Category Archives: History

A look at the history of MLB lockouts and what comes next originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago

Baseball fans may want to hold on to their hottest MLB moments because it seems they are heading to a very frigid December.

Major League Baseballs collective bargaining agreement is set to expire on Dec. 1, and as soon as the clock strikes midnight, a lockout is expected to commence. The goal would be to resolve all issues before spring training takes place in February, but it very well could last till before the regular season begins on March 31.

While the owners of the 30 MLB clubs and their players have publicly expressed optimism that a new deal will be reached, this hot stove might be quickly cooling off.

Baseball hasn't seen a work stoppage in quite a while. The last strike ended the 1994 season, canceled that years World Series and even spilled over into the following season. But if no agreement is reached this offseason, then the inevitable lockout will freeze upcoming transactions for the upcoming season.

If you're a little confused on what all this means, here's all you need to know about how baseball lockouts work and strikes of the past.

The current CBA (collective bargaining agreement) expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on Dec. 1, 2021.

A lockout is a work stoppage or a denial of employment that is initiated by the management of a company during a labor dispute. It is different from a strike, in which the employees refuse to work. A lockout in baseball is initiated by the owners, which means team executives wouldnt be allowed to talk to players, make major league signings or swing trades.

Baseball could see its ninth work stoppage and first in 26 years if an agreement is not reached by Dec. 1. If so, the lockout will start Dec. 2, freezing the free agent market and threatening the start of spring training in February.

The most recent lockout took place in 1994-95, when a players strike and ensuing lockout lasted for 7.5 months.

There have been eight strikes and lockouts in major league history:

1972 Major League Baseball strike: Canceled 86 games. The owners conceded after 13 days.

1973 Major League Baseball lockout: Canceled no games. Owners and the MLBPA agreed on a three-year CBA and spring training games resumed.

1976 Major League Baseball lockout: Canceled no games. Players were locked out of spring training the first couple of weeks of March. No regular-season games were missed.

1980 Major League Baseball strike: Canceled no games. Players went on strike late in spring training and an agreement was reached before the beginning of the regular season.

1981 Major League Baseball strike: Canceled 713 games. The MLBPA went on strike after games on June 11 and games didn't resume until Aug.10.

1985 Major League Baseball strike: Canceled no games. This in-season strike lasted from Aug. 6-7, but the games missed were made up at the end of the season.

1990 Major League Baseball lockout: Canceled no games. This lockout destroyed spring training and pushed the start of the season back a week, but the full 162-game season was played.

199495 Major League Baseball strike: Canceled 938 games and the entire 1994 postseason, including the MLB World Series.

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A Look at the History of MLB Lockouts and What Comes Next - NBC Chicago

This is like my childhood in a nutshell, Valley Relics Museum founder Tommy Gelinas says as we survey a display of Southern California fast food curios. Between a wooden Taco Bell sign and an oil painting of Colonel Sanders, theres a Jack in the Box clown head that you used to be able to yell your drive-through order intoat least until the clowns mightve freaked out one too many kids so in the late 70s, early 80s they started blowing up Jack [in TV commercials].

If theres a 20th-century local pop culture curiosity thats vanished from L.A.s San Fernando Valley, theres a good chance some remaining shred of it has found a second life at this Lake Balboa museum. Gelinas has been rescuing, collecting and preserving Valley-related ephemera for over two decades. In 2013, he first put his accumulation of mementos on display at the Valley Relics Museums first brick-and-mortar location in Chatsworth. As his collection of 20-foot-tall signs grew, he moved the museum in 2018 to its current home, a pair of spacious hangars at the Van Nuys Airport stuffed with cars, bikes, neon, arcade cabinets and celebrity memorabilia.

For out-of-towners and Basin-dwelling Angelenos, the Valleys reputation has often been unfairly distilled down to a few things: heat, adult entertainment and, like, grody-sounding Valspeak. For Gelinas, though, growing up in the Valley was so much more than that. It was go-karts and BMX tracks, record stores and themed restaurants, film studios and movie star residents, hot rods and airplanes, and sparkling swimming pools alongside empty ones thatd been converted into skateparks. But there wasnt really any sort of shrine to that story of the Valley.

I always tell people, its not Van Gogh, Gelinas says. The Valleys history is really important history, its very interesting history. But no ones really fighting for it.

Now, though, the Valley Relics Museum sure is. Unlike a Post-Impressionist masterpiece, its acquisition and authentication process tends to be a bit more straightforward. A lot of the items that enter into the museums collection are donated, many times from celebrities and business owners surviving family members. The rest are rescued. In those cases, theres a pretty good chance the museum already has postcards and photos to document the history of the item, and oftentimes Gelinas is scooping up the artifacts himself.

