History

When Bobby Franks was 14 years old, he delivered an impassioned indictment of capital punishment during a school debate competition, arguing that “only God is permitted to take human life.” Asked whether this stance contradicted the principle of “an eye for an eye,” he replied, “Punishment should be reformative, never vindictive.”

Franks’ rhetoric impressed the contest’s judges, who declared his team the winner. Just two weeks later, the debate champion would be dead, the victim of a murder that captivated the nation and raised lasting questions about the very issue that Franks had just debated.

On the afternoon of May 21, 1924, Franks came across 18-year-old Richard Loeb, an acquaintance he sometimes played tennis with, while walking home from school in Chicago. Loeb offered Franks a ride in his car, but the boy declined, as he was just a few blocks from his destination. “Come on,” Loeb reportedly said. “I want to talk to you about the tennis racket you had yesterday. I want to get one for my brother.” Franks relented.

The next morning, a Polish immigrant found Franks’ nude body stuffed into a drainage culvert about ten miles away. Far from a whodunit, Loeb and 19-year-old Nathan Leopold confessed to the murder ten days later, after they became leading suspects. In police interviews, both men admitted the crime was committed merely for the thrill of it all.

Newspapers at the time offered a range of alternative theories for the grisly murder, from the young men’s privileged upbringing to their atheist beliefs to their college curriculums. As Erik Rebain, author of Arrested Adolescence: The Secret Life of Nathan Leopold and the creator of a website dedicated to the case, says, the public started seeking answers to recurring questions: “Why did this happen? How could these people have turned into this? … Anything you wanted to blame [the murder] on, you could blame it on.”

Thanks in large part to nonstop media coverage, the relatively straightforward hearing (Leopold and Loeb pled guilty, so they didn’t face a trial by jury) became a mirror for the anxieties of the 1920s, allowing observers to attribute the crime to whatever they perceived as society’s ills. This fascination endures a century later.

“The reason that this case continues to grab people when there have been so many other sensational murders is that the motive just has never been comprehensible to anybody else,” says Nina Barrett, author of The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes. “Nobody has ever understood why two well-educated, privileged boys with a great future ahead of them … would think the most fun thing they could do on a spring afternoon would be to murder a kid from the neighborhood.”

Plotting the imperfect crime

Born into wealthy Jewish families in Chicago in 1904 and 1905, respectively, Leopold and Loeb were afforded every opportunity throughout their youth. Both were precocious students, with Leopold demonstrating a penchant for languages and ornithology, and Loeb preferring literature and history. Though the two grew up in the same neighborhood (as did their victim, Franks), they only became friends in spring 1920. The following February, the pair’s friendship turned sexual, “and they also started committing crimes together,” says Rebain. “You see this escalation in their relationship,” from petty theft to arson to perhaps even assault.

Loeb was the “gregarious and sociable” foil to Leopold’s “misanthropic and aloof” personality, writes historian Simon Baatz in For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago. Though scholars generally agree that Loeb was the instigator of these crimes, some place more of the blame on Leopold’s shoulders. Loeb “seems to have had a big fantasy world in which he was rebelling against his parents,” says Barrett. “Instead of becoming the perfect, well-dressed, rich attorney they wanted him to be … he was becoming the opposite of that: the secret bandit, killer, lawbreaker.”

Leopold was more interested in lawbreaking as an intellectual exercise demonstrating his superiority. He was also eager to maintain his romantic relationship with Loeb, sometimes promising to act as an accomplice in exchange for sex.

In November 1923, the pair robbed Loeb’s former fraternity house at the University of Michigan. Leopold wanted to rob a second house, too, but Loeb was reluctant. Neither heist was particularly successful, and the friends fought bitterly on their drive back to Chicago. Ultimately, they agreed to carry out a kidnapping, ransom and murder scheme that would prove their genius and cement their bond at a pivotal moment in their relationship. Leopold was set to depart for Europe soon, and Loeb was eager to stall their separation.

The duo concocted a plan involving false identities with elaborate backstories and decoy bank accounts, a wad of cash thrown out the window of a moving train, and a killing method that would leave both equally culpable for taking a life. (They later abandoned the idea of strangling the victim with a rope, each pulling on one end until he was dead, but that didn’t stop Alfred Hitchcock from immortalizing the murder weapon in Rope, his 1948 thriller inspired by the case.)

Though the pair initially considered killing a former friend of Loeb’s, they decided to instead target a young boy, as he would presumably be easier to overpower and more likely to be unsupervised than a girl of the same age. The victim had to be wealthy enough to ensure his family could pay the ransom, and he had to live nearby so the killers could observe the mayhem their actions had provoked without attracting suspicion.

Rope (1948) Official Trailer #1 – Alfred Hitchcock Movie

The murder of Bobby Franks

Beyond this criteria, Leopold and Loeb left their choice of victim “completely up to chance,” says Rebain. Though they’d written up a list of potential targets and almost selected a different boy, they ended up taking “the most likely looking subject that came our way,” as Leopold later told authorities. Though it took some convincing by Loeb for Franks to join them in the rented automobile, he did so, then greeted Leopold, whom he’d never met before.

The killers’ accounts of what happened next are generally in agreement, aside from one main point of contention: Both Leopold and Loeb named the other as the one who dealt Franks the fatal blow, hitting him over the head with a taped chisel multiple times before stuffing a rag down his throat. (The general consensus now is that Loeb committed the murder while Leopold drove the car.)

After Franks was dead, the pair drove some distance away, stripped the corpse of its clothing (but didn’t abuse it in any other way) and waited until night fell, passing time by stopping for sandwiches and root beer. Under cover of darkness, they doused Franks’ body in hydrochloric acid to mask his identity, then hid the boy in a culvert near the Indiana border, in an area where Leopold sometimes went birding. On their way home, they mailed a typewritten ransom note demanding $10,000 in cash and called the Franks, telling their victim’s mother that her son “has been kidnapped [but] is safe.”

The carefully constructed scheme quickly fell apart from there.

The ransom letter, which arrived the following morning, advised the Franks family to “remain at home” after 1 p.m. and ensure “the telephone is not in use,” as the killers would provide further instructions via phone. But by the time Leopold and Loeb enacted the next step of their plan, the body had already been found. The hydrochloric acid had done little to disfigure the corpse. Newspapers covered the discovery of an unknown boy’s remains, announcing his identification as Franks—the son of a “retired millionaire manufacturer”—that same day.

The men had hoped Franks’ body would never be found, or at least not until decomposition had set in. The remains’ rapid recovery prevented the pair from collecting the ransom.

Over the following week, local and national papers alike speculated on the killer’s motive (the Chicago Tribune theorized that a sexual predator had “sought to cloak his act and the boy’s presumed accidental death by the demands for money,” while the Boston Globe posited that Franks had died while fighting off his kidnappers) and character (only a “scholarly person, a master of English,” could have written a ransom letter with such “faultless” grammar, according to the Tribune).

Another flaw in the plan came about when, in the killers’ haste to hide the body in the culvert, Leopold’s horn-rimmed glasses fell out of his pocket. This unassuming accessory proved to be the key to the investigation. It had a unique hinge that was only available through a single Chicago supplier. That company, in turn, had sold just three pairs of glasses featuring the patented technology. One belonged to a woman, while another was sold to a lawyer who was traveling in Europe at the time of the murder. The third belonged to Leopold, who readily supplied an alibi: He’d spent the day of the murder with his friend Loeb, driving around town before picking up a pair of young women.

Though Loeb presented a slightly different version of events, he soon changed his story to match up with Leopold’s, convincing the authorities—however briefly—of the pair’s innocence. But as investigators kept digging, they uncovered two damning pieces of evidence: Leopold’s maid had recently seen a typewriter like the one used to write the ransom note, though it had since disappeared from the family home. And Leopold and Loeb couldn’t have spent the day driving around in Leopold’s car, as his chauffeur was making repairs to it at the time. Confronted with these inconsistencies, Loeb confessed to the killing early on the morning of May 31. Leopold made a similar statement shortly after.

The duo believed themselves to be “supermen” whose superior intellect placed them above the law. The murder, then, was a test of sorts, offering Leopold and Loeb a chance to prove their mettle by committing the perfect crime. But the plan’s spectacular failure only underscored their naïveté and immaturity.

“They planned some things so thoroughly, like making these false identifications and registering in different hotels and banks and all this background stuff that didn’t end up mattering at all,” says Rebain. “What got them were these little things that they just didn’t think about enough.”

The “trial of the century” that wasn’t a trial at all

Prosecutor Robert Crowe was determined to hang Leopold and Loeb. The public was similarly eager to punish these rich upstarts, who expressed little remorse for their actions. “We were experimenting” to commit the perfect crime, Leopold told reporters. “The killing was accidental and incidental. But it is as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify an entomologist impaling a beetle on a pin.”

As Crowe prepared to mount a case against the killers, their families sought out the best attorney money could buy: Clarence Darrow, who’d made a name for himself as a labor lawyer and would soon achieve great fame through his defense both of Leopold and Loeb and of John Scopes, the teacher at the center of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial.” According to a biography of Darrow, a group led by Loeb’s uncle knocked on the Chicago-based attorney’s door in the early morning hours of June 2 and begged him to “save our two boys. … Get them a life sentence instead of a death sentence.” Darrow, a staunch critic of the death penalty, agreed to take the case.

Leopold and Loeb underwent extensive physical and psychiatric evaluation while awaiting trial—a fact that led many observers, including the prosecution team, to believe that Darrow would argue they were not guilty by reason of insanity. Instead, the attorney changed the pair’s plea to guilty.

Darrow’s shift in strategy reflected his belief that Judge John Caverly, who had a reputation as one of the court’s more liberal justices, would find it much harder to order the executions of two teenagers than a jury of angry Chicagoans would. By pleading guilty, Leopold and Loeb would not be judged by a dozen of their peers, but by one judge in a sentencing hearing. “I know perfectly well that where responsibility is divided by 12, it is easy to say, ‘Away with him,’” the attorney said in court. “But, your honor, if these boys hang, you must do it. There can be no division of responsibility.”

