Tulips originated in Central Asia, were cultivated in the Ottoman Empire by the 16th century, and then reached Western Europe. Although nobody knows for certain who first brought them west, the transfer is traditionally credited to a Habsburg ambassador in Constantinople who took bulbs to Vienna. Botanist Carolus Clusius planted tulips in Vienna’s Imperial Botanical Gardens in 1573 and at Leiden University’s botanic garden in late 1593, contributing to their growing popularity in the Netherlands.

​

In your opinion, how can the path toward progress turn into a disaster that cannot be undone?

In 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, launched his economic project, which aimed to transform China from a poor agricultural nation into a major industrial and agricultural power.

The objectives of Mao Zedong's project were to enable China to catch up with the world's leading industrial powers—especially Britain—within a short period of time.

He also sought to achieve self-sufficiency in China, prove the success of the communist model, and demonstrate that the Party was capable of achieving faster economic growth than capitalist countries.

Mao Zedong's plan was based on four main pillars:

1. Establishing the People's Communes:

Farmers were treated as nothing more than tools for the state's development. Thousands of villages were merged into massive units known as the People's Communes, where tens of thousands of people lived.

Communal dining halls were also established, where farmers were gathered and fed collectively.

And what about their land? It became state property, turning the farmer from a landowner into nothing more than a worker on that very land.

1. Increasing Agricultural Production by Force:

The government imposed extremely high production quotas that far exceeded the country's actual capabilities. Because officials feared legal accountability, they began submitting false reports claiming that harvests had reached record levels, even though the reality pointed to a serious decline in production.

1. Backyard Steel Furnaces:

As mentioned earlier, Mao Zedong aspired to transform China into an industrial nation. He ordered every village to build small furnaces for smelting steel, forcing people to melt down metal tools, household utensils, and even agricultural equipment to produce steel.

However, most of the steel that was produced was of poor quality and unusable.

As a result, the farming tools that peasants depended on were lost.

1. The Campaign to Eliminate Sparrows:

The government believed that sparrows were consuming grain, so it encouraged millions of citizens to kill them.

The campaign succeeded, and sparrows nearly disappeared, leading to a dramatic increase in insect populations, which in turn fed on the crops.

As a result, agricultural production declined, farming equipment was lost, fields were neglected as their owners became occupied with other state projects, and some regions were also struck by adverse weather conditions, making the situation even worse.

The development project was clearly turning into a massive failure—indeed, a catastrophe—but the authorities refused to acknowledge it.

Instead, they relied on reports claiming that there was a surplus of grain.

The state continued collecting large quantities of crops and exporting them, while the people living in the villages were left without enough food.

By 1959, the Great Chinese Famine had begun.

The Chinese Famine is considered the largest famine in modern history. People in the villages died of starvation, while many survived by eating grass, tree leaves, and bark. Others ate clay, leather, or anything they could chew.

Street vendors began selling cooked insects.

There was also considerable demand for spiders because they provided people with protein.

In some of the hardest-hit regions, historical sources documented cases of cannibalism as a result of the complete collapse of the food supply, and in some villages, the entire population disappeared.

There is no universally agreed-upon death toll for the Chinese Famine, but some studies estimate that approximately 40 to 45 million people died.

The famine ended in 1961. One of the main reasons it lasted so long and became one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history was that officials were afraid to tell the leadership the truth. Crop requisitions continued even as people were starving to death, while anyone who criticized government policies was punished.

In addition, the leadership refused to admit that the project had failed.

In 1961, the Chinese government began rolling back its most radical policies. Some land was returned to families, the People's Communes were relaxed, and agricultural production gradually recovered, allowing the famine to subside.

In the end, one question still remains: Was Mao Zedong truly seeking to strengthen his country's economy, or was his primary motivation to consolidate his influence and reinforce his authority as an invincible leader?

Until the next forgotten story,

— Ruqaiah Mohamed 🪐

© 2026 Ruqaiah Mohamed. This article is an original work and may not be reproduced without permission.

Isaac Singer ended up in Devon almost by accident. Isabella's health was poor after their son Franklin was born, a doctor recommended the mild sea air at Torquay, and they went down for the climate and decided to stay. They lived at the Victoria and Albert Hotel for a while, hushing the children, and hunted for something permanent. He tried to buy the Brunel estate above Watcombe and was told it wasn't for sale. He tried for high ground above Torquay and that didn't work either. Eventually he took the Fernham estate at Paignton and started building a palace on it.

So: enormously rich, newly arrived, and wanting in. A local paper described how that went.

He tried to get into society by giving a grand ball, to which all the aristocracy of the neighbourhood were invited. But they mercilessly snubbed him, and in revenge he asked all the tradesmen of the place, and gave them an entertainment the like of which for magnificence has hardly ever been seen in England.

My first assumption was that word had travelled. Singer had left New York a decade earlier with his private life coming apart in public, several parallel families, an arrest on his wife's complaint, sworn testimony that he'd beaten and choked her.

Devon hadn't heard any of it. American papers weren't current reading in Torquay, and locals were still dismissing the stories about his other children as slander decades later. Whatever the gentry were cutting him for, it wasn't that.

His biographer Ruth Brandon calls it "probably a generic, not a personal snub, for being in patent sewing machines rather than for scandalous notoriety."

Which took me a moment. It wasn't the scandal, and it wasn't the accent or the noise or the money. It was the object. A sewing machine was household equipment rather than a railway or a bank, and it had made him richer than the men who owned railways while leaving him less admissible than any of them.

That pattern held for the rest of his life there. He kept three days a year: Christmas, when several hundredweight of meat went to the poor of the district, the Fourth of July, when the American gave his party, and his birthday in October, when the children got their treats. The guest lists never changed. Tradesfolk, and what one account calls "a better class of local residents."

He die at Paignton in July 1875, in a house still wrapped in scaffolding. Two thousand people came to the funeral. The procession ran nearly three-quarters of a mile with between seventy and eighty carriages; the principal shops in Torquay and Paignton were partly closed, flags at half mast, and at Paignton the church bell was tolled. Mourning coaches went first, then his own carriage with the blinds drawn, then the servants, then about fifty estate workers walking four deep. The private and tradesmen's carriages closed the procession.

One thing I can't give you is the newspaper. Brandon took that ball quotation from a scrapbook of press cuttings kept by Singer's executor, and most of them are undated with the paper's name gone, so I can't tell you which one it was or exactly when it ran. It's described there as written some years after the fact.

I've been working through Ruth Brandon's history of the Singer company and got stuck on this for most of an evening. It's a newspaper account she quotes, undated:

There are hundreds of cases where poor women, widows perhaps, with a lot of children, are induced to buy sewing machines on this installment plan — five dollars a month, probably, for a forty-dollar machine. Perhaps they will manage to pay thirty dollars of this money and then get behind. I have known cases where women have been back in a small unpaid balance not more than ten dollars, for which they have been not only arrested and put in prison, but the machine has actually been taken from them and all the money paid on it kept as rent for the time they have used it.

