There used to be a paint made of ground-
up Egyptian mummies. ‘Mummy Brown’
was a favorite color of many 19th-century
European painters, but some people were
so upset by its ingredients, they buried
tubes of it in the ground out of respect
for the dead. It was still being made up
until 1964, when the manufacturer’s
ancient mummy supply finally ran out. SourceSource 2Source 3
The 1920s was a decade that began on January 1, 1920, and ended on December 31, 1929. In North America, it is frequently referred to as the “Roaring Twenties” or the “Jazz Age”, while in Europe the period is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age Twenties” because of the economic boom following World War I. French speakers refer to the period as the “Années folles” (“Crazy Years”), emphasizing the era’s social, artistic, and cultural dynamism. The devastating Wall Street Crash in October 1929 is generally viewed as a harbinger of the end of 1920s prosperity in North America and Europe.
The concept of “ley lines” originated with Alfred Watkins in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, though Watkins also drew on earlier ideas about alignments; in particular he cited the work of the English astronomer Norman Lockyer, who argued that ancient alignments might be oriented to sunrise and sunset at solstices. On 30 June 1921, Alfred Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire,
and had been driving along a road near the village (which has now
virtually disappeared). Attracted by the nearby archaeological
investigation of a Roman camp, he stopped his car to compare the
landscape on either side of the road with the marked features on his
much used map. While gazing at the scene around him and consulting the
map, he saw, in the words of his son, “like a chain of fairy lights” a
series of straight alignments of various ancient features, such as
standing stones, wayside crosses, causeways, hill forts, and ancient churches on mounds.
He realized immediately that the potential discovery had to be checked
from higher ground when, during a revelation, he noticed that many of
the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a
straight line.He subsequently coined the term “ley” at least partly because the lines passed through places whose names contained the syllable ley, stating that philologists defined the word differently, but had misinterpreted it. He believed this was the ancient name for the trackways, preserved in
the modern names. The ancient surveyors who supposedly made the lines
were given the name “dodmen”. Watkins believed that, in ancient times, when Britain was far more densely forested,
the country was criss-crossed by a network of straight-line travel
routes, with prominent features of the landscape being used as navigation points. This observation was made public at a meeting of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club of Hereford in September 1921. X
Culturally, the 1990s are characterized by the rise of multiculturalism and alternative media, which continued into the 2000s. Movements such as grunge, the rave scene and hip hop spread around the world to young people during that decade, aided by then-new technology such as cable television and the World Wide Web. A combination of factors, including the continued mass mobilization of capital markets through neo-liberalism, the thawing of the decades-long Cold War, the beginning of the widespread proliferation of new media such as the Internet from the middle of the decade onwards, increasing skepticism towards government, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a realignment and reconsolidation of economic and political power across the world and within countries. The 1990s saw extreme advances in technology, with the World Wide Web, the first gene therapy trial, and the first designer babies all emerging in 1990 and being improved and built upon throughout the decade. New ethnic conflicts emerged in Africa, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, the former two which led to the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, respectively. Signs of any resolution of tensions between Israel and the Arab world remained elusive despite the progress of the Oslo Accords, though The Troubles in Northern Ireland came to a standstill in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement after 30 years of violence. X
RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in the early morning of 15 April 1912, after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. Of the 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, more than 1,500 died in the sinking, making it one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history. Under the command of Edward Smith, the ship carried some of the wealthiest people in the world, as well as hundreds of emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia and elsewhere throughout Europe seeking a new life in North America. Titanic only carried enough lifeboats for 1,178 people—slightly more than half of the number on board, and one third of her total capacity. On 14 April 1912, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles (600 km) south of Newfoundland, she hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time. The collision caused the ship’s hull plates to buckle inwards along her starboard side and opened five of her sixteen watertight compartments to the sea; the ship gradually filled with water. Just under two hours after Titanic foundered, the Cunard liner RMS Carpathia arrived on the scene of the sinking, where she brought aboard an estimated 705 survivors. The disaster was greeted with worldwide shock and outrage at the huge loss of life and the regulatory and operational failures that had led to it. Public inquiries in Britain and the United States led to major improvements in maritime safety. One of their most important legacies was the establishment in 1914 of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), which still governs maritime safety today. The wreck of Titanic remains on the seabed, split in two and gradually disintegrating at a depth of 12,415 feet. X
The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a
group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be
possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As
a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special
court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch,
Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to
Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were
accused over the next several months. By September 1692, the hysteria
had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though
the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against
accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness
lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch
trials would endure for centuries. X
During the era in which the Ripper was active, there were 11 murders
committed in London’s East End. These murders took place between April
3, 1888 and February 13th, 1891. These murders were collectively known
as the “Whitechapel Murders”, being labeled as such by a London
Metropolitan Police Service investigation.
Of the eleven Whitechapel Murders, it is widely believed that Jack the Ripper is directly responsible for five of them.
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