origins Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of Times Forgotten

When Does United States History Really Begin?

There’s a lot of controversy going on right now about when we should say that United States history begins. In 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched an initiative called “The 1619 Project,” which argues that the year 1619 should be seen as the true year when the United States was founded because that is the year when the first enslaved Black people arrived in the English colonies in North America.

In response to this, in September 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was creating a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” throughout the United States and to defend traditional narratives about American history against the claims made by the 1619 Project. I’ve already written an entire article about what a ridiculous idea I think this is, so I’m not going to talk any more about it.

What is interesting, though, is the way that both the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission fixate on particular dates for the supposed founding of the United States. I contend that both of these proposed dates are fundamentally flawed. In fact, I believe that it is a mistake to try to pin down any particular date for the founding of the United States. This country has come into existence through a long, gradual process and focusing on exact dates and saying those dates matter more than all the others limits the ways we can think about American history and naturally tends to marginalize certain groups of people from the American story.

Where Does the Myth of Medusa Come From?

Medusa is one of the most fascinating figures in classical mythology and one who bears a deep contemporary resonance. Indeed, just yesterday, it was announced that a controversial statue of her would be installed in Collect Pond Park in New York City. In order to understand this statue and the controversy surrounding it, we need to talk about the bizarre and fascinating history of how the Medusa myth has evolved over the past 2,800 years or so.

The story about Medusa that most people today are familiar with holds that she was once an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman, but then she was raped by the god Poseidon in the temple of the goddess Athena. Athena was disgusted by the desecration of her temple, so she cursed Medusa, giving her snakes for hair and making it so that anyone who saw her face would be instantly turned to stone. Then, eventually, the hero Perseus came along and beheaded her.

This story, however, is actually radically different from the story the ancient Greeks were familiar with. In the oldest surviving sources for the Medusa myth, she is seemingly born a Gorgon with the ability to turn people to stone at a glance, she is never raped by Poseidon, and she is never cursed by Athena. Oh, and she apparently also had the four-legged lower body of a horse.

Were Mythical Creatures Inspired by Fossils?

It is popularly believed that stories about dragons and other mythical creatures must have arisen when ancient peoples discovered fossils of prehistoric animals, especially dinosaurs. As we shall see in a moment, there is definitely some evidence that ancient peoples did sometimes discover fossils of prehistoric creatures and interpret them as the remains of mythic beasts.

Fossils, however, seem to have only rarely been the source of belief in such mythic creatures to begin with; it seems to have been far more common for people to interpret fossils in light of mythic creatures they already believed in, rather than inventing entirely new mythic beasts to explain the fossils.

Furthermore, the vast majority of claims about specific mythical creatures being inspired by specific prehistoric creatures don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny. There is almost no solid evidence to support the assumption that dragons, Cyclopes, or griffins were inspired by prehistoric fossils and there is actually quite substantial evidence against these assumptions.

Why Are Ghosts Depicted Wearing Bedsheets?

We are all familiar with the traditional “bedsheet ghost,” but have you ever wondered where this image comes from? Why on Earth do we imagine ghosts wearing bedsheets? As strange as it sounds, the history of the Halloween bedsheet ghost is far darker and more mysterious than most people probably realize.