens a woman to the island of Kauaʻi’s verdant Mount Waiʻaleʻale.

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Hula is a celebrated cultural tradition today, but there was a period—nearly five decades—when hula’s role in Hawaiian culture was suppressed. In 1819, King Kamehameha II let the kapu system, a set of rules and regulations that governed many aspects of Hawaiian life, lapse. In doing so, he created a religious vacuum and ideal conditions for Christianity to take root when American missionaries arrived the following year. As American awareness of hula gained momentum, so did the demonization of hula in the press and public policy. By Christian standards, there was “no place for what was seen as lascivious gyration,” or “the works of the Devil,” notes Tangarō of missionary’s sentiments toward hula.

Much of the monarchy converted to Christianity and this new value system influenced the Hawaiian trajectory, including the decisions of Queen Kaʻahumanu. Kaʻahumanu was King Kamehameha I’s confidant and favorite wife. After Kamehameha’s death, she co-ruled the monarchy with King Kamehameha II. In 1830, a converted Kaʻahumanu issued a ban on public hula performances. According to a paper in The Hawaiian Journal of History, it was likely an attempt to silence “public demonstration of sexuality on the grounds that it was vulgar, savage, and a violation of their Christian morals.”

As Western influence grew and Hawaiʻi’s fate approached annexation and eventual U.S. statehood, so did the need for local manpower to fuel its new sugar economy. In 1858, missionaries with a keen interest in sugar’s profits pursued legislation to suppress hula even further, citing lethargy in sugar cane fields, promiscuity, and attrition from Sunday service. Records show a code of conduct published in 1859 required a license for ticketed, public hula performances. Yet hula persisted under the mesh of legal restrictions and moral shaming. Hawaiians still danced, particularly in more rural areas where government oversight trickled, missionary presence was scarce, and police all the more so. “Hula was never lost,” says Tangarō.

And although the decree requiring licenses was repealed in 1870, opposition to hula continued to play out in the press through the early 20th century. The Hawaiian Gazette, a pro-sugar industry newspaper, ran an editorial in December 1886 condemning hula as, “an immoral dance,” that “cannot claim for itself a poetry of motion or a poetic idea,” and declared, “It is no use Hawaiʻi posing as a Christian State, or even a civilized State, until the stain of the hula is removed.”

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That same year, King Kalākaua welcomed public hula performances at his 50th birthday celebration (his Silver Jubilee) on the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu. Several years prior, hula performers were present at his coronation. Before Merrie Monarch added hula competition to its event lineup, the festival’s early years hearkened back to the spirit of Kalākaua’s Silver Jubilee. His frequently cited words—“Hula is the language of the heart, and therefore the heartbeat of the Hawaiian people”—capture the sentiment of a renaissance that revived aspects of Hawaiian culture formerly suppressed, including music, art, medicine, sport, and, of course, hula.

Today, hula is practiced and performed globally, with halaus across the U.S. and abroad. As hula resonates around the world, it endures in Hawaiʻi. “Hula is place, it is its people, it is all that is Hawaiʻi,” says Ka’upu. And as far as hula competition goes, Merrie Monarch remains its benchmark. Come late April 2019, as in years past, proud bare feet will assemble on stage in Hilo, earthy fragrance permeating the air, spectators rapt as the culmination of months and sometimes years of rigorous practice begins and centuries of history come alive.


You Can Apply to Spend a Month Making Art in a Utah Ghost Town

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Welcome to Cisco.

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In the 1880s, Cisco was an old Western railroad town under the starry Utah sky. The Denver and Rio Grande Western traveled through, and visitors mingled with local ranchers and shepherds in the city’s saloon, restaurants, and hotels. In 1924, oil, turquoise, and natural gas were discovered nearby, which led to growth, but as freeways and more locomotives began to skirt the tiny Utah town, it became easier and easier to bypass it. Today, it’s a certified ghost town, with only one inhabitant. Her name is Eileen Muza, a visual artist, and she’s starting a residency to bring more creatives to the beautiful and abandoned outpost.

Muza has lived in Cisco since 2015, and has spent the last four years restoring the ghost town with salvaged materials. She started Home of the Brave, a three- to five-week nonprofit residency, with the help of her two sisters, Renée and Margaret, to both preserve and share the unique character of the place.

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Muza first learned of Cisco from a seatmate on a flight, as she was on her way to see the rock art in remote Horseshoe Canyon. “When I first came through Cisco I could not believe all the things left behind and even had trouble believing it was a ghost town at all,” says Muza. “I even knocked on the door of what would eventually be my log cabin, thinking there might be some crotchety old man inside that I could talk to and get the scoop. But of course there was nobody.” She was struck by the many abandoned buildings (approximately 100, most of which are dilapidated sheds and shacks) and building materials left scattered about. Muza estimates that there are only seven fully intact buildings, one of which is her log cabin, another being Ethel’s Cafe. She eventually decided to leave her “normal” Chicago life for permanent residence in the ghost town. “After some haggling I bought the lots with the post office and log cabin on them from the owner. He was happy that I wanted to live there and fix it up since he was getting too old to do it himself,” she says.

The artist was understandably terrified, and stories of murder and mayhem from the town’s history (from shootings at Ethel's, to fugitives passing through, to sinister alleged visits from Ted Bundy) certainly didn’t help. Inviting friends and family to come visit made the transition easier. Seeing how Cisco impacted visitors is what inspired Muza to create the artist residency. “I find this to be a good spot for an artist residency is because it is so unique. All eras of history are represented here in different states of decay,” she says. “Many people might come through and just see a garbage dump, but I see layers and layers of human life.” In Cisco, Muza has found strange examples of everyday life in an old desert town: a television hidden in a late-19th-century dugout, a half-full bottle of maple syrup sitting where a wood-burning stove used to be, an old military jacket stuffed between two walls (with a packet of tobacco in it, stamped 1939). “All things here seem to have had many lives … so I find it inspiring to see how others lived here,” she says. An old railroad car on the land had once been lived in; the bathtub and gun rack are still there. And in one of Muza’s houses, she found a painted wooden sign, which had been used as a playing card table, embedded in the floor.

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Home of the Brave will invite one artist at a time, two times a year, and this year the inaugural residency will begin October 1. The remote workspace is at least an hour from just about anywhere. “It’s a really good place for solitude,” Muza says. “It would provide a unique opportunity for someone who is not used to rural living.” The studio space is in a remodeled 1970s Winnebago Brave camper in the center of town, with windows facing east toward Sal Mountain and west toward the Bookcliffs. Artists of all kinds—visual artists, writers, dancers, musicians—are invited to apply.

For those who can handle extreme seasonal temperature swings and imposing presence of desert dust and wind storms, Cisco is an ideal place to escape any kind of comfort zone. With old oil wells and outhouses as a backdrop, Muza has rebuilt and restored big chunks of what remains of Cisco with her hands. “I have all this space here and I feel like I need to share it on another level and give someone an experience they might not ever have.”

The Beloved Japanese Novelist Who Became a Queer Manga Icon

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Nobuko Yoshiya’s stories of frustrated, forbidden love helped establish a genre read by millions.

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There is an ordinary building in Kamakura, Japan, that used to belong to an extraordinary woman. Nestled among elms and red maples, the house is an oasis, resembling a traditional teahouse in the Sukiya style characteristic of Kyoto’s 16th-century imperial villas. Now it is a memorial and museum dedicated to its former occupant, prolific Japanese novelist Nobuko Yoshiya.

The Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum is unusually hard to visit, but if you manage to make it inside, you will see a small arsenal of memorabilia from Yoshiya’s life: first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts, photos, and some of her original furniture. But the real allure is the house itself, preserved just as it was when Yoshiya died in 1973—including the study where she penned the novels that made her one of 20th-century Japan’s most successful writers.

Yoshiya never married; instead she lived with a female partner, Chiyo Monma, for 50 years. Despite a life lived against the grain, Yoshiya became one of Japan’s most beloved artists. She published feminist stories that focused on the strong emotional and romantic bonds between women—one with the notable title Danasama muyo (Husbands Are Useless). The impact of her novels is still being felt, far beyond the feminist and queer communities where she has become a particularly celebrated icon. Her writing laid the groundwork for shōjo manga, a genre of comics and graphic novels aimed toward teen girls that includes iconic titles such as Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena—widely devoured by millions upon millions all over the world. “There is not a single woman alive who doesn’t know who Yoshiya Nobuko is,” declared a 1935 profile published in the magazine Hanashi.

Yoshiya was born in 1896 in Niigata, Japan, the only daughter in a family of five children—an upbringing that had an impact on her approach to gender roles, and her resentment of the male domination of society. In 1915, Yoshiya moved to Tokyo, where she resided for the rest of her life. She began attending meetings of Seitō, Japan’s pioneering feminist magazine, where she met other modern female writers attempting to carve out lives not beholden to men. With the support of this community, she cut her hair into an unconventionally short bob and began to wear men’s clothing.

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Just a year later, Yoshiya published a 52-story collection called Hana monogatari. Translated into English as Flower Tales, the collection details intense emotional relationships between girls—and introduced many of the motifs and symbols that define modern shōjo manga, such as the boarding school dormitory setting, imagery involving Western flowers, and a dreamily wistful style of writing. Yoshiya used flowers, most often roses, to symbolize the emotional intensity of these girls’ relationships. Each story was paired with an illustration by the famed artist and doll creator Jun’ichi Nakahara, who drew schoolgirls with the huge, bubbly eyes so characteristic of manga and anime today. Most of the Flower Tales concern unrequited crushes or longing among women, often for another student or a teacher.

These stories soared in popularity and cemented Yoshiya’s place among the canon of popular Japanese writers. According to Sarah Frederick, a professor of Japanese literature at Boston University, Yoshiya’s stories can be read two ways: as queer (though they hold back from anything more shockingly sexual than a kiss) or as purely, if intensely, platonic.

In 1919, shortly after Flower Tales, Yoshiya wrote one of her best-known—and most scrutinized—stories, ”Yaneura no nishojo” (“Two Virgins in the Attic”). Many critics read it as quasi-autobiographical, as it follows two students, Akiko and Tamaki, who feel like outcasts in their dormitory. They spend all their time in a triangular attic, where they develop a romantic longing. They spy on each other in the bathroom and smell each other’s scent of “lily magnolia”—all culminating in a kiss. Urban Japanese architecture has a notable lack of attics, yet they commonly appear in modern-day shōjos—a lineage almost directly traceable to Yoshiya.

Many manga scholars consider “Two Virgins in the Attic” to be the first prototype of yuri manga, the modern extension of shōjo that is more explicitly focused on lesbian romantic and sexual relationships, according to Hiromi Tsuchiya-Dollase, a professor of Japanese at Vassar College. Though yuri is now considered a genre in its own right, some of the most popular shōjo mangas of all time, including Sailor Moon, have subplots that veer into yuri.

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Though male homosexuality had a long history in Japanese culture, literature, and art, at the time the country had no conception at all of sexual relationships between two women, Tsuchiya-Dollase says. In the Edo period, which spanned most of the 17th through 19th centuries, it was considered normal and often idealized for men to engage in love affairs with both women and men. These same-sex relationships existed under a code of ethics called nanshoku, wherein older men could pursue younger men who had not yet undergone coming-of-age ceremonies.

But at the turn of the 20th century, Japanese culture clearly understood the specific concept of an S relationship, or a passionate friendship between two girls (the “S” stands for “sister”). In the 1910s and 1920s, S relationships were everywhere in literature written for schoolgirls, where these intensely emotional relationships were seen as training for eventual marriage with a man. Though many modern readers classify Yoshiya’s work as lesbian literature, the term “lesbian”—or in Japan, rezubian—only came into popular use after Yoshiya’s death. Instead, her work belongs squarely in the acceptable realm of S relationships—though it was deeply imbued with what we now recognize as queerness.

These inclusive if shrouded conceptions of same-sex desire changed when Sigmund Freud began publishing works on the aberration of homosexuality in the early 1910s, according to Michiko Suzuki, a professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at University of California, Davis. It suddenly became dangerous for women to hold hands in public, or even exchange letters. In 1911, two high school girls died together in a high-profile “love suicide” under the understanding that their love could not continue in the post-graduation world, writes Peichen Wu in the collection Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia.

