“Thank the good God we have all got through and the only family that did not eat human flesh,” wrote fourteen-year-old Virginia Reed, a surviving Donner Party member, in an 1847 letter. “Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody and never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.” Reed reported being “pleased with California, particularly with the climate.”
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In 1961 Mary Ingraham Bunting established the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a research center for women with PhDs or “the equivalent” in creative achievement who had been forced to leave academia and the workforce. A 1960 brochure advertising the program warns that “this sense of stagnation can become a malignant factor even in the best of marriages,” but that women no longer need be “crusaders and reformers” because “the bitter battles for women’s rights are history.”
Including trademarks in books became crucial after the invention of the printing press; without stringent copyright laws, rival publishers could repurpose superiorly edited texts with impunity. Aldus Manutius of Venice, who employed Erasmus as a proofreader, called attention to his company’s “sign of the dolphin wound round the anchor.” Florentine printers were aping the mark, but in the frauds, “the head of the dolphin is turned to the left, whereas that of ours is well known to be turned to the right.”
Around 1500 bc, the Hittite augur Maddunani sacrificed to the gods one goat kid, one piglet, and one puppy in an attempt to end an epidemic that had devastated the army. While puppies played “an extensive, and apparently vital” role in Hittite ritual, wrote historian Billie Jean Collins, “this is the only case in Hittite ritual of puppies being killed as an offering.”
Before the nineteenth century, a conductor’s baton was a baseball-bat-size implement that was banged against the floor to keep time. This could be dangerous. In 1687, while conducting a symphony playing Te Deum for Louis XIV, who had just recovered from serious illness, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully accidentally struck his foot with his baton, causing inflammation in his toe. He refused amputation, and an infection spread, killing him two months later.
“When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West,” the Lakota heyoka Black Elk explained in 1932, “it comes with terror like a thunderstorm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm.”
“I don’t believe in miracles, because it’s been a long time since we’ve had any,” Joseph Heller said in an interview in 1988. Some sixteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine had written, “Men say, ‘Why do not the miracles, which you talk about as having been worked, take place now?’ I might indeed reply that they were necessary before the world believed for the very purpose of making it believe.”
In July 1990, one year before the collapse of the USSR, scholar Nicholas Eberstadt testified before a Senate committee about a CIA study of the Soviet economy, which showed high Soviet meat production and per-capita milk output—exceeding U.S. levels—though shortages were widely reported by tourists and Soviet citizens. “The Soviet government routinely hides many of its efforts from outside views,” Eberstadt granted. “But where, one wonders, are the hidden stockpiles and reserves of Soviet meat?”
Chronicler Jean le Bel wrote that during the Jacquerie, a popular revolt in France in 1358, peasants “killed a knight, put him on a spit, and roasted him while his wife and children looking on. After ten or twelve of them raped the lady, they wished to force-feed them the roasted flesh of their father and husband, and made them then die by a miserable death.”
Tacitus reports in his Annals that Nero’s “passion for extravagance” brought disrepute and danger in the year 60 when the emperor went bathing in the spring that fed the Aqua Marcia, the aqueduct believed to deliver Rome’s healthiest drinking water. Nero “profaned the sacred waters,” complains Tacitus, and “the divine anger was confirmed by a grave illness that followed.”
Before Michelangelo’s David was placed in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1504, Leonardo argued the nude sculpture needed “a decent ornament” and sketched it with underpants inked on. David was later fitted with a prim brass girdle sustaining twenty-eight copper leaves. It remained for at least forty years.
Plutarch related that news of the Athenians’ brutal defeat at Syracuse during the Peloponnesian Wars first came from a stranger who told the story at a barbershop “as if the Athenians already knew all about it.” When the barber spread the news, city leaders branded him a liar and an agitator. He was “fastened to the wheel and racked a long time.” Official messengers later came with the “actual facts of the whole disaster,” and the barber was released.
In the weeks surrounding Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, the minister of culture, eight of forty-one party regional leaders, fourteen of ninety-eight Luftwaffe generals, and eleven of fifty-three admirals committed suicide. In Berlin, 3,881 Germans killed themselves in April alone; 7,057 suicides were reported by the end of the year.
In the Finnish runic epic Kalevala, Loviatar, the daughter of the god of death, is impregnated by the wind and gives birth to nine diseases: Consumption, Colic, Gout, Rickets, Ulcer, Scab, Cancer, Plague, and an unnamed disease, “the worst of the nine,” who is banished by his mother “to bewitch the lowland people, / to engender strife and envy.”
Japanese athletic-footwear company Onitsuka Tiger changed its name in 1977 to ASICS, an acronym of the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, “a sound soul in a sound body,” altering a line from one of Juvenal’s satires. “If you must pray for something,” wrote the poet, “then ask for a sound mind in a sound body.”