In making his decision, Darrow urged Caverly to consider three mitigating factors: the pair’s youth, their guilty plea and their mental state. Leopold and Loeb may not have been insane, the defense argued, but they were certainly mentally ill, plagued by “emotional immaturity, obsessions with crime and Nietzschean philosophy, alcohol abuse, glandular abnormalities, and sexual longings and insecurities,” writes Douglas O. Linder, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, on his Famous Trials website.

Psychiatrists detailed the killers’ childhood trauma, much of it inflicted by their strict upbringing. Loeb’s governess pushed the young boy to excel academically and discouraged him from socializing with other children, while Leopold’s “seduced him when he was still a child,” writes Baatz. “The damage inflicted on each boy at an early age had resulted in compensatory fantasies that led directly to the murder.”

The president of the American Psychiatric Association, William Alanson White, testified that Leopold and Loeb “complemented each other,” arguing that neither would never have committed the crime on his own. But the experts called to the stand by the prosecution offered a different perspective. Based on physical examinations of Leopold and Loeb, one neurologist said he had found no evidence of “any defect, any disorder, any lack of development or any disease.” The fact that two sets of psychiatrists came to entirely different conclusions led some observers to discount all of the expert testimony: Few realized that “each side spoke for a different branch of psychiatry”—the prosecution for neurology and the defense for psychoanalysis—“and was, therefore, separately justified in reaching its verdict,” writes Baatz.

Crowe and Darrow, the lead attorneys on either side of the case, also presented wildly varied portraits of the killers. The prosecutor referred to Leopold and Loeb as “cowardly perverts,” “snakes,” “spoiled smart alecks” and “mad dogs,” calling particular attention to the sexual nature of their relationship. “Leopold was willing to go along with Loeb because he could use his body for vile and unnatural practices,” Crowe argued. As remorseless killers who had taken a life in cold blood, the two deserved the death penalty, in his view.

Darrow, on the other hand, suggested that “these two very privileged sons of very wealthy families were actually victims,” said author John Farrell in a 2018 documentary about the case. “They were in this very sheltered life with cold families, and … they should be pitied rather than hated.”

The defense attorney traced the murder to the killers’ childhoods, arguing that their past experiences had determined the decisions they made as teenagers. “Somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man, something slipped,” Darrow said. As a result, Leopold and Loeb could not be held fully responsible for their actions. Inflicting the death penalty on them would achieve nothing beyond satisfying the public’s bloodlust.

On August 23, approximately a month after the sentencing hearing began, Darrow delivered a closing argument that demonstrated both “his eloquence [and] his wit,” according to Barrett. Often appealing directly to the judge, Darrow used Leopold and Loeb’s case as a jumping-off point for a broader criticism of the death penalty. “We can learn, by reason and judgment and understanding and faith, that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man,” he said in the final minutes of his summation.

Crowe, in his closing arguments a few days later, countered by claiming that Caverly would put his “official seal of approval upon [Darrow’s] doctrines of anarchy” if he declined to sentence Leopold and Loeb to death.

Caverly took nearly two weeks to reach a decision. When the court reconvened on September 10, the judge praised the lawyers’ “careful analysis” of Leopold and Loeb’s mental state and life histories as a “valuable contribution to criminology.” Still, despite the voluminous testimony provided by experts on both sides, Caverly’s decision ultimately came down to one chief consideration: the defendants’ youth. Instead of sending the pair to the gallows, he sentenced them to life imprisonment for murder and an additional 99 years each for kidnapping. Though Leopold and Loeb might welcome their reprieve from hanging, the judge pointed out that “the prolonged suffering of years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation.”

Life plus 99 years

The public had breathlessly followed the story from the time of Franks’ kidnapping to the killers’ sentencing. Newspapers covered every development in the case, portraying Leopold and Loeb as “gentleman gangsters” at a time when Chicago was notorious for its mob activity, says Barrett. Everyone had an opinion on the pair’s motive: Editorials argued that if Leopold and Loeb had performed “physical labor as children, they wouldn’t have done this,” Rebain says. Other observers believed they’d been “overeducated” and shouldn’t have studied philosophy. Even the Ku Klux Klan weighed in, citing the friends’ German Jewish heritage as a reason for their depravity. In response to such criticism, Jewish rabbis pointed out that Leopold and Loeb were self-proclaimed atheists divorced from Jewish values.

On one front, however, the public was largely united: Leopold and Loeb should pay for their crimes with their lives, and the fact that they’d only received a prison sentence was a direct reflection of their money and privilege. People believed that “a poor defendant who couldn’t afford Darrow and all these psychiatrists … would just be hanged,” Rebain says. “They wouldn’t have any chance.” Others feared that crime would increase “because people think they can get away with anything.”

As for the three families at the heart of the case, none was particularly pleased with its outcome. Grateful as they were that Leopold and Loeb would not be hanged, the killers’ loved ones had to contend with the fact that these young men who had once shown such promise would now spend the rest of their lives in prison. The Franks, for their part, were ready to be out of the spotlight and able to grieve in peace.

“I always have seen [the case] as this sort of Shakespearean drama about these three families, [who] were all immigrants to America and had pursued the American dream,” says Barrett. The murder “basically ruined those families for generations,” she adds. It’s “a really tragic morality tale” about the limits of wealth and influence.

After the sentencing hearing wrapped up, Leopold and Loeb were imprisoned in Illinois’ state prison in Joliet. Leopold was transferred to the Stateville Penitentiary the following year, while Loeb remained at Joliet until 1930, when he reunited with his friend at Stateville. Initially, “they were in a lot of danger,” says Rebain. “Because they were 19, they were very young to be going to an adult prison. And because of the nature of their crime and the rumors about their sexuality … they were very much targets for assault.”

Both eventually adjusted to life in prison, particularly under the less restrictive conditions at Stateville, where they were “as close as it is possible for two men to be,” Leopold recalled in his autobiography. They collaborated to open a correspondence high school at the prison and often played handball and bridge together. Then, on January 28, 1936, another inmate by the name of James Day attacked Loeb in the prison shower, slashing him more than 50 times with a razor. “I think I’m going to make it,” Loeb reportedly told his doctors; Leopold, who’d rushed to his friend’s side after learning of the attack, offered to donate blood to Loeb but was turned down. Loeb died soon after at 30 years old.

Though Day claimed he’d acted in self-defense, fending off a sexual proposition by a razor-wielding Loeb, this explanation didn’t hold up to scrutiny, as Day suffered no injuries during the encounter and was the one who’d brought the weapon to the shower in the first place. A jury later acquitted Day of Loeb’s murder—a verdict that Rebain says was influenced by homophobia and lingering resentment of the victim’s earlier crime.

The murder sent Leopold, who declared Loeb both “my best pal” and “the greatest enemy I have ever had, for my friendship with him had cost me my life,” into a deep depression. It was only during World War II, when he volunteered for malaria studies conducted at the prison, that he found a renewed purpose. This verve for life happened to coincide with Leopold’s first opportunity to apply for parole, which was denied in 1953 amid intense public backlash but granted in 1958.

Leopold was released from prison on March 13, 1958, at age 53, after serving 33 years of his sentence. Eager to avoid the spotlight, he moved to Puerto Rico, where he’d received an offer of employment as a laboratory technician. While living abroad, Leopold earned a master’s degree in social work; married a former secretary; conducted medical research; and revisited his interest in ornithology, even publishing a book on the region’s birds. He died of a heart attack on August 29, 1971, at age 66.

Rebain decided to write his 2023 biography of Leopold after realizing that most accounts of the killer’s life dedicate just a few sentences to his experiences after parole. Diving into the archives, he found sources that contradicted the popular perception of Leopold as “the lesser of two evils, just a shy kid who had a crush on the wrong guy.”

In truth, says Rebain, Leopold’s correspondence paints him as a social, assertive figure who was “absolutely not letting anyone tell him what to do.” He bragged about violating parole restrictions against alcohol use, among other individual freedoms, and, in a letter to one of the attorneys who’d helped secure his release, claimed that he’d “visited most of the better whorehouses, cheap bars and gambling casinos in Greater San Juan.”

Casual observers often cited Leopold’s case as an example of the power of rehabilitation. After his death, Puerto Rican Governor Luis A. Ferré even declared that “the story of Nathan Leopold is one that must confirm the faith and intrinsic goodness of the human being.” But Rebain’s research suggests the killer wasn’t as reformed as many thought.

The Shocking Criminal Case of Leopold and Loeb (Full Documentary)

In the decades since the “trial of the century,” Leopold and Loeb’s story has inspired countless novels, movies, plays, documentaries and other adaptations. Reflecting on the case’s enduring appeal, Barrett points out that in 1924, the public was hungry for a kind of “tawdry sensationalism. Even though there were murders galore in Chicago … there wasn’t a murder among the rich people who should know better.” Today, says Rebain, the story contains “so many elements for people to latch onto, so even if you’re not interested in one aspect, you’re going to be interested in another,” whether it’s class, sexuality, religion or psychology.

Often forgotten in discussions of Leopold and Loeb is their victim, Franks. “He was a really smart kid,” Barrett says, and he showed “as much promise” as his precocious killers did. The author cites an anecdote shared by Franks’ father, who told reporters that his wife kept a copy of Franks’ winning argument against the death penalty in a box. Sometimes, she’d take the paper out and remind herself that her son wouldn’t have wanted his killers to hang for his death. “That was a source of comfort to her,” Barrett says. “The layers of tragedy in that, the amount of empathy in that one comment, is missing from anything Leopold and Loeb ever said, [and] it just kind of sums up why this is as big a tragedy as it is.”

From stone tools that prepared animal skins for humans to use as thermal insulation, to the advent of bone awls and eyed needles to create fitted and adorned garments, why did we start to dress to express ourselves and to impress others?

Paleolithic Eyed Needles and the Evolution of Dress

Clothing is understood as a significant component in shaping what makes us human. The emergence of clothing enabled our ancestors to inhabit more corners of the world, access different resources and environments, and connect with a broader community. Today, clothing is associated with identity and status. Yet archaeological evidence indicates that apart from thermal reasons, clothing was not intrinsic for society or cultures to function.

