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bemusedlybespectacled:

secrethistoriesproject:

22. Mary Anning

If you went down to the blue lias cliffs at Lyme Regis in Dorset on a freezing winter day in the 1820s or 1830s, you might have seen a thoroughly bundled-up figure scratching in the shale and examining the stones. A scientific gentleman of the Royal Society, making important discoveries about fossils that would later lead to, among other things, the development of the theory of evolution? 

Well, almost. 

You’d actually be looking at Mary Anning, a working-class woman from a religiously-dissenting family who wouldn’t have been allowed to scrub the front steps of the Royal Society — and a damn fine scientist nonetheless. 

Anning’s family were Congregationalists, members of an unpopular religious minority. They lived in the village of Lyme, so close to the sea that their house flooded in bad weather, and they were pretty damn poor. Her father, Richard Anning, was a carpenter who supplemented his income by picking up and mining interesting stones — then called ‘curios’, later to be known as ‘fossils’ — from the beach and selling them to tourists (who initially bought them because they were weird or pretty, not for any scientific interest). 

Anning and her brother Joseph (the only two of the family’s ten children to live to adulthood) helped their father at this work. After he died in 1810, 11-year-old Mary and 14-year-old Joseph (and their mother, Molly) all continued to work at fossil-collecting in order to keep their family afloat. In 1811, when Anning was twelve years old, they discovered what would later be identified as the first complete icthyosaur skeleton — Joseph dug up the skull, and a few months later, Mary found the rest of the skeleton. They sold the find to Henry Henley, a local aristocrat, who sold it on to collector William Bullock who displayed it in London — causing people to begin to ask serious questions about the Biblical account of Creation.

Anning continued to work as a fossil-hunter into adulthood, eventually opening her own shop in Lyme in 1826, ‘Anning’s Fossil Depot’. It wasn’t particularly safe or easy work, either - in 1833, Anning was caught in a landslide that nearly killed her (and did, unfortunately, kill her dog Tray, pictured in a sketch above).

Despite the fact that she had had limited access to schooling (she learned basic reading and writing at Congregationalist Sunday School), Anning was deadly serious about educating herself as a scientist. She read as many scientific journals and publications as she could get hold of. She conducted dissections of modern animals in order to better understand the fossil ones she was researching, and made careful copies of diagrams and illustrations that she found in books. Among many other discoveries, she also uncovered the first plesiosaur and the first British example of a pterosaur: her notes were also key to the discovery that coprolite stones were in fact fossilized animal dung (a discovery for which scientist William Buckland ended up getting most of the credit).

As interest in the new sciences of geology and palaeontology grew, Anning was not permitted to join the Royal Society, nor the Royal Geological Society. This effectively meant that she could not be recognised as the maker of any scientific discoveries, as she had no means to publish her work. Many of the wealthy fossil collectors who bought items from her published Society papers on their purchases: some of them appear to have ripped off her descriptions of the fossils wholesale and passed them off as their own. A friend of Anning’s, Anna Pinney, wrote: 

She says the world has used her ill … these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.

And damn right, too! Although those ‘in the know’ do seem to have recognised the value of Anning’s work to some extent, collecting a subscription to pay her medical bills and making her a member of the new Dorset County Museum, she still  doesn’t appear to have got anything near the scientific credit she deserved. In 1847, she died of breast cancer — and the President of the Geological Society spoke at her funeral (why yes, that was the same society that wouldn’t let her join while she was alive). The eulogy was published in the Society’s quarterly transactions, an honour that no other woman would receive until the Society began accepting female members in 1904. 