This shift coincided with Yoshiya’s ascendance to commercial success. After “Two Virgins in the Attic,” she stopped writing about schoolgirls and turned to housewives. Her stories lost almost all explicit queerness, and instead focused on unhappy marriages in which a wife, after learning of her husband’s affair, takes solace in the arms of a close female friend. But whenever something resembling a queer relationship begins to form, one character will end it in a typical “bury your gays” trope—usually by dying or becoming a nun.

Yoshiya’s queerness may have been veiled in her work, but her private life was no secret. Early in her 20s, Yoshiya met Monma, who was working as a math teacher at the time. The two soon became inseparable, and in classic lesbian style, moved in together within a year of meeting each other. After Monma’s job sent her away for 10 months, Yoshiya mailed her beloved a rather practical proposal.

1. We will build a small house for the two of us.
2. I will become the head of household and officially adopt you.
3. We will ask a friend to serve as a go-between, and hold a wedding reception.

Same-sex marriage was not, and still is not, legal in Japan, so adoption was the only legal recourse that would allow two unrelated women to co-own property or make medical decisions together. Monma accepted, and the two moved into a small house in Tokyo. By 1928, Yoshiya had amassed enough royalties to own five homes in Japan, one of which would become her future museum.

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During Yoshiya’s life, Tokyo hosted other female writers with known romantic relationships with other women. In the early 20th century, prominent Japanese-Russian translator Yoshiko Yuasa became one of the first female Japanese writers to go public with her relationship with a woman, and later in life explicitly identified as a lesbian. But Yoshiya stands out as someone who both wrote about same-sex love and friendship, and also lived with a female partner for her entire life, Suzuki says. Japanese society didn’t seem to mind—or at least they managed to ignore it. During World War II, the government even commissioned Yoshiya to report on the war.

The first iterations of illustrated shōjo comics appeared in magazines not long after the war. Despite their intended audience of teenage girls, they were largely created by male artists who either needed the money or saw shōjo manga as a training ground for shōnen manga, the genre aimed at boys. Either way, these men didn’t know what their teen readers wanted. “So they read Yoshiya’s stories and copied her works,” Tsuchiya-Dollase says. She cites Osamu Tezuka’s popular Astro Boy manga, for example, as an example of an early manga that drew inspiration from Yoshiya’s themes of sentiment and melodrama. Similar to the plight of many of the orphaned heroines in Yoshiya’s work, Astro Boy is discarded by his father and creator, who had made him to fill the void of his dead son. Suzuki believes this theme, of longing to be loved by absent parents, derives directly from Yoshiya’s work.

Women did not begin working as shōjo manga artists until the 1960s, often making their debuts—as Yoshiyo had as a young writer—by entering competitions in magazines. These new female artists began writing more complex and authentic stories of girlhood, which sold better among their target audience. By the 1970s, which some see as the golden age of shōjo manga, women artists outnumbered men. By the early 1990s, artists began expanding the genre to include young warriors (Red River and Sailor Moon) and ecologically inspired science fiction (Please Save My Earth and Moon Child). Steered by this new female vanguard, shōjo plots drifted away from heterosexual romance and toward self-fulfillment.

In the late 1990s, shōjo manga more directly inspired by Yoshiya—primarily focusing on the love between girls—experienced a major revival when writer Oyuki Konno published Maria Is Watching, which Tsuchiya-Dollase calls a direct descendant of Flower Tales. Like Yoshiya’s early work, Maria takes place in a dormitory, teems with melodrama, and tells the stories of strong emotional relationships between young girls. The manga also involves Yoshiya’s beloved European roses and distinctly floral dialogue.

In turn, Maria inspired a new burst of shōjo manga written by women that focuses on strong female bonds. Notable examples include Magic Knight Rayearth and Nana as well as Revolutionary Girl Utena, set in a magical academy featuring queer characters who transgress gender roles and so, so many roses—in tornadoes, graveyards, and even a garden that hosts a very queer dance. “Yoshiya created new ways for girls and women to imagine themselves,” Suzuki says. “They uphold the ideal of female sisterhood above all else.”

Early in her career, Yoshiya wrote a letter to her Monma threatening war on male writers who she saw as chauvinist pigs, who could care less about the meaningful relationships girls could have with each other. “Almost to the point of endorsing obscenity, they push on girls the idea that they should be flirting with men,” she wrote, coming to what she saw as a perfectly logical conclusion. “I will do battle with them face-to-face shouting ‘begone you demons’ and exorcise them from our midst.” The sensitive students, powerful magic-wielders, and ecological warriors in ashōjo manga today are keeping up that fight.

Found: The Last Survivor of the Atlantic Slave Trade

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New research has placed a new name in a special place on the list of 'Clotilda' survivors.


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When Cudjoe Lewis and other enslaved people under the cruel thumb of James Meaher, brother of shipbuilder and illegal slave trafficker Timothy Meaher, learned that they had been emancipated, their first thought was to return home, to West Africa. After realizing the voyage would be too costly, Lewis was chosen to ask Timothy Meaher for reparations in the form of land to live on. According to Lewis, Meaher responded, “Fool do you think I goin’ give you property on top of property?”

So, the newly freed people decided to save their money to purchase land from him, even reducing their diets to molasses and bread. Eventually, they bought several acres, which they christened African Town, now known as Africatown. It was a community where traditional African village life merged with its new setting in the American South. There was an elected chief and medicine man, and the self-sufficient enclave spoke its own language. It was not Africa, but it was quite a turnaround for Lewis and more than 100 others, who had arrived in Mobile as slaves just five years earlier—more than 50 years after the international slave trade had been outlawed.

The ship they arrived on, Clotilda, is considered the last slave ship to traverse the Atlantic with human cargo, and it was thought that Lewis, who died in 1935, thought to be aged 94, was the last survivor of that trade. However, according to new research published in the journal Slavery & Abolition, someone outlived Lewis by two years: a woman who was a young girl when she boarded the Clotilda. Her name was Redoshi, but it took some literary, historical, and archival work to find her.

According to Hannah Durkin, lead author of the article and a researcher at Newcastle University, this woman was first alluded to in a letter that author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote to Langston Hughes in 1928: “Oh! almost forgot. Found another one of the original Africans, older than Cudjoe about 200 miles upstate on the Tombig[b]ee river. She is most delightful, but no one will ever know about her but us.”

That was almost the case.

“She [Hurston] didn’t name her, so Redoshi’s story was thought for decades to be lost,” says Durkin via email. “But I happened to notice that Hurston listed a West African–born woman in the index of her posthumously published book, Every Tongue Got to Confess, and I put the pieces together.” The name listed there was Sally Smith. In the 1989 book Selma: A Bicentennial History, historian Alston Fitts identified the West African name for a person called Sally Smith, or “Aunt Sally,” as Redoshi.

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Durkin began diving through census records to connect the dots, which led her to a newspaper article from the Montgomery Advertiser, where the woman had actually given an interview in 1932. Then Durkin found footage of her from a 1938 United States Department of Agriculture film about former slaves who had become farmers. “The most significant discovery by far” in her work, Durkin says. “I could now begin to see her as a living person. She wasn’t just a name on a page anymore.”

It appears that Redoshi was indeed the Clotilda survivor Hurston had mentioned. Redoshi died in 1937, after Lewis. One source Durkin found put her age at 110, though the researcher believes that to be an exaggeration.

Redoshi was brought to the United States with the founders of Africatown, but she never became part of the community. Instead, she lived the rest of her life on the plantation she was originally sold to, Bogue Chitto, where she eventually owned land of her own. According to Durkin, the Montgomery Advertiser claimed Redoshi had met Lewis in 1932, though Durkin is unsure how they might have encountered one another. Historian Emma Langdon Roche wrote in 1914 that Lewis and Africatown received occasional news from two married survivors living in Selma, about 35 miles from Bogue Chitto, whom Roche believed to have been Redoshi and her husband. He was known as William or Billy, according to a University of Newcastle press release, and was taken with Redoshi. It’s believed he died in the 1910s or 1920s.

Its population has gone up and down over the years, but Africatown survives today, and it is thought that some of the residents are directly descended from people who were brought over on Clotilda. A direct descendant also appears in living rooms across the country every night: Questlove, drummer and producer for The Roots—the band for The Tonight Show—learned in a 2017 episode of Finding Your Roots that he is directly descended from Charles and Maggie Lewis, Clotilda survivors and among the original founders of Africatown.

The Promise and Perils of Resurrecting Native Americans’ Lost Crops

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Who owns ancient seeds?

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Elizabeth Horton never intended for Plum Bayou to become a testing site for recovering lost crops. By planting historical staples such as Chenopodium berlandieri, a type of goosefoot and a cousin of modern-day quinoa, she sought to teach visitors about the agriculture of the Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park’s original inhabitants. Yet Horton’s plants aren’t originals—they’re wild cousins of the crops that fed North America since at least 3900 BC. Due to a Native shift toward maize cultivation around 900 AD, and the devastation of Euro-American colonialism, these “lost crops” have been extinct for 500 years.

But when Horton planted wild goosefoot, knotweed, and marsh elder in her garden, something uncanny happened. “The plants in the garden started behaving very strangely,” Horton says. Under her care, the wild plants grew large, their seeds fat. It’s possible that the plants Horton cultivated are feral—strains that were once domesticated, but re-entered the wilderness long ago. It’s also possible that by tending to these wild plants, Horton triggered the same biological reactions that ancient Native Americans prompted when they originally domesticated these species.

The latter explanation most intrigues the scientists of the Lost Crops Network, of which Horton is a member. Researchers affiliated with the Network are using advances in genetics to understand how Native Americans domesticated and cultivated now-extinct ancient crops. By comparing the genetic material of ancient archaeological seeds to that of their wild modern counterparts, says Logan Kistler, Curator of Archaeobotany and Archaeogenomics at the Smithsonian, scientists can better understand the development of agriculture—and of humanity itself. “The history of humanity is the history of domestication,” Kistler says.

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Besides retracing history, this research offers the potential of re-domesticating these lost crops. Currently, scientists can use traditional plant breeding techniques to select for qualities similar to plants’ now-extinct domesticated cousins. By comparing the DNA of the plants they breed to that of archaeological seed samples, they can create as close a replica as possible.

Yet Natalie Mueller, an ethnobotanist and Cornell University postdoc affiliated with the Network, anticipates a far-out alternative. Advances in genetic engineering, particularly CRISPR, allow scientists to more easily and precisely edit plant genomes for specific characteristics. There’s already speculation that this technology could allow scientists to engineer favorable characteristics from ancient plant DNA into modern cultivars. As this technology advances, Mueller writes, it may be possible for researchers to genetically engineer exact modern replicas of lost ancient plants, de-extincting them Jurassic Park-style.

Re-domesticating extinct indigenous crops holds great potential to sustain communities grappling with food insecurity, says Paul Patton, Professor of Anthropology and Food Studies at Ohio University. He’s been growing wild goosefoot in test plots in Southeastern Ohio, with the eventual goal of providing the indigenous quinoa alternative as an economic boost to a region devastated by the environmental effects of boom-and-bust industries such as mining. Goosefoot is healthier than wheat, corn, and other staples, says Patton. Its tangy greens taste like a cross between spinach and arugula.

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Yet goosefoot is more than a tasty vegetable—it’s Native American heritage. “Each one of these seeds is a cultural history that really captures the lives of the people who were growing them and who passed them from generation to generation,” says Patton. With the possibility of redomestication and even commercialization on the horizon, researchers must contend with the implications of this cultural history. Who should have the right to extract genetic material from archeological seeds that are the heritage of tribes across Eastern North America—especially since the very act of extracting DNA from ancient seeds destroys them? If ancient crops are redomesticated and even commercialized, who should profit?

Native American farmers and activists have long been grappling with questions like these. For Taylor Keen, seeds aren’t commodities or artifacts—they’re alive and sacred. “There’s an analogy to our ancient blood lines,” he says. An Omaha and Cherokee instructor at Creighton University’s Heider College of Business, Keen founded Sacred Seeds, a Native American-run collective dedicated to reviving rare indigenous cultivars.

