Are the streets of Washington, D.C. supposed to form a pentagram? Actual Mason here (and current Master of a Lodge): I'm going to have to go ahead and assume that you aren't a Freemason yourself. To say that today "it's not really Freemasonry" is rather ignorant. Sure, we don't get together every month and figure out how to take over the government, but the core values we practice everyday and pass on to newer Masons hearken back to why the fraternity was created in the first place. A good deal of the original founding fathers of the US were Masons, and one of their primary goals was to create a secular society where personal liberty and freedom were paramount - Freemasonry strives for those things; politics and religion are taboo topics at meetings, and equality is our most important pursuit. If I suggest that next time you bash modern Freemasons, you look into it a bit before you comment...you might be surprised. If you're misinformed then everything looks like a theory. Haha, I see what you did there.
Top 5 Misconceptions About Columbus | Christopher Columbus & Intrepid Explorers | Columbus Day | Flat-Earth Myth & Who Discovered the Americas Updated on Oct. 11, at 3:34 p.m. ET Monday is Columbus Day, time to buy appliances on sale and contemplate other things that have nothing to do with Christopher Columbus. So much of what we say about Columbus is either wholly untrue or greatly exaggerated. Here are a few of the top offenders. 1. If he did, he was about 2,000 years too late. Columbus, a self-taught man, greatly underestimated the Earth's circumference. The Columbus flat-earth myth perhaps originated with Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus; there's no mention of this before that. 2. Yes, let's ignore the fact that millions of humans already inhabited this land later to be called the Americas, having discovered it millennia before. What Columbus "discovered" was the Bahamas archipelago and then the island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. So why does the United States celebrate the guy who thought he found a nifty new route to Asia and the lands described by Marco Polo? 3.
Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know No one can know who was the first female mathematician, but Hypatia was certainly one of the earliest. She was the daughter of Theon, the last known member of the famed library of Alexandria, and followed his footsteps in the study of math and astronomy. She collaborated with her father on commentaries of classical mathematical works, translating them and incorporating explanatory notes, as well as creating commentaries of her own and teaching a succession of students from her home. Hypatia was also a philosopher, a follower of Neoplatonism, a belief system in which everything emanates from the One, and crowds listened to her public lectures about Plato and Aristotle. Her popularity was her downfall, however. She became a convenient scapegoat in a political battle between her friend Orestes, the governor of Alexandria, and the city’s archbishop, Cyril, and was killed by a mob of Christian zealots.
The Origin of Blue Jeans | Around The Mall An early pair of Levi Strauss & Co.'s "Duck Trousers." Photo courtesy American History Museum On the 109th anniversary of Levi Strauss’ death, his chief product—blue jeans—have become a $91 billion per year industry, an icon of American culture, and quite possibly the world’s most popular article of clothing. His name, more than any other, evokes the tough denim fabric and heavy stitching of America’s favorite pair of pants. It all started in 1871, when tailor Jacob Davis of Reno, Nevada, had a problem. As local miners snapped up the overalls he made with rivet-strengthened stress points and durable “duck cloth,” a type of canvas, Davis realized he needed to protect his idea. Davis soon moved to San Francisco, and wide scale production of riveted pants started for the first time. A close-up of the Smithsonian's original Levi Strauss trousers. Business for the company boomed as pants flew off the shelves. Essential to the Levi’s name was the integrity and ruggedness of the trousers.
13 Halloween Superstitions & Traditions Explained | Black Cats & Witches | Jack-o'-Lanterns & Trick-or-Treating | History of Halloween Remy Melina, LiveScience Staff Writer | October 29, 2011 08:07am ET Credit: Monkey Business Images | shutterstock Halloween may seem like it's all about costumes and candy, but the holiday — which is relatively new to America, having only become popular in the early 1900s — has its roots in pagan beliefs. Dating back about 2,000 years, Halloween marked the Celtic New Year and was originally called Samhain, which translates to "summer's end" in Gaelic. Some Halloween traditions, such as carving Jack-o'-lanterns, are based on Irish folklore and have been carried on throughout the centuries, while others, such as candy corn, are more modern Halloween additions. Read on to find out the meaning behind 13 spooky Halloween staples, including spiders, witches and trick-or-treating.