Anning has received much greater recognition after her death, and is a relatively famous figure nowadays — there are a number of fictional novels and kids’ books about her, and her story is even reputed to be the basis for the tongue twister ‘She sells seashells…’. The third image above is a display that now hangs in the Natural History Museum in London showing information about her life beside a plesiosaur skeleton. However, I think it’s important to remember not only her discoveries, but the sheer effort of will that it must have required for a person of her gender and class and religious background to have been taken even as seriously as she was by the scientific community during her lifetime. Surviving and thriving as an academic from a working-class background isn’t all that easy in 2012… and yet nearly 200 years earlier, Anning was doing it despite some pretty terrifying odds. It’s also, of course, important to remember how little credit she got for it, and how her findings were misappropriated by her so-called superiors — which is, of course, what happens when some people are forcibly barred from taking part in academic discourse.

Somehow, a museum plaque and a tongue-twister still don’t seem like enough to make up for that.

More: 

Bio at the Natural History Museum: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/biographies/mary-anning/index.html

Bio at Lyme Regis Museum: http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/in-the-museum/mary-anning

Essay by William Sargeant, ‘The Three Mary Annings’: http://www.whaton.uwaterloo.ca/waton/s008.html

BBC primary-school kids’ page with images and a game: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/famouspeople/mary_anning/

Bio from San Diego ‘Women in Science’ series: http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/anning.html

Wikipedia biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning

Images from the ‘Literary Lyme’ walking tour: http://www.literarylyme.co.uk/maryanninggallery.html

I did a report on Mary Anning my freshman year of high school. I had to dress up as her and everything. She was so badass.

sansdeity:

secrethistoriesproject:

12. Bayard Rustin

What do a ‘Communist draft-dodging homosexual sex-pervert’ and a ‘Civil Rights hero’ have in common?

Well, for starters, they’re sometimes the same person.

Bayard Rustin was an activist and teacher who played a key role in the Civil Rights movement. His accomplishments included:

• Rustin moved to New York after spending time at university and in teacher training, and quickly became active in civil rights politics. He registered as a conscientious objector to World War II, and went to California to help protect the interests and properties of Japanese-Americans who were interred for the duration of the war.
• He worked on the campaign to defend the Scottsboro Boys, and was an early worker on the campaign for desegretation on public transport. In 1942, he was arrested for the first of many times for repeatedly refusing to move from the front seat of a bus when asked to do so.
• In 1947, he helped organise the first of the Freedom Rides, sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an interfaith and mixed-race pacifist group. He was arrested while on the Ride and served twenty-two days in a chain gang in North Carolina
• In 1948, he travelled to India to learn from Gandhi’s pacifist independence movement. 
• In 1956, he went to work as a close advisor to Dr Martin Luther King, passing on the techniques of non-violent resistance that he learned from the Gandhian movement. 
• And finally, he was the main organiser of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the event at which Dr King made his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech (link is to video). It was in no small part thanks to Rustin’s careful organisation (of everything from bus marshals to bathroom facilities) that the march was able to stay peaceful and non-violent.

So why have you never heard about Bayard Rustin in history class? 

Because Bayard Rustin was gay. 

(or, perhaps more accurately, because Bayard Rustin was openly gay and not particularly interested in keeping quiet about it).

In 1953, he was arrested in Pasadena, California for having consensual sex in a parked car with two male partners. He was intially charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct: the charges were later altered to a lesser count of ‘sex perversion’, to which he pleaded guilty. After his conviction, he was asked to leave the FOR,and he was later shunned by many members of the civil rights movement.

It’s important to remember that this may not have been completely due to the homophobia of the other civil rights leaders — they were acting under  the fear of being smeared or blackmailed by right-wing opposition (after all, these events were taking place at the height of McCarthyism). Their fears weren’t ill-founded, either — in 1963, right-wing Senator Strom Thurmond lectured Congress on Rustin’s ‘Communist draft-dodging homosexual sex-pervert’ ways. Some opponents even threatened to circulate rumours that Rustin and Dr King were having an affair. 

