The expression about unacceptable behavior that’s based in Irish history.
Around 16,000 BCE the melting ice from the Ice Age raised sea levels and separated Ireland from Britain. Then around 6,000 BCE Britain became separated from mainland Europe. Since around 8,000 BCE the island of Ireland has been steadily inhabited but whether these early settlers arrived on a disappearing land bridge or by boats is unknown. The Celts came much later (exactly when is debated) but somewhere starting around 500 BCE.
The long conflict between the Irish and English stems from the 1169 CE Norman invasion of Ireland. An 1155 papal decree by Pope Adrian IV (who, what a coincidence, was English himself) granted King Henry II of England the right to invade & govern Ireland. This was the start of the next several hundred years of brutal English colonization of Ireland.
Us From Them
The Lordship of Ireland began in 1177 but, in the beginning, England really only ruled over parts of Ireland. Some of the Lords who had been given land assimilated to the local Irish culture, the crown gained land and lost land, and gradually the area under English control shrank. By the 14th century only a region around Dublin was still under English control. To clearly mark the King’s territory, to separate “us from them”, a wooden fence was constructed along portions of the border. This border was the pale, from the Latin “palus” for a stake or fence. So, the native Irish living free outside of the control of the English crown were “beyond the pale.”
To try and control their subjects the English put in place various laws to prevent Irish influence. Marriage between English settlers and the Irish was forbidden, as was speaking Irish Gaelic, dressing like the Irish, or even cutting your hair like an Irish person. These activities were deemed unacceptable behavior and were “beyond the pale.”
Today the idiom “beyond the pale” continues to mean things that are offensive or unacceptable, just like what the English thought centuries ago.
Added info: the oldest structures in Ireland, sometimes thought of as Celtic, existed long before the Celts arrived in Ireland. Newgrange, the 5,200 year old passage tomb just North of Dublin, was created 2,500 years before the Celts arrival (it was also created before the pyramids of Giza).
The bizarre 1991 Gulf War trading cards celebrating weapons and the American military.
In 1990, after Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait, a coalition of Western forces mounted a response in defense of Kuwait (… and oil). The initial operation of the Gulf War was codenamed “Operation Desert Shield” which was followed by the combat phase of “Operation Desert Storm”. Around the same time the American trading card industry was reaching new highs. Trading cards were expanding beyond just sports. There were cards for TV shows, movies, bands, cartoon characters, etc. It was in this world that Desert Storm trading cards were launched.
A collection of cards from Topps Desert Storm series 2 including the “Desert Drink” card which discussed the benefits of staying hydrated.
For the children
In 1991 Topps produced the Desert Storm trading card series. There were 88 cards and 22 stickers with 9 cards & one sticker per 50-cent pack. There were cards of military leaders such as General Norman Schwarzkopf, political leaders such as President George H.W. Bush, as well as cards for vehicles, weapons, and other military equipment. Topps said these cards were not glamorizing war but instead were offering an “encyclopedic look at this military operation and its personalities and weapons …”.
As for being “encyclopedic”, the cards included numerous mistakes such as card 73 (“Machine Gunner”) which listed the 14 NATO member countries, but in 1991 there were actually 16 member countries (they forgot to list France and Iceland). Topps said their information was provided by the Pentagon and arms manufacturers, shirking any fact-checking responsibility.
Topps ended up producing three different Desert Storm card series, for a total of 264 cards, but they weren’t alone. A host of other companies got in on the action producing similar cards. Pro Set had 350 cards in their Desert Storm series with interesting cards such as Greenwich Mean Time, oil, as well as a card for the U.S. Constitution.
A collection of Pro Set Desert Storm cards including the “Greenwich Mean Time” card.
Strange days
Today the cards feel like a satirical take on America’s love of guns & patriotism – an odd relic of the early ‘90s. Critics at the time felt the cards trivialized warfare, that they were propaganda, and were desensitizing kids to violence. As for their monetary value, because of their popularity they were mass produced and so Desert Storm trading cards aren’t worth much. You can buy the entire Topps first series for $10.