Artist impression of decorated tailored clothing in the Upper Paleolithic. (Mariana Ariza/University of Sydney)

A team of researchers led by Dr Ian Gilligan, Honorary Associate in the discipline of Archaeology at the University of Sydney, are the first to suggest that eyed needles were a new technological innovation used to adorn clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity.

“Eyed needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a transition in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes,” says Dr Ian Gilligan.

Dr Gilligan and his co-authors reinterpret the evidence of recent discoveries in the development of clothing in their paper, Paleolithic eyed needles and the evolution of dress.

“Why do we wear clothes? We assume that it’s part of being human, but once you look at different cultures, you realize that people existed and functioned perfectly adequately in society without clothes,” Dr Gilligan says. “What intrigues me is the transition of clothing from being a physical necessity in certain environments, to a social necessity in all environments.”

Morphological variation in the size and shape of Late Pleistocene eyed needles. (Gilligan et al, 2024)

Paleolithic Eyed Needles and the Evolution of Dress

The earliest known eyed needles appeared approximately 40,000 years ago in Siberia. One of the most iconic of Paleolithic artifacts from the Stone Age, eyed needles are more difficult to make when compared to bone awls, which sufficed for creating fitted clothing. Bone awls are tools made of animal bones that are sharpened to a point. Eyed needles are modified bone awls, with a perforated hole (eye) to facilitate the sewing of sinew or thread.

As evidence suggests bone awls were already being used to create tailored clothes, the innovation of eyed needles may reflect the production of more complex, layered clothing, as well as the adornment of clothes by attaching beads and other small decorative items onto garments. 

“We know that clothing up until the last glacial cycle was only used on an ad hoc basis. The classic tools that we associate with that are hide scrapers or stone scrapers, and we find them appearing and going away during the different phases of the last ice ages,” Dr Gilligan explains

Dr Gilligan and his co-authors argue that clothing became an item of decoration because traditional body decoration methods, like body painting with ochre or deliberate scarification, weren’t possible during the latter part of the last ice age in colder parts of Eurasia, as people were needing to wear clothes all the time to survive.

“That’s why the appearance of eyed needles is particularly important because it signals the use of clothing as decoration,” Dr Gilligan says. “Eyed needles would have been especially useful for the very fine sewing that was required to decorate clothing.”

Clothing therefore evolved to serve not only a practical necessity for protection and comfort against external elements, but also a social, aesthetic function for individual and cultural identity.

The regular wearing of clothing allowed larger and more complex societies to form, as people could relocate to colder climates while also cooperating with their tribe or community based on shared clothing styles and symbols. The skills associated with the production of clothing contributed to a more sustainable lifestyle and enhanced the long-term survival and prosperity of human communities.

Covering the human body regardless of climate is a social practice that has endured. Dr Gilligan’s future work moves beyond the advent of clothing as dress and looks at the psychological functions and effects of wearing clothes.

“We take it for granted we feel comfortable wearing clothes and uncomfortable if we’re not wearing clothes in public. But how does wearing clothes impact the way we look at ourselves, the way we see ourselves as humans, and perhaps how we look at the environment around us?”

This paper was published in Science Advances.

This article was first published under the title, ‘The beginnings of fashion: why do we wear clothes?’ by the University of Sydney.

Top image: Morphological variation in the size and shape of Late Pleistocene eyed needles. Source: Gilligan et al, 2024

Board games are booming: In 2023 alone, the industry topped $16.8 billion globally, and by 2032, it’s projected to reach $40.1 billion.

Classics like Scrabble are being refreshed and transformed, while newer inventions such as Pandemic and Wingspan have garnered millions of devotees.

This growing cardboard empire was on my mind when I visited the American Antiquarian Society in August 2023 to research its collection of early games.

As I sat in that archive, which houses such treasures as the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British America, I beheld another first in American printing: a board game called the Travelers’ Tour Through the United States.

This forgotten game, printed in 1822, the year after Missouri became a state, has a lot to say about America’s nascent board game industry, as well as how the young country saw itself.

An archival find

Produced by the New York cartography firm of F. & R. Lockwood, the Travelers’ Tour was an imitation of earlier European geography games, a genre of educational game. These activities generally used a map for a board, and the rules involved players reciting geographic facts as they raced toward the finish.

The Travelers’ Tour first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S.

But for almost a century, another game was thought to hold that honor.

In 1894, the game manufacturer Parker Brothers acquired the rights to the Mansion of Happiness, an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843. In its promotional materials, the company declared it “the first board game ever published in America.”

That distinction ended in 1991, when a game collector found the copy of the Travelers’ Tour in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society.

A new game for the new year

By 1822, the American market for board games was already becoming established, and middle- and upper-class parents would buy games for their families to enjoy around the parlor table.

At that time, New Year’s—not Christmas—was the holiday for gift-giving. Many booksellers, who earned money from the sale of books, playing cards and other paper goods throughout the year, sold special wares to give as presents.

These items included holiday-themed books, puzzles (then called “dissected maps”) and paper dolls, as well as games imported from England, such as the New Game of Human Life and the Royal and Entertaining Game of the Goose.

Since the Travelers’ Tour was the first board game to employ a map of the U.S., it might have been an especially interesting gift for American consumers.

It’s difficult, however, to gauge just how popular the Travelers’ Tour was in its time. No sales records are known to exist, and since so few copies remain, it likely wasn’t a big seller.

A global database of library holdings shows only a few copies of the Travelers’ Tour in institutions around the U.S. And while a handful of additional copies are housed in museums and private archives, the game is certainly a rarity.

Teetotums and travelers

Announcing itself as a “pleasing and instructive pastime,” the Travelers’ Tour consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities, ranging from New York City to New Madrid, Missouri. Beside each number is the name and description of the corresponding town.

Using a variant spelling for the device, the instructions stipulate that the game should be “performed with a Tetotum.” Small top-like devices with numbers around their sides, teetotums functioned as alternatives to dice, which were associated with immoral games of chance.

Once spun, the teetotum landed with a random side up, revealing a number. The player looked ahead that number of spaces on the map. If they could recite from memory the name of the town or city, they moved their token, or traveler, to that space. Whoever got to New Orleans first won.

An idealized portrait of a young country

Though not necessary to play the Travelers’ Tour, the descriptions provided for each location tell historians a lot about America’s national aspirations.

These accounts coalesce into a flattering portrait of the nation’s agricultural, commercial, historical and cultural character.

Promoting the value of education, the game highlights institutions of learning. For example, Philadelphia’s “literary and benevolent institutions are numerous and respectable.” Providence boasts “Brown University, a respectable literary institution.” And Boston’s “citizens … are enterprising and liberal in the support of religious and literary institutions.”

As the game pieces meander toward New Orleans, players learn about Richmond’s “fertile backcountry” and the “polished manners and unaffected hospitality” of the citizens of Charleston. Savannah “contains many splendid edifices” and Columbia’s “South Carolina College … bids fair to be a valuable institution.”

Absent from any corresponding descriptions, however, is any mention of what politician John C. Calhoun called America’s “peculiar institution” of slavery and its role in the fabric of the nation.

And while four entries briefly reference Native Americans, no mention is made of the ongoing dispossession and genocide of millions of Indigenous people.

Though it promotes an American identity based on a sanitized version of the nation’s economic might and intellectual rigor, the Travelers’ Tour nonetheless represents an important step toward what has become a burgeoning American board game industry.

Two centuries later, board game culture has matured to the point that new titles such as Freedom: The Underground Railroad and Votes for Women push the genre to new heights, using the joy of play to teach the history of the era that spawned America’s first board game.

This article is republished from the Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Matthew Wynn Sivils is the director of Iowa State University’s Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities.

In a discovery sure to capture a good deal of public attention, a team of archaeologists have found the remains of a Roman wall built to trap the forces of Spartacus, the escaped former Roman gladiator who led the most celebrated and famous slave revolt in world history.

The discoverers of this fascinating and historically significant find were led by Dr. Paolo Visona, a classical archaeologist from the University of Kentucky in the United States.

The Roman wall was found in a mountainous area in south-central Calabria in southern Italy, where Spartacus and his rebellious forces fled in 71 BC in their efforts to escape to Sicily. Walls like this one were built on the orders of the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had been dispatched to lead the Roman legions assigned to capture or kill Spartacus and his army of freed slaves and former gladiators.

An Incredible Discovery Deep in an Italian Forest

The ancient Roman wall cuts through a section of the Dossone della Melia forest in the Calabria region in the southernmost part of the Italian mainland. Excavations have unearthed the remains of a stone wall and supporting earthwork that was approximately 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) long, and is still essentially intact. Nearby the archaeologists also found traces of a Roman defensive ditch known as a fossa, plus remnants of what appeared to have been a rampart or embankment system.

 “The wall has now been conclusively identified as part of the structures built by the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus to contain the slave revolt leader Spartacus and his forces,” the Archaeological Institute of America said in a statement announcing this discovery.

Only partially exposed and covered by moss, the remnants of the Roman fortifications were in a relatively out-of-the-way location, and could have easily remained hidden forever. But a group of local environmentalists stumbled across a section of the stone wall while hiking through the forest, and suspecting it was something ancient they alerted local cultural authorities.

Eventually archaeologists arrived to examine the stone structure in person. They used ground-penetrating radar and LiDAR aerial survey equipment to find out more about the partially buried wall’s structure, and they also extracted soil samplings and took magnetometer readings in an attempt to learn more about when the wall was built.

The ancient Roman wall in Calabria, Italy, which has been found to be used to trap Spartacus. (Archaeological Institute of America)

The Data Adds Up

With all the data they collected, Dr. Visona and his team were able to identify the structure as a Roman wall built by Crassus’ forces in 71 BC, as they were beginning to encircle Spartacus’ army and limit their options for escape. The time frame of the wall’s construction was exactly right, and the historical record makes it clear that Crassus had built structures like this as a part of his campaign to defeat Spartacus and put down the slave revolt.