Thirty dollars in, ten to go, and she loses both the machine and the thirty.

My first thought was that somebody was breaking the law. They weren't, and that's the part worth explaining, because the whole thing turns on a piece of contract design.

Edward Clark set the arrangement up for Singer in 1856 — Brandon's date — taking Cyrus McCormick's reaper scheme several stages further. Five dollars down, three to five a month with interest. But it wasn't a sale. You rented the machine, the rent counted toward the price, and title stayed with the company until that last payment landed. So her thirty dollars were never part-payment on something she owned. They were rent on something she'd been borrowing, and the company was within its rights to keep them.

Singer's own house paper laid out the appeal without any embarrassment at all: "Her husband cannot accuse her of running him into debt since he is merely hiring or renting the machine and under no obligation to buy. Yet at the end of the period of the lease, he will own a sewing machine for the money."

(Scientific American, meanwhile, was fascinated by the psychology of it: "a woman would rather pay one hundred dollars for a machine in monthly installments of five dollars than fifty dollars outright, although able to do so." Which tells you the customers understood the arithmetic and took the deal anyway.)

Here's what collection looked like when it went badly. Baltimore, 1863:

Jacob H. Aull, a sewing machine company's agent, was tried in the criminal court yesterday for assault on Mary H. Beard, who had rented a machine by the month and was in arrears for some months. Aull went to the house and removed the machine, in doing which Mrs. Beard charged he struck her. Aull testifies that he seized the machine and carried it off, though Mrs. Beard held on to part of it. He denied striking her or using unnecessary force. Judge Pinkney said he would have to acquit the defendant, the Court of Appeals having decided that the agent can remove the machine on default in payment of the installments contracted for. There was sufficient resistance on the part of Mrs. Beard to exempt the agent from the charge of assault, but he was extremely sorry that the law was such as to permit this kind of business to be carried on...

I had to read the acquittal twice. She held onto the machine — and her holding on is what cleared him of assault. The Court of Appeals there is Maryland's highest court, though neither the judge nor the reporter says which case he had in mind, and I haven't found it.

Then there's another clipping, on how the contracts got signed:

They carry their cow-catcher contracts around in their pockets and if they can put a machine in a poor man's house and get his wife to put her name or mark to this written instrument their end is accomplished. The absence of the husband is their chief reliance in the majority of cases.

Which is the company's own pitch, read from the other side. Singer's paper said the arrangement spared a wife from accusing her husband of debt. The press said the agents counted on him being out of the house.

No idea where "cow-catcher contract" comes from, by the way. It isn't in any dictionary I've checked. Presumably the locomotive thing, the frame on the front that sweeps whatever's on the track out of the way. If anyone's seen it in period usage I'd genuinely like to know.

One thing before this reads as a nineteenth-century horror we've grown out of. Self-help repossession is still lawful in most of the United States — a secured creditor can take the collateral without going near a court, as long as he doesn't breach the peace. UCC 9-609. The tow truck at four in the morning is Jacob Aull with better equipment.

On sourcing, since it matters for this one: both quotes are from Brandon (1977), and she got them out of a scrapbook of clippings kept by Singer's executor, David Hawley. Most are undated, and the papers' names are long gone. So Baltimore, 1863, and that's about as far as I can take you. And no, the report doesn't name the company. Given whose scrapbook it was sitting in, make of that what you like.

Leaders who achieve great success in history are often hailed as idols.

Some stand out for their unbelievable mindsets. Others make a name for themselves with superhuman endurance and athletic abilities.

Well, do you think a "half-man" could ever join the ranks of these idols?

A warrior missing an arm, without a leg, and lacking an eye...

It might seem impossible for such a man to win a victory. You might even say, "A victory? This guy wouldn't even be able to survive daily life!"

But he lived.

And he etched his name into history in golden letters.

Admiral Blas de Lezo, one of the greatest figures in Spanish naval history, inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the British, who possessed a massive fleet, at Cartagena de Indias in South America.

This defeat was so humiliating that speaking, writing, or even remembering this battle was practically banned in Britain.

If you are ready, let's take a closer look at the life of that legendary Spanish missing an arm, a leg, and an eye.

Blas de Lezo was born in 1689 in the seafaring town of Pasajes, in the Basque region of Spain.

Throughout history, the Basque region was the place that provided the Spanish navy with its toughest ocean sailors, most fearless admirals, and master shipbuilders.

Lezo's parents were also at the very center of this deep-rooted maritime culture.

The family belonged to the class known as "Hidalgo" in the Spanish social structure.

Unlike the nobles in Madrid, they weren't an incredibly wealthy family known throughout the kingdom. However, they held a highly respected nobility on a regional level.

The fact that Blas de Lezo rejected a comfortable nobleman's life at just 12 years old to join the French navy and set sail was a direct result of this deep-rooted heritage from his parents.

Even though the fearless admiral spent a significant part of his life at sea, he managed to build a large family.

In 1725, while serving in Lima, the capital of Peru, he married a noblewoman named Josefa Pacheco de Bustos.

Josefa belonged to one of the region's respected and wealthy families.

She became his greatest spiritual supporter during his endless campaigns and sieges.

The marriage of Josefa and Blas de Lezo brought exactly 7 children into the world.

As his duty stations changed, the admiral tried to keep his family with him as much as possible.

The Spanish sailor gained his first experience of the battlefield at the age of 15 during the Battle of Vélez-Málaga.

While fighting against the British and Dutch fleets, a cannonball tore off his left leg below the knee.

There was no anesthesia in the medicine of that era. As surgeons amputated what remained of his leg and cauterized the stump, he endured the operation without letting out a single scream.

This missing leg was the first gift the war gave him, but... it wouldn't be the last.

Just three years later, while defending the fortress of Toulon, a piece of shrapnel pierced his left eye.

He lost his eye completely, but he never stopped fighting.

When he turned 25, he plunged into battle with the ship he commanded, this time at the Siege of Barcelona.

During the conflict, a musket bullet struck his right arm. Although the arm wasn't amputated, it remained completely paralyzed and useless.

Blas de Lezo, in the prime of his youth, was now a man with no left leg, a blind left eye, and a useless right arm.

To mock him, his enemies gave him the nicknames "Mediohombre" and "Pata de Palo."

But he wore these wounds like medals of honor, transforming into the most feared tactical genius of the Spanish navy.

And it was thanks to a battle in 1741 that this brilliant commander became a legend in the royal courts of Europe.

During the conflicts known as the "War of Jenkins' Ear," Britain sent a massive fleet to the heart of the Spanish Empire, Cartagena de Indias in South America.