Added info: at the same time as the Desert Storm trading cards Topps also produced Desert Shield baseball cards. The baseball cards were the same as regular baseball cards but with an Operation Desert Shield palm tree crest stamped on the front in gold foil. Also, after 9/11 Topps created the Enduring Freedom line of trading cards which included a collectible Osama bin Laden trading card.
The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 led to the creation of Frankenstein.
Mount Tambora is a volcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia and on April 5, 1815 it began a monumental multi-day eruption. The eruption is still the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history, the estimated equivalent of a 14,000-megaton nuclear bomb. It was so powerful it removed the top 4,750 feet of the volcano, reducing it to 9,350 feet tall as it sent more than 38 cubic miles of debris into the sky. The explosion was so loud it was heard 1,600 miles away, the equivalent of an explosion in Philadelphia being heard in Denver.
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, cause global devastation.
The eruption immediately killed over 10,000 people on the island. All of the island’s vegetation was destroyed and the water was poisoned which led to starvation and disease killing a further 37,825 Sumbawanese people. As the tsunami it generated, and the ash it expelled, spread to other islands, it killed off more vegetation and more people. Over 71,000 people are believed to have died in the immediate area of Indonesia from the eruption. However, with so much material being sent into the sky, the full impact of the eruption was only beginning.
Into the Stratosphere and Around the World
The long-term effects of the eruption were caused by the gases & ash sent into the stratosphere 141,000 feet into the sky. The sulfur dioxide (SO2) released caused a global greenhouse effect, blocking out sunlight and changing weather patterns. While the effects were spread around the world they were worse in the northern hemisphere. The cold weather and constant rain (such as the 8 weeks of “unceasing and extraordinary rain” in Ireland) killed crops around Europe causing food shortages in what became the worst famine in 19th century mainland Europe. Over 65,000 people died around the British Isles as a result of a typhus epidemic which was made worse by the volcanic induced weather. A new strain of cholera also developed in this weather, killing thousands more.
In North America a dry fog descended on the northeastern states which lasted for months. The extended cold was felt up & down the eastern seaboard. On the 4th of July the high in Savannah, Georgia was only 46° F. Rivers and lakes were still frozen in Pennsylvania in August. The extreme weather and bitter cold is believed to have been a catalyst for the westward expansion across America – people wanted to find a place that wasn’t awful. The eruption of Mount Tambora lowered global temperatures by 0.7 to 1.3 °F but its particularly brutal effects on the northern hemisphere is why 1816 came to be known as the “year without a summer.” The initial volcanic eruption, the extreme cold, the unusual weather patterns, as well as the spread of diseases resulted in a global death toll in the hundreds of thousands.
Silver Lining
Despite the adversity there were some positives. German inventor Karl Drais was motivated to find an alternate means of transportation to the horse (since horses require food which was in short supply at the time). He invented the first bicycle, the Laufmaschine, in 1817.
The eruption caused strange dark colors in the skies captured by a variety of painters of the day.
In the arts painters were inspired by the unusual hazy skies. Particulate matter from Mount Tambora hung in the stratosphere frequently blocking the shorter wavelength colors of blue light. A study of paintings from between 1500 to 1900 found that the paintings around 1816 were redder & darker than other time periods. The polluted skies might have made for more depressing daily life but they made for some great paintings.
But perhaps the greatest byproduct of the year without a summer was in literature. In the summer of 1816 a group of English friends traveled to Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They hoped to escape the bad weather of England but ended up in even more rain. Sitting around with nothing to do Lord Byron proposed everyone write a ghost story. John William Polidori, Byron’s personal physician, took a story idea by Byron and eventually wrote 1819’s The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story.
The year without a summer generated two of the most influential stories in Gothic horror.
An 18 year old Mary Godwin had trouble coming up with a story until (literally) one dark & stormy night, sometime after midnight, she had a “waking dream” of a pale man kneeling beside the thing he had put together that showed signs of life. With the encouragement/help of her soon to be husband Percy Shelley, Mary (Godwin) Shelley had the beginnings of Frankenstein. In 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, considered the first science-fiction story.
From one miserable vacation, caused by a volcano thousands of miles away, two of the most defining works of the Gothic horror genre were born.
The nostalgic song toasting times gone by that has spread around the world.