Spartacus’ final defeat at the hands of Crassus and his legions took place farther to the north, near the modern-day site of the municipality of Senerchia along the banks of the River Sele. But before this final conflict and the death of Spartacus the rival armies engaged in many pitched battles, and it seems one of these battles took place in the rugged forest land of south-central Calabria.

The archaeologists who discovered the ancient wall know this, because their excavations unearthed a cache of artifacts that could only have come from a military conflict. These included many broken pieces of iron weapons, sword handles, sharp javelin points, one spearhead, several large, curved blades, and other unidentified iron debris that was in various states of disrepair.

Spartacus’ army apparently fought to break out of the trap Crassus had set, meeting their rivals at the wall and ultimately overcoming the legions and living to fight another day.

Detail of mosaic depicting gladiators, Villa Borghese. Spartacus is said to have attended gladiatorial training school. (Public Domain)

Who Was Spartacus, and Why Is He Still Remembered?

Born in Thrace, a region to the north of Greece and the west of Italy, Spartacus joined the Roman army on his own some years before the slave revolt for which he is most famous. For unknown reason he was expelled from the army and cast into servitude soon after, eventually being sent off to the city of Capua in Campania to be trained as a gladiator.

It isn’t known how long Spartacus fought in Roman gladiatorial games before he launched his rebellion. But historians know the revolt took place in 73 BC, as Spartacus organized and led a group of about 70 gladiators who broke out of captivity using improvised weapons.

Spartacus’ rebellion led to what was known as the Third Servile War, meaning it was the third slave revolt by Roman Republic captive laborers that had to be put down by force. But while the previous two uprisings were suppressed rather easily, Spartacus’s revolt was a different story altogether.

Eluding capture or defeat time after time, the Thracian was able to free and recruit enough slaves to build an army of approximately 70,000 men. Spartacus won all of his early battles with the forces of the Republic, and with the situation becoming increasingly urgent and worrisome the Romans called on the acclaimed military leader Marcus Licinius Crassus to organize a major campaign to suppress the revolt once and for all.

Crassus had been a highly successful general, and by this time he was the wealthiest man in all of Rome. Using his own money to organize his expeditionary force and fund his campaign, Crassus launched a large-scale and relentless pursuit of Spartacus that featured many intense battles and ultimately prevented Spartacus from spreading his rebellion to any adjacent territories.

Two years after the rebellion began, Crassus and his men finally trapped Spartacus in the region of Lucania on the right bank of the River Sele. In the final battle of the Third Servile War, Spartacus was killed along with the majority of his men, leaving just 6,000 survivors. To discourage further rebellions, Crassus ordered all 6,000 of these prisoners to be executed by crucifixion, and their bodies were put on display along the side of the roadway (the Appian Way) that connected Capua to Rome.

This slave revolt represented such a significant challenge to the authority and prestige of Rome that it ultimately provoked changes in political and military organization that led to the replacement of the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire. The story of the Thracian-born Spartacus’ incredibly successful rebellion, which took three years to suppress, has never been forgotten, and in modern times Spartacus and his feats have been immortalized in movies, TV shows, books and documentaries.

In Search of History’s Most Famous Rebel, and His Pursuer

Excavations at the newly discovered Roman wall will continue, and more interesting finds are expected. Given that a violent conflict occurred there 2,095 years ago, it is certainly possible that the bodies of men killed in the battle will be unearthed eventually.

If so, this won’t include the body of Spartacus, who met his demise later on. But finding the remains of Roman soldiers and the army of escaped slaves they were pursuing could tell archaeologists a lot more about how the conflict progressed, and about how the Roman legions under Crassus were ultimately able to gain the upper hand against the powerful forces organized by the legendary Spartacus, history’s most famous rebel.

Top image: Wall purported to be used to contain Spartacus in Calabria, Italy  Source: Archaeological Institute of America

By Nathan Falde

Coppery like a penny, thick like bad molasses, even a little gamey like a possum.

The white conductor’s blood in her mouth probably didn’t taste good, but it probably didn’t taste bad, either. Ida B. Wells sat firmly while the Memphis streetcar man gripped her body and tried to forcibly remove her from the first-class ladies car on a train from the Poplar Station to northern Shelby County in Tennessee. Wells—a prominent Black journalist and activist—took a bite out of the guy until he “bled freely,” he would later testify in court.

After the conductor successfully dragged Wells off the train, she sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad Company for failing to provide “separate but equal” accommodations for Black and white passengers. She won the case and received a $500 settlement, but the ruling was ultimately overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Wells occupied that seat on September 15, 1883. Born about an hour southeast in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, she’d lost her parents and young brother to the devastating 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Her parents were involved with Reconstruction-era politics and the democratization of education; their daughter would carry on that mantle as a radical teacher in her own right. She studied at the historically Black Shaw University (now Rust College), then took summer classes at Fisk University in Nashville and LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis.

The loss of both of her parents forced Wells to become the main caregiver for her five surviving siblings. The yellow fever epidemic ravaged the South, especially port cities and distribution hubs up and down the Mississippi Delta. The death toll reached more than 4,000 in New Orleans, 1,000 in the Vicksburg area and 5,000 in Memphis. Rich white people had the means to flee hotbeds of disease, but African American communities in larger cities were left to shelter in place. Black folks, however, would seize the means of survival in other ways.

Mutual aid came to life through disaster relief in Memphis. Black residents built networks of community care with a robust understanding of class struggle. The most vulnerable and most devastated by the epidemic were those without steady employment and without access to safe water sources, ventilation and functioning sewage systems.

Benevolent associations and mutual aid societies, sometimes referred to as secret societies, had a long history in many antebellum Southern cities. Sometimes they were aligned with churches, and sometimes they weren’t. What united most was a commitment to shared resources, autonomous care and collective power. This took the form of financial assistance through death benefits, insurance, health care, and vittles for the poor and hungry.

Toward the end of the 1880s, strikes broke out across the United States, and disenfranchised laborers regrouped and reorganized labor and communities. There was an upswing in the formation of labor unions, alliances, and food and farm cooperatives nationwide during this period, with the unifying goal of fostering solidarity, land justice and economic power in new ways.

For example, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance amassed more than one million members by 1891. The cooperative union became a clearinghouse for organizations that preceded it, like the Colored Farmers’ Union, the Cooperative Workers of America and the Colored Agricultural Wheel. Some chapters had publishing wings; many led alternative academies in farming, offered debt relief and mortgage loan assistance, and created opportunities for cooperative exchange and distribution through the original food hubs. This was the new world of reorganized food provisioning and labor that shaped Wells’ Memphis.

When it came time to bring those farm products to market, the 19th-century grocer had control over transactions, with access to goods behind the counter mediated by the counter space that separated the buyer from the merchant. The grocer and counter clerks would take down orders in pencil on the back of the sacks, grind coffee beans, weigh out sugar and flour, and so on.

It wasn’t until 1916 that Piggly Wiggly opened at 79 Jefferson Avenue in Memphis. It was the first fully self-service grocery store and a precursor to the supermarkets of today. Until then, customers relied on an exchange with the grocer and clerks.

At the end of the 19th century, Memphis was fifth on the list of the biggest wholesale grocery markets in the U.S. The white grocer William Barrett operated what was at first the only grocery in Memphis’ Curve neighborhood. Barrett was taking advantage of the access deficit in the outskirts of the city. This is a glimpse into the early history of food apartheid, or what some policymakers call food deserts. In the words of writer and farmer Leah Penniman, the term food apartheid “makes clear that we have a human-created system of segregation that relegates certain groups to food opulence and prevents others from accessing life-giving nourishment.” The saga of People’s Grocery, a community-owned store that emerged as an alternative to Barrett’s in 1889, shows how entrenched the history of human-made food apartheid is.

In what seems to be the only existing photograph of People’s Grocery, a dark horse pulls a Van Buren Cigar wagon whose driver looks directly at the camera. Visible in the background is a storefront with three windows and a big sign with the store’s name emblazoned on it. People’s Grocery may have looked like Barrett’s store on the inside in some ways, but by virtue of its more cooperative structure, the store differed because it restructured food access and community, as well as the relationship between the grocer and customer.

Many of the working Black folks in the Curve and beyond contributed capital to collectively and cooperatively sustain People’s Grocery. Sociologist Zandria F. Robinson writes that the store was also a beloved “destination for Black people inside and outside the city.” Co-owned by a group of Black residents in the neighborhood, it was a financially successful food cooperative held in high regard by the Black community. Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells, was the store’s director. Black folks were building power by owning their labor, claiming space and documenting the terrors of white supremacy in the ever-expanding Bluff City sprawl.

Elite and working-class white Memphians alike invested in maintaining racial segregation through the changing neighborhood landscapes of the city in the 1890s. Historian Paula Giddings describes the racial geographies of the neighborhood as white communities began laying the groundwork for Jim Crow: “Whites were establishing racially exclusive areas within the city and abandoning outlying areas like the Curve to a large number of the poorer African American migrants, who joined the biracial working class already residing there.” These shifts in landscape also included attempts to maintain exclusive white ownership and control of spaces for food provisioning like the grocery store.

In 1889, People’s Grocery was the first Black-owned cooperative grocery in Shelby County’s 14th Civil District, on the then-outskirts of Memphis. On March 9, 1892, a white lynch mob instigated by Barrett killed Moss and two of his colleagues, accusing them of plotting a war against white citizens.

The story of People’s Grocery is a foreboding of future actions of white supremacist terrorism against Black businesses in East St. Louis, Illinois; Elaine, Arkansas; Knoxville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; and Houston, not to mention the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

Anxious white business owners in Memphis were growing increasingly threatened by Black community power. Black community control over land and autonomous food provisioning was revolutionary and thus a target for state violence. White city officials and landowners codified segregation through attempts to control not only the ballot box but also private and public spaces like grocery stores and curb markets. These same white boosters, property owners and police units relied on mob violence and the horrific public spectacles of lynching in their attempts to destroy Black power in Memphis.