The numbers were terrifyingly disproportionate for a commander.

The British, under the command of Admiral Edward Vernon, had 186 ships, over 2,000 cannons, and nearly 29,000 soldiers.

This armada was even more magnificent than the famous Spanish Armada of 1588, and it was one of the largest naval forces history had ever seen up to that day.

The Spanish, on the other hand, had only 6 ships and 3,000 soldiers.

Vernon was so confident of victory that, while the siege had barely begun, he sent a message to King George II of Great Britain: "We have won, Cartagena has fallen."

With the news spreading, celebrations erupted in the streets of London.

The British mint even struck thousands of "victory medals" showing Blas de Lezo kneeling before Vernon with the inscription "The pride of Spain humbled by Admiral Vernon" and distributed them to the public.

However, things did not go as expected.

For Blas de Lezo, fighting in the open sea was literal suicide. So, he shaped the battlefield according to his own rules.

He intentionally sank his 6 ships in the narrow channels at the harbor entrance. Thus, the massive British ships couldn't enter the bay and remained out of range.

The Spanish admiral also masterfully played the card of the region's harsh geography and the approaching "rainy season."

Unfamiliar with the dense jungles and swamps, the British infantry fell victim to diseases like yellow fever, malaria, and dysentery as the war dragged on.

The final blow came with a night assault launched on the San Felipe Fortress, which resulted in heavy casualties for the British.

When the British infantry launched the assault, they realized the trenches dug by Lezo's orders had been deepened. The climbing ladders they brought with them were simply too short.

Because of this, the British soldiers trapped at the base of the walls helplessly perished under relentless Spanish fire.

After weeks of siege, the British were forced to retreat, losing their ships and thousands of soldiers.

The famous curse uttered by Admiral Vernon as he retreated became the sentence that best summarized the situation of the enemy.

"God damn you, Lezo!"

When the British fleet returned to London in tatters, a massive shock ensued.

Those "victory medals" the public wore around their necks became the biggest laughingstock in history.

The shame was so great that the British government implemented an unprecedented state censorship.

Discussing this defeat within the borders of Britain, writing about it in newspapers, and highlighting it in naval records were effectively suppressed.

Unfortunately, Admiral Blas de Lezo, who shattered one of the greatest fleets in history, couldn't enjoy this victory for long.

Due to an illness he caught during the war and the wounds he had sustained, he passed away on September 7, 1741, just months after the victory.

After the admiral's death, the Lezo family suffered great hardships.

Due to political conflicts with Sebastián de Eslava, the civilian governor of Cartagena, the name of the admiral and his family was unjustly discredited.

When the governor's plots were exposed, the respect and honor owed to the family and the legendary name were personally restored by King Charles III of Spain.

Today, frigates bearing his name still sail the seas, keeping his legacy alive.

History has given us legendary sailors such as Marcus Agrippa, Horatio Nelson, and even "Captain Jack Sparrow" in history.

But Blas de Lezo left us an unforgettable legend...

The Dissolution of Yugoslavia

Following the conclusion of the Second World War, Josip Broz Tito established a federal state comprising six republics:

1. Serbia

2. Croatia

3. Slovenia

4. Bosnia and Herzegovina

5. North Macedonia

6. Montenegro

Within Serbia, two autonomous provinces were incorporated:

1. Kosovo

2. Vojvodina

Tito governed with a careful balancing act, ensuring that no single nationality predominated over the others.

In 1974, Tito promulgated a constitution that granted the six republics—alongside the two provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina—exceptionally extensive powers. These included:

1. The administration of their own internal affairs.

2. The right of veto.

3. Equal representation within the collective presidency.

At the time, Tito's aim was to reassure the diverse nationalities and to prevent the hegemony of Serbia, which represented the dominant force within the Federation.

Yet the constitution soon revealed its flaws, as it left the federal government considerably enfeebled. This weakness grew only more pronounced after Tito's death in 1980, for the Union now lacked a strong hand to preserve its cohesion. In the years that followed, a host of grave problems arose: mounting foreign debt, soaring inflation, rising unemployment, a deteriorating economy, and—most dangerously—an intensification of nationalist fervour. Each republic began to clamour for greater autonomy or outright secession.

In April 1987, Slobodan Milošević travelled to Kosovo, where he met with protesting Serbs. Albanian-led demonstrations had first erupted in 1981, initially calling for improved conditions, but these soon evolved into demands for Kosovo to be granted the status of a full republic within the Federation. This development deeply unsettled the Serb population within the province, for although Kosovo was legally subordinate to Serbia, the vast majority of its inhabitants were ethnic Albanians.

Milošević proceeded to revoke most of Kosovo's autonomy, placing it under direct Serbian control, and advocated for the reinforcement of Serbia's influence throughout the Federation, while simultaneously curtailing the autonomous status of both Kosovo and Vojvodina. Other republics—particularly Slovenia and Croatia—viewed these moves as a direct threat to their own standing within the Federation, and this perception soon spurred their own declarations of independence.

First: The Independence of Slovenia and Croatia

On 25 June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia proclaimed their independence. The Yugoslav People's Army, whose ranks were overwhelmingly composed of Serbs, intervened in Slovenia in an attempt to block the secession. A brief conflict, known as the Ten-Day War, ensued, but it ended swiftly with the army's withdrawal, owing to the paucity of the Serb population within Slovenia. Slovenia thus became the first republic to secede successfully.

Croatia, however, presented a far more complex case. It contained numerous regions with substantial Serb minorities, who refused to accept the declaration of independence. War consequently broke out between Croatian forces and the Serbs, the latter being supported by the Yugoslav army. The conflict dragged on for four years, concluding with Croatia reclaiming the greater part of its territory.

Second: The Independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia was the most ethnically heterogeneous of all the Yugoslav republics, containing a mosaic of different peoples:

1. The Bosniaks (Muslims).

2. The Serbs (Orthodox Christians).

3. The Croats (Catholic Christians).

Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992. This proclamation, however, was met not with acquiescence but with fierce resistance. The Bosnian Serbs rejected it outright and proclaimed their own separate entity. The new state was recognised by the European Communities in April 1992, followed shortly thereafter by the United States, and it was admitted to the United Nations on 22 May 1992.

Nevertheless, the Serbs remained obstinate in their opposition. The Bosnian Serbs argued that the independence referendum did not represent them and therefore refused to participate. Even before the declaration of independence, they had already announced the establishment of the Republika Srpska, affirming that they would remain closely tied to Serbia. With the backing of the Yugoslav army, they succeeded in seizing large swathes of Bosnian territory.

In April 1992, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina officially commenced. Fighting erupted among the Bosniaks (Muslims), the Bosnian Serbs, and the Croats. The conflict was marked by:

1. The Siege of Sarajevo, which lasted for nearly four years.

2. Widespread ethnic cleansing and mass displacement.

3. The Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed—an atrocity later classified by international tribunals as genocide.