While Sacred Seeds works with existing cultivars, rather than lost crops, similar questions of cultural heritage and food sovereignty animate the group’s work. Keen founded Sacred Seeds after a mentor asked him a stirring question: “What are you doing to protect your corn?” Not only were indigenous corn cultivars, including those of his own tribes, at risk of extinction from disuse, Keen’s mentor told him, but they were at risk from large agricultural companies seeking to patent and profit from Native people’s heritage. Ironically, Keen came to realize, the vastly diverse, richly colored, starchy Native maize varieties that were the origins of yellow and white American corn had been largely displaced. Keen discussed the threat at later meetings with fellow Cherokee leaders: Could their sacred corn become the property of Monsanto?

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These anxieties are shared by indigenous farmers worldwide. Since 1980, American companies have been able to patent plants, and as of 2011, three big agricultural companies, including Monsanto, controlled nearly 75 percent of global seed sales. While companies claim that patenting seeds—many of which are genetically modified—inspires innovation, farmers from India to Mexico and the United States have mobilized against what they view as the commodification of indigenous agricultural knowledge for corporate, rather than community, profit.

Meanwhile, Native activists and organizations across the United States, from the Iroquois White Corn Project to the Native-owned Sierra Seed company, are reviving indigenous cultivars as a means of achieving food sovereignty. For Keen, agriculture is religious, a connection to maize’s cosmological significance—a “romance with Mother Corn,” he says.

In light of this culturally profound, yet historically exploited, legacy, the possibility of re-domesticating lost Native American crops is both exciting and deeply fraught. That’s why Mueller says scientists have a responsibility to contend with these ethical questions while lost crop redomestication is still in its infancy.

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Some safeguards are already in place. Under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, scientists have a legal and moral commitment not to take any material, including seeds, from burial or other sacred sites. Most ancient North American seeds that archaeologists have recovered are currently held in public museum collections, which have stringent guidelines about DNA testing. Still, Mueller writes, the politics of who manages and accesses archaeological seeds reflect broader global power imbalances.

Horton of Plum Bayou says that as a government servant, her primary obligation is to the public: She sends seeds from her garden to non-profits, educational institutions, and federally recognized tribes—not corporations. Meanwhile, Mueller and Patton have presented their research to tribes and begun to forge connections with Native food-sovereignty activists.

Many Native people have a living relationship to the wild versions of these extinct, domesticated plants. Choctaw farmers Amy and Ian Thompson dedicated their Nan Awaya Heritage Farmstead to reviving traditional foods, including goosefoot. Ian Thompson is currently working on a cookbook that will include a recipe for lambsquarter stew made with hickory nuts and the seeds of wild Chenopodium.

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While Mueller urges scientists to forge these connections as soon as possible, the commercialization of North American quinoa is still distant. For now, it is spring. In Plum Bayou, delicate shoots of erect knotweed peek out of the rich black soil. In Omaha, Taylor Keen is planting his garden again. Some years are better than others: In 2018, up to 80 percent of the crop was lost to excess rain. But Keen is animated by the promise of a new season. The first time he saw his corn grow, he marvelled at the plants. “One leaf turned to two, two turned to four,” he says. “It was a beautiful thing.”

Found: Hot Pink ‘Pagodas’ at the Bottom of the Sea

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A deep-sea expedition uncovers a candy-colored oasis off the Gulf of California.

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Around 6,500 feet below the Gulf of California, Mexico, the seafloor hosts a candy-colored light show. Hot pink, orange, and snow-white plumes strobe out from a deep sea valley ridged with pagoda-shaped hydrothermal vents, called volcanic flanges. There are “mirrors pools,” too, upside-down puddles of vent fluid that reflect back whatever swims beneath them in a deep-sea mirage.

While conducting a routine survey of microbial communities that dwell around hydrothermal vents, Mandy Joye, a microbiologist at the University of Georgia, discovered one of the most colorful chemical hotspots in the ocean. Joye’s team previously surveyed the area in November 2018 with a mapping bathymetry robot, which stumbled upon a patch of craggy topography that resembled mountains at the bottom of the sea. Joye returned to investigate the site in late February 2019 in an expedition on the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel, funded by the National Science Foundation. What she found was astonishing: an entire valley of massive hydrothermal vents spewing sherbet-colored fluids.

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Joye’s team initially expected to discover some novel microbial habitats, but no one expected anything on this scale. The largest of the towers reached up to 75 feet high and 32 feet across. And each vent rippled in volcanic flanges, horizontal ledges that build up as hydrothermal fluid flows out of the vent and reacts with the surrounding seawater. When 350-degree-centigrade hydrothermal vent fluid meets two-degree boring old seawater, spontaneous sulfides precipitate to create insoluble structures that harden like rock.

Joye likens the structure of these vents to a blood vessel: There’s one central artery and many smaller capillaries that each feed out into a flange of their own. The team observed flanges of an enormous size, some reaching 13 feet across and seven feet deep. Researchers often call these vents “pagodas,” as the flanges can resemble the jutting eaves in traditional Asian architecture. One flange looked so distinctively like a spaceship that Joye’s team nicknamed it “the Millennium Falcon.”

What surprised Joye the most, however, was that the plumes erupting from the flanges were shockingly, unabashedly pink. “We never saw pink before,” Joye says. “It looked just like someone blew cotton candy over these rocks to create pink pagodas! So wispy, beautiful, and cloud-like.” While the deep sea abounds with charismatic bioluminescent animals—popular examples include the anglerfish and comb jelly—biochemical reactions are just as colorful. “Biochemistry requires metals, and metals have color,” Joye says. “It’s just a big flashing beacon that’s saying, ‘This is a super fascinating biomolecule.’”

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The underside of each flange holds a seemingly mirrored pool that gave rise to these pink and orange plumes. This mirage happens due to the exceptionally high heat of the hydrothermal fluid, which Joye describes as a “funky and bizarre” soup of toxins. “These pools stink of hydrogen sulfide, and they’re charged with metals like arsenic and selenium and mercury,” she says. So for an organism to thrive around these vents, their biology must be capable of taming an unimaginably toxic chemistry.

Aside from these otherworldly vents, Joye also uncovered something eerily familiar. Heaps and heaps of trash littered the seafloor, including mounds of fishing line and plastic bags, an artificial Christmas tree, and a Mylar balloon emblazoned with the smiling face of Elsa from Disney’s Frozen. “It takes your breath away when you see these majestic incredible natural wonders, and then you pivot 20 degrees to the right and there’s a trash heap,” Joye says.

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In the coming months, Joye’s team will study the microbial samples they retrieved from these vents, assessing the organisms’ metabolism and genomics. They want to better understand the relationship between geochemistry and temperature in creating an extreme environment in which only a microbe could thrive.

Researchers at This Base in Antarctica Eat Better Than You Do

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And the chef does it with just one food shipment a year.

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In July of 2018, Lewis Georgiades ran out of mayonnaise. The British chef has cooked everywhere from small, family-run establishments to Michelin star restaurants in France. He knows how to problem-solve. At any other kitchen, Georgiades might have offered a nice olive oil and vinegar as a substitute, while a coworker ran out to buy a tub of mayo. But such spur-of-the-moment solutions were impossible this time.

That’s because Chef Georgiades’s kitchen is in Antarctica: at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station. At a latitude of 67 degrees south, July is the dead of winter. Georgiades had tried to warn his diners as they piled mayo high on their plates. They didn’t listen. The next food delivery was three months away.

At Rothera, the population of more than 100 Antarctic researchers and support staff plummets to around 20 when winter hits and cuts the base off from the outside world. Sunlight is a fleeting and peripheral commodity. For about two months each year, the sun never comes above the horizon. Working at Rothera means total isolation from family, friends, and normalcy.

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It also means no local produce, no easy delivery of fresh meat, and no trips to the market to purchase herbs, garnishes, or trending ingredients. But that doesn’t stop seasoned chefs from spending anywhere from six months to many years in an Antarctic kitchen. Why? Because cheffing at Rothera gets to the core of why they cook.

“It’s a completely different world, and one far from that of TripAdvisor and food critics,” Georgiades says. “Instead, it’s all about the very basic need of providing good food in order to make people’s day. And keep them happy, and give them a sense of comfort and home through food … That’s what drives me.” At Rothera, there’s one kitchen and nowhere else to eat. The food better be good.

Moroccan tagines. Burritos. Fish and chips. Lamb stew and dumplings. Thai fish curries. This may sound like the offerings available along a stretch of restaurants in London. But it’s actually a sampling of a typical weekly menu available to Rothera’s multinational crew. “Then tomorrow we’re having slow-braised beef bourguignon with caramelized onion mash, fine green beans, and a bitter chocolate tart to finish,” says Georgiades. It’s a big step up from Antarctic explorers Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean eating seal, dog meat, and biscuits mixed with melted snow during the infamous Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914.

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Georgiades’s four-person kitchen staff has worked in high-end and Michelin star restaurants from London to the French Alps. They are head chefs, bakers, caterers, and culinary college instructors. Together, they host Sunday roasts (a tradition in England) and full-fledged Thanksgiving dinners. They even celebrate regional holidays such as the pancake-laden Mardi Gras feast of Shrove Tuesday and Burns Night, a birthday party for Scottish poet Robert Burns, complete with haggis, the infamous sheep’s organ pudding.

But this variety requires detailed planning. Whereas most chefs track inventory and place food orders daily or weekly, Georgiades only gets one shot to get everything perfect. Because at Rothera, the food shipment comes once annually. By the time Georgiades ran out of mayo, the wintertime air was cold enough to turn jet fuel into jelly, and Rothera had undergone its seasonal transformation from a summertime Antarctic port to an ice-bound and isolated tundra. The ship carrying the coming year’s supplies can only arrive at the discretion of the melt. Then, it’s all-hands-on-deck for a week as the entire Rothera crew helps unload all their food for the next year, dividing the bounty between multiple storage locations to ensure emergency reserves in case of a fire or other disaster.

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To plan for the coming year, Georgiades calculates “bed nights.” These are the total number of days each crew member will be on base analyzing data—on climate change, species adaptation, and more—rather than out in the field on Ski-Doos or in cold-water scuba gear collecting samples. Then he considers cuisine variety, special occasions, and dietary restrictions. This season alone, the crew has 23 vegetarians, two vegans, two gluten-free individuals, one person who keeps Halal, and two with nut allergies.

Georgiades isn’t above a little sleuthing to bring some excitement to the Rothera menu. During the warm season, he jumps on deck of passing ships to haggle. “It always makes me feel like a bit of a pirate when I board the ships,” Georgiades says. He’s bartered for antelope meat from South African researchers. He’s resupplied Rothera with peanut butter from an American crew that asked only for English Tea in return. “I've really been quite pushy with them,” Georgiades admits. He even managed to get some Magnum ice cream bars one season. “I brought them out months later, and the guys went nuts,” he says.

Despite Georgiades’s procurement tactics, meals can get mundane months after passing ships have been iced out of Rothera’s frigid and lonely community. Access to fresh fruits and vegetables, which the team longingly refers to as “freshies,” is painfully limited. One warm season, after receiving a shipment of the treasured freshies, Georgiades took a risk. “It started with an avocado,” he says. He packed up the fresh fruit and shoved it in the freezer. Then he did the same with cherry tomatoes, coriander, and other herbs. Then, months later, Georgiades served guacamole to the Rothera crew. “To see something so green and vibrant does something incredibly good for the soul when you’ve been living off tinned veg for so long.”

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It isn’t just the vibrancy of the food that warms the soul during Antarctic winters. When you live and work in isolation, community gatherings and daily rituals take on added importance. To meet both the physical and emotional needs of Rothera’s crew, the kitchen staff provide five meals a day: the holy trinity, plus two “smokos.” These quick meals take their name from their historic purpose: a midday break when weathered explorers would warm up over a hot drink, a snack, and their daily tobacco ration. Today, it’s all about calories and community—the tobacco has been swapped for piping hot soup, fresh sourdough, and homemade pastries, cakes, and biscuits. Scientists and support staff convene over coffee and crosswords. Most meals are similarly casual, but on Saturday evenings, the crew finds the dining area transformed from a canteen into a high-end restaurant environment, with white tablecloths, bread baskets, candles, wine, cheese, and meals stretching up to 12 courses.