Wells was 29 years old when the mob of white terrorists murdered her friends and destroyed the beloved People’s Grocery. “This,” Wells wrote, “is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was.”

How one journalist risked her life to hold murderers accountable – Christina Greer

While Wells was on a trip to the Northeast two months after the lynching, a local, white-run Memphis newspaper wrote a smear piece and stoked the fires of violent white terrorists who threatened her life and burned down her newspaper office on Beale Street. At the time, Wells was writing prolifically about People’s Grocery in her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. She was shining a light on the targeted trauma inflicted by white vigilantes and the police as they tried to sustain a white knuckle-grip on the South.

Joining the 5,000 other Black people who used “their economic and political power as citizens, laborers and consumers to vote with their feet,” as sociologist Robinson describes it, Wells left Memphis. She chose exile. She mobilized.

For the rest of her days, Wells lived the life of an itinerant activist. She would build and transform vast networks of political education throughout the Southern diaspora and on an international scale. Wells traveled across the country and the globe to talk about white racial terrorism and municipal governance in all of its grasping fragility and bloodthirsty desperation. Core to her anti-lynching crusade was the evisceration of the rape myth, exploding the idea that lynching was always retribution for assaults on white Southern womanhood. It was the violence at People’s Grocery that had revealed these truths to Wells.

To understand the history of food justice is to understand the role that modern policing has played in establishing and maintaining the architecture of white supremacy, an architecture that structures oppression, some of which is centered in American food systems. In Memphis and beyond, Wells spurred uprisings that sought to dismantle these supremacies of racial capitalism.

Faron Levesque is a public historian, writer and host, currently based in New York and born and raised in Memphis. This article is excerpted from their essay “Eat the Rich: Radical Food Justice in Memphis and Chicago,” which appears in the volume Acquired Tastes: Stories About the Origins of Modern Food. Their newsletter, the Bottomfeeders Banquet, explores labor and working-class history, food justice, queer and trans revolt, and revolutionary learning.

This article originally appeared on the MIT Press Reader.

Now known as the Pilgrims, the departure of the Puritans from England was spurred by a confluence of religious, political, and social factors during the early 17th century. Emerging from the Protestant Reformation, which challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, the Puritans sought to purify the Church of England from residual Catholic practices. Their dissatisfaction stemmed from the sluggish pace of reformation within the Church, which retained many Catholic rituals and doctrines despite severing ties with Rome.

Queen Elizabeth I’s cautious approach to religious reforms, balancing between Catholic and Protestant interests, provided limited space for the Puritans to express their reformist zeal. King James I’s reign saw further tensions, as his clashes with the Puritans over issues like priestly vestments and Calvinist doctrine exacerbated their discontent.

The situation worsened under King Charles I, whose overt Catholicism prompted many Puritans to seek sanctuary in the Americas. Motivated by a fervent desire for religious freedom and the opportunity to establish communities based on their ideals, Puritans embarked on perilous voyages on ships like the Mayflower, founding colonies like Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Driven by a fervent desire for religious purity and autonomy, the Puritans left England to forge a new existence in the New World, where they could practice their faith without interference. Their migration peaked during the early 17th century, marking a significant chapter in both English and American history.

Top image: Pilgrims going to church.       Source: Public Domain

By Robbie Mitchell

When Calvin Coolidge’s motorcade arrived in the southwestern corner of South Dakota on August 17, 1927, he became the first United States president to make an official visit to a reservation. As the New York Times reported, Coolidge appeared in front of “10,000 Sioux Indians as supreme chief”—a nod to a recent ceremony that had awarded him the Lakota name Wanblí Tokáhe, which translates to “Leading Eagle.”

Addressing the crowd at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that summer day, Coolidge spoke of his “satisfaction” at having signed an “epoch-making law,” one that “symbolized the consummation of what for many years had been the purpose of the federal government—to merge the Indians into the general citizenry and body politic of the nation.”

The law that Coolidge praised was the Indian Citizenship Act, which he’d enacted three years earlier, on June 2, 1924. A century old this week, the legislation stated that “all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States” were now citizens.

Coolidge’s South Dakota speech revealed the extent to which he viewed this legislation as purely beneficial for the estimated 40 percent of Native people who had not yet become American citizens by 1924. Political support for Native citizenship had increased after World War I, when 12,000 Native men “proved to be courageous and rendered distinguished service” for the U.S., as Coolidge later reflected.

Congress granted these veterans citizenship in 1919; the president later spoke fondly of the Native dignitaries who attended the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in 1921, saying their presence “symbolized the outstanding fact that the red men and their neighbors had been brought together as one people.”

Coolidge’s comments alluded to a broader trend in the early 20th-century U.S. At the time, many white Americans believed “that the best way forward for Native people would be through having them speak English, having them be taught in a different school, having them dress a certain way, having them worship a certain way. And the final completion of that [process] was full citizenship,” says Stacy Leeds, dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. A member of the Cherokee Nation, Leeds is the first Indigenous woman to serve as a law school dean.

But universal—and unilateral—citizenship for Native Americans was not welcomed by all. Members of the Onondaga Nation protested the act as “a destructive and … injurious weapon” that abrogated their existing treaty with the federal government. “We, the Indians, have not as yet tired of the free use and enjoyment of our rights as Indians living on reservations,” they wrote in a December 1924 letter to the president.

The Onondaga Nation’s objection highlighted an enduring, visceral disagreement over governance. The new law “purported to apply to everybody, no matter the context or situation,” says Leeds. “That in and of itself erases the importance of tribal sovereignty.”

Coolidge delivered his 1927 speech in a place with potent meaning: the sacred Black Hills, where the Sioux had established a reservation under the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. After an expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer found gold in the area in 1874, Congress violated the terms of the treaty by restoring part of the reservation to “the body of the public lands”—dry legislative speak for seizing this profitable soil from the Sioux, who had a long history in the region.

Tensions between the two groups culminated in the June 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, colloquially known as “Custer’s Last Stand” due to the American commander’s overwhelming defeat there. The Black Hills were also the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, in which American troops killed up to 300 Lakota, including women and children.

The taking of Native land is a recurring theme throughout U.S. history. The American government established myriad treaties with tribal groups that, even when unfavorable, inherently acknowledged Native sovereignty. The drafters of the Constitution recognized this authority too, granting Congress the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations … and with the Indian tribes.”

But the desire to negotiate faded as the U.S. expanded, growing in both political power and size as it pushed westward. The 1830 Indian Removal Act epitomized this shift, authorizing the relocation of Native tribes west of the Mississippi River. Though the Cherokee sought to prevent their removal by claiming sovereignty, the Supreme Court ruled that tribes were “domestic dependent nations” who were “in a state of pupilage,” tied to the U.S. in a manner akin to “that of a ward to his guardian.” The failed appeal paved the way for the Trail of Tears, in which an estimated one-third of the roughly 17,000 Cherokee forced to travel on foot to Oklahoma died.

In 1871, Congress formalized its rejection of tribal sovereignty, declaring that “no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.”

The 1887 Dawes Act accelerated the loss of tribal lands, dividing communally held Native territory into individual allotments intended for farming and ranching. (The government seized any “surplus” land outside of these parcels—in total, more than 90 million acres—and sold it to white settlers.) Citizenship was on offer for Native Americans who claimed allotments and “adopted the habits of civilized life,” defined as a stationary, agrarian lifestyle and social structure that mirrored that of white Americans. Land and citizenship became even more intertwined. As Coolidge said at Pine Ridge in 1927, the Dawes Act represented “the next forward step in this progress contemplating complete citizenship,” building upon Congress’s negation of the treatymaking process in 1871.

Legislation bearing the name of Representative Charles Curtis, who later became the first vice president of color, reinforced the Dawes Act in 1898 by expanding its territorial scope and hastening the dissolution of tribal governments. Curtis, whose father was a white settler, spent part of his childhood on the Kaw reservation in Kansas before moving to Topeka and launching a successful career in politics—one that embodied a certain model of assimilation.

Less than a decade later, in 1906, the Burke Act gave the secretary of the interior sweeping—and highly subjective—power over allotees, including latitude to determine “whenever he shall be satisfied that any Indian allottee is competent and capable of managing his or her affairs.”

Taken collectively, “this mass of legislation, decisions, rules and regulations” resulted in “confusion, much trouble and in too many cases injustice to the Indians,” as Coolidge later said. The president sought to address the ills wrought by such policies by encouraging Native Americans’ absorption into mainstream white American society.

“Coolidge and his contemporaries believed that assimilation was a good and benevolent thing,” says Eric Zimmer, a historian and the director of philanthropy at the Black Hills Area Community Foundation. “But they understood that the way that it was happening—federal Indian policy—was not working.”

On December 13, 1923, a few months after President Warren G. Harding’s sudden death propelled then-Vice President Coolidge into office, the new commander in chief invited the Committee of One Hundred to the White House. Convened earlier that year by Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work, the group of elite advisers (both Native and white) was tasked with finding solutions to the enduring “Indian problem,” as it was often called. Work acknowledged that “for many years, the government has been charged intermittently with having no policy, or with exploiting the Indian, or with acquiescing in his extinction or with permitting the dissipation of his wealth.”

One of the Native activists invited to the White House that day was Ruth Muskrat, a student at Mount Holyoke College, who delivered a speech in which she evoked the legacy of generations past while pointing to the promise of youth to “become the leaders of this new era.” Muskrat, who later dined with the president and the first lady, presented Coolidge with a copy of The Red Man in the United States, a text by a Protestant missionary that described these “ideal” leaders as “Indian men and women who have come under the influence of Christianity and through it of American culture and civilization.”

“We want to become citizens of the United States,” Muskrat told Coolidge, “and to have our share in the building of this great nation that we love.”

Also in 1923, Coolidge appointed Charles Eastman, a Santee Dakota physician, author and advocate for Native rights, to the role of U.S. Indian inspector, with responsibility for conditions on reservations. Eastman, who had tended to the injured at Wounded Knee in 1890, was supportive of the movement to expand citizenship—and was in a position to advise the president directly.