Auld Lang Syne started as a traditional Scottish folk song. The lyrics were written down, added to, and made famous by 18th century Scottish national poet Robert Burns. In the late 18th century Burns was touring Scotland collecting folk songs & poetry when he recorded Auld Lang Syne in 1788 and submitted it to The Scots Musical Museum.
Burns contributed hundreds of songs to the Museum whose intention was to preserve the fading Scots language & culture which was becoming increasingly influenced by English culture. Auld Lang Syne is written partially in English but also partially in Scots (which is a Germanic derived Scottish language, different than “Scottish” which is a Celtic Gaelic derived language). The lyrics were originally set to a few different melodies but in 1799 they were paired with the melody we know today.
Written down and added to by Robert Burns, Auld Lang Syne has become the unofficial theme song of New Year’s.
What is it and why New Year’s Eve?
Because the lyrics are partially in Scots most people don’t know exactly what the song means. The title “auld lang syne” is Scots and translates to “old long since” or more loosely “for the sake of the good old days gone by”. The song is a toast to friendship and to the fond memories of days gone by.
Given the song’s spirit of looking back while looking forward it became a standard sung every Hogmanay (the Scottish New Year’s Eve). Its association with New Year’s in North America was because of Guy Lombardo. On New Year’s Eve 1928 Guy Lombardo and The Royal Canadians big band hosted a concert at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City and at the stroke of midnight they played Auld Lang Syne. For the next 47 years they played NYE concerts and every midnight they played Auld Lang Syne, earning Lombardo the nickname of “Mr. New Year’s Eve”. When Dick Clark created Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve from Times Square in 1972 he too played Lombardo’s version of Auld Lang Syne at midnight. Since then the song has become synonymous with New Year’s.
Guy Lombardo’s classic 1947 rendition of Auld Lang Syne.
Around the World
While the song is internationally recognized as the unofficial theme song of New Year’s Eve the melody has been used in other ways. The Korean national anthem Aegukga had used the melody of Auld Lang Syne until 1948 when it was replaced with an original melody. It was also the melody of the national anthem of the Maldives, Qaumii salaam, until 1972 when it too was replaced with an original melody.
The Dutch song Wij houden van Oranje (which translates to “We Love Orange”) is a national soccer chant set to the melody of Auld Lang Syne. Also in Japan the melody is used for for the graduation ceremony song Hotaru no Hikari, it’s the melody used to mark the end of the day in department stores, etc.
QI discusses the history of Auld Lang Syne
Toasting the Past, Looking Forward
Like the Roman god Janus, Auld Lang Syne is a seasonal reminder to look back at the days gone by but also look ahead to the future. It’s a nostalgic song that toasts the people with us today as well as the people with us in spirit.
Lacking key ingredients, the menu at the first Thanksgiving of 1621 was a bit different than the traditional turkey dinner of today.
In the fall of 1621 the English Pilgrims and the Wampanoag came together in Massachusetts for, what has subsequently become a much mythologized, 3 day harvest festival. The pilgrims had a lot to be thankful for — that they were still alive following the deaths of half their fellow pilgrims the previous winter, that they had their supplies fortified by the Wampanoag, and that they had completed a successful summer growing season. What they ate as they gave thanks is debatable.
Definitely on the Menu
One food that was definitely served was venison. Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag, had 5 deer brought to the event. Another meat on the menu was “wild fowl”, but exactly what kind of birds these were is unknown. It’s possible that there was turkey at the first Thanksgiving but more likely it was goose or duck (or a combination). Other regional bird options at the time would have been swan and passenger pigeon.
Also definitely present was corn. The Wampanoag, who used the Three Sisters method of farming, had taught the pilgrims how to grow corn. As the pilgrims had grown a successful crop of Flint corn (aka “Indian corn”) it was cooked into a porridge, a bread, and/or with beans.
Maybe on the Menu
Given that the Plymouth Colony was by the water it’s very likely that seafood was also served. Eels, clams, muscles, cod, bass, and/or lobsters were very likely a part of the meal. It’s worth noting though that, unlike today, lobster was considered a food of last resort.