The Srebrenica Massacre

On 11 July 1995, the forces of the Army of the Republika Srpska, commanded by General Ratko Mladić, entered the town of Srebrenica after a protracted siege. Thousands of civilians had gathered around the United Nations base in the village of Potočari, seeking protection, but the international contingent there was small in number and lightly armed, and proved unable to prevent the town's fall.

Once the Serb forces had taken control, the Bosniak men and boys—those aged roughly twelve and above—were systematically separated from the women and children. The women, children, and elderly were transported by bus to areas under the control of the Bosnian government.

The thousands of men and boys who had been separated were then taken to schools, warehouses, fields, and various other locations, where they were executed without mercy, shot in groups over the course of several days. The victims were buried in mass graves; later, many of the bodies were exhumed and moved to secondary burial sites in a concerted effort to conceal the evidence of the crime.

Subsequent international investigations, together with extensive exhumations and DNA analysis, established that more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys had been killed and annihilated within the span of just a few days in July 1995. The identification of some victims continues to this day, owing to the dispersal of remains across multiple mass graves and the commingling of body parts.

Months after the massacre, the Dayton Agreement was signed, bringing an end to the Bosnian war. The Srebrenica massacre has since stood as a stark and terrible illustration of the consequences of ethnic hatred and nationalist extremism.

The cascade of independence declarations did not cease with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Further secessions followed:

1. Macedonia declared independence in 1991 (in the same year as Slovenia and Croatia).

2. The name "Yugoslavia" was formally abolished in 2003.

3. Montenegro gained independence in 2006.

4. The province of Kosovo declared independence in 2008.

Until the next forgotten story, — Ruqaiah Mohamed🪐 © 2026 Ruqaiah Mohamed. This article is an original work and may not be reproduced without permission.

See this goofball? This cute little prehistoric hellspawn that looks like Finn from Adventure Time went God Emperor of Dune?

First, that’s check your feet. That’s why we wear shoes. Yes, that thing is an Ancylostoma duodenale, aka an Old-World hookworm. It’s called an Old-World hookworm because it came from, you know, the Old World (Eurasia and Africa).

So it’s a bit odd that somewhere in South America, several thousand years before the pyramids went up, a hookworm had its mouth buried in the gut wall of the intestinal lining of a human being, drinking blood. Because South America, last I recall, is New World.

Ancylostoma duodenale is not a complicated organism. It latches onto the mucosa of the small intestine, feeds, and lays eggs. Its entire reproductive strategy depends on the premise that its host will, at some point, take a shit on warm ground. The eggs drop into the soil with the feces. Larvae hatch, molt twice over the course of a week or so, and then wait for a bare human foot to wander past so they can bore through the skin and start the cycle over.

The whole operation needs two things from the outside world: moisture and heat. Soil temperatures have to be above 20 degrees Celsius, and sustained for at least ten days. Below that, the larvae die. So cold ground is a death sentence with no appeal. 

That biological fact blew a hole in one of the most entrenched orthodoxies in American archaeology. Because if you grew up in the 1900s like I did, the consensus held that every human being who reached the Americas walked there through the Arctic, across the Bering land bridge.

But hold the fuck up. Isn’t the Bering land bridge between Alaska and Siberia? Known for their balmy, pleasant year-round weather up there in the Arctic Circle?

A. duodenale was in pre-Columbian South American populations; Araújo, Ferreira, and colleagues at the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz confirmed it through coprolite analysis and mummified remains starting in the early 1980s. A tropical parasite whose larvae cannot survive a cold night had somehow crossed the coldest landscape on the only migration route anyone was willing to talk about. 

The hookworm's lifecycle and the Clovis-first corridor model could not both be true, and the hookworm was not the one with a credibility problem. 

So, settle in, and let’s talk about why your textbooks, once again, were wrong on the first peoples in the Americas.

The Part Where a Spear Point Becomes a Religion

For the better part of the twentieth century, the question of who got to the Americas first had an answer, and God help you if you questioned it. 

In 1932, excavations at Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, turned up finely knapped stone spear points jammed in among mammoth bones. Radiocarbon dating, once it came along, placed the Clovis culture at roughly 13,200 to 12,800 years before present. In 1964, geochronologist C. Vance Haynes collected and correlated dates from Clovis-point sites across North America and arrived at a tidy bracket: there was nothing older than about 12,000 years. The Clovis people, the model said, crossed the Bering land bridge from northeast Asia during the last glacial maximum, walked south through an ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, hit the Great Plains, and fanned out from there. Nobody came before them. Nobody took a different route. That was the catechism, and Haynes was the pope.

The "Clovis-first" hypothesis was backed by the most prominent names in American archaeology. It was also, for anyone who found evidence to the contrary, a career hazard. James Adovasio spent years excavating Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania, where stratigraphic layers yielded artifacts with radiocarbon dates stretching back to 16,000 years ago, possibly 19,000. 

Haynes screamed about contamination. The dates were wrong. Coal seepage from nearby deposits had corrupted the samples. When Adovasio's team tested for coal contamination and found none, Haynes did not give a damn. The orthodoxy had a standard of evidence for pre-Clovis claims that was, in practice, rigged: every anomalous date was a contaminated date until proven otherwise, and the proof required was always a little more than what anyone had managed to produce. You could bring a perfectly excavated site with clean stratigraphy and consistent radiocarbon dates, and the Clovis-first crowd would find a reason it didn't count. It was classic academia tribal territorial defense. Someone should hire David Attenborough for the nature documentary.

But sites continued to accumulate. The dam broke in 1997, in Chile. Tom Dillehay's excavations at Monte Verde had been producing dates older than Clovis for years, but the site gained definitive acceptance when a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists, including several Clovis-first stalwarts, visited the site and found nothing to undermine its dating of roughly 14,500 years before present. Even Haynes conceded. 

Monte Verde was real, it was pre-Clovis, and it was at the southern tip of South America, which meant that whoever lived there had been in the New World long enough to walk thousands of miles south of the ice-free corridor before Clovis people were knapping their first spear point in New Mexico. 

That made absolutely no sense.

The Part Where Somebody Finally Looks at Some Shit

While archaeologists were busy kicking the shit out of each other over spear points and stratigraphy, a group of Brazilian paleoparasitologists had been quietly assembling evidence from a completely different archive: actual shit. Ancient, desiccated, thousand-year-old shit.

Since the early 1980s, Adauto Araújo, Luiz Fernando Ferreira, and their colleagues at the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz had been cracking open coprolites from archaeological sites in Brazil and Peru and finding hookworm eggs inside. The eggs have a distinctive morphology so the identifications were solid. And the coprolites were unambiguously pre-Columbian, which meant the worms were too.