For the chefs, cooking at Rothera is more than a culinary challenge. It’s an opportunity to be part of a one-of-a-kind community, both within and beyond the kitchen. Here, your colleagues are also your doctors, your mechanics, your friends, your emotional support, your guides. And the happiness of the crewmembers relies on their willingness to share their passions with others on base. Field guides take curious staff to ski or ice climb. The mechanic teaches others how to weld. The crew’s backgrounds, skills, and interests vary widely. “Despite this, we all share the same goal,” says Georgiades. “We want to be part of something both unique and incredible. And that is why we take a chance on leaving everything behind to live and work in Antarctica.”

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After three and a half years in the Antarctic tundra, Chef Georgiades is preparing to move on from Rothera. But he’s leaving Rothera’s kitchen, and community, in good hands. Chef and patissier Daniel Stojanovic will take over the Rothera kitchen. “I really liked the idea of cooking for a station, a community, a large team of people,” he says. His new menu ideas include seared scallops with black pudding and apple, and classic French pastries such as tarte au citron. Cooking at Rothera is Stojanovic's way of supporting polar research and being part of the scientific community. "Here," he says, "I cook for my friends."

It’s a bittersweet departure for Chef Georgiades, now 38. Though he admits he’s excited to cook with fresh produce again, that’s not the only thing driving him to make the change. “There’s only so long that you can look at the same ingredients and stores before starting to run out of ideas,” Georgiades says. “And that’s not fair on the staff.”

What a Blanket Made With Dog Hair Can Tell Us About Indigenous Communities in the Pacific Northwest

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The Coast Salish wool dog has been extinct for a little over a century.

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At the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington, there rests a white blanket with two reddish-brown stripes running down the sides. It’s more fuzzy than fluffy, and a gaping tear in the outer layer exposes the horizontal threads woven beneath. Those threads are made of materials including hemp, linen, goat hair, and the hair of the Coast Salish wool dog, also known as the woolly dog, which has been extinct for over a century.

Few objects survived the encroachment of settlers upon Coast Salish people—a group of related tribes native to an area ranging from the Puget Sound up to the middle of Vancouver Island in British Columbia—and their land, so remnants like this blanket are precious. “Something created by the hands of a weaver in your community … that’s an important kind of connection that goes far beyond what we can put in a museum catalog,” says Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, a curator at the Burke Museum.

Lydia Sigo is a Suquamish tribal member and the curator and archivist at the Suquamish Museum. Suquamish, Washington, is seated across the Puget Sound from Seattle and just north of Bainbridge Island, where, Sigo says, woolly dogs were kept for over a thousand years.

Because their prized white hair was the product of a recessive trait, the dogs were kept on islands including Bainbridge and Tatoosh—a little thimble of rock jutting up from the sea at the westernmost tip of northern Washington just below Vancouver Island—so they would be isolated from hunting dogs and other canines in the village. The Coast Salish people fed them a bounty of dried salmon, which kept the canines glossy-coated over the winter months. Before the dogs were shorn with sharpened mussels, their fur was cleaned of dirt and debris with white clay or diatomaceous earth. Those hairs were turned into a fluffy, tangled mass, then spun into yarn together with fibers of plants, such as stinging nettle or Indian hemp; plant fluff from fireweed, cottonwood, and cattail fluff; mountain goat hair; and feather materials, such as duck down.

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Out of those materials came highly-prized blankets. Blankets were for ceremonial use—they were used at marriages, naming ceremonies, and initiations into Salish religious practice—and also represented wealth and generosity. “Part of Coast Salish culture is about being a good host … the symbol of wealth is what you give away, not what you keep,” says Sigo. According to S’abadeb / The Gifts, a book about Coast Salish art and culture by Barbara Brotherton, an ultimate example of this principle was the blanket scramble, a free-for-all during which blankets were tossed, often from atop a longhouse, for people to tussle over. The scrambles continued even when blankets became rarer in the 19th century. Then, pieces rather than entire blankets were thrown out, and could be collected to weave into fuller textiles.

Woolly dogs themselves were a highly valuable trade item. “Not everyone had a little wool dog,” says Joey Holmes, who is a member of the Nondalton and Grand Ronde tribes and married into the Suquamish. Holmes began teaching himself to weave as a teenager. “We have this saying now: Our cedar bark clothing was like our jeans and T-shirts and our wool regalia was like our formal wear,” he says.

In 2011, Holmes found a mentor in Virginia Adams (her traditional name is šəq̓həblu), a descendant of Mary Adams, a weaver of blankets and baskets who was married to Jack Adams, one of the last Suquamish chiefs. While woolly dogs officially went extinct in the 1870s, the picture below, taken in 1912, shows Mary with her woolly dog Jumbo. It’s unclear from the historical record how Mary raised or obtained Jumbo, but Sigo notes that, “for [Mary] to have a woolly dog in 1912 shows how our tribe fought to keep their culture when the world was changing.”

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“Virginia was one of the main people who helped revitalize wool weaving,” says Holmes. She learned and taught the southern Salish style of textile weaving, native to the Puget Sound area. This style utilizes twill weaving, which can be used to make various zig-zag patterns, including herringbone, a pattern seen in the Burke Museum’s woolly dog blanket. When microscopic analysis revealed that the blanket’s threads contained woolly dog hair in 2017, scientists, museum curators, and members of the Coast Salish community gathered to share and celebrate.

The Coast Salish world changed dramatically after contact with Europeans in the late 18th century. By the end of the 19th century, the dogs had disappeared, and so did the entire lifestyle supporting the production of blankets, from access to fishing waters to the freedom to practice potlatch culture.

“A lot of objects left communities under difficult circumstances and our hope is that these can be teachers now for the current generation,” says Bunn-Marcuse. While blanket scrambles and woolly dogs may not have survived, threads of tradition are still being picked up and passed on to weavers to like Joey Holmes, and folded into Coast Salish life today.


The Haunting Beauty of the Reconsecration of Shinto Shrines

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Photographer Yukihito Masuura spent more than a decade documenting rituals that connect past and present.

Some of Yukihito Masuura’s most intimate photographs are of pieces of wood. In these close-ups, the grain fills the frame, and scale is an afterthought. It’s easy to mistake them, at first, for giant boughs of driftwood, or clouds of interstellar gas, or the jagged slopes of a craggy mountain.

Through Masuura’s lens, the images feel monumental. To hear him tell it, they hold everything a viewer needs to know about the subject of his recent series: the process of reconstructing and reconsecrating Japan's Shinto shrines.

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Three cedar fragments in his images were excavated nearly two decades ago at the Izumo Ōyashiro shrine, also known as Izumo-Taisha, in Japan’s Shimane prefecture. The fragments, which traveled to the Tokyo National Museum, are roughly the height of people who stop to bow in front of them. They are thought to have been parts of the large pillars that supported the shrine in centuries past, and they help bolster historic accounts that the structure once towered several hundred feet tall. It has since been rebuilt several times, in a ritual known as sengu, repeated at regular intervals (that vary by shrine) for roughly 1,300 years.

Shintoism, which has roots in the early eighth century, is a religion that recognizes the sacred potency of landscapes, spirits, ancestors, and more (known as kami), and emphasizes the linking of past and present. During the recurring reconstruction rituals, some Shinto shrines are overhauled more completely than others. In some cases this involves remaking entire buildings and the furnishings inside, as has been the case at the Ise Grand Shrine (also known as Ise Jingu), which is rebuilt from scratch every 20 years. Other cases are more like renovations. In either event, the idea, according to the Association of Shinto Shrines, is that the renewed spaces rejuvenate the divine spirits worshipped there. “We’re always making these structures new for the gods,” Masuura says, through a translator, at a recent, brief exhibition of the series at Foto Care in New York City.

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Because local people participate in the process, the rituals also sustain historic construction techniques, and transmit and reinforce cultural beliefs. The activity often give tourism numbers a boost, too. When the shrine of Izumo-Taisha was freshened up in 2013 for the first time in 60 years, it drew a record eight million visitors, more than double the year before, the Japan Times reported.

Masuura began photographing shrines and their associated rituals in the early 2000s, and he kept at it for 14 years. When those pieces of cedar were excavated at Izumo-Taisha, Masuura interpreted them as poetic symbols, and proof that the present is tethered to the past. No one set had out to find evidence in the ground, he says, “It just happened.” That indelible, insistent, evocative quality emerges in his images.

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For several years before embarking on this project, Masuura had worked on commission to photograph sculptures in museums’ permanent collections. In France, he became captivated by the hands, torsos, and feet that Michelangelo coaxed out of stone. He was drawn to the sense that there was something powerful and magnetic about the inanimate bodies, he says, beyond their obvious aesthetic qualities. For Masuura, the old, warped wood recalled something similar. For the photographer, the wood evokes the idea of kehai, which loosely translates as “the presence of something.” He hopes that someone looking at his photos would feel that presence as well, then and now.

He visited the shrines frequently, and usually at night. “The gods are thought of as being something that you should not see, so I went when they are not visible,” Masuura says. Some of his drop-ins overlapped with the renovation project at Izumo-Taisha, and he photographed the ceremonies that moved the gods to a new home while it was underway, and the ones that reinstalled them at the conclusion.

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Many of the resulting images are enigmatic: One includes several people holding shrouds over something—it’s not clear what. (Masuura says it’s a portable shrine, and since onlookers aren’t supposed to gaze directly at a god, the attendants “are covering it with a white cloth to conceal what’s underneath.”) Other images are pragmatic celebrations of the joints that loft the balustrade, and still others are atmospheric, such as one in which light floods tree branches, setting a whole scene aglow.

Across the series, the themes of change and continuity sit alongside each other. They’re especially clear in a photograph printed as a panorama on washi paper. The shrine, in the background, is in crisp focus, while the procession in the foreground is blurry, almost ghostly. It seems to suggest that the priests and the tradition simultaneously stretch into the past and wrap toward the future.

For Sale: The Entire Town of Story, Indiana

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For $3.8 million, you can write the next chapter.

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If just buying a charming rural home isn’t quite enough for you, we’ve got promising news. An entire small town in Indiana—named Story—is for sale. And fittingly, Story’s tale is one worth telling. The town began in 1851, when a doctor named George P. Story received 173 acres of land from Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States. Over the years, the town then known as “Storyville” started to grow—farms, Story’s medical practice, and a school. In 1882, Story got its first dry goods store and post office. It never grew particularly large, but the story goes that the Great Depression cleared out what few families were left, threatening to end Story and turn it into a ghost town.

More or less abandoned to the elements, Story saw a small resurgence in the early 1980s. Benjamin (who goes by just one name) encountered the town—on the edge of Brown County State Park and not far from Bloomington—for the first time in 1978. He saw the old general store, a house, a gristmill, a barn, and “an assortment of mostly dilapidated buildings,” on four and a half acres and for sale for $65,000. He and his wife Cyndi took a chance on the unique town and decided to set up shop in the form of a restaurant, housed in the old general store. “[It] had no indoor plumbing when we moved there, only an outhouse in back,” he says. The second floor was one large room. “Many years previous, owners had obtained a Studebaker franchise and assembled buggies up there,” Benjamin says. “Parts were sent by rail from South Bend to Freetown, brought to Story on horse-drawn carts and first-generation pickup trucks, hauled upstairs, and assembled. The final products were let down on a ramp through a door in the back.” He remembers Story being very dark, and very quiet.

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There are only six houses in Story. One of them, built in the Queen Anne style, is the Wheeler-Hedrick House, across the street from the store. Another, built in 1858, is known as the Story-Griffitt House. Benjamin and Cyndi bought them all, one at a time, and converted them into overnight accommodations—the Story Inn. “We also built a commercial kitchen in the back [and] the old general store became the dining room,” Benjamin says. “When we sold Story we had a 100-seat restaurant and 18 overnight rooms, all on 23 acres.”