There were certainly vegetables & fruits on the menu but which ones were never specified (other than corn). Chestnuts, walnuts, beans, onions, carrots, cabbage, pumpkins, and various squashes were all grown in the area. Blueberries, plums, grapes, and raspberries were also grown in the area and could have been present. While cranberries might have been served cranberry sauce definitely was not since the colonists lacked the necessary sugar (and that cranberry sauce didn’t exist for another 50 years).
Not on the Menu
Even though pumpkins may have been present, pumpkin pie definitely was not. The pilgrims had neither the butter nor the flour necessary to make pumpkin pie – they didn’t even have an oven in 1621. Something pumpkin pie-esque that may have been prepared is a spiced pumpkin soup/custard cooked directly inside a pumpkin which was roasted on hot ashes.
There was no stuffing because, again, the colonists lacked the necessary flour. There were also no potatoes (mashed or otherwise). Potatoes came from South America and, while they had made their way to Europe by the late 16th century via the Spanish, they had yet to make their way to New England. There also weren’t any forks on the table since they too hadn’t made their way to North America yet (but on the upside nobody present had an overbite).
A historical reenactment of how to cook some of the foods present at the first Thanksgiving.
The parasite responsible for giving American southerners a bad reputation.
For centuries American southerners were maligned as lazy, slow, shiftless, dumb. Southerners had “the germ of laziness.” There was just something different about southerners that made them less-than their northern counterparts. As it turned out there was something different about them but it had nothing to do with genetics or social conditioning. That something was hookworm.
Hookworm
Hookworm, and specifically the New World hookworm Necator americanus, is a parasitic worm that arrived in America by way of the slave trade in the 17th century. In the larval stage hookworms live in wet warm shady soil where they wait to encounter a human. A person walking barefoot outdoors may make contact with a hookworm at which point it can penetrate the skin and crawl into the foot. From there it travels through the circulatory system to the lungs where it triggers a dry cough. The human host then unknowingly coughs up the worm only to swallow it down to the small intestine, which is where the worm wanted to be the entire time. The worm then lives around 1-2 years (or longer) attached to the wall of the intestine, sucking blood, and where a female worm can lay up to 30,000 eggs per day. Eventually these fertilized eggs are pooped out in a poorly built outhouse or in some bushes, contaminating the soil to start the process again. It’s disgusting.
Because hookworms thrive in warm humid environments they do particularly well in the southern climate of the United States. The area from southeastern Texas to West Virginia became nicknamed the “hookworm belt”. For poor southerners who couldn’t afford shoes and didn’t have indoor plumbing it was almost impossible to avoid hookworm. By 1910 it’s believed that around 40% of the people living in the south were infected with millions of worms.
Putting their gross lifecycle aside, the problem with hookworms is that they steal your blood. Alone one worm won’t do much damage, but getting infested by multiple worms on a continual basis over years/decades has a severely damaging cumulative effect. By consuming your blood hookworms can cause an iron deficiency. People with hookworms become tired, lose weight, and have little strength to do anything. Pregnant women are at risk for anemia and a greater chance of dying in child birth. Infected children can suffer irreversible developmental problems including stunted growth and intellectual disabilities. All of this matches the unfair characterization of southerners as slow rednecks.
In 1902 zoologist Charles W. Stiles discovered that hookworms were endemic to the southern US. In 1909 John D. Rockefeller got involved by funding the creation of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease. They campaigned across the south to educate, test, and help treat hookworm. Students in small country schoolhouses would submit stool samples to their teachers to be tested – some schools even required students be screened for hookworm. People would go to health clinics on the weekends to learn more. An estimated 7.5 million southerners had hookworms. While the Rockefeller Commission helped treat the problem what greatly reduced hookworm was the urbanization of the south enabling more people to afford shoes and sanitary indoor plumbing.
Beyond the health consequences the socioeconomic impact of hookworm is also destructive. The US regions with hookworm had lower rates of literacy and school attendance than areas without it. A 1926 study of Alabama children showed that the more worms a child had the lower their IQ. Even today children with chronic hookworm face up to 40% lower future wage earnings when they grow up. General productivity is measurably lower as a result of hookworm. The southern regions that were worst infected with hookworms saw the greatest income expansion after treatment, but unfortunately centuries of infection had a cumulative effect. Eight of the ten poorest US states are still southern states.
