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Mission Dolores, California - Native people playing the stick game (1816) People always ask me, and you probably, and the world generally, whether this catastrophe or that one is like the [...]

One of the last things I did before the lockdown was to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see their temporary exhibit, Sahel: Art and Empires on [...]

The Islamic holiday of Ramadan moves slowly backward through Earth's seasons, because the Islamic calendar is slightly shorter than the solar year. A few years ago, Ramadan fell in the beginning of [...]

Earth Day 2020 will be tomorrow, Wednesday, April 22nd. I remember the first Earth Day, when my hippie-revolutionary grade school planted trees in the front of the school. The tree I planted [...]

Did you know that people have been burning marijuana to intoxicate themselves for thousands of year - probably tens of thousands of years? And that in addition to this purpose, they've also [...]

Aztec doctor treating people with smallpox (1500s AD, Codex Mendoza) Like many other diseases, including the current pandemic, smallpox probably got started in Central Asia. Around 150 AD (almost two [...]

People tell a lot of stories about the origins of Easter - is it a pagan holiday? A Christian holiday? How is it related to Passover? Here we try to sort that [...]

If you're preparing to celebrate Passover at home, here are some helpful links: First, what even is Passover? Who were the first people to celebrate Passover? Why? https://quatr.us/west-asia/where-did-passover-come-from-jewish-holidays.htm Second, the Bible story [...]

This major Chinese holiday is, like so many other spring holidays, related to the extremely ancient Babylonian New Year celebration. In China, people were certainly celebrating Qingming Jie by the time of [...]