The Axis Plan To Invade America In 1942 Taken from the March 2, 1942 issue of Life, these diagrams and maps detailed how the Axis powers could invade North America following Pearl Harbor. The Axis Plan was imagined in 6 Plans (Plan 1 is above): Plan 2 of the Axis plan to invade America has the Japanese invading the West Coast of America via Pearl Harbor and then California. Plan 3 of of the Axis plan to invade America has the Japanese invading North America through the Panama Canal, then proceeding up through Mexico to the West Coast of the United States. The Four Most Important Battles Of Ancient Greece The Most Important Battles Of Ancient Greece: Battle of Marathon, 490 BC The Battle of Marathon took place during the first Persian invasion of Greece, fought between the combined forces of Athens and Plataea against King Darius’ Persian army. Darius’ attempted to invade Greece as he was angered after the Athenians had sent aid to Ionia in a revolt against the Persians. Once the Persian armies had defeated the Ionian revolt, they turned their attention on Greece, first capturing Eretria (who had helped the Athenian and Ionian forces) and finally sailing into Marathon for vengeance. Though Darius worked on rebuilding his army for another invasion, the second invasion didn’t occur until his death and was led by his son, Xerxes. Battle of Salamis, 480 BC Fought in September 480 BC, the Battle of Salamis was one of the most significant naval battles in ancient Greece, between the Greek city-states and their perpetual enemy, Persia.
Himno a la Nikkal, la canción más antigua del mundo Reproducción de una de las tablillas de Ugarit con el Himno a la NikkalPara muchas personas la música es algo que va unido a ellas. Desde que nacemos estamos escuchándola y, a lo largo del día, son muchos los momentos en los que alguna canción o melodía nos acompaña. Pero hubo un momento en la historia en el que alguna canción tendría que ser la primera, como todo en esta vida. Muchos son los estudios que se han realizado para determinar cuál era la canción más antigua del mundo y cuando se creó. Entrada al palacio real de Ugarit, lugar donde las canciones hurritas fueron encontra …En la década de los años 50, en la zona en la que habitaron los hurritas (Mesopotamia) se encontraron unas tablillas de arcillas en unas excavaciones realizadas en el Palacio Real de Ugarit. Todo parecía indicar que en dichas tablillas se encontraban unos escritos cuneiformes (la forma más antigua de expresión escrita) y se sospechaba que eran composiciones musicales en forma de himnos.
history of the world through facebook The Man Who Busted the 'Banksters' | Past Imperfect Ferdinand Pecora. Photo: National Archives Three years removed from the stock market crash of 1929, America was in the throes of the Great Depression, with no recovery on the horizon. As President Herbert Hoover reluctantly campaigned for a second term, his motorcades and trains were pelted with rotten vegetables and eggs as he toured a hostile land where shanty towns erected by the homeless had sprung up. They were called “Hoovervilles,” creating the shameful images that would define his presidency. Millions of Americans had lost their jobs, and one in four Americans lost their life savings. With unemployment hovering at nearly 25 percent in 1932, Hoover was swept out of office in a landslide, and the newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised Americans relief. Ferdinand Pecora was an an unlikely answer to what ailed America at the time. Just months before Hoover left office, Pecora was appointed chief counsel to the U.S. “Where do you live?” Sources
Hollywood star whose invention paved the way for Wi-Fi Jonathan Keats, contributor "HEDY LAMARR, screen actress, was revealed today in a new role, that of an inventor," reported The New York Times on 1 October 1941. "So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details." The invention was not her first. When Lamarr turned her attention to national defence, following the tragic sinking of a ship full of refugees by a German U-boat in 1940, she knew far more about armaments than most movie stars. Her insight was that you could protect wireless communication from jamming by varying the frequency at which radio signals were transmitted: if the channel was switched unpredictably, the enemy wouldn't know which bands to block. Notorious in the music world for avant-garde compositions featuring airplane propellers and synchronised player pianos, prior to the war, Antheil had galvanised Paris, and incited riots, with his cacophonous Ballet Mécanique.
Shipping Timetables Debunk Darwin Plagiarism Accusations Charles Darwin was not a plagiarist, say two researchers who aim to refute the idea that Darwin revised his own theory of evolution to fit in with one proposed by fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. The accusation has received little support from serious historians of Darwin’s life and work, who say that Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection independently at more or less the same time. But it has proved hard to dispel, thanks to some vociferous advocates of Wallace’s primacy. Alfred Russel Wallace (left) and Charles Darwin (right) came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection independently at more or less the same time. In 1858, Darwin received a letter from Wallace, written on the island of Ternate in Indonesia. The most extreme accusation came in a 2008 book, The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime by Roy Davies, a former documentary-maker for the BBC. Striking coincidence Conspiracy theory
From the Collections, Sound Recordings Heard for the First Time | Around The Mall Curator Carlene Stephens, on left, and collections manager Shari Stout look at a glass disc containing a sound recording from the 1880s. Photo by Rich Strauss, courtesy of the National Museum of American History One March morning in 2008, Carlene Stephens, curator of the National Museum of American History’s division of work and industry, was reading the New York Times when a drawing caught her eye. She recognized it as a phonautograph, a device held in the museum’s collections. The article reported that scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had managed the seemingly impossible. Using equipment housed developed in collaboration with the Library of Congress, Carl Haber and Earl Cornell, a senior scientists in the lab’s physics and engineering divisions, analyzed high resolution digital images scans of a phonautogram found in a Paris archive. “When I read the article, I thought, oh my gosh,” says Stephens. “It is possible,” says Stephens.