Hi and welcome to ‘a handful of history’, my fortnightly sharing of real-life stories from around the world. All the narratives I pick are rooted in history one way or another, yet I feel that most of them carry themes and happenings that seem very present day-like. I create this blog out of love and curiosity for the field of human history and culture, and I’m happy that you find it interesting too. My blog and newsletters are free; if you want to help me keep it going, please join my newsletter. THANK YOU. Thanks for being here - let's dive in. Enjoy! Majken xx
Why Women Should Tell the Stories of Humanity
A few years ago, the British theatre director and producer Jude Kelly travelled to Somaliland in Africa, she tells us in her TED talk. Part of her joy going there was visiting the Laas Geel caves, which are caves that contain some of the oldest cave paintings in the world - i.e. images that are thought to be about 9,000 to 11,000 years old. A picture of a little girl caught Kelly's eyes. “I thought it was a bit like me when I was a little girl”, Kelly says, “and I thought, well, who painted this joyful, youthful figure?” And so she asked the curator of the caves: "Tell me about the men and women who painted these.”” The curator, obviously displeased, answered that "Women didn't paint these pictures." "Well, it was 11,000 years ago." Kelly replied, "How do you know?" And he said, "Women don't do these things. Men made these marks. Women don't."
“Now, I wasn't really surprised,” Kelly tells us, “because that's an attitude that I've seen continuously all my life as a theatre maker. We are told that divine knowledge comes down through the masculine [..] Similarly, we're told that creative genius resides in the masculine, that it is the masculine that will be able to tell us about who we really are, that the masculine will tell the universal story on behalf of all of us, whereas women artists will really just talk about women's experiences, only really relevant to women and of passing interest to men.” “However”, Kelly states, “unless we're prepared to believe that women's stories really matter, then women's rights don't really matter, and then change can't really come.” She really has a point.
TED talk "Why Women Should Tell the Stories of Humanity" by British theatre director and producer Jude Kelly.
The Model Book of Calligraphy
Eye candy. In the early 1560s, the Croatian-born master scribe Georg Bocskay produced “The Model Book of Calligraphy” - Mira calligraphiae monumenta - showing an impressive range of writing styles. At the time, Bocskay was a secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I.
Some 30 years later (and 15 years after the death of Bocskay), Emperor Ferdinand’s grandson, who had inherited the book, hired the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel to add to it illustrations of flowers, fruits, and insects. Here are some examples. Pretty amazing, right!
Illustrations: Dianthus and Almond - Spider, Love-in-a-Mist, Potter Wasp, and Red Currant - Tulips, Fly, Kidney Bean, and Bean.
The Airport for Celebrities You Never Knew Existed
In Newfoundland, which is the most eastern province in Canada, lies the Gander Airport. It was built back in 1939 and it served as an obligatory stop for refuelling the planes that flew between Europe and America. Everybody had to stop by here, including hot shot celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, John Travolta, and Fidel Castro - who was there during winter and ended up sledding behind a nearby hospital. Some of the most amazing thing about the airport is, I think, that it still looks pretty much the same as it did when Queen Elizabeth II opened the terminal building in 1959. Just look at those seats and all the sculptures and paintings! I’d love to do a stop over myself one day.
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