The town’s current owner, Rick Hofstetter, bought the town in 1999. Hofstetter put more effort into Story, and the 40 years of care has turned into a fairly popular—though out-of-the-way—tourist destination. While most of Story’s buildings have been renovated, the village has not lost its 19th-century charm. Because it was a relatively desolate (and poor) town for decades, its original historic wooden floors, globe lighting, and tin ceilings remain. Just last month, the town was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today all of Story can be yours, if you have $3.8 million. A new owner would have some appealing options. Keep it as a unique bed-and-breakfast. Invite artists and creatives to stay for a while. Or steer into the name and make it a book town. The question is: What chapter would you write next?

How Basque Food Got to Northern Nevada

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It all started with the Gold Rush.

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In the old railroad town of Elko, Nevada, the Star Hotel’s neon sign reads, “Tasty BASQUE FOOD … FAMILY STYLE.” Inside, I sit at a communal table in the saloon-like dining room, where Scott Ygoa, the owner, is fixing drinks for customers in cowboy hats. The Star was built by Pete and Matilda Jauregui in 1910, says Ygoa, as a “home away from home” for Basque migrants. Ygoa, who bought the Star in 2004, is also a Basque Nevadan.

In sparsely-populated northern Nevada, towns such as Elko are oases in the Great Basin Desert, and almost all of them have an old Basque hotel. Internationally, Basque cuisine is in the spotlight: 40 Basque restaurants have Michelin stars, and several appear on lists of the world’s best restaurants. But the trendy pintxos of San Sebastian have little in common with Nevada’s Basque hotels.

Take a seat at a communal table at the Star, or the Martin Hotel in Winnemucca, and you’ll be presented with plates of slow-cooked cowboy beans, garlicky iceberg salad, cabbage soup, white bread, french fries, and spaghetti. I enjoyed a Picon, a cocktail of brandy, grenadine, and Amer Picon bitters that was once popular in the Basque country, but is now available virtually nowhere besides these Basque-American hotels. The main course is usually simple grilled lamb chops, steak, or sweetbreads fried with peppers and onions.

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So how did Basque people, whose language is the oldest in Europe and not known to be related to any other on Earth, whose cuisine is based on a rich seafaring history, end up running hotels in the middle of the Nevada desert?

Basque migrants first arrived in the American West during the California Gold Rush. By the 1860s, Nevada had the highest proportion of foreign-born residents of any state. But few prospectors struck it rich, and when fortune-seekers had to find other sources of income, Basques began tending flocks of sheep. It was an unpopular occupation, but as a solitary job that required little knowledge of English, it fit Basque immigrants. The first Basque hotels served a specific need: Unmarried Basque shepherds needed a place to board during the winter and socialize with fellow euskaldunak.

Although he arrived decades later, Ygoa’s father had a similar experience.

“My dad came to the general merchandise store here in Elko in 1962,” Ygoa says. “They geared him up with what he needed like bed rolls, boots, Levi’s 501s. Then they walked him to the Star and he finally heard his language again. They had lunch, and he went right to the mountains.”

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By the late 1800s, Basque shepherds had developed a tradition of summering alone with their flocks in the mountainous and desert regions of Nevada and spending the cold months in town, boarding and dining family style at the Basque hotels in Reno, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Elko, and Ely. Hotel owners served as translators, postmasters, and companions for the culturally isolated men. When Scott Ygoa was young, he says, “We worked on a ranch that was primarily Basque, so I grew up speaking the language. We didn’t really associate with Americans that much.”

Basque immigration slowed in the early 1900s. Nevada was incorporating national forests and public lands, and poor sheepherders struggled to get grazing permits. In addition, strict immigration laws slowed the flow of new arrivals, until a wartime need for wool gave Basque immigration a boost.

During World War II, the sheep industry experienced labor shortages. Cue Nevada Senator Pat McCarran, a deeply anti-Communist Democrat who had rejected the New Deal and developed close ties with the fascist government of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. To aid the industry, McCarran championed a series of “Sheepherder Laws” that granted residency to thousands of Basque shepherds with the cooperation of Franco.

As the Elko Daily Free Press put it: “No other group of immigrants enjoyed such preferential treatment, or expeditious attention. If a Basque sheepherder in the Pyrenees applied for a visa … within a month he found himself with a dog at his side and a willow in his hand herding a band of 1,000 sheep in Nevada or another western state, sleeping by a campfire, and eating beans from a can.”

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As war consumed Europe—and left it struggling long after peace prevailed—plenty of Basque men saw this as a good deal. Ygoa’s father came because there was little economic opportunity in the old country, where his family had survived on beans. Life could be easy and bountiful in Nevada, if a little lonely, and still reliant on beans.

With this wave of new immigrants, the Basque sheepherding tradition was cemented, and new Basque establishments sprang up by the dozen. Louis’ Basque Corner, one of the most popular family-style Basque restaurants in Nevada, opened in 1967, and has been serving pickled beef tongue, sweetbreads, and Picon punch in downtown Reno ever since.

“A lot of people say, ‘Is this how they eat in the old country?’” Ygoa says, “and it’s not. You get more seafood there, cause they’re right on the coast. I think ours is kind of like an American version.”

Nevada is not the only part of the American West that became familiar with Basque cooking. Central California was once full of these establishments, and in the 1970s, San Francisco’s North Beach still boasted six Basque hotels. Boise, Idaho, is home to a thriving Basque Block. But Nevada has particularly strong ties to Basque culture. It’s the only state to have had a Basque governor, Paul Laxalt, who also served as the state’s senator in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And the University of Nevada in Reno has a Center for Basque Studies, which focuses on both Basque country and the Basque-American culture of Nevada.

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Of course, after generations of intermarriage and assimilation, this Basque heritage has begun to fade. “Forty years ago, everybody knew what Basque people were in Elko,” says Scott Ygoa. “I’m probably one of the last ones in this area to really grow up Basque.” American novelist Frank Bergon, who is of Basque descent, says that as a young man, he didn’t even know what “Basque” meant. “We were Americans first and Westerners second,” he writes. “When pressed for my heritage, I usually said with the accepted euphemism of the time, ‘half-French, half-Spanish.’” The “hotel” aspect has also become less relevant. “Even when I bought it, there were eight or nine boarders still,” explains Ygoa. “I still got one Basque guy left. He’s been here a little over 30 years now.”

While many Nevadans aren’t aware of the history of the hotels, the cuisine is still beloved, and almost everyone from Reno or Elko is familiar with Basque family-style meals. Ironically, “Basque Family Style” was a culinary custom invented for shepherds without families, but it’s now a Nevada tradition that Ygoa believes has roots in the Basque tradition of hospitality.

“Everybody’s welcome in your house, and food is the way that you surrounded yourself with people,” he says. “I think these restaurants were based on the same idea.” As I enjoy the convivial surrounds of the Star Hotel, I begin to understand the power of good food and good company that reminded Nevada sheepherders of home.

21 Rare Skills That Could Become Your Newest Hobby

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Find your next passion, as recommended by Atlas Obscura readers.

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There are many ways to live curiously, but one of the most fulfilling options might be mastering an obscure skill. Learning how to do something that few people even bother to attempt—whether it's a nearly obsolete practice like blacksmithing or a unique art like paper marbling—offers both knowledge and a sense of community that is rare in every sense of the word. Recently in our Community forums, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the rare skills they've always wanted to learn or have learned, and each response we received could easily make for a new obsession.

Take a look at some of our readers' most intriguing rare skills interests below, and if there's an obscure craft you'd like to learn, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going. Never again will you find yourself at a cocktail party without something to talk about.


Champion Memorization

“Memory/Mind Palace or methods of loci have always been fascinating to me. I read the book Moonwalking with Einstein by [Atlas Obscura co-founder] Joshua Foer several years ago, and I tried to use some of the tips to improve my memory. I just think it’d be cool to be able to recite poems and quotes off the top of my head.” nagnabodha


Navigating By the Stars

“I keep getting sidetracked by all the mythology behind them, which has also been helpful in mentally logging the ones I have gotten through so far… I don’t anticipate needing the skillset to get around, just to make the night sky that much more meaningful.” MelissaThiede


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Animal Tracking

“I would really like to improve my animal tracking skills and also some skills in carpentry. Thankfully though I’ll be heading to Spain soon to track bears and hopefully wolves, and my dad’s a carpenter so those are feasible.” Monsieur_Mictlan


Silhouette Cutting

“I love this topic of discussion! It’s dear to my heart as I’ve spent the last few years delving into and attempting to master a rare skill: traditional freehand silhouette cutting. For anyone that might not be familiar with the craft, silhouette portraiture in the form I practice is very specific to the 18th/19th centuries. The artist has a subject sit for just a few minutes, while cutting out the shape of their profile using scissors and thin black paper. The tricky part being that there is no drawing, tracing or digital alteration involved in the process. Once I started making silhouettes, I simply could not stop and I’ve been at it ‘professionally’ for about three years. I operate an online shop and I cut silhouettes live at museum functions and modern events. I love playing a small part in keeping what’s largely considered a ‘dead art’ alive and well.” shanliewolter


Silent Movie Music

“I’ve actually had a couple piano gigs accompanying silent films and loved it. The most memorable one was for a screening of a William S. Hart movie in the cowboy star’s former home. It’s a really unique set of musical demands. Part improv, part composition, part high-wire act. Next year, I’m actually planning on doing a project with a friend of mine who does live foley effects for radio plays (another antiquated talent) where we’ll accompany old cartoons.” tralfamadore


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Flintknapping

“I’d like to find time to learn flintknapping. I’ve been volunteering with some archaeological digs and it might someday come in handy (though not on the dig I’m working at right now, it’s all 18th and 19th century!) It is funny to think that in a few centuries, anything I do could really screw with archaeologists.” hasufin


Storytelling

“I would love to learn how to be a great storyteller. I have a lot of stories but I find I get caught up in details and timelines that aren’t important to the audience. I know of some storytelling workshops here in New York City but haven’t committed to it yet. I would also love to learn how to make furniture but I find I can’t even sand down and repaint a beautiful piece I have now, because I don’t have a space to do it. City life problems.” icatsstaci


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Suminagashi

“I want to master suminagashi, the Japanese style of paper marbling. I love admiring marbled endpapers either on Insta (#marbledmonday) or when I encounter them in my work. I took a suminagashi class recently, and while the basics are pretty easy to learn, I want to get better so I can create beautiful endpapers of my own (and learn how to bind books while I’m at it…). Especially important is mastering marbling rice paper, because it rips so easily!” shatomica


Ice Carving

“I’ve always wanted to learn ice carving. Attacking a block of ice with a chain saw just seems really attractive to me.” ginakingsley


Bookbinding

“Bookbinding. I have five prayer books that belong to my family. During World War II, they got buried in a backyard for a few years, only to be dug up, transported across oceans and continents, and almost forgotten. They are falling apart and I’d love to restore them.” hoffmannatty


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Bobbin Lace

“I’m learning bobbin lace. I went to Venice last year, and visited the island of Burano, where lace has been made since the Renaissance. I also love making period costumes for myself, and will use this lace on a 1906 shirtwaist.” atruewalker


Cold Reading

“Cold reading is a skill I’ve practiced most of my life. Working with information streams not commonly thought about by others to formulate information about a person and use inductive reasoning to make more accurate guesses about someone without knowing them. The skill is useful for work, life, and if you choose to eventually be a sociopath or professional liar.” phillipeb


Blacksmithing

“Due to my love of the old and fantasy I’d love to learn blacksmithing. Particularly to be a swordsmith. I love the idea of it but also I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands and feeling the sense of accomplishment after I’ve built or worked on something.” Lovelyevenstar


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Pitman Shorthand

“I have a skill that was once quite common but is now disappearing: Pitman shorthand. I had wanted to be a writer when I was a kid, but my mother, fearing that I would starve, insisted that I learn typing and shorthand so I could at least ‘have something to fall back on.’ Those skills served me extremely well through college, law school (because I also came to fear starvation), and my 35-year legal career. I retired last year and am now trying to learn various languages, including two ‘dead’ ones that, like shorthand, employ non-Latin alphabets: Ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics. I’ll never be any good at them, but the learning process is fascinating.” lindacantoni


Making Stained Glass

“I started doing a different kind of art, stained glass, about 16 years ago. I didn’t know anyone or anything about it, but I got some supplies and gave it a try. It was ugly at first but I got better over time. I now do artwork for Disney Galleries… Yeah, it’s a dream come true.” davidbird42


Antique Telegraphy

“I have my father and grandfather’s old telegraph keys. My father worked 35 years as a telegrapher for the Frisco Railroad and my grandfather did the same for 45 years. My dad’s bug is in great shape and all I would have to do is set up a sounder to get it going (he used an old Prince Albert tobacco tin at the depot). I’ve often thought I should have asked him to teach me, but alas, he’s gone now. What an amazing skill that seems to be disappearing.” rssr56


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Playing the Harp

“I’ve been enamored by this instrument since I was a little girl. I tried taking lessons when I was in my 20s, but life sort of got in the way.” singaporecherry


Playing the Theremin

“I want to learn to play the theremin. I have an electric theremin. Now I need to sit down and actually learn.” tundrabunny


Playing the Spoons

“I would love to play the spoons. I watch videos of Abby the Spoon Lady on YouTube all the time! The other skill I’d like to learn is to drive a team of horses.” lagibbs2inmom


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Lockpicking

“Maybe not yet rare, but as we become more technical it will be a rarer skill. Maybe I could rent myself out instead of having people buying bolt cutters… Just a thought.” pam104


Vintage Paper Model Building

“The skill that I’ve been learning and continue to learn is that of building vintage paper models (but only from copies)! The models are very simple, but there are many ways they can be enhanced and reinforced.” Tom_Chicago

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Found: A Gold Coin from Britain's Roman Revolt

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Allectus only reigned for three years, but here he is, nearly two millennia later.