Hookworm in the US is typically thought of as a problem of the past but it is still very much a problem of the present. Given the severe income inequality in the US, hookworm is thriving in regions living below the poverty line. Hookworm lives in, and reinforces, poverty and while 85% of the world lives on less than $30 a day 10% of the world is currently living in extreme poverty. Around the world an estimated 477 million people are currently living with hookworms inside them.
For hundreds of years Europeans used ground up Egyptian mummies as medicine and paint pigment.
The Arabic word mūmiyā (which later became “mummia”) was the name for the black sticky asphalt material that came out of the ground used as a sealant, an adhesive, and as medicine around the ancient world. Pliny the Elder and others wrote about the medicinal uses for mummia which became a bit of a cure-all for a range of ailments.
Unfortunately mummia the petroleum product looked like another black substance that was a byproduct of the Egyptian embalming process. As such the word “mummia” came to mean both the petroleum product AND the byproduct of Egyptian mummification, which was then even further confused as meaning an entire mummified body. This is how we got the word “mummy”. Unfortunately this series of mistakes also led to hundreds of years of cannibalism.
Cannibal Medicine
Since the petroleum based mummia was used both externally as a salve as well as ingested internally, the Egyptian mummy version of mummia became used in the same ways. The 11th century physician Constantinus Africanus even described mummia as a “spice” found in the sepulchers of the dead. Soon the human version replaced the petroleum version and people began to crumble & grind human corpses for medicine.
With the Crusades, Europeans learned of mummia and its medicinal possibilities. This significantly increased European demand for Egyptian mummies and by the 15th-16th centuries there was a thriving trade in mummies. Thousands of bodies were being exhumed and shipped to Europe to be turned into medicines. In 1586 English merchant John Sanderson shipped 600 pounds of mummies to London to sell at various apothecaries. This was fueled in part by orientalism, that Egyptian mummies had some sort of exotic ancient knowledge or power.
Europeans would consume portions of Egyptian corpses for help with general pain, ulcers, inflammation, epilepsy, cough, difficult labor, etc. – none of which worked, or if they worked it wasn’t the mummy that was the active ingredient. The practice was so common Shakespeare included mummy as an ingredient in the witches’ potion in Macbeth. Demand was so high that by the 17th century some mummy dealers were producing counterfeit mummies. Newly deceased people, animals, or prisoners who had been purposefully starved & executed, were put through a process to simulate ancient Egyptian mummies.
After a few hundred years of medicinal cannibalism Europeans began to express doubt as to the practice’s efficacy (and ethicality). The 16th century herbalist Leonhard Fuchs felt foreign mummies were acceptable but local ones were wrong. While doubts arose during the Renaissance in the 16th century it took until the 18th century age of Enlightenment for the practice to fall out of fashion. As consuming mummies slowly ended Egyptian mummies took on a new role: paint pigment.
Around the end of the 16th century artists began using ground up Egyptian mummies (mixed with other materials) to produce mummy brown, a shade of brown pigment. Apothecaries that were grinding up mummies for medicine began to grind them up for paint as well. As a paint it was good for shadows, flesh tones, and glazing. Artists Benjamin West, Martin Drolling, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Burne-Jones, Eugène Delacroix, and others all painted with mummy brown.
It wasn’t until the 19th century that mummy brown began to fall out of favor. That said as recently as 1926 C Roberson & Co. still sold mummy brown made with ground up Egyptian corpses. As mummy brown died out so too did hundreds of years of large-scale desecration of deceased Egyptians, using human beings for medicines and paints.
Added info: in another example of “what’s old is new again”, in 2024 some Sierra Leoneans were digging up dead bodies for their bones to make the highly addictive street drug kush.
The concept of Haitian zombies was used as a threat to keep slaves working.
Before Haiti was an independent country it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue where they produced sugar, coffee, cotton, and other goods. The French brought more than a million West African people to the colony as slaves, more than any other colony in the Caribbean. Slavery in Saint-Domingue was particularly brutal – most people were poorly fed, they worked 12 hour days, pregnant slaves frequently didn’t live long enough to have babies, torture was common. Life expectancy was about 3-6 years with about half of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue dying within the first few years of arriving.