I pretty much have saved every item personally by hand, he says. And when somethings donated, it takes time and money to hire a crane and bring a crew down. Anyone can take down a sign for a few hundred bucks. But just anyone can actually carefully remove the neon, bring the sign down, transport it, get it safe and then restore it.

The museums hangar full of illuminated signage is easily its most visually impressive asset. Youll find insignias from some familiar spots like Henrys Tacos and Bobs Big Boy, but the neon and backlit collection is mostly a collection of Valley bygones: country western club the Palomino, mostly-vanished fast food chain Pioneer Chicken and Woodland Hills spot My Brothers Bar-B-Q (three-dimensional cow sign included).

Its also where the museum deviates the most from its geographic boundaries and acts as a catch-all for dying signage around the city, like the starburst-adorned Premiere Lanes from Santa Fe Springs or the Sunset Strips former Tiffany Theater and Ben Franks. When we met with Gelinas this fall, we happened to bring up the Pig N Whistle sign in Hollywood that had been abruptly dismantled the day before. Sure enough, Gelinas started swiping through photos on his phone: His team had already saved the neon letters and carefully placed them into the bed of a pickup truck.

Beyond the monument to business marquees, youll find rows upon rows of nostalgic souvenirs. BMX bikes from manufacturers like Redline and Mongoosethat were made in the Valley, where the sport first took off in the 70sare suspended from the ceiling. There are signs and blueprints from Lockheeds secretive Skunk Works aerospace plant in Sun Valley. Still-functioning cabinets from Family Fun Arcade in Granada Hills are set to free play. Theres a cash register and belt buckles from cowboy-bedazzler Nudie Cohns North Hollywood shop, plus his antler and spur-adorned Pontiac. Spicolis Volkswagen bus from Fast Times at Ridgemont High is currently on display on a yearlong loan, complete with its interior disco ball.

Like any proper museum, theres a gift shop, too, and here Valley Relics has taken the clever step of letting you literally buy a piece of nostalgia. Gelinas scooped up the rights to dozens of defunct local restaurant and retail logos, so you can support the nonprofit by buying a T-shirt with Malibu Grand Prixs F1-style go kart against the sunset or Licorice Pizzas steaming record. Taken altogether, its a pretty persuasive argument that the Valley has offered way more than just sleepy suburbia.

For a long time, the Valley was looked down upon because people didnt understand it, Gelinas says. But every time someone talked funny about the Valley, we were like, it doesnt really matter, because there was so much to do.

The Valley Relics Museum is located at 7900 Balboa Boulevard in hangars C3 and 4 (youll find the entrance on Stagg Street). Its open Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 4pm. Admission costs $15.

Link:

How the Valley Relics Museum is illuminating the area's history, one neon sign at a time - Time Out Los Angeles

Bryson DeChambeau helped the Americans win the Ryder Cup in September and he's John Hawkins' pick to win in Las Vegas this week.

Golffile | Scott Halleran

For all the chest-beating and tweeting to promote their upcoming meeting, new BFFs Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka have embraced a notion perfectly ideal for their budding bromance: if they make enough noise, people just might listen. Some folks call it marketing. Others call it nonsense, sort of like staging a feud to bolster ones Q-rating. Regardless, Fridays 12-hole showdown will feature a lower quotient of starpower than the four previous versions of this series.

DeChambeau and Koepka arent exactly crossover material when it comes to drawing a mainstream viewing audience. This particular made-for-TV muckabout desperately needs the Tiger-and-Phil factor to have any chance of justifying its existence. Mickelson will be calling the action for TNT alongside Ernie Johnson and Charles Barkley, but grandma doesnt tune in to hear Lefty run his mouth.

More announcers than competitors? Hmmm. Sounds like a gum-flapping festival with a hundred or so golf shots sprinkled in.

Thats what this shindig was built for heavy on the sizzle with nothing at stake. Speaking of nothing, thats what DeChambeau and Koepka have been doing since that hilarious thumping the U.S. laid on Europe two months ago at the Ryder Cup. The Brawny Brainiac has yet to make his 2021-22 PGA Tour debut. Neither have a lot of guys, for that matter, but none of them are squaring off against their personal antagonist the same dude who kept their pseudo-feud alive for most of the summer with a pot-of-golds worth of bragging rights on the line.

Speaking of Koepka, he has played in four Tour events this fall, and it should be noted, not very well. He