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From the years 286 to 296, a crew of Roman dissidents reigned over a Britain severed from the rest of the Roman Empire. The revolt was instigated by Carausius, but he didn’t see it through to the end: His own finance minister, Allectus, offed Carausius in 293, and took over until the independent outpost fell three years later.

Little is known about Allectus, but traces of his brief reign can still turn up in the most unexpected of places. Just last month, in a field in the southeastern English county of Kent, an amateur metal detectorist stumbled upon a gold coin bearing the ancient emperor’s face. (The opposite side depicts two figures kneeling to the god Apollo.) He found it near an ancient Roman road, after 45 minutes of a search that turned up only “bits of old tractors and shotgun cartridges,” according to the anonymous detectorist.

The coin had some weight to it—a relatively hefty 4.31 grams—which suggested that it just might be the real deal. Sam Moorhead, the British Museum’s Adviser for Iron Age and Roman coins, then authenticated the find by linking it to another Allectus coin in the Museum’s collection. Certifiably ancient, the newly discovered Aureus—or gold Roman coin—will hit the block at London’s Dix Noonan Webb auction house on June 12, 2019. DNW estimates that it well sell for between £70,000 and £100,000—that’s potentially more than 130,000 dollars.

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That’s because buyers may never get another chance to acquire an Allectus Aureus. According to DNW, this is the first one discovered in more than 50 years, and only the 24th known to exist. (The British Museum’s item was found in the 19th century, in the town of Silchester.) It is only the second to be discovered in Kent, and the very first to head to auction.

Nearly two intervening millennia notwithstanding, the coin is a timely find. Last month, Moorhead gave a lecture at the British Museum “on Carausius, Allectus and the first Brexit,” so-called for the emperors’ efforts to disentangle Britain from greater Rome. With the United Kingdom now on the verge of departing the European Union, it’s no wonder that Allectus finally decided to show his face again.

For Sale: An Abandoned, Decaying Fort on a Private Island

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Won't someone, anyone, buy Fort Montgomery?

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Pity Fort Montgomery. The years have not been kind to the three-story 19th-century structure falling to pieces in New York State where Lake Champlain meets the Richelieu River, right on the border between the United States and Canada. Over the centuries, some of the red bricks have crumbled, so archways look like mouths that are missing teeth. Brown leaves have tumbled in through the windows. Whatever limestone walls haven’t been claimed by plants have been marked up by humans brandishing paint, pens, blades, and a bawdy sense of humor.

And to add insult to injury, no one seems to want it.

The current owners have been trying to offload Fort Montgomery for decades. Back in the 1980s, they tried to negotiate a deal with the state of New York. Then, in 2006, they put it up for $9 million on eBay. In 2009, they tried again, and slashed the price to $3 million. Still, no nibbles. "It seems like it'd be worth $20 or $30 million with all the history behind it," the owner Victor Podd told the Toronto Star the day before the auction closed. "We've had it out there. But if no one's even offering $3 million, it's hard to say we want more." It’s currently listed on several real estate sites for just shy of $1 million.

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The fort has the kind of wacky pedigree that might tantalize a history buff buyer. A previous fort built in 1816 on the same site was enough to launch a thousand face-palms: Because the engineers were a little murky on exactly where the border fell, a precursor meant to fortify the U.S. against northern invasion accidentally went up on the Canadian side. As James Millard, a historian who literally wrote the book on the moldering remains, has noted, that structure earned the nickname Fort Blunder. The highly visible, expensive mistake was eventually abandoned and plundered. Then, when the international border was redrawn in the 1840s, positioning the island in U.S. waters, Fort Montgomery went up in the footprint of the folly.

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Why build a fresh fortress? The relationship between United States and Great Britain—of which Canada was still a part—remained strained after the Treaty of Ghent, which ostensibly smoothed the sharp edges of the conflict between the nations. “When the news of the treaty signed at Ghent in 1814 reached America, few people on either side of the border were so optimistic as to believe that the ‘peace and amity’ which it established were to be permanent; and on both sides military precautions were put in hand,” writes the Canadian military historian Charles Perry Stacey in an article in The American Historical Review.

Fort Montgomery went up over the course of three decades, and construction continued through the Civil War. It once boasted a moat and a drawbridge that linked it to land. Though it was never fully garrisoned, in its heyday it was well armed with guns pointing toward Canada. Now, though the property looks considerably worse for the wear, it's on the National Register of Historic Places.

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The artillery is long gone, and the fort is still in search of a new owner. Because it’s in bad shape and has been languishing on the market for so long—kind of like a lonely Island of Misfit Forts—the Preservation League of New York State included it in its 2009 “Seven to Save” list, a roundup of at-risk historic sites that need a little love. “As far as we know, there are no current plans for the site,” writes Katy Pearce, communications director of the Preservation League of New York State, in an email. If you’ve got a cool million hanging around, you could set some in motion.

Norway Will Finally Return Thousands of Artifacts to Easter Island

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Sculptures, weapons, and human skulls will soon go back to the South Pacific.

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In 1955, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl voyaged to Rapa Nui, the ancestral name of Easter Island, and collected many things: tiny carved sculptures, a stone axe, even human skulls. Though Heyerdahl promised to return the items to Rapa Nui as soon as he had analyzed them and published his findings, his death in 2002 stranded the artifacts in Oslo’s Kon-Tiki Museum, over 8,800 miles away from their home.

Now, 17 years after Heyerdahl’s death, the Norwegian government has finally agreed to return the objects to the indigenous Rapa Nui people, the first inhabitants of Easter Island, a Chilean island in the South Pacific. Last week, Norway’s King Harald V and Queen Sonja signed an agreement with representatives from the Chilean ministry of culture, marking the beginning of what will likely be a long process of repatriation.

The agreement specifies that the artifacts must be returned to a “well-equipped museum,” according to the ministry’s press release. Heyerdahl’s son, Thor Heyerdahl Jr., also attended the signing and told Smithsonian that the human remains would be prioritized in the repatriation process. The Kon-Tiki museum will retain most of its other artifacts, including the original Kon-Tiki raft as well as maps and exploratory materials the explorer used to navigate in his overseas expeditions.

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The Kon-Tiki Museum derives its name from a seemingly impossible 1947 journey that made the hunky and intrepid Heyerdahl an international sensation. Heyerdahl and a crew of five crossed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia on a makeshift raft crafted from balsa wood, bamboo, and rope—all technology available to pre-Columbian America—in order to prove the explorer’s hypothesis that ancient South Americans could have settled Polynesia using similar voyaging methods. The crew survived the journey, eating flying fish that heaved themselves onboard as well as the occasional shark. Heyerdahl’s theory was ultimately disproved by DNA research indicating that the first settlers Polynesia originated from Southeast Asia.

In his two voyages to Easter Island, Heyerdahl complicated several myths about the enormous stone sculptures known as moai, according to the Kon-Tiki Museum. For the indigenous Rapa Nui, moai represent the faces of specific ancestors. Though many believed the moai at Rapa Nui’s Rano Raraku quarry only depicted gigantic heads, Heyerdahl’s team excavated the statues and discovered each head sat upon an even more gigantic torso. In his second voyage, Heyerdahl attempted to solve the age-old quandary of how such enormous sculptures could have been moved to their final locations. He and 16 local residents tied ropes around the 15-ton head and dragged it a short distance by twisting the rope back and forth, resulting in a moai that moved in a shuffling kind of “walk.”

The Kon-Tiki agreement marks the first positive resolution of several of Chile’s ongoing repatriation battles. In August 2018, the Chilean government worked with the Rapa Nui people to petition the British Museum to return the seven-foot-tall Moai called Hoa Hakananai’a, or “the stolen or hidden friend.” Hoa Hakananai’a was removed without permission from the island in 1868 by the British Royal Navy as a present for Queen Victoria, who went on to donate the sculpture to the museum. “We want the museum to understand that the moai are our family, not just rocks,” Anakena Manutomatoma, a member of the Rapa Nui delegation pushing for Hoa Hakananai’a’s repatriation, told The Guardian. “For us [the statue] is a brother; but for them it is a souvenir or an attraction.”

In November 2018, representatives from the Chilean government met with officials at the museum to discuss the possibility of loaning the statue (a full return does not seem to be on the bargaining table). One possible proposal floated by the Rapa Nui delegation would replace the original statue in the museum with a duplicate, carved by the indigenous sculptor Benedicto Tuki, according to Artnet. While no concrete resolutions emerged from the meeting, museum authorities accepted an invitation to travel to Rapa Nui for follow-up talks in the coming months.


In India, the British Hyped Potatoes to Justify Colonialism

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The British East India Company handed out seeds and bribes to farmers willing to grow the humble spud.

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It’s hard to imagine what regional cuisines across India would look like without the potato. Many of the most iconic dishes found on Indian plates, such as Bengal’s aloo posto or South India’s masala dosa are filled with the starchy vegetable. But the potato is indigenous to South America, not South Asia. Colonialism, as well as Enlightenment theories on happiness, led to the tuber becoming an important ingredient in Indian cooking.

Yet the potato was an unlikely candidate for a starring role in Indian food. When the British East India Company arrived in India in the 17th century, they found that, although the Portuguese had brought the crop over earlier, very few Indians grew or ate potatoes. Moreover, many Company agents thought the climate was too hot, too windy, and too dry to successfully grow the rain-loving tuber. Nevertheless, the East India Company decided to heavily promote the potato among Indian peasants.

According to 1797 Company ledgers, now housed in the India Office Records in the British Library, agents in Bengal provided a “considerable quantity” of free seeds to peasants to encourage them to produce and eat their crop. In Bombay, the East India Company exempted potatoes from the transit taxes typically levied on the crop in order to encourage their cultivation. The Company also provided 100 rupees, a significant sum at the time, to be distributed amongst potato-growing peasants to reward them.

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In Madras, a potato campaign also began in 1797. It was spearheaded by one man: Dr. Benjamin Heyne, a Scottish missionary and naturalist. In a 1799 letter, he wrote of his desire to use potatoes to prevent the “lamentable effects which have too often been produced by a scarcity of grain” in India. In order to promote the crop, he bribed Indian peasants with approximately one-third of a rupee to plant potatoes. Furthermore, to show Indian peasants the value of the crop, he planted potatoes in the Bangalore Botanical Gardens, and traveled far and wide across the subcontinent promoting the tuber in various villages. Soon, societies sprung up around India seeking to promote various crops, especially the potato. The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, formed in Calcutta in 1820, held contests for growing the “best” potato. Though records are unclear on exactly what qualifications they were looking for, winners were awarded 40 rupees and a silver medal.