The conventional explanation for hookworm in the Americas was European introduction. Colonizers brought it. The slave trade brought it. Post-contact migration brought it. Fuller took the hardest line, arguing that hookworm was flat-out absent from the pre-Columbian Americas, that the coprolite evidence was garbage, and that the lifecycle of the parasite confined its prehistoric range to the Old World. Faulkner and Patton, and separately Reinhard, Araújo, Ferreira, and Coimbra responded with additional specimens from Tennessee and a point-by-point defense of coprolite-based diagnosis. 

The evidence held up. The worms were old. The question was how the hell they got here.

The Bering land bridge could not do it. A. duodenale larvae need soil above 20 degrees Celsius to mature from their first rhabditiform stage to the infective third-stage filariform larvae that bore through skin. That takes seven to ten days in warm, moist soil. Beringia, during the periods when it was walkable, was frozen steppe. The soil temperatures were nowhere near 20 degrees for any sustained period, ever. 

A human population crossing on foot would have needed decades to make the journey, and during those decades, every adult hookworm in every gut would have lived out its one-to-three-year lifespan and died. The eggs those worms shed would have landed on frozen ground. The larvae would have frozen with them. No reinfection, no transmission, no new hosts. By the time the migrants reached anywhere warm enough for the hookworm lifecycle to function again, the infection would have been extinct in the population for years. 

Hawdon and Johnston saw this problem and tried to save the land-bridge model with a biological Hail Mary. A. duodenale, unlike its cousin Necator americanus, has a genuinely weird trick: its larvae can go dormant inside the skeletal muscle of the host, sitting there in a state of arrested development like a biological time bomb (or, if you want to squirm, like little mini xenomorphs ready to hatch!). These dormant larvae can reactivate later. The species can also transmit through breast milk. So Hawdon and Johnston proposed a scenario in which a woman carrying dormant hookworm larvae in her goddamn muscles walks across Beringia, gives birth somewhere on the other side, nurses her infant, and passes the infection into the baby through her milk, all without the larvae ever needing to touch the soil. The worm hitchhikes through the Arctic inside human tissue, then wakes up in a warm climate and gets back to work. The theory had all the energy of that scene from Shaun of the Dead where they keep having to add bits to their plan to get it off the ground.

It was an imaginative hypothesis. It required every single biological variable to break in the hookworm's favor across a multi-generational Arctic migration, but it was at least theoretically possible. 

Then Montenegro, Araújo, and Ferreira fed it into a paleoclimate model and watched it die.

Working with climate scientists, Montenegro et al. built a simulation that combined the known biology of A. duodenale with reconstructed temperature data for Beringia during the late Pleistocene. The model defined "zones of contagion viability" as areas where soil temperatures exceeded 17 degrees Celsius for fourteen days, or 20 degrees for ten. Outside those zones, the hookworm transmission cycle breaks. Inside them, the worm can reproduce. The question was whether any plausible migration route through Beringia, at any plausible speed, could keep at least some of the route inside those zones long enough to maintain the chain of infection.

The answer was no, and it was not close. The documented Clovis southward expansion rate was about 16 km/yr. The fastest documented Arctic migration in the archaeological record, the Thule/Inuit expansion around 1,000 BP, clocked in at 15 to 30 km/yr.

Even under the most absurdly generous assumptions in the model (an 8-year maximum worm lifespan, the warmest possible temperature reconstruction, a +3°C arbitrary warming adjustment), the absolute floor was 183 km/yr. Literally, people needed to be sprinting across the Arctic six times faster than the fastest migration speed calculated. In the realistic scenario using A. duodenale's actual 1.5-year lifespan, it needed 1,856 km/yr, or roughly 5 kilometers a day, every day, across frozen steppe, with no stops, no camps, no hunting seasons. That's a forced march across the Arctic at a pace no pre-industrial population has ever sustained anywhere on Earth, and they'd need to keep it up for years.

Yeah, nah, that ain’t happening, fam.

The Part Where Someone Notices There's an Ocean Right There 

The alternative archaeologists had been ignoring had been on the table for years: the Pacific coastal migration theory. 

It goes like this: instead of walking inland through an ice-free corridor between two continental glaciers, people traveled down the Pacific coast, either on foot along the shoreline or in small watercraft, hugging the edge of the continent from northeast Asia through coastal Alaska, down British Columbia, and southward along the western coasts of North and South America. 

The route had two advantages that the corridor model lacked. First, the coast was accessible earlier. Large stretches of the Pacific shoreline were ice-free by 16,000 years ago, while the interior corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets may not have been passable until 14,000 BP or later. Second, the coast was warm. Or at least warmer. Coastal climates are moderated by the ocean; even during glacial maxima, shoreline temperatures along the Pacific Rim stayed significantly milder than the frozen interior of Beringia. A population moving along the coast would have had access to marine resources like fish, shellfish, sea mammals, and kelp, as well as temperate ground the entire way, without ever needing to cross hundreds of miles of Arctic steppe. 

Before some of y’all roll your eyes and dismiss this as academics being academics, the route changes almost everything about the first peoples in the Americas except the destination.  If the coast was also a route, the clock starts thousands of years earlier. That's the difference between "people arrived just before Clovis" and "people arrived so long before Clovis that Clovis is a late chapter in a much longer story." As well, these are completely different adaptive strategies, different technologies, literally different ways of being human. It’s as much a question of what kind of people were the first Americans?

And, most importantly, if the corridor was the only way in, then the peopling of the Americas was basically a single event: one population, one route, one wave. If the coast was also viable, and viable earlier, then you're looking at multiple movements by potentially different populations over thousands of years. That has cascading implications for genetic diversity, linguistic diversity, and cultural variation among Indigenous peoples across the hemisphere. The difference between "one founding population" and "several waves over millennia" is enormous. 

The problem with the coastal theory was not evidence against it. The problem was that the relevant coastline is now underwater; post-glacial sea level rise drowned the Pleistocene shoreline, and with it any archaeological sites that coastal migrants left behind. The absence of evidence was not evidence of absence, but it was enough for the Clovis-first camp to dismiss the whole idea. 

But Montenegro's hookworm argument landed at roughly the same time as a broader rethinking of Pacific coastal migration.. In 2007, archaeologist Jon Erlandson and colleagues proposed the "kelp highway" hypothesis, arguing that a continuous belt of productive kelp forest ecosystems stretched from northeast Asia to Baja California by about 16,000 years ago. Kelp forests are phenomenally productive environments strung out along the coastline like a buffet that runs for ten thousand miles. The kelp highway explained how people could have reached Monte Verde, thousands of miles south of the ice sheets, before the interior corridor was ever passable. They didn't need the corridor. The coast was open, and it was full of food.