The range and breadth of Native approaches to citizenship—opposition, adaptation, political engagement—defies simplification. But political engagement served as a kind of funnel through which select Native voices were heard.

“The people who would have objected the most to [citizenship] would not have been politically engaged,” says Leeds, “and they certainly wouldn’t have had the power of the voices that you get to read in the papers and in those speeches.”

Coolidge expressed awareness of the range of views on the matter, even if he was not directly engaged with them. “It is a curious fact that most people in this country seem to believe that [the] Indians are a homogenous people and can be dealt with as a unified race of nation,” he said at Pine Ridge. “The exact contrary is the outstanding fact which has made the Indian problem a most difficult one.”

As president, Coolidge seemed to take an interest in meeting with Native groups, ensuring he was photographed meeting with tribal representatives at the White House throughout his tenure, from the Committee of One Hundred at the start of his term to a Comanche delegation during his last year in office. The famously taciturn president claimed in his autobiography that his great-grandmother’s family “showed a marked trace of Indian blood.” But this claim is unverified, its origin seemingly known only to Coolidge himself.

Coolidge’s decision to spend the summer of 1927 in South Dakota provided an opportunity for concentrated interactions with Native groups. On July 7, the president visited an Indian boarding school in Rapid City, where “he asked the superintendent if the little Indian girls did not get homesick sometimes,” Time reported. On August 2, several Sioux chiefs met with the president and, according to the Associated Press, “told him of the old Indian ownership of the Black Hills, and the hunting and fishing they had enjoyed here.” Though a congressman seeking election had pledged to help the chiefs claim compensation for the seized land, he failed to follow through. The president, Zimmer says, “promised to look into” the matter, but ultimately, “nothing material came of” his efforts. (In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in the Sioux’s favor, awarding the tribal confederation $106 million, or upwards of $1 billion today. But the Sioux have refused the money because accepting it would forfeit their claim to the land. The dispute remains unresolved.)

On August 4, Coolidge attended a ceremony in which he was adopted as “Leading Eagle” by Sioux chiefs Chauncey Yellow Robe and Henry Standing Bear. Footage from that day shows Yellow Robe’s daughter, Rosebud, affixing a feathered war bonnet to Coolidge’s head. The New York Times claimed that a handful of surviving veterans who’d fought against Custer at Little Bighorn attended the ceremony, which was held in the town of Deadwood.

In a speech, Standing Bear alluded to the contradictions of that moment, highlighting where the attendees stood, in “these Black Hills for which our people have long struggled against the whites,” and expressing hope for a “future relationship more enlightened.”

But some disapproved of the chiefs’ induction of the president into the tribe: Though records are scarce, the Rapid City Journal noted internal discord at the invitation, with some Sioux leaders reportedly “indignant at the ceremony.” (During Coolidge’s visit to Pine Ridge two weeks later, tribal representatives handed him a message that more directly laid out the issue at hand. It stated, “We are too proud to ask for anything that is not ours by right, and all we ask is that our treaties be kept [and] that our lost lands be paid for.”)

After the ceremony, the president—still wearing his war bonnet—sat in the stands for Deadwood’s Days of ’76 celebration. A re-creation of frontier life in the West, the festivities included “an attack on a wagon train by the Indians, a reproduction of Custer’s Last Stand and Indian dances,” the Lead Daily Call reported. This romanticized take on the Wild West may have seemed like an odd venue for Sioux leaders to engage with Coolidge, but the location reflected the importance of the Black Hills’ budding tourism industry. “The local premier tourist attraction would both be attractive to [Coolidge] and his entourage, as well as the press covering him,” says Zimmer.

Chief Leading Eagle (1927)

Coolidge gave another speech in the Black Hills on August 10, at Mount Rushmore, which was known by the Lakota as the Six Grandfathers Mountain but was later renamed for New York attorney Charles Rushmore by white settlers. Inaugurating work on the national memorial that adorns the mountainside today, the president said, “Its location will be significant, … a mountain which probably no white man had ever beheld in the days of [George] Washington, in territory which was acquired by the action of [Thomas] Jefferson, which remained almost unbroken wilderness beyond the days of [Abraham] Lincoln, which was especially beloved by [Theodore] Roosevelt.”

While in South Dakota, the president announced that he would not seek re-election. Toward the end of Coolidge’s term in 1928, Work commissioned a study of the poor conditions Native people continued to face due to previous federal policies. The resulting Meriam Report laid out in detail medical, educational and social hardships, including the “grossly inadequate” provisions for children at Indian boarding schools and the disruption to families wrought by forced enrollment at such institutions.

The report also repudiated the promises of the Dawes Act, noting that “many [Native Americans] are living on lands from which a trained and experienced white man could scarcely wrest a reasonable living.” It blamed widespread poverty on the fact that the “economic basis of the primitive culture of the Indians has been largely destroyed by the encroachment of white civilization. The Indians can no longer make a living as they did in the past by hunting, fishing, gathering wild products.”

Work’s report led to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the legislation reversed the Dawes Act and re-enabled tribal land ownership. It also provided for tribal constitutions that would be recognized by the federal government, though some tribes rejected this approach to sovereignty.

As had been the case for more than a century, land and legal rights remained subject to prevailing political winds. In 1953, Congress passed a resolution that is often referred to as the “termination policy” for its elimination of individual tribes. President Richard Nixon sought to reverse the resolution in the early 1970s, calling for “self-determination without termination.”

The ever-pendular relationship between tribal nations and individuals and the federal government served as a persistent reminder that citizenship did not confer equal footing. States continued to disenfranchise Native voters for decades after the 1924 act. Despite her earlier praise for the law, Muskrat, who went on to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wrote in 1944 that “the full privileges of democracy enjoyed by other citizens of the land” were still lacking for Native Americans.

Highlights: President Obama Visits Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, June 13, 2014

In his 1927 message to Congress, Coolidge spoke of his desire “to advance the time when the Indians may become self-sustaining.” The following year, he reiterated his hope for “complete participation by the Indian in our economic life.” Yet the president also vetoed legislation that would have enabled tribal groups to sue in claims court—a blow to those seeking land restitution. (Coolidge expressed support for the notion but balked at the accumulated interest payment.)

“For all their significance to local and regional history, the president’s interactions with American Indians in Rapid City, Deadwood and Pine Ridge did not shake the entrenched … ethnocentrism of the day,” wrote Zimmer in a 2017 journal article. “They did not spur Coolidge to action.”

Coolidge’s 1927 visit to a reservation has been emulated by just a few presidents since, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The speech Coolidge delivered at Pine Ridge revealed the deeply ingrained beliefs, at once paternalistic and sincere, that prompted him to sign the Indian Citizenship Act a century ago. That act ushered in another chapter in a long, fraught relationship between Indigenous peoples and the U.S., one in which these individuals were further absorbed—along with both the pitfalls and potential that process entailed—into the “body politic” of the nation.

The 2024 expedition to the Antikythera shipwreck marked a significant milestone in underwater archaeology. Between May 17 and June 20, under the framework of the 2021-2025 research program led by the Swiss Archaeological School in Greece and supervised by the Ephorate of Marine Antiquities. Ideal weather conditions allowed for extensive excavation, yielding numerous artifacts, with the most notable being a substantial part of the ship’s hull. What’s more, a second area of interest has offered up evidence that the site is one of multiple wrecks.

The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sport reports, how the team have made remarkable progress, with a systematic scientific approach, the first since the wreck’s discovery by Simian spongers in 1900, aimed to enhance understanding of the site and the ancient ship’s rich cargo.

Led by Dr. Angeliki G. Simosi and Professor Lorenz Baumer, the international research team tackled questions about the wreck, including whether it involved more than one ship, the circumstances of the wreck, and the identities of the human remains found in recent years.

Second Ship Found At the Antikythera Shipwreck! Breakthroughs in 2024

Advanced Techniques and Technology

To address these questions, the team utilized various advanced techniques. A database and Geographic Information System (GIS) from previous years aided planning and feedback. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) from Hublot Xplorations and the Coast Guard’s Undersea Mission Unit monitored operations in real-time and created digital 3D models of selected areas. Special scanners developed by Hublot’s R&D department produced 3D models of lifted objects.

A specialized manned underwater surface survey covered two distinct collection sites 200 meters (219 yrds) apart, referred to as Areas ‘A’ and ‘B’. The goal was to locate, identify, and document remains of utilitarian pottery and transport vessels, with selected samples retrieved for further study. New closed-circuit mixed-gas diving devices enhanced the efficiency and safety of these procedures.

A new limited-intervention excavation method was also applied, focusing on selected 2×2 meter zones. Extracted sediments were studied in a field-based micro-geoarchaeological lab, allowing precise stratigraphic observations and revealing the site’s complexity and differing formation processes between Areas ‘A’ and ‘B’.

Analysis of phytoliths, resins, and caulking materials provided crucial insights into the ship and its cargo.

Exposing a large part of the ship’s hull. (Greek Ministry of Culture)

Rich Archaeological Finds

The excavations yielded about 300 objects or groups of objects, including 21 marble fragments (18 from statues), numerous structural elements of the ship’s hull, and over 200 pottery fragments.

The most significant find was a structural part of the ship’s hull, revealing previously hypothesized shipbuilding features. This section included wooden planks forming the outer shell with transverse reinforcements, connected using copper pins and coated with a protective lead layer. This discovery pinpointed the ship’s seabed location and orientation, raising the question of whether multiple ships were involved in the Antikythera event.

Second Wreck Site Revealed

Area ‘B’, investigated due to its pottery concentration similar to Area ‘A’, yielded remains of another wooden ship beneath its cargo. These findings, documented and retrieved for analysis, aim to clarify the relationship between the two areas. Modern digital recording methods enriched the 3D models of the seabed surface.

Marble thumb or toe among artifacts at the site. (Greek Ministry of Culture)

Marble and Ceramics Analysis

Recovered marble fragments suggested a concentration of sculptural works in Area ‘A’, including fragments of marble heads, fingers, extremities, and clothing parts, likely from different statues.