The British were obsessed with promoting the potato in India, despite the allegedly inhospitable climate. Yet their relentless promotion of the tuber had a sinister underpinning. In the 18th century, the potato gripped the imaginations of political and economic leaders alike. Adam Smith, in his famous economic treatise Wealth of Nations, waxed rhapsodic about the potato for four paragraphs, writing that “the strongest men and the most beautiful women” in the British Dominions were the potato-eating Irish. “Should this root ever become in any part of Europe, like rice in some rice countries, the common and favourite vegetable food of the people,” Smith predicted, “the same quantity of cultivated land would maintain a much greater number of people.” He advocated that all laborers should be fed potatoes. Others, like the famous Scottish doctor William Buchan, spoke of the fact that “some of the stoutest men we know, are brought up on milk and potatoes.”

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The East India Company officials took these Enlightenment visions to heart. As one colonial official wrote in a 1789 letter, the potato was a “substantial provision for the Labourer,” which would help “improve and extend materials for foreign trade.” The potato, for the British, represented a tool through which they could expand their corps of colonial laborers, spanning the globe from Belfast to Bombay.

But the potato was not only understood as a means to increase Britain’s wealth. It was also envisioned as a justification for British imperialism. The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, in their 1838 records of transactions, stated that through growing European-introduced crops such as the potato, “happiness till now unknown in India, will be diffused abroad.” The East India Company too promoted the idea that the potato was an embodiment of “happiness,” noting in an 1800 report by the Bengal Revenue Commission that the tuber would help “alleviate the Miseries” in India caused by the frequent failures of the rice crop. Food historian Rebecca Earle writes that the ruling elite at the time understood public happiness as the “highest aim of government.” The potato as a tool to increase public happiness meant it embodied Britain’s supposed right—and by extension moral imperative—to rule India.

Despite the original doubts of British East India Company agents, the promotion of the potato did in fact bring the tuber into widespread cultivation. While the East India Company assumed the climate of India would be inhospitable, certain zones on the vast subcontinent are well-suited to nurturing the crop. According to food writer and historian Chitrita Banerji, the “great virtue of the potato is its flexibility in how it could be cooked, and that it was not difficult to cultivate.” The crop’s similarity to many indigenous gourds, as well as the fact that its consumption was not prohibited by any religious traditions, ended up easing the potato’s entrance into different regional Indian cuisines.

It wasn't long before the relentless promotion had an effect. In an 1814 letter, a British army wife wrote in the typical patronizing colonial parlance that “the natives are all fond of it, and eat it without scruple.” Cookbooks written in Hindi and Gujarati in the 19th century give recipes for everything from fried potatoes to potato khichari, a traditional dish of rice and lentils. The potato transformed Indian cuisine, with the creation of many much-loved potato dishes.

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Yet the potato never reshaped Indian diets in the ways the British intended. The British imagined that the potato would be a staple in India, just as it was for the Irish. But the potato never displaced rice as India’s staple crop. “India is the great assimilator,” Banerji says. The potato, she argues, was cooked in place of Indian crops such as yams and gourds rather than as a substitute for rice. Now, Banerji says with a laugh, Indian is one of the only cuisines where two starches, potatoes and rice, often feature in the same meal.

While much of India has welcomed the potato with open arms, its foreign origins have not been forgotten in certain corners of the country. At Jagannath Temple in Puri, a sacred Hindu worship space, food is offered up to the deity Jagannath six times a day. The potato, however, isn’t present in any of those dishes. “These temples have been making the same food for the past 500 years,” Banerji says. That means rice and dal, among other dishes. “Since the potato has not been around that long, it is not served.”

Yet for most people, the potato is standard fare in India. Banerji recalls with reverence the potatoes she grew up eating. “Oh! I can never make those potatoes as good as my mother,” she says, describing her steamed potatoes with turmeric, mustard oil, ground chili, salt, and asafetida. From Lucknow to Delhi, Goa to Pune, the potato is served in many different ways on Indian plates today. “It is always funny to me,” Banerji says with a knowing smile, “that colonialism’s injustices provoked these culinary delights.”

Chicago Has Become the Nerve Center of Competitive Pinball

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Experience the thrill of multiball mayhem and the agony of a double drain.

DISCO JACKPOT,” the machine blares, as 2.8 ounces of steel fly through the dazzler. Chicago local Zachary Parks, 16, taps his sneakered foot anxiously, watching 48-year-old Jim Belsito rack up points on Deadpool. On a rainy afternoon, 40 of the world’s top pinball players have gathered on the top floor of Chicago’s Bottom Lounge. It’s a typical industrial-chic sports bar, but the drawn blackout curtains and high humidity make it feel more like an brick-walled cave. A single exposed window illuminates the field of competitors, huddled around a wall of 10 pinball machines, ranging from vintage (Ali, Stars, Cheetah) to recent (Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Maiden, Deadpool). The camera crew documenting the event is used to working in low light at tournaments. “I’m surprised they even have that curtain open,” one photographer tells me, “the players usually like it dark.”

Belsito is hunched over the game. He’s just shot the right orbit, and if he can hit all the major shots to fill Deadpool’s chimichanga punch card, he’ll be able to fight the T. rex for a chance to shoot the scoop and win the mode, bringing him one step closer to a Mechsuit Multiball. And then all hell will break loose—in the machine and on the scoreboard. He’s engaged in a rare three-way-tiebreaker to advance to the next round—one step closer to pinball glory, a championship belt, and $2,500. Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies is helping with play-by-play commentary and the room smells a little like a middle school gym class.

This isn’t a fever dream from 1978, it’s hour five of the Stern Pro Circuit Pinball Championship. Complete with fringe celebrities and live streams, these updated tournaments have made professional pinball an analog alternative to digital gaming’s dominance and its league-based evolution, e-sports. But I’ll level with you: The learning curve is high. If you think you know pinball—even if you can grasp the basics of strategic gameplay (modes, jackpots, multiballs)—trust me, you have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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If a baseball game is like a pot brownie—a bright, lackadaisical buzz—tournament pinball is an acid trip: sweaty, 12 hours long, and seemingly devoid of narrative structure. It’s not for everyone. I’d done some research, so I thought I had a handle on the basics: Score as many points as possible by shooting the ball at the lit areas on the playfield, hit enough shots to complete the “mode” (the pinball version of a quest), and complete all the modes to achieve a “multiball” (when several balls shoot out over the playfield at once). Do it fast enough to earn a “jackpot” for additional multipliers on every shot and do it all without letting the ball slip through the flippers or drop down the side, known as “draining.” But within that basic framework, things get complicated quickly. Every machine has different shots to make, different ways the modes affect gameplay, and different quirks that can sabotage the best struck shots.

Strategies also vary from machine to machine. “Older machines are more ‘chaotic,’” 15-year-old Escher Lefkoff (ranked #21 in the world) explained during warmups that morning. “The newer ones are more predictable, so a skilled player can control the gameplay.” It’s complicated, sure, but methodical—not unlike your typical first-person shooter video game, where your trigger is a flipper, your bullet a ball. Skill and precision are rewarded, but in real time, amid the flashing lights, the glint of steel, the exclamatory directives, it’s tough for even the most trained eye to know where to focus. Layer on a lexicon of jargon and complex, tournament-style play and you have yourself a seizure-inducing combo.

Competitions typically feature three elimination rounds: In rounds one and two, groups of four rotate through four machines, playing a single game (three balls) on each. The top two players in each group advance, culling the field of 40 down to 20, and then 10. Finally, comes the “ladder bracket,” which, to be frank, neither I nor the couple next to me (who drove 11 hours from Baltimore to watch the tournament) could wrap our heads around. In other words, four hours into a half-day pinball marathon, it starts to lose its charm. But, like any good trip, about five hours in, things get interesting.

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Belsito’s in a groove now, finishing off Deadpool’s Mystique mode in what the commentator calls “one of the fastest battles ever,” to trigger a Sauron Multiball. He scored close to 178 million points on his previous ball—a monster game, considering the handicaps manufacturer Stern puts on the machines (shorter flippers, no extra balls) to make gameplay more difficult for the pros. The already-pale teenage Parks grows ghostly, his spindly frame seems to shrink in his oversized gray T-shirt. He had drained his last ball in two flips.

Parks, along with Lefkoff and a handful of teenagers are the new guard of pinball aficionado—a generation raised in the digital age, yet enamored with pinball’s distinctive blend of mechanical feedback and quest-based gameplay. “There’s something cool about the game being physical when everything else is turning virtual,” Parks later said.

If you’d asked him this morning, he probably wouldn’t have put himself in the running. Ranked #225 in the world according to the IFPA (International Flipper Pinball Association) standings, Parks was a dark horse in a group packed with top-50 players, including Belsito (#10) and 37-year-old vet Josh Sharpe (#8)—both now vying for the final spot in the next round. “I’ll just be happy to advance,” Parks said sheepishly before the first round. He still has a chance, but it’s growing slimmer.

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Then, out of nowhere, Belsito’s last two multiballs slip between the flippers—a catastrophic “double-drain.” Belsito leads the group 254,441,420 points to Sharpe’s 122,277,200 and Parks’s 58,558,720. But Parks has one ball left. He’ll need a staggering 196 million points to advance.

The Stern Pro Circuit Pinball Championship is the culmination of a year-long competition sponsored by Chicago-based Stern Pinball, the world’s top pinball machine manufacturer. Stern’s setup features a commentators’ table, an overhead camera view of each machine so the crowd can follow along, and a documentary crew to capture the drama. And there is drama. Prior to the championship, Stern’s head of marketing shared the backstories of some of the more hype-worthy players, including father-son rivals Adam and Escher Lefkoff, “The Weatherman” Eric Stone (known for his hot-headed “rage tilting,” a physical assault of the machine itself), and untouchable champion Keith “The GOAT” Elwin.

It’s all part of 73-year-old pinball mogul Gary Stern’s plan to bring pinball back to its golden age(s). (It’s had several.) The crazy thing is that it appears to be working. Savvy marketing combined with the new popularity of barcades have sent machine sales skyward over the past few years. A decade ago, Stern Pinball was the last remaining pinball manufacturer in the United States. Today, there are three in the Chicago area alone and Stern has doubled the size of its factory since 2015. The city has become the epicenter of the game’s resurgence.

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Parks steps up to the machine. The entire crowd is hanging on his every flip. He’s got a mountain to climb, but it’s not impossible. “I know that if I hit certain shots and I do it perfectly, I can come back,” he explains. “Someone could play for half an hour and have a score 20 times mine, but I could make that up in five minutes.”

He plunges the ball into play and quickly collects enough chimichangas to fight the Megalodon for his first battle mode. 60 million. He misses a shot and uses a strategic tilt to narrowly avoid draining, but he’s patient, not an ounce of panic in his slight frame. 123 million. Deadpool’s eyes blink faster and faster on the playfield, indicating time is running out on Parks’s point multiplier. 156 million. He’s made up nearly 100 million points in just four minutes.

Parks steadies himself for his next attack. He’s spent hours practicing and watching Deadpool strategy videos in preparation. He knows this machine like the back of his hand, but once flipper hits ball, anything can happen.

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Parks must battle Sabretooth in the next mode—he’s two-thirds of the way to the Mechsuit Multiball and it’s looking like he might actually pull it off. Another target shot brings him to 178 million. Then, suddenly, his shot ricochets off the left bumper straight down the side drain. Disaster. Utter. Catastrophic. Just like that, the game is over. The crowd breaks into a roar. Parks will finish with 178,265,310 points—impressive, but not enough.*

That’s the best and worst thing about pinball, its caprice, regardless of how good you get. “There’s still an element of randomness,” says The GOAT. “Unlike a video game, you can’t memorize it.” I turn around to ask Parks how he’s feeling about his performance, but I’ll have to wait. He’s back at the flippers, with nothing on the line. Playing another game just for the fun of it.

* Andy Rosa (#31) of Flint, Michigan, took the title.

Air Conditioning Caused the Fire That Claimed Brazil's National Museum

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And budget cuts allowed it to spread.