The brutal conditions of Saint-Domingue left the enslaved people hoping that, in death, their souls would return home to West Africa.
Haitian Vodou & Zombies
The Code Noir was a 1685 decree that outlined how slavery was to be conducted in the French empire. Among other things it stated that slaves were prohibited from practicing African religions and instead were forcibly baptized into Catholicism. What resulted was Haitian Vodou, a religious blend of West African beliefs (practiced in secret) given a veneer of Catholicism.
Part of this belief system was the idea that, upon dying, you would return to lan guinée (ie. Guinea, or West Africa). Their idea of heaven was to escape the slavery of Saint-Domingue and to simply go home. Feeling the allure of going home some people decided to escape slavery on their own terms. As such suicide was very common Saint-Domingue.
Initially suicide was seen as a viable way of getting to lan guinée but at some point there was a change. At some point (oral tradition is murky on when/how) suicide was prohibited and the punishment for committing suicide was that you’d be a slave forever – you’d become a zombie. The zombies of Haitian Vodou are not the Western pop culture shambling brain-eating zombies. The Haitian zombie was someone whose soul had been captured, denied entry to lan guinée, and was turned into an undead field hand with no chance of escape. Plantation slave-drivers used this to their advantage threatening slaves that if they killed themselves they would be turned into zombies to work forever under the control of a bokor/sorcerer. Unlike today what was feared was the threat of becoming a zombie, not the actual zombies themselves.
1929’s White Zombie was the first zombie movie. It used some Haitian Vodou beliefs but took significant artistic license.
White Zombie
Over time the zombie concept evolved and changed. The sensationalistic 1929 William Seabrook travel book The Magic Island introduced voodoo and zombies to mainstream Western culture. This inspired the 1932 film White Zombie, which was the first zombie movie. White Zombie stars Bela Lugosi as the villainous Murder Legendre (a bit on the nose) who’s a bokor enslaving people as zombies to be his henchmen and to work in his sugarcane mill. White Zombie used Haitian Vodou ideas but with a lot of artistic license. Later zombie stories dropped the Saint-Domingue threat of eternal slavery, then they dropped the bokor master commanding the zombies. Aside from being mindless undead creatures, the zombies of today have little resemblance to their sadder more terrifying origins.
Added info: following the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804, the 1883 Haitian Criminal Code outlawed the practice of turning someone into a zombie.
Before museums existed, people had cabinets/rooms to display their collected treasures.
There was a time when museums did not exist. The role of collecting, preserving, and displaying the art, artifacts, and wonders of the world belonged largely to individuals. As far back as the 4th century BCE Greeks were collecting exotic treasures from the East. More than just trading in commodities, the Greeks collected the art and textiles from these far away cultures. Roman emperor Augustus decorated his homes not just with art but with rare objects and bones of giant animals. Over the centuries, as cultures explored & traded with increasingly distant lands, the trends in what was collectible grew & changed. By the 16th and 17th centuries wealthy European collectors had amassed enough objects that they created special cabinets and/or rooms to show-off their collections. They created cabinets of curiosities.
Ole Worm’sMuseum Wormianum is one of the most famous cabinets of curiosities.Ferrante Imperato’sDell’Historia Naturale is another famous wunderkabinett.
Wunderkabinett
From the German for art (kunst) or marvels (wunder) and cabinet (kabinett) or room (kammer), these cabinets & rooms were places where Renaissance scholars, merchants, royalty, and others could store their collections. Collecting was very fashionable in 17th century Europe and these cabinets were dedicated spaces to displaying all manner of objects. Like the contemporaneous maps of the world, some of these spaces were designed for show while others were more utilitarian.
A collection of cabinets and rooms displaying all manner of curiosities.
Some collectors had thousands of specimens. The objects in these cabinets were thoughtfully categorized and organized, each piece contributing to the larger whole. Collecting was a way to bring order to the world, to exert some level of control over something that is uncontrollable. What was stored & displayed in these cabinets depended on the collector, but broad categories of objects included:
Fine art
Applied art (scientific instruments, anthropological objects, etc.)