Ceramic findings included commercial amphorae of various types, with Coan amphorae being abundant at the wreck site. Lamboglia 2 amphorae were more numerous than expected and divided into three subcategories. Area ‘B’ revealed previously unattested types, including amphorae from Chios and a Rhodian amphora with twisted handles.

Ceramic amphoras recently recovered at the Antikythera site, of various origins, including lower Italy, Rhodes, Kos. (Greek Ministry of Culture)

A field micro-geoarchaeology lab enabled visual and microscopic analysis of ceramic bodies and residues, identifying mastic used as a coating in some amphorae.

Other pottery vessels found included a lagynus and a two-handled skyphos, along with unconfirmed forms of table pottery in Area ‘B’.

Collaboration and Future Research

The “Return to Antikythera” program, supported by S.A. President Katerina Sakellaropoulou and sponsors like Hublot, the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, and the Nereus Research Foundation, showcased international cooperation. The team received substantial support from the Ministry of Culture, local authorities, and residents of Antikythera.

Future research will focus on extensive laboratory analysis of the hull samples to understand the shipbuilding techniques, types of wood used, and the ship’s provenance. The new findings open possibilities for uncovering more about the ancient maritime tragedy and the lives of those involved.

Top image: Remnants of a second ship found at the Antikythera site in Greece, and right, marble artifact.               Source: Greek Ministry of Culture

By Gary Manners

A grand tour of Rome’s iconic sculptures often includes a few staples: the Vatican Museums’ writhing Laocoön; the Capitoline Museums’ Dying Gaul, taking his last breath; and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina, with those indelible fingerprints left on the goddess’s leg.

But some statues that dot the Italian capital are lesser known. They may not offer much to look at, but they always have a lot to say. Six sculptures in particular, each with its own personality and name, were installed in Rome’s center around the time of the Renaissance and quickly became sites to express political discontent. Locals tacked disgruntled but clever verses onto the busts, writing satires that bemoaned the pope, the city’s bourgeoisie and the corrupt nature of those who held power. As a group, Abate Luigi, Pasquino, Il Facchino, Madama Lucrezia, Marforio and Il Babuino earned the nickname of Rome’s statue parlanti, or talking statues, not because they actually spoke, but because they gave the people a physical way to have an anonymous voice.

Of the six, it is Pasquino, the alleged head and torso of a Greek hero—likely the Mycenaean king Menelaus, carrying the body of fallen warrior Patroclus—that rose to the forefront. Mounted just steps away from the Piazza Navona, the statue stands near the Via Papalis, a papal processional route that was once “one of the most desirable and prestigious [Roman] streets on which to live or to have a business,” says Valeria Cafà, a former conservator at the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

It was in this area that Cardinal Oliviero Carafa decided to build his estate, Palazzo Orsini, around the turn of the 16th century. During construction of this opulent structure, workers found the “turbaned or helmeted head and muscular upper torso and forelegs” of a sculpture, as well as “merely a slice of torso from below the breast to the upper edge of the pubic hair,” writes Leonard Barkan in Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture.

“The malformed and badly damaged figure was immediately recognized as a marble Hellenistic statue,” wrote scholar Christopher Gilbert in a 2015 paper on Pasquino’s rhetorical role. “Carafa had the statue installed in the Piazza Navona during celebrations for [the Feast of Saint Mark] and instituted a ceremonial routine of adorning it in mythic garb so that each year it assumed an ancient guise.” At the annual feast, workers dressed up and restored the torso and head, often in rudimentary ways, with stucco or papier-mâché.

The statue’s name is inspired by a historical figure who might have been “a schoolmaster, a teacher, a cobbler, a barber or some other vocation entirely,” according to Gilbert. Many chroniclers maintained that the real Pasquino was a tailor to the Roman court, someone who had access to the affairs of elite Romans and could serve as what Gilbert called “a folk messenger of sorts.”

Pasquino’s sculpted namesake occupied an “ambiguous role from the very beginning” of its Renaissance rediscovery, says Maddalena Spagnolo, an art historian at the University of Naples Federico II and the author of Pasquino in the Square: A Statue in Rome Between Art and Vituperation. Rome’s residents used the statue to both “support the pope and at the same time criticize the pope and his inner circle,” Spagnolo adds.

Despite never serving as pope himself, Carafa was one of the most powerful players in 15th- and 16th-century Rome. Born in Naples in 1430, he was elected cardinal in September 1467 and was known for his “erudition, as well as the integrity and piety of his life,” wrote scholar Anne Reynolds in a 1985 paper. “Although a serious candidate for the papacy on several occasions, Carafa never attained that position. His prestige and authority, however, were unquestionable.”

Pasquino’s mounting in the piazza can be dated to no later than 1501 by literary sources. But Spagnolo speculates that Carafa may have chosen to display Pasquino even earlier, around the time of Pope Alexander VI’s possesso in 1492, when the Christian spiritual leader officially assumed his duties in the city of Rome. On that day, the Borgia pope used the Via Papalis as a ceremonial route, similar to how the ancient Romans conducted their military triumphs through the Campus Martius.

“Everyone who had a house on the Via Papalis was supposed to show joy and agreement for the new pope,” Spagnolo says. Carafa’s installation of Pasquino paid homage to Alexander while simultaneously displaying the cardinal’s “power with this beautiful, huge palace” and accompanying ancient statue.

It didn’t take long for Pasquino to give voice to discontent instead of ceremonial joy. On August 13, 1501, the statue spoke his first words, as recorded in the Latin diary of Johann Burchard, master of ceremonies at the papal court. The lines referenced the Borgia family’s coat of arms (which features an ox), as well as the crest (featuring a wheel) of Cardinal Jorge da Costa, who was thought to be a potential successor to Alexander:

I predicted that you, an ox, would be pope.

And now I say that you will die if you leave this place.

The wheel, keeping pace with the herdsman, will follow.

The same message was then posted throughout different parts of the city, where it certainly had the intended effect.

“The pope was impressed by what he read on the paper on Pasquino, and he was very superstitious,” Spagnolo says. “He read this, and he decided to never leave Rome again.”

The Six ‘Talking Sculptures’ of Rome: The Congregation of Wits

The problem with Pasquino has always been to what extent scholars can say that pasquinades, as the messages left near the statue are called, represented the feelings of the people rather than warring political factions. One fact is certain, according to Spagnolo: All of the political invectives against the pope that were tacked onto the talking statues and later published by scholars were “not written by poor people, but by people who were very much [involved in the] papal court.”

Famed satirist and self-described “Scourge of Princes” Pietro Aretino even “claimed Pasquino’s voice as his own,” wrote scholar Laurie Shepard in a 2016 journal article. This dispels the notion of the statue as the true spokesperson of the Roman populace, as he represented only a small segment of those already in the know. In fact, his messages may have been planted to further the aims of the powerful few. As Spagnolo points out, the initial pasquinade that kept Alexander in Rome for the rest of his life was planned by allies inside the Vatican.

Prominent pasquinades often skewered powerful families and the current pope, who was criticized for whatever his preferred method of corruption was. Under Urban VIII, who served as pope from 1623 to 1644 and was a member of the prominent Barberini family, Pasquino offered a succinct bon mot: “What the barbarians did not do, the Barberinis did.” This comment was likely a reaction to Urban’s choice to strip bronze from the Pantheon, “the only ancient Roman building that had survived more or less intact” into the 17th century, as Oxford Reference notes. The pope used the metal to build fortifications at Castel Sant’Angelo, arguing that it “was more important to defend the Holy See than to keep the rain out of the Pantheon porch.”

Laurie Nussdorfer, an emeritus historian at Wesleyan University, says the pasquinade was “a really wonderful comment from … people in the city that these antiquities are theirs. It’s not okay for the pope to just come in there and do things with them.”

Yet the perennial tension of where these messages originated persists. Spagnolo attributes the confusion in part to dissimulation, which was the papal court’s modus operandi. In many ways, she explains, the pasquinades were “the product of a cultivated milieu that imitated the language of the mob but expressed the views of one faction … or another and did not aim to attack the authority of the papacy.”

Wherever the satires came from, it was inevitably the common people who faced punishment if they were discovered with a pasquinade in hand. The authors were “impossible to find,” Spagnolo says, but even those who kept the notes in their pocket, repeated them to others or copied them could be found guilty of a crime. As Nussdorfer wrote in a 1987 journal article, in 1636, an aristocrat “lost his head in Rome merely for possessing a manuscript of pasquinades that made fun of Urban VIII’s government.” Proximity to Pasquino and his rhetoric carried inherent danger—but just how much danger depended on the level of power one had.

“It struck me in looking at the history of graffiti that there is a very deep culture of humor in Rome in particular and a deep culture of scratching the surface of public buildings and public statuary,” Gilbert tells Smithsonian magazine. “In the Renaissance itself, which was a moment of revival of art and architecture in an attempt to restore the glory of Rome, … you get a tradition of defacing all of that architecture.”

This defacement ruined Pasquino’s chances of one day being displayed in a museum, where the statue could perhaps be restored to its former glory. In the early 19th century, rampant debate over whether the statue should be moved to a museum ensued. Due to fear of backlash and never-ending pasquinades, and in recognition of the sculpture’s popular status (a descriptor derived from the Latin word populus, or the people), officials decided Pasquino was meant to stay in the piazza.

Pasquino’s fate differs from that of Marforio, the second-most famous of the talking statues and the only one housed in a museum: namely, Rome’s Capitoline Museums. A first-century reclining statue of a male god, likely the personification of the ocean or a river, the statue was discovered in the Forum of Augustus in the 16th century. It was first placed near the Piazza Venezia before being moved to its current home on the Capitoline Hill in the late 1500s. The hulking Marforio had a teasing, almost antagonistic relationship with Pasquino. The pair often sparred with each other in note form. In 1589, when the Tiber River flooded, Pasquino supposedly prayed to be placed up with Marforio in a protected spot. But the verdict was that the Roman people would not allow it. After all, says Spagnolo, Pasquino had a “sad and smelly tongue.”