Erlandson's model explained how people could have traveled the coast. Montenegro's model explained why the parasite evidence proved that somebody did. Together, they made the Clovis-first corridor look like what it always was: a hypothesis that had been promoted to dogma by a generation of archaeologists who confused their model with the truth.

Araújo, Reinhard, Ferreira, and Gardner hammered the last nail in 2008, publishing "Parasites as Probes for Prehistoric Human Migrations?" in Trends in Parasitology. The paper synthesized two decades of picking through ancient turds and concluded that host-specific parasites of humans, including hookworms, whipworms, and threadworms, could track ancient migrations with more precision than stone tools ever could. Based on the archaeoparasitological record, the authors concluded, "it is clear that humans entered the New World at least twice in ancient times" 

That’s right, the argument that finally made the coastal migration model unavoidable did not come from archaeology. It came from parasitology. Archaeologists had spent decades fighting over stone points, stratigraphy, and radiocarbon dates, and every piece of evidence in those categories could be contested: contamination, misidentification, disturbed context, or just plain bad luck. Radiocarbon dates are always arguable; that's half the reason Clovis-first survived as long as it did. 

Hookworm larvae, on the other hand, either survive in a given soil temperature or they don't, and no amount of disciplinary politics, grant funding, or angry letters to journal editors changes the number. 

You can argue about charcoal samples. You cannot argue with thermal biology.

Works Cited

Araújo, Adauto, Luiz Fernando Ferreira, and Ulisses Confalonieri. "A Contribution to the Study of Helminth Findings in Archaeological Material in Brazil." Revista Brasileira de Biologia 41, no. 4 (1981): 873-78.

Araújo, Adauto, Luiz Fernando Ferreira, Ulisses Confalonieri, and Marcia Chame. "Hookworms and the Peopling of America." Cadernos de Saúde Pública 4, no. 2 (1988): 226-33.

Araújo, Adauto, Karl J. Reinhard, Luiz Fernando Ferreira, and Scott L. Gardner. "Parasites as Probes for Prehistoric Human Migrations?" Trends in Parasitology 24, no. 3 (2008): 112-15.

Erlandson, Jon M., Michael H. Graham, Bruce J. Bourque, Debra Corbett, James A. Estes, and Robert S. Steneck. "The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas." Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 2, no. 2 (2007): 161-74.

Faulkner, Charles T., and Sharon Patton. "Pre-Columbian Hookworm Evidence from Tennessee: A Response to Fuller (1997)." Medical Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2001): 92-96.

Ferreira, Luiz Fernando, Adauto Araújo, and Ulisses Confalonieri. "The Finding of Helminth Eggs in a Brazilian Mummy." Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 77, no. 1 (1983): 65-67.

Fuller, Kathleen. "Hookworm: Not a Pre-Columbian Pathogen." Medical Anthropology 17, no. 4 (1997): 297-308.

Hawdon, John M., and Simon A. Johnston. "Hookworms in the Americas: An Alternative to Trans-Pacific Contact." Parasitology Today 12, no. 2 (1996): 72-74.

Montenegro, Alvaro, Adauto Araújo, Michael Eby, Luiz Fernando Ferreira, Renee Hetherington, and Andrew J. Weaver. "Parasites, Paleoclimate, and the Peopling of the Americas: Using the Hookworm to Time the Clovis Migration." Current Anthropology 47, no. 1 (2006): 193-200.

Reinhard, Karl J., Adauto Araújo, Luiz Fernando Ferreira, and Carlos E. A. Coimbra Jr. "American Hookworm Antiquity." Medical Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2001): 96-101.

The underground railroad was a bunch of independent places that harbored individuals fleeing slavery. The underground railroad we know mimiced the one the Quakers and Indidiginous people had. People who ran the "stations" were called conductors. Read about it in The Wheel by Jack Head.

Hey y'all, Ohio historian here. I wrote this up originally for r/HistoryAnecdotes but made the meme after joking about it with my coworkers today. If you want more context, read below (yes, it's an essay. That's why it's called r/HistoryAnecdotes, Not r/HistoryTweets.)

----------------------------------

About 3,500 years ago, a woman in eastern Kentucky planted goosefoot on a riverbank. Goosefoot is a weed. You've pulled it out of your driveway. Your city probably sprays for it. Its other common names include pigweed, lamb's quarters, and fat hen, because apparently nobody in the history of the English language has ever looked at this plant and thought it deserved dignity.

She planted the weed anyway, because she wasn't an idiot. 

Goosefoot seeds are packed with starch, easy to harvest by the handful, and after a few generations of selective planting, they germinate faster and produce more food per acre than you'd expect from something named after a barnyard animal. She also grew marshelder, maygrass, sunflower, and squash. She was a farmer. She had been taught by farmers. She would teach farmers after her.

It took American archaeology roughly four thousand years, several million dollars in grant funding, and a scanning electron microscope to figure out what she already knew. And only because a couple of women finally got fed up enough to publish a paper about it.

The Part Where Crops Get Stupid Names, Win Stupid Prizes

This is the Eastern Agricultural Complex: goosefoot (chenopod), sunflower, marshelder (also called sumpweed, which, just breathe that in for a second: sumpweed. Mmmmm. Smells exactly what it sounds like.), squash, maygrass, erect knotweed, and little barley. These plants were independently domesticated in the river valleys between the Appalachians and the Great Plains starting around 5000 BCE. They fed communities across present-day Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, and Arkansas for thousands of years before corn moseyed up from Mexico around 200 BCE.

Most of the crops are extinct now. Domesticated marshelder vanishes from the record around 1350 CE. No European ever saw it cultivated. Domesticated chenopod, erect knotweed, and maygrass followed it out as maize-centered agriculture took over. Within a few generations of abandonment, the seeds reverted to wild morphologies of thicker coats, smaller achenes, four thousand years of breeding running backward.. Somebody at Michigan State was trying to re-domesticate marshelder as of 2006. Good luck explaining that grant application.

This is one of the ten or so independent centers of plant domestication on the entire planet. This is up there with the Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze, Mesoamerica. Ohio. When we said “the heart of it all,” we weren’t fucking kidding, alright? Humans looked at wild plants, thought "I could do something with this," and invented farming. From scratch. Multiple times. In multiple places. One of those happened to be along the Ohio, Wabash, and Mississippi Rivers.

And nobody believed it for most of the twentieth century, because the crops were a list of things your HOA would fine you for.

Gayle Fritz, who devoted her career to studying these plants, tells a story in Feeding Cahokia that boils down the problem in archaeology. She got interviewed by National Geographic for a feature on Cahokia. She spent hours explaining the full agricultural system: the diversity, the breeding, the nutritional profiles, all of it. 

Then the published article mentions one plant by name: corn. Sumpweed didn't make the cut. 

She says this happened to her multiple times, with multiple outlets, across multiple decades. Filmmakers, documentary producers, audio tour companies. They'd show up, get excited about the native crops, and then cut every single one from the final product.

You can sort of see the editorial meeting. "So the ancient city was sustained by a diverse agricultural system including crops like..." checks notes "...marshelder and erect knotweed." Modern Americans have a hard time accepting that plants they know only as sidewalk weeds could have been carefully bred crop species. Which is fair. Quinoa, which is a close cousin of chenopod, spent centuries being ignored for exactly the same reason until it got a marketing team and a spot at Trader Joe's. The entire difference between "ancient superfood" and "that shit growing in the parking lot" is branding.

Yeah quinoa. I’m coming after you. You don’t deserve your Whole Foods status.

And corn? Corn. 

The Part Where Everyone Assumed Mexico Did It

Fuck corn.

For most of the twentieth century, the archaeological establishment had a very simple explanation for agriculture in eastern North America: Mexico did it. Corn, beans, and squash, the "Three Sisters," were introduced as a package deal from the civilized south. This explanation is what I was taught. It’s what I taught my students when I first entered undergraduate teaching. 

It’s also entirely wrong. 

Bruce Smith calls these "South of the Border Stories." For fifty years during the middle of the twentieth century, every time archaeologists found something impressive in eastern North America, somebody drew an arrow from Mexico. Poverty Point? Mexican influence. Hopewell? Mexican influence. Mississippian? Mexican influence. Farming? Well obviously that came from Mexico. Where else would it come from? The periphery? Next you’ll be telling me they didn’t actually hunt with bows and arrows until the Middle Ages or something.

Clearly, the contempt for Native Americans was baked in. Eastern North America, in this framework, was a cultural backwater. Its peoples hunted, fished, and gathered competently enough, but they did not innovate. They received. They were the archaeological equivalent of that friend who only watches movies after someone else recommends them. And they still think Law Abiding Citizen is the best film ever, even after you showed them Children of Men.

This was the consensus position, probably (lol let’s be honest, definitely) in your textbooks. It shaped hiring decisions in academia. And it survived until the 1980s, when Bruce Smith and Wes Cowan started putting ancient seeds under an electron microscope and the dates blew the whole thing apart.

In 1987, Smith and Cowan ran accelerator mass spectrometry dates on domesticated chenopod specimens from two rockshelters in eastern Kentucky. The results were 3,450 years before present. That’s a thousand years older than anyone had estimated. Then, others fell right in the window, with the earliest domesticated sumpweed and sunflower. All of them centuries before maize showed up in the region.

Corn didn't start the American Indian revolution. Corn showed up to the revolution already in progress, hung around on the margins for eight hundred years doing basically nothing, and then took all the credit. Corn is the Stalin to chenpod’s Lenin and sunflower’s Trotsky.

So fuck corn. Sincerely: an Ohioan.

But did the establishment update its position? Reader, it did not. As late as 2001, Lentz and colleagues were still arguing that the eastern domesticates were really Mexican crops that had been shipped north, "triggering the domestication of minor indigenous crops" along the way. One of these papers dismissed marshelder as an "extinct minor cultigen."  Marshelder. The crop that outnumbers both sunflower and maize in Hopewellian archaeobotanical assemblages. The crop that was more important than corn for two thousand years. The crops that oh, by the way, had similar hectare yield sizes to maize. Minor.

Smith, who by this point had spent three decades building the empirical case, pointed out in a 2007 introduction to his reissued book that this argument was structurally identical to every other "South of the Border Story" that the profession had already abandoned. He was polite about it, because he was publishing in an academic press.

I don’t need to be polite though.

Oh, and to make this even better, for decades, archaeologists excavated sites across the Eastern Woodlands using screens with quarter-inch and eighth-inch mesh to catch artifacts and botanical remains as they sifted through soil. Corn cob fragments are large. They catch on quarter-inch mesh. Chenopod seeds are tiny. They fall right through.

Before the "flotation revolution" of the 1970s, when people started systematically washing soil samples through fine-mesh sieves, thousands of EAC seeds were literally dropping through the screens at every dig site in the Midwest and nobody was catching them. Fritz spells it out: the apparent dominance of maize in the archaeological record was substantially an artifact of recovery technique. You screened for corn. You found corn. You concluded corn was dominant. The method created the evidence, and the evidence validated the method.

So to recap: the crops had stupid names, the theoretical model said nobody farmed them on purpose, the evidence was falling through the screens, and everything important supposedly came from Mexico. You could not design a more effective system for ignoring an agricultural revolution if you tried.

Ooooh, wait a minute. What if I brought gender into this?

The Part Where It's All About the Patriarchy (and Pigweed)

Yes, I brought out the P word. Get your jimmies ready, I aim to be rustlin’.

Okay, it’s not actually that bad, mostly just token gender blindness in archaeology. Patty Jo Watson and Mary Kennedy published a chapter in 1991 that could have ended careers but instead just made a lot of people very quiet at conferences and very loud on the internet. Everyone agreed, then as now, that women were the primary plant gatherers and horticulturalists in Eastern Woodlands societies. Everyone. This is not debated. Fritz describes it as "a fact widely known and accepted by archaeologists, historians, and geographers but often left unstated in discussions of food production." 

Watson and Kennedy looked at the dominant model for how domestication happened in the East, Smith's "floodplain weed theory," and noticed something remarkable. The theory proposed that plants like chenopod and marshelder colonized disturbed soils near human settlements, people harvested them, and selective pressures gradually produced domesticated morphologies over time.

Automatically. Passively. Without anyone doing anything on purpose. The plants just sort of... domesticated themselves.

Near the settlements.

Where the women were.

But not because of the women. Because of ecology.

…

…Profit. Gimme a Ph.D.

Look, if these crops were “real agriculture,” then someone was doing “real farming.” And if that someone was a woman, then a bunch of mid-century archaeologists had been wrong about a bunch of stuff they'd built their careers on. Namely, the part between “seed in ground” and “fully domesticated plant” was being skipped over entirely. The alternative was to keep insisting that domestication was a passive, agentless process that sort of spontaneously occurred in the vicinity of trash heaps.

Which is exactly what happened. For years.

The floodplain weed theory was good science and the evidence for it was real. But Watson and Kennedy noticed that it was also extremely convenient for anyone who didn't want to grapple with the gendered implications of who was actually doing the farming. You could study the origins of agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands for an entire career and never once write the word "women" in a paper. A lot of guys took that option.

But even outside gender blindness, there's a massive difference between "humans invented agriculture" and "agriculture sort of happened near some humans." One of those is a story about ingenuity, experimentation, and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge being passed from mother to daughter. The other is a story about weeds growing next to a trash pile. When we say domestication was passive, we're not just being imprecise; we're saying that one of the most consequential technological revolutions in human history, the one that made cities and civilization and everything after them possible, didn't actually require anyone to be smart. And it just so happens that the people we're stripping of credit are the ones ethnography, archaeology, and basic common sense all agree were doing the work.

So, how do we know they actually did the work and this wasn’t an accident? Testa thickness. Stop giggling in the back, I said testa, not testes. Wild chenopod seeds have thick coats, 40 to 80 microns, because thick coats are adaptive in the wild. They let seeds sit dormant in soil for years and germinate only when conditions are right. That's how wild plants survive. Domesticated chenopod from these sites has coats under 20 microns. Thin coats mean the seed germinates immediately when planted. That trait is only useful if someone is planting seeds in prepared ground on a schedule.

In other words, a weed passively colonizing a trash heap has zero selective pressure toward thin coats; if anything, the pressure runs the opposite direction. The thin coat doesn't just suggest intentional cultivation. It literally, physically cannot exist without it. Smith's SEM work in the 1980s made this case and nobody has refuted it since.

Then stack on top of that that maygrass shows up at archaeological sites hundreds of miles north of its natural range (plants don't walk), storage pits are found built specifically for these seeds (you don't build infrastructure for accidental weeds), and the fact that these people were managing seven or more crops with different growing seasons simultaneously, which requires a planting calendar. The "accident" model requires you to believe that multiple plant species spontaneously developed traits that only benefit cultivated organisms, migrated outside their natural habitats on their own, and were stored in purpose-built facilities, all without anyone doing anything on purpose. At a certain point Occam's razor just cuts the “planted by accident” theory short.

So, Smith's paper in PNAS is the final word. Eastern North America is an independent center of plant domestication. One of ten on the planet. Confirmed by genetic analysis, archaeological dating, and morphological evidence. Done. We can put this one to bed, just like “Pluto is a planet.” Right, guys?

Guys?

Works Cited

Crites, Gary D., and R. Dale Terry. "Nutritive Value of Maygrass, Phalaris caroliniana." Economic Botany 38, no. 1 (1984): 114–120.

Fritz, Gayle J. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019.

Harter, Abigail V., et al. "Origin of Extant Domesticated Sunflowers in Eastern North America." Nature 430 (2004): 201–205.

Lentz, David L., et al. "Prehistoric Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) Domestication in Mexico." Economic Botany 55, no. 3 (2001): 370–376.

Smith, Bruce D. "Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America." Science 246, no. 4937 (1989): 1566–1571.

Smith, Bruce D. Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Smith, Bruce D. "Eastern North America as an Independent Center of Plant Domestication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, no. 33 (2006): 12223–12228.

Smith, Bruce D. "Introduction to the New Edition." In Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America, xi–xxviii. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

Smith, Bruce D., and C. Wesley Cowan. "Domesticated Chenopodium in Prehistoric Eastern North America: New Accelerator Dates from Eastern Kentucky." American Antiquity 52, no. 2 (1987): 355–357.

Smith, Bruce D., and Richard A. Yarnell. "Initial Formation of an Indigenous Crop Complex in Eastern North America at 3800 B.P." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 16 (2009): 6561–6566.

Watson, Patty Jo, and Mary C. Kennedy. "The Development of Horticulture in the Eastern Woodlands of North America: Women's Role." In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, 255–275. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Remembering the American veterans who died while serving together in the Egyptian Army after the civil war.

Those of them who died in Egypt or Sudan were mostly buried as it is forbidden in the Islamic religion to cremate the corpse, also Christians and Jews living there at the time (and still today) only buried their deceaseds.

My deepest regards from Egypt ..

Source: “The blue and The Gray on the Nile” written by William B. Hesseltine & Hazel C. Wolf

—————

1- Cornelius E. Hunt

Civil War record: master’s mate, Confederate States Navy

1870: Arrived in Egypt.

1871: Assigned to teach in military school at Aboukir, Alexandria.

1873: Died February 28 of injuries sustained in fall from horse.

—————

2- Edmund Parys

Civil War record: acting ensign, U.S. Navy

1871: Arrived in Egypt. Signal corps.

1874: Died in Egypt, April 13.

—————

3- William P. A. Campbell

Civil War record: 1st lieutenant, Confederate States Navy - CSS Rappahannock at the French port Calais

1870: Arrived in Egypt.

In charge of khedivial steamers between Alexandria and Constantinople.

1874: To Sudan in expedition with British general Charles Gordon; died from cholera in Khartoum on October 10.

—————

4- Frank A. Reynolds

Civil War record: lieutenant colonel, Confederate States Army

1870: Arrived in Egypt. Loring’s staff.

1873: To U.S. as inspector of arms purchased by khedive Ismael.

1875: Died in Ilion, N.Y., during an errand to purchase Remington rifles for the Egyptian army, still in Egyptian service.

—————

5- Alexander Welch Reynolds

Civil War record: brigadier general, Confederate States Army

1870: Arrived in Egypt. Loring’s staff.

1876: Died after his son Frank with one year in solitude and poverty, in Alexandria, Egypt in May 26.

—————

6- Robert Schuyler Lamson

Civil War record: none - too young

From New York city.

His maternal grandfather was (Robert Schuyler) a prominent financier, steamboat operator, and railroad president. He served as president of five railroads, including the New York & New Haven and the Illinois Central, and was known as "America's first railroad king".

1875: Arrived in Egypt. Member of Ratib Pasha’s staff.

1876: Gura campaign in Ethiopia.

Went to Darfur, and died there from malarious fever in October 18.

—————

7- Charles Frederick Loshe

Civil War record: lieutenant, U.S. Volunteers (from Germany)

1875: Arrived in Egypt.

1876: Gura campaign; chief of transportation, quartermaster, and commissary.

Surveying on Red Sea coast.

1878; To Red Sea coast; died at Suakin in September 2.

—————

8- Henry Irgins

Civil War record: sergeant, U.S. Volunteers

He received the rank of captain in the Egyptian army.

1876: Arrived in Egypt.

Gura campaign; assistant to chief engineer and confederate officer ‏Henry C. Derrick.

1878: Discharged like most American officers due to financial reasons; died in Liverpool en route to US.

—————

9- Erastus Sparrow Purdy

Civil War record: brevet lieutenant colonel, U.S. Volunteers

1870: Arrived in Egypt.

1871: Expedition to map area between Cairo and Suez and between Kenneh on the Nile and Kosseir on the Red Sea.

1874: Expedition with confederate officers Raleigh E. Colston and Alexander M. Mason, a hydrographic survey of bay and harbor of Berenice, exploration and mapping of Bishereen Desert between Berenice and Berber, Colston to conduct special survey of ancient gold mines at Derehib in Wadi Allakee, all to return via Korosko Desert and city.

1878: Discharged.

1878-1881: Civilian employee of khedives Ismael and then his son Tawfiq until his death in Cairo, June 21, 1881.