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In September 2018, lovers of history and museums around the world mourned the catastrophic fire that claimed Brazil’s National Museum, and the majority of its 20 million artifacts. The 200-year-old building was brimming with rare cultural treasures—from Brazilian funeral urns, to a northern Chilean mummy, to the largest lace bug collection in the world. After a long investigation, it’s been determined that a faulty air conditioning unit was responsible for sparking the blaze. “There were various pieces of evidence that allowed us to conclude that the [air conditioning unit] was the primary cause of the fire,” said electrical expert Marco Antonio Zatta at a news conference in Rio de Janeiro, according to the Associated Press.

Police and fire officials have been working with an ensemble of anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, and more, both to determine how the fire got so out of control, and to recover as much as possible from the rubble. Three cooling systems, it was reported, were getting much stronger electrical currents than were appropriate based on the manufacturer’s recommendations, and they were sharing circuit breakers and grounding devices. Years of budget cuts also played a role. The museum, run by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, was in need of a range of safety updates. According to the investigation, performed by federal police and led by chief Ricardo Saadi, funding issues impacted the installation of fire protection devices such as hoses, water sprinklers, alarms, and fire doors. In fact, the Associated Press reports that the museum had only spent $4,000 on safety equipment between 2015 and 2017. This allowed the fire—which reached 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit in the museum’s auditorium—to spread much more rapidly than it otherwise might have.

In the end, most of the world’s largest collection of Latin American historical and cultural artifacts was lost, but about 2,000 objects have been recovered, and people have been trying to memorialize it in various ways. Immediately after the ashes cooled, rescuers recovered skull fragments of “Luzia,” the 11,500-year-old fossilized remains of a woman, some of the oldest known human remains ever found in the Americas. Indigenous Brazilian arrows, an antique Peruvian vase, and the five-ton Bendegó meteorite survived the inferno as well.

The Subversive, Surprising History of Curry Powder

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One of India’s most popular gastronomic exports tells a tale of empire.

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In the 2001 romantic comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary, the iconic meeting of the film’s lead couple begins with a voiceover as Bridget trudges through the snow down her mother’s driveway: “It all began on New Year’s day, in my 32nd year of being single. Once again I found myself on my own and going to my mother's annual turkey curry buffet. Every year she tries to fix me up with some bushy-haired, middle-aged bore, and I feared this year would be no exception.” The presence of turkey curry—a hybrid Indian and British food—as the background to this budding British romance reveals how much curry has become synonymous with British culture.

This love of curry, a dish adopted and adapted after the colonization of India, is a relic of when the sun never set on the British Empire. But the term “curry” reflected a willful ignorance of the diversity of Indian food. Lizzie Collingham, who mentions the Bridget Jones scene in her book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, writes that curry was something “the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture.” While their Indian cooks served them rogan josh, dopiaza, and qorma, the British “lumped all these together under the heading of curry.”

Domesticating curry also aided in Britain’s colonizing mission. Susan Zlotnick, a professor of English at Vassar College, has written about how the memsahibs of the British Raj were doing the work of empire by incorporating Indian elements into British cooking and making curry, in essence, culturally British. Cookbooks of the time were “self-conscious cultural documents in which we can locate a metaphor for nineteenth-century British imperialism,” writes Zlotnick. “By virtue of their own domesticity, Victorian women could neutralize the threat of the Other by naturalizing the products of foreign lands.” Taking the culinary wisdom of the colonized, and making it their own, was part of the grand imperial project.

Currying things, with fresh or tinned curry powder, became synonymous with British cookery. Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (first published in 1861) and Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery in all its Branches (1845), both bestsellers of their time, with several reprints, contained an abundance of curry recipes that called for curry powder. Some, such as Mrs. Beeton’s “fricasseed kangaroo tails,” revealed the multiple threads of colony in a single dish.

This became an enduring legacy of the British Empire and colonization—it sent native foods between colonies and around the world. Much of Indian cuisine today comprises ingredients from the Americas introduced by colonists, such as chilies, potatoes, and tomatoes. Likewise, the spice trade was formative to European colonial conquest, fostering global connections between continents. This was at a time when “Europe was clearly not in the center, but on the margins of a world system centered around Asia and the Middle East,” writes anthropologist Akhil Gupta in the book, Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia. And so, curry powder’s popularity in England ensured its journey to America with early settlers.

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According to culinary historian Colleen Taylor Sen, author of Curry: A Global History, Indians arrived in North America almost immediately after the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607. “The British from the East India Company made great fortunes and came to America, where they had these big estates,” she says. They brought servants and indentured laborers from India for their estates. “India and America were like sister colonies.” Curry made the trip too.

Through the 1800s, curry was a common dish, and curry powder a familiar flavor, in the United States. One of the earliest quintessentially American cookbooks, The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph, has at least six recipes that call for curry powder, including one to make the powder. Eliza Leslie’s bestselling Directions for Cookery, in Its Various Branches (1837) contains a “genuine East India receipt for [chicken] curry,” including recipes for mulligatawny soup with freshly ground curry powder. Mrs. Hill’s New Cook-Book (1870), which proclaimed itself “especially adapted to the Southern States,” contained recipes for curried meat stews and roasts, a “rice chicken pie” in a curry powder gravy, several ways to curry a calf’s head, and Mrs. Hill’s own curry powder recipe, made of pounded coriander seed, turmeric, ginger, black pepper, mustard, allspice, cumin, and cardamom.

The expense of shipping spices to the colonies, and to Britain, was probably the primary reason why blended, pre-made curry powder became common. Although there has never been a set combination of spices that goes into curry powder, the British commercialized and sold spice blends under that broad rubric since at least 1784. Not everyone could afford to buy the individual spices and make their own blends. And while Brits in colonial India had servants to freshly grind spices and select the right combinations for each dish, the average home cook in London or Virginia often leaned on one commercial curry powder (and swapped in more familiar techniques and ingredients, such as butter in place of ghee) for all their curries.

As soon as Indians had a voice in the British and American food worlds, they would denounce the use of curry powder, which reduced the region’s rich and varied cuisine to a few mass-produced mixes.

In the United States, this denunciation came strongly after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which abolished quotas based on national origins and encouraged high-skilled immigration. The influx of newly-arrived South Asians led to an increase in restaurants catering to these migrants. The face and flavor of curry changed from recipes written by white Americans to ones by South Asian chefs who voiced concerns about authenticity and appropriation while introducing their own versions of Indian food.

“What you don’t need is curry powder,” Madhur Jaffrey, the high priestess of Indian cooking in America, wrote in 1974 in An Invitation to Indian Cookery. “To me the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s.” She added that “no Indian ever uses curry powder,” nor would they mix their own, since then every dish would taste the same. “If ‘curry’ is an oversimplified name for an ancient cuisine,” she charged, “then ‘curry powder’ attempts to oversimplify (and destroy) the cuisine itself.”

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The rage felt toward curry powder was also fueled by the association between curry and racial slurs. While Britain had embraced curry—and Americans followed suit—anti-immigrant sentiments transcended a shared love of food. When Indians migrated to England and sister colonies, the racial epithet “curry-muncher” was the xenophobic response. After the East India Company’s trade monopoly in India ended in 1813, and the British government set up a more solid presence in India, the colonizing mission necessitated a separation from “natives.” Within India, an archetypal colonist discourse around disgust, backwardness, and mistrust set in, along with a need to establish the Englishness of the rulers.

Still, the term curry and Westerners’ taste for it was too strong to ignore. Jaffrey’s early readers were primarily Euro-American, and she went on to write bestselling cookbooks with such names as Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible, 100 Essential Curries, and Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Nation.

Later Indian-origin chefs in the U.S. and England, such as Meera Sodha, Raghavan Iyer, and Julie Sahni, had the benefit of writing and cooking for a more diverse audience that included diasporic Indians. Over time, they reclaimed the word curry by offering traditional or family recipes and introducing a more nuanced view into the diversity and range of Indian cuisine.

None of these authors would be caught dead using store-bought curry powder, but South Asian home cooks began to exert ownership over these products. By the 21st century, South Asian Americans were the fastest growing immigrant group in the United States. Both in the homeland and in the diaspora, double income South Asian households with little time to freshly grind spices and prepare jhalfrezi, qorma, kalia, bhuna, or dopiaza (different forms of dry and gravy-laden Indian dishes that typify curry) reached for commercial spice mixes—the equivalent of the curry powder of yore. Countless food forums include discussions on how best to use these premade blends, which, notably, are never called curry powder, the Hindi term masala (etymologically rooted in Urdu and Arabic) being preferred. Today the Indian premade packaged spice blend is an industry that, by some accounts, is worth a billion dollars. “Biryani masala,” “pav bhaji masala,” “goat curry masala,” and an assortment of masalas to marinate kebabs have become staples of the South Asian pantry. Curry endures, but now in the kitchens of South Asians, and at South Asian restaurants whose fare became considered “ethnic food.”

The decline in the popularity of curry in America—relative to the days when it featured prominently in American cookbooks—can be accorded in part to its reclamation by diasporic South Asians. “Our tastes are probably more racialized than we are willing to acknowledge,” said Krishnendu Ray, Chair of the Department of Food and Nutrition Studies at New York University, in an interview with WNYC. Most of the cuisines that have achieved “elite” status in the U.S. belong to ethnicities now considered white, such as Italian, French, and New American food. “Poor immigrants coming into the country—their food can become popular, but it is very difficult for their cuisine to acquire prestige.” And so, much of Indian, Chinese, and Mexican cuisine today gets relegated to a niche.

Food is often tied to national identity, but the contribution of curry powder to the global kitchen is a noteworthy instance of the early forces of globalization. An invention of a colonial empire, it epitomized Britishness—under the guise of being authentically Indian—and graced the tables of white southerners in America, ultimately drawing the ire of South Asians until it was reclaimed, reinvented, and rebranded under its current avatar as “masala.” The history of this humble kitchen ingredient is the history of empire and its aftermath.

Nepal's Mounting an Expedition to Discover if Everest Has Shrunk

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The long history of measuring the world’s highest point.

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In April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked Nepal. The quake destroyed buildings and claimed lives, but it also reshaped the region’s geology. It was large enough to cause many Himalayan peaks to drop slightly—including the world’s tallest mountain.

When satellites passed over Mount Everest, early readings suggested its peak appeared to have lost an inch. However, the initial measurements aren't quite accurate enough to know what actually happened—an inch isn’t a lot on more than 29,000 feet of rock. Since the quake, the true height of Everest has been a topic of discussion in the scientific community. Now Nepal's Survey Department is about to try to end those arguments by sending a specially trained team up to the summit to get a final, Nepal-approved height and quash rumors that the pride of the nation may have lost a little of its stature.

This effort began back in 2017, when the department commissioned a team of climbers to begin training and conducting fieldwork for the perilous technical journey. Now the team is ready. “Nepal has never measured Everest on its own although the world’s highest peak lies in its territory," Ganesh Prasad Bhatta, head of the Survey Department, said to AFP in 2017. "So, we want to prove to our people that Nepal is capable of measuring Everest.”

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It seems like the height of a mountain—even if it shifts or changes—shouldn’t be much cause for controversy, but measuring one with precision is easier said than done, and that can lead to disagreements. The first proper measurements of the mountain were taken during Britain’s Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, under the direction of Sir George Everest. It was announced in 1856 that the mountain's highest point is 29,002 feet above sea level.

An Indian survey team measured the mountain at 29,029 feet in the 1950s, a number confirmed by Chinese surveyors—give or take a couple of inches—in the 1970s. An American team equipped with GPS came up with 29,035 in 1999, followed by another Chinese survey in 2005 that measured the bedrock without the ice and snow, and came up with 29,017. Over the years, different teams from different corners of the world have all come up with slightly different numbers.

China and Nepal have been at odds end over the height for a few years now. Specifically, some in Nepal believe that China’s 2005 height—slightly lower—diminished the mountain, and that China then started using the higher number again when they realized that Nepal was drawing more climbers than Tibet. It's confusing, but at the very least, national pride is at stake.

According to the Nepal Survey Department, the team will employ precise leveling, trigonometric leveling, gravity surveys, and the Trimble R10, a new Global Navigation Satellite System gifted to them by New Zealand. Even then, no measurement will be final. The mountain will continue to lose height from earthquakes, gain it between them, and inch up as the Indian Plate presses northward.

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