The talking statues began to seep their way into the quotidian culture of Rome, of note even to foreign visitors. In 1667, Austrian lawyer Joahann Theodor Sprenger wrote about a trio of the sculptures, delineating their various audiences:

Pasquino has two rivals, one the Facchino on Via Lata,

the other Marforio on the Capitoline.

Pasquino is addressed to the aristocrats,

Marforio to the middle class,

Facchino to the peasants.

Much like Pasquino, each artwork carried its own folkloric connotation. Il Facchino portrayed a traditional Renaissance-era worker who toted fresh water from home to home. The sculpture’s origin is unknown, though observers once claimed that Michelangelo himself sculpted the humble water-bearer.

Madama Lucrezia, located by the Palazzo Venezia, is a colossal Roman bust that stands nearly ten feet tall. The statue depicts either the Empress Faustina or, more likely, the Egyptian goddess Isis. She takes her name from Lucrezia d’Alagno, a favorite of Alfonso V of Aragon. When Alfonso died in 1458, d’Alagno came to Rome, settling near the statue’s current home.

In typically gendered fashion, Madama Lucrezia, as the only female talking statue, is occasionally referred to as Pasquino’s paramour, Spagnolo says. But she also held an important political role in the eyes of the people. When French troops established the Roman Republic in 1798 and forced the pope into exile, Madama Lucrezia was toppled off her pedestal and plastered with the words “I can’t stand anymore.”

Abate Luigi, perhaps the most surprising candidate for talking statue status given his lack of a head, may have depicted a magistrate when he was created in the late imperial period. An inscription on the sculpture’s base does some of the talking for him:

I was once a citizen of ancient Rome,

and now everyone calls me Abbot Luigi.

I achieved eternal fame with Marforio and Pasquino with the urban satires.

I was insulted, disgraced and buried,

but here, I have a new life that is finally secure.

The last of the six talking statues is Il Babuino, or the baboon. Part of a fountain, the reclining sculpture of the faun Silenus was commissioned by merchant Alessandro Grandi around 1576. It soon took on a life and reputation of its own, leading locals to rename the street on which it stood from Via Clementina (an homage to Pope Clement VI) to Via del Babuino.

What makes Rome’s talking statues so remarkable is how much history they contain. Each sculpture carries the stories of the pasquinades affixed to its surface, as well as its own creation centuries or even millennia ago. It is a testament to Rome’s ever-present vitality that these statues remain in use today. As Google Arts & Culture notes, “Pasquino’s base is still covered in anti-government poems, snarky asides about enemies and complaints about community affairs.”

While scholars can’t confirm that Pasquino was always a site of genuine political protest, he endures as a beacon of hope, a physical space that offers power, however imagined, to the disenfranchised. In one prescient and touching pasquinade, Pasquino addressed his own role of serving as a voice of the people for as long as possible:

Xerxes’ army had not nearly as much wealth

As I have papers: I will soon become a bookseller.

No man in Rome is better than me. I ask for nothing from anyone else;

I am not wordy. I sit here and I’m silent.

You who wish to hang a song on this filled-up wall:

Be quick—I will be naked in a short time.

Graham Hancock, the British host of the hit Netflix series “Ancient Apocalypse,” has canceled plans to film a new season in the United States following significant backlash from Native American groups, according to The Guardian this week. Hancock, a former journalist, is known for his controversial theories about an advanced lost civilization active during the last ice age, which mainstream archaeologists and Indigenous communities have criticized.

Despite the show’s popularity, having reached Netflix’s top 10 in 31 countries, its plans to film at the Grand Canyon and Chaco Canyon faced strong objections from local tribal leaders. Some Native groups argued that Hancock’s theories misrepresent and undermine their history and cultural heritage.

Permits and Pushback

In February, ITN Productions, the company behind “Ancient Apocalypse,” applied for permits to film at the Grand Canyon National Park and Chaco Canyon National Historical Park. The National Park Service (NPS) confirmed that ITN received a permit for Chaco Canyon and had applied for one at the Grand Canyon. However, ITN informed The Guardian that neither permit will be utilized, as ITN announced plans to film outside the US, although no specific reason was provided.

Documents The Guardian obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that some filming had occurred in Chaco Canyon in January. However, planned filming in March was canceled due to delays in securing permissions for other sites.

Digital reconstruction of ancient Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico before the site was mysteriously abandoned. (Public domain)

The filming permit application described the program as exploring “one of archaeology’s biggest mysteries: the peopling of the Americas” and uncovering the latest findings about the earliest inhabitants. This description, however, sparked controversy as it implied investigating Indigenous history through a lens that many Native American groups found offensive.

Native American and Archaeological Community Reactions

Hancock’s theories, which suggest an advanced ice age civilization contributed to modern understandings of mathematics, architecture, and agriculture before being wiped out by comet-induced floods, have drawn ire from both Indigenous communities and professional archaeologists. They argue that Hancock’s claims disrespect the oral histories and archaeological evidence of Indigenous peoples.

Stewart Koyiyumptewa, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Hopi Nation, criticized Hancock for presenting his theories as superior to Indigenous histories. The Hopi people, who have lived in or near the Grand Canyon for over 2,000 years, consider the area sacred and allegedly felt degraded by the prospect of Hancock filming there.

A Grand Canyon National Park staff member, who is Native American, echoed these sentiments, expressing embarrassment and discredit to the agency’s efforts to respect Indigenous people and rectify historical wrongs.

Hancock’s Theories in a Nutshell

However, there is no denying the popularity of Hancock’s theories amongst those who are willing to challenge mainstream thinking.

Even before the huge success of the Neflix series, Hancock had authored major international non-fiction bestsellers including;  The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, The Message of the Sphinx, Heaven’s Mirror, Underworld and Supernatural, and of the epic adventure novels  Entangled and War God.

His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into 30 languages. His public lectures, radio and TV appearances, including two major TV series for Channel 4 in the UK and The Learning Channel in the US – Quest For The Lost Civilisation and Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age – have put his ideas before audiences of tens of millions. He has become recognized as an unconventional thinker who raises controversial questions about humanity’s past.

Graham Hancock’s “Ancient Apocalypse” theory posits that advanced human civilizations existed during the last ice age and were subsequently wiped out by a cataclysmic event, leaving behind remnants that influenced later ancient cultures. Here are some arguments supporting his theory:

1. Ancient Structures and Advanced Knowledge: Hancock and others point to megalithic structures like Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which date back to around 9600 BC, as evidence of advanced engineering and astronomical knowledge that predates known civilizations like the Sumerians and Egyptians. He argues that the sophistication of these structures suggests they were built by a more advanced civilization that existed before recorded history.
2. Flood Myths and Geological Evidence: Many ancient cultures have flood myths, such as the biblical story of Noah, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Hindu tale of Manu. Hancock connects these myths to geological evidence of dramatic sea level rises and flooding around the end of the last Ice Age, suggesting that these stories could be memories of real events experienced by early advanced societies.
3. Ice Age Timeline and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: Hancock supports the hypothesis that a comet impact or a series of impacts caused the Younger Dryas period around 12,800 years ago, a time of sudden climate cooling. He argues that this event could have triggered massive floods and other natural disasters that destroyed advanced Ice Age civilizations.
4. Lost Civilizations and Diffusionism: Hancock suggests that knowledge from these lost civilizations diffused into later known cultures, explaining similarities in pyramidal structures, astronomical alignments, and advanced mathematics across distant ancient societies like the Egyptians, Mayans, and Mesopotamians. He contends that these similarities are too pronounced to be mere coincidence and indicate a common source of knowledge.
5. Critique of Mainstream Archaeology: Hancock often critiques mainstream archaeology for being overly conservative and dismissive of alternative theories. He argues that the academic establishment is reluctant to revise the timeline of human civilization and that new discoveries are often shoehorned into existing frameworks rather than prompting a re-evaluation of history.

Hancock’s arguments rely on reinterpreting archaeological, geological, and mythological evidence to support the idea that advanced human societies existed much earlier than traditionally believed.

Critics argue that his theories often lack direct evidence and that his interpretations can be speculative, but they continue to spark debate and interest in the possibility of unknown chapters in human history, of which there are many.

Broader Implications and Criticism

Hancock’s show has faced controversies internationally. In the first season, his portrayal of archaeological sites in Indonesia and Micronesia led to objections from scholars and Indigenous leaders. Hancock’s (and other researchers) theories about the ancient pyramid Gunung Padang and the ruins of Nan Madol being constructed by an advanced civilization over 20,000 years ago were particularly contentious. Local oral histories and archaeological evidence suggest these structures were built by ancestors of present-day communities within the last 1,000 years.

Professor Patrick Nunn, an expert in Pacific geography and archaeology, argued that Hancock’s theories perpetuate racist ideologies from the 19th century by stripping Indigenous peoples of their historical achievements. In a 2000 essay, Hancock claimed that prehistoric Americas were inhabited by various ethnic groups, including Caucasians and Africans, based on his interpretation of ancient artifacts.

When the National Park Service initially considered granting ITN a filming permit at the Grand Canyon, Koyiyumptewa and other tribal leaders expressed their disapproval, emphasizing that such decisions should involve tribal consultation. The lack of consultation and the negative consequences of the proposed filming further strained relations between Indigenous communities and the authorities.

Call for Accountability

Established archaeologists have urged Netflix to label “Ancient Apocalypse” as science fiction, arguing that Hancock’s theories are harmful to the profession and exhibit racist attitudes towards Indigenous peoples. The Society for American Archaeology’s letter to Netflix described Hancock’s narrative as “preposterous” and emboldening extreme voices that spread “false historical narratives”.

Hancock has defended his work, denying any intent to spread disinformation or racist ideologies. He argues that the absence of material evidence for a lost ice age civilization does not disprove its existence.

According to Pinkvilla, he defended himself like this in a post on his website:

“I have been outspoken about the many failings of archaeology as an institution, but at no point in Ancient Apocalypse is any individual archaeologist disparaged. With its 30th November 2022 open letter, however, the SAA seeks to disparage me as an individual, to defame my reputation for honest reporting and to do harm to me personally.” 

Top image: Controversial reporter, Graham Hancock. Source: Netflix

By Gary Manners