Natural materials (fossils, shells, rocks, etc.)
Historical objects
These categories, as well as these collections, served as the precursors to our modern museums. The Amerbach Cabinet was a collection of art, books, coins, etc. that was assembled by various members of the Amerbach family. It was eventually co-purchased by the city of Basel & the University Basel and became the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1661, the first public museum in the world. Francesco I de’ Medici had his studiolo, a 26 x 10 foot room of curiosities that is part of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Other Medici possessions served as the start of the Uffizi Gallery. Elias Ashmole, who amassed his fortune & collection through sometimes questionable means, gifted his collection to the University of Oxford which became the Ashmolean Museum in 1683.
Throughout the 18th century an increasing number of private collections were converted into public museums, some of which still exist today but all of which helped define what museums have become.
Added info: In 1784 Charles Wilson Peale’s collection became the Philadelphia Museum which was the United States’ first museum (and also the first to display a mastodon skeleton).
The terms redneck and hillbilly both come from rebellious 17th century Scottish protestants.
Rednecks
In 17th century, King Charles I pushed for greater religious uniformity across the British Isles. Scottish Presbyterians disapproved as these reforms were increasingly Catholic in style & organization. In 1638 thousands of Scots signed the National Covenant (sometimes using their own blood as ink), signifying their preference for a Presbyterian Church of Scotland and their refusal to accept the reforms made by Charles. Going one step further, some of these “Covenanters” took to wearing red cloth on their necks as an outward sign of their resistance. These dissenting Scottish religious rebels were the original “red necks”.
Looking closely at The Signing of the National Covenant in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh by William Allan you can see the man signing the Covenant at the center is having his blood drawn by a dagger for him to use as ink.
Hillbillies
Political and religious tension continued around the British Isles throughout the late 17th century which led to the 1688 Glorious Revolution. On the one side of this revolution was Catholic King James II and those who supported a strong monarchy, on the other were Protestants & Parliamentarians. Afraid of a Catholic dynasty and that James would leave the throne to his Catholic son James Francis Edward, seven influential English nobility invited the protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange to invade England and take the throne.
Around the same time, Scottish Presbyterian leader Richard Cameron was preaching a message of rebellion against the English. Being a religious nonconformist, Cameron took to being a field preacher and spread his radical message outdoors away from Scottish towns. His followers (the Cameronians) were given the nickname “hillmen” due to their outdoor religious gatherings.
As William of Orange easily invaded England, and successfully took the throne, he was supported by Scottish Protestants. The Scottish living in Northern Ireland at the time fought against the Jacobite supporters of King James. William of Orange was nicknamed “King Billy” and his Ulster Scots Protestant supporters were nicknamed “Billy boys”. Eventually these two Scottish Protestant rebel nicknames of “hillmen” and “Billy boys” got combined to form “hillbilly boys” and then just “hillbilly”.
Ulster Scot supporters of William of Orange became known as “Billy Boys” which, when combined with the Scottish Cameronian nickname of “hillmen”, eventually became “hillbilly”.
American Rednecks & Hillbillies
Despite their successful support for William many Scottish were still oppressed for being Presbyterians and for being Scottish. Searching for greater religious & personal freedom they began to emigrate in larger numbers from Ulster to the British colonies in North America. An estimated 200,000 Ulster Scots (aka Scotch-Irish) emigrated to the American colonies between 1717 and 1775. Settling up and down the East coast and throughout Appalachia, these Scottish protestants brought with them their religion, their rebelliousness, as well as their nicknames.
Over the centuries the meanings of both “redneck” and “hillbilly” have changed. During the “Redneck War” of 1920-21 “redneck” was used to label the unionizing coal miners (many of whom were Scotch-Irish) who wore red bandanas in solidarity. The term has also been used to describe early 20th century southern Democrats as well as more literally to describe poor farmers with sunburnt necks. Hillbilly also took on a more literal interpretation to describe the people who settled the rural hilly areas of Appalachia and the Ozarks. Today both terms are generally used as derogatory slurs for poor rural whites.