Nevertheless, Rustin never seems to have been inclined to deny his sexuality or to keep it a secret. Rachelle Horowitz, a fellow March organiser, commented that she thought ‘he’d never heard there was a closet’.  Immediately after his removal from the FOR Rustin briefly saw a psychiatrist, Dr Robert Ascher, but seems to have quickly given up on the idea of attempting to ‘cure’ himself of being gay. He continued to have male partners, and formed a long-term relationship with Walter Naegle in the late 1970s which lasted until the end of his life. As the litany of his achievements above suggests, he also managed to overcome the stigma of having been arrested for his sexuality. After being dismissed from the FOR, Rustin became secretary of the War Resisters’ League, and later worked as a secretary to Dr King.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin continued to work for civil rights — and among those rights were gay rights. He was one of the first thinkers to begin comparing the post-Stonewall gay rights movement to the Civil Rights movement, and in 1986 he gave a speech entitled ‘The New N****** Are Gays’ — a statement that I’m not going to comment on aside from saying that I think he was much more qualified to have an opinion about the topic than I am. He also worked to found Project South Africa, a programme which sought to connect concerned Americans with groups working for democracy in SA. By the time of his death in 1987, his FBI file stretched to over 10,000 pages.

At a time when post-1960s white American society was settling into cosily mythologising the history of the Civil Rights movement into a non-threatening, happy story of ‘Rosa Parks sat down on the bus because her feet were tired and then racism was over, hooray’, Rustin continued to ask difficult questions, cause trouble and demand more from his society — and for that, I sort of have to love him. 

More:

PDF of Rustin’s essay ‘From Montgomery to Stonewall’ plus a pamphlet authored by him preparing marchers for the 1963 March: http://www.illinoisprobono.org/calendarUploads/Rustin%20Documents.pdf

Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner, speaks about his life: http://rustin.org/?page_id=11

Detailed bio of Rustin from ‘Waging Nonviolence’: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/03/revisiting-rustin-on-his-centennial/

Profile on KNOWhomo with a brief excerpt from ‘The New N****** Are Gays’: http://knowhomo.tumblr.com/post/11565611172

Washington Post article on Rustin: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bayard-rustin-organizer-of-the-march-on-washington-was-crucial-to-the-movement/2011/08/17/gIQA0oZ7UJ_story.html

Website for Brother Outsider, a film biography of Rustin: http://rustin.org/?page_id=2

Article on Rustin’s speech ‘The New N****** are Gays’: http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/damnation/gays-are-the-new-niggers/

Wikipedia biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin

He also participated in a legendary debate versus Malcolm X on the issues of integration!

Link 

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Actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr was once called “the most beautiful woman in the world.” She also gave us the technology that laid the groundwork for Wifi and Bluetooth. 

choosechoice:

Do you know who this woman is? Probably not. This is Victoria Woodhull. In 1872, she was the first female candidate for President of the United States, the Equal Rights Party candidate. She was an advocate of free love, by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce, and bear children without government interference. She was the first woman to start a weekly newspaper; an activist for women’s rights and labor reforms. She was also a stockbroker, divorced her first husband, who was an abusive alcoholic (and whom she married when she was 2 weeks past her 15th birthday!) and was a major advocate of women’s rights. Many of her quotes still remain relevant today:

To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold …

 Basically, she was a magnificent woman and a woman before her time. Absolutely brilliant inspiration

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explore-blog:

A map of the universe by René Descartes from Principia philosophiae, 1644, one of many fascinating depictions in this visual history of mapping the cosmos

explore-blog:

A charmingly illustrated vintage bicycle safety manual circa 1969

explore-blog:

Mugshot of Vincent Peruggia, who stole the Mona Lisa and tried to sell it to the Uffizi in 1911.

bemusedlybespectacled:

ceruleancynic:

jumpingjacktrash:

lamamama:

“But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.”

- Charles Darwin, in a letter dated October 1, 1861 [x]

charles darwin: tumblr blogger.

sing it, darwin. 

ONE OF US

ONE OF US

ONE OF US

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