Sam Cooke And The Song That 'Almost Scared Him'

Fifty years ago this week, Sam Cooke strolled into a recording studio, put on a pair of headphones, and laid down the tracks for one of the most important songs of the civil rights era.

Rolling Stone now calls "A Change Is Gonna Come" one of the greatest songs of all time, but in 1964 its political message was a risky maneuver. Cooke had worked hard to be accepted as a crossover artist after building a sizable following on the gospel circuit. And the first thing to know about the song, Cooke biographer Peter Guralnick says, is that it's unlike anything the singer had ever recorded.

Link

We Uncovered The Mystery Behind The Pyramid That's On The Back Of Every Dollar Bill Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/history-dollar-bill-symbols-2014-2#ixzz2sJNdNrkb

Link

National Geographic 2013 in Review

This a pretty visually stunning timeline
Uvealblues
Link

A Cold Man's Warm Words

The tenderest words in American political history were cut from the document they were to have graced.
It was July 1, 2 ,3 and 4, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia. America was being born. The Continental Congress was reviewing and editing the language of the proposed Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, its primary author, was suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
The tensions over slavery had been wrenching, terrible, and were resolved by brute calculation: to damn or outlaw it now would break fragile consensus, halt all momentum, and stop the creation of the United States. References to the slave trade were omitted, but the founders were not stupid men, and surely they knew their young nation would have its date with destiny; surely they heard in their silence the guns of Fort Sumter.
Still, in the end, the Congress would not produce only an act of the most enormous human and political significance, the creation of America, it would provide history with one of the few instances in which a work of true literary genius was produced, in essence, by committee. (The writing of the King James Bible is another.)

Barbara Kelley

Read more »

Are we all descended from a common female ancestor?

In 1987, a group of genet­icists published a surprising study in the journal Nature.­ The­ researchers examined the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) taken from 147 people across all of today's major racial groups. These researchers found that the lineage of all people alive today falls on one of two branches in humanity's family tree. One of these branches consists of nothing but African lineage, the other contains all other groups, including some African lineage.
­Even more impressive, the geneticists concluded that every person on Earth right now can trace his or her lineage back to a single common female ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago. Because one entire branch of human lineage is of African origin and the other contains African lineage as well, the study's authors concluded Africa is the place where this woman lived. The scientists named this common female ancestor Mitochondrial Eve.

(via Guy Kawasaki)

Those Who Make Us Say 'Oh!'

Peggy Noonan eloquent as ever..

A tribute to America's war heroes, past and present.

Stethoscope

I recently bought a noise-reduction, sound amplification stethoscope that is amazing. Thus while while the original stethoscope (c.1816)may have evolved out of a sense of modesty (so that the doctor didn't need to place his chest on the bosom of his patients), my new one is so powerful I feel like I can hear sounds from "miles" away!
uvealblues

The stethoscope was invented due to a doctor's modesty...

History of Religion in 90 seconds

How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? Our map gives us a brief history of the world's most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!

Spread of Religion

Religion spread animation (flash animation)

Maps of War

Maps of War (flash animation)

Eternal Embrace? Couple Still Hugging 5000 Years On

This story certainly makes one contemplates one's mortality and how one will be remembered...


ROME (Reuters) - Call it the eternal embrace.


Archaeologists in Italy have discovered a couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, hugging each other.

Crippled by Their Culture wsj.com

OpinionJournal - Featured Article (WSJ subcription required) :
Here is a free link to this most interesting argument put forth by Thomas Sowell, a very smart political anaylist (who happens to be African American).

"For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race--that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites....

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both."

Culture is left...