If you’ve seen the movie The Right Stuff you might remember the name Pancho Barnes. Pancho owned the dive bar in the desert where the test pilots hung out. Well, it turns out Pancho was a SHE - in the film she’s the wise cracking “pudknocker” lady - but it turns out SHE was a bad ass pilot and pioneer for women in aviation. Pancho was a stunt pilot, she broke Amelia Earhart’s speed record in 1930, and started the first pilot’s film union in Hollywood. It’s more than a little frustrating that in a film trying to illustrate the courage and skill of American aviation that they ignore and gloss over one of its pioneering rockstars. Never let anyone define you. Never let anyone stop you. Don’t make an impact on society, make a crater. Leave it smoldering and leave everyone drop-jawed in awe.

DEAR MISS: Notwithstanding the cloud of doubts which overshadows the mind of adoring fancy, when I trace that vermillion cheek, that sapphire eye of expressive softness, and that symmetrical form of grace, I am constrained to sink into a flood of admiration beneath those heavenly charms. Though, dear Miss, it may be useless to introduce a multiplicity of blandishments, which might either lead you into a field of confusion, or absorb the truth of affection in the gloom of doubts; but the bell of adulation may be told from the distance of its echo, and cannot be heard farther than seen. Dear Miss, whatever may be the final result of my adventurous progress, I now feel a propensity to embark on the ocean of chance, and expand the sail of resolution in quest of the distant shore of connubial happiness with one so truly lovely. Though, my dearest, the thunders of parental aversion may inflect the guardian index of affection from its favorite star, the deviated needle recovers its course, and still points onwards to its native poll. Though the waves of calumny may reverberate the persevering mind of the sailing lover, the morning star of hope directs him through the gloom of trial to the object of his choice.

My brightest hopes are mix’d with tears,
Like hues of light and gloom;
As when mid sun-shine rain appears,
Love rises with a thousand fears,

To pine and still to bloom.
When I have told my last fond tale
In lines of song to thee,
And for departure spread my sail,
Say, lovely princess, wilt thou fail
To drop a tear for me?

O, princess, should my votive strain
Salute thy ear no more,
Like one deserted on the main,
I still shall gaze, alas! but vain,
On wedlock’s flow’ry shore.

About this poem:

George Moses Horton holds the distinction of being the first African American to publish a book, and the only to publish while living in slavery.

When U.S. 40 reaches Collinsville, Illinois, the land is flat and open. Seedy storefronts line the highway: a pawnshop, a discount carpet warehouse, a taco joint, a bar. Only the Indian Mound Motel gives any hint that the road bisects something more than underdeveloped farmland.

This is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, a United Nations World Heritage Site on a par with the Great Wall of China, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Taj Mahal.

The 4,000-acre complex preserves the remnants of the largest prehistoric settlement north of Mexico, a walled city that flourished on the floodplain of the Mississippi River 10 centuries ago.

Covering an area more than five miles square, Cahokia dwarfs the ancient pueblos of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and every other ruin left by the storied Anasazi of the American Southwest. Yet despite its size and importance, archaeologists still don’t understand how this vast, lost culture began, how it ended, and what went on in between.

A thousand years ago, no one could have missed Cahokia—a complex, sophisticated society with an urban center, satellite villages, and as many as 50,000 people in all.

Thatched-roof houses lined the central plazas. Merchants swapped copper, mica, and seashells from as far away as the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. Thousands of cooking fires burned night and day.

And between A.D. 1000 and 1300, Cahokians built more than 120 earthen mounds as landmarks, tombs, and ceremonial platforms. The largest of these monuments, now called Monks Mound, still dominates the site. It is a flat-topped pyramid of dirt that covers more than 14 acres and once supported a 5,000-square-foot temple.

Monks Mound is bigger than any of the three great pyramids at Giza outside Cairo. “This is the third or fourth biggest pyramid in the world, in terms of volume,” says archaeologist Tim Pauketat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It towers 100 feet over a 40-acre plaza that was surrounded by lesser mounds and a two-mile-long stockade. The monument was the crowning achievement of a mound-building culture that began thousands of years earlier and was never duplicated on this continent.

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/feb/uncovering-americas-pyramid-builders/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England’s written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.

In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as “densely populated” and so “smoky with Indian bonfires” that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea.

Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.

Historians estimate that before the plague, America’s population was anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe’s at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population. For comparison’s sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe’s population.

While this all might seem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, your high school and college history books weren’t exactly in a hurry to tell you the full story. Which is strange, because many historians believe it is the single most important event in American history.

But it’s just more fun to believe that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture.

Read more: 6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html#ixzz1vvFcedhN

TRUTH.

Here was rather irrefutable evidence of what could only be construed as gay life in ancient Egypt.

It was the tomb of Ni-ankh-khnum and Khnum-hotep, palace functionaries and royal confidants, and the underground crypt was designed to be shared by both of them.

The two men press their faces together, nose to nose, one’s arm around the other’s back in intimate embrace usually depicted as between man and wife. There are seven such scenes of them up close and personal. Even their names have been written together to read “joined in life, joined in death.”

It’s fascinating and unlike anything yet discovered beneath the sands of Egypt. In their beautiful, colored-splashed tomb, these guys have been together for more than 4,000 years. Their lapidary embraces give new meaning to long-term relationship.

Tom Stoddart, Sudan 1998

(Source: kateoplis)

48 years ago today: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

On August 28, 1963, over 250,000 people descended on the National Mall to advocate for social, political and economic justice for African Americans in the United States. The Freedom March is widely credited for pushing the JFK Administration and Congress to move forward on civil rights legislation.

The nine goals of the rights march:

1. A comprehensive civil rights bill from the present Congress, including provisions guaranteeing access to public accommodations, adequate and integrated education, protection of the right to vote, better housing, and authority for the Attorney General to seek injunctive relief when individuals (sic) constitutional rights are violated.
    
2. Withholding of Federal funds from all programs in which discrimination exists.
   
   
3. Desegregation of all public schools in 1963.
   
   
4. A reduction in Congressional seats in states where citizens are disenfranchised.
   
   
5. A stronger Executive Order prohibiting discrimination in all housing programs supported by Federal Funds.
6. A massive Federal Program to train and place unemployed workers.
7. An increase in the minimum wage to $2 an hour. The Federal minimum covering workers in interstate industries.
8. Extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act to include exempted fields of employment.
9.  A Federal Fair Employment Practices Act barring discrimination in all employments.

The legacy of the 1963 Freedom March centers around Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

You can view the full speech here. I also highly recommend reading Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Chairman John Lewis’s speech - now Congressman Lewis (D-Atlanta) - from the March on Washington. 

Take a moment today to consider where we’ve been, where we are today, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

[Photos: National Archives; National Archives; Francis Miller/LIFE; USIA; LIFE; Library of Congress]

(Source: pantslessprogressive)