Meet Jane, the 14-year-old eaten when the first British settlers in America turned to cannibalism: The macabre secrets of starving pioneers besieged by Red Indians Skull of a 14-year-old girl, named 'Jane of Jamestown', shows scratch marks Anthropologists from the Smith-sonian National Museum of Natural History analysed her skull and severed leg bones Dr Douglas Owsley said bones evidence of 'survival cannibalism' Human remains date back to the deadly winter of 1609-1610, known as the 'starving time' in Jamestown, when hundreds of colonists died By Annabel Venning for MailOnline Published: 22:35 GMT, 15 May 2013 | Updated: 22:35 GMT, 15 May 2013 She had arrived in America only a few months earlier. After a stormy 16-week voyage across the Atlantic, Jane, a 14-year-old girl from southern England, would have been relieved to reach land when she scrambled ashore at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America, in August 1609. But any sense of salvation was to be short-lived. A facial reconstruction of 'Jane of Jamestown' who archeologists believe was dug up and eaten by settlers. There was simply not enough to feed all the extra mouths.
'Politics Ain’t the Same' — How the 19th Amendment Changed American Elections - BillMoyers.com A line of suffragists march with banners that read "Come to the White House Sunday at 3," in Washington DC in 1915. (Photo by Harris & Ewing/Buyenlarge/Getty Images) My mother was born in the United States of America without the right to vote. I just stopped to re-read that sentence because it seems so, you know, quaint. By the time she neared voting age in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, prohibiting federal and state governments from denying citizens the right to vote “on account of sex.” Sheet music cover image of Oh! That’s my ritual, too (without the body armor), which is why this Friday, Aug. 26 — the 96th anniversary of the day American women got the vote — I’ll offer my annual thanks to the women and men who made it happen. Not to mention countless insults, inanities and hurled rotten eggs. But the result changed the dynamic, opening the electoral process to more individuals than ever before in American history. Yeah, well. Give her half credit.
‘Slam-dunk’ find puts hunter-gatherers in Florida 14,500 years ago Big game hunters of the Clovis culture may have just gotten the final blow to their reputation as North America’s earliest settlers. At least 1,000 years before Clovis people roamed the Great Plains, a group of hunter-gatherers either butchered a mastodon or scavenged its carcass on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Stone tools discovered in an underwater sinkhole in the Aucilla River show that people were present at the once-dry Page-Ladson site about 14,550 years ago, reports a team led by geoarchaeologists Jessi Halligan of Florida State University in Tallahassee and Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. The Clovis people appeared in North America around 13,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating of twigs, seeds and plant fragments from submerged sediment layers provides a solid age estimate for six stone artifacts excavated by scuba divers, the team reports May 13 in Science Advances. Brendan Fenerty Excavations from 2012 to 2014 uncovered animal bones, too.
The Rise and Not-Quite-Fall of Religion in American Politics by Derek Beres Religion and politics are old bedfellows generally—for millennia the two were indistinguishable. But to understand how we've arrived at where we are today, we need only travel back to the last great economic crash: the Great Depression. As Americans were trying to piece together any semblance of identity, and as Roosevelt initiated the sweeping reforms of the New Deal, a grumbling was heard emanating from conservative America. And those grumblers decided religion was the missing piece in their evolving jigsaw. In America, the Right began embracing religion with capitalistic furor in the thirties, so argues Princeton history professor Kevin M Kruse. Corporate behemoths and manufacture lobbies, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, employed clergymen to promote conservative political values. Kruse continues, Until now. Is this pointing toward a less religious nation? Image: Chip Somodevilia / Getty Images
The Real Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan. It Was Not To End the War Or Save Lives. Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives. But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that concluded (52-56): Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. General (and later president) Dwight Eisenhower – then Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces, and the officer who created most of America’s WWII military plans for Europe and Japan – said:
On Immigration, Law Is on Obama’s Side THE legal controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement policies will soon come to a head when the Supreme Court justices hear the case United States v. Texas on Monday. Texas claims that the president’s executive decisions lack legal sanction by Congress and have injured the state. But whether or not you like President Obama’s actions, he has operated under longstanding provisions of law that give the executive branch discretion in enforcement. This presidential prerogative has been recognized explicitly by the Supreme Court.
The Cold War’s Over—So Why Is the US Military Still Built to Fight It? This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. It’s 1990. I’m a young captain in the US Air Force. I’ve just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, something I never thought I’d see, short of a third world war. Right now I’m witnessing the slow death of the Soviet Union, without the accompanying nuclear Armageddon so many feared. Think of it as the trifecta moment: Vietnam syndrome vanquished forever, Saddam’s army destroyed, and the United States left standing as the planet’s “sole superpower.” Post-Desert Storm, the military of which I was a part stood triumphant on a planet that was visibly ours and ours alone. What I didn’t realize back then was: America’s famed “containment policy” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union didn’t just contain that superpower—it contained us, too. Now was the time to go for broke. Think about it. The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be
How much did the Louisiana Purchase actually cost? Wikimedia Commons/White House Historical Association It’s a familiar chapter in our history, part of the triumphant narrative of westward expansion: In 1803, the United States bought a massive chunk of North America, and we got it for a song. Spain had ceded the Louisiana Territory to France, and Napoleon, in turn, offloaded it to American diplomats in Paris after the Haitian Revolution ruined his plans for the New World. Vaguely defined at the time as the western watershed of the Mississippi River, and later pegged at about 827,000 square miles, the acquisition nearly doubled the national domain for a mere $15 million, or roughly $309 million in today’s dollars. Divide the area by the price and you get the Louisiana Purchase’s celebrated reputation as one of the greatest real estate bargains in history. Historians have long known that Indians were paid something for their soil rights, but we’ve never been able to say how much. Play the animation Interactive by Andrew Kahn
The Confederate Cause in the Words of Its Leaders This afternoon, in announcing her support for removing the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley asserted that killer Dylann Roof had “a sick and twisted view of the flag” which did not reflect “the people in our state who respect and in many ways revere it.” If the governor meant that very few of the flag’s supporters believe in mass murder, she is surely right. But on the question of whose view of the Confederate Flag is more twisted, she is almost certainly wrong. Roof’s belief that black life had no purpose beyond subjugation is “sick and twisted” in the exact same manner as the beliefs of those who created the Confederate flag were “sick and twisted.” This examination should begin in South Carolina, the site of our present and past catastrophe. In citing slavery, South Carolina was less an outlier than a leader, setting the tone for other states, including Mississippi: Louisiana: Alabama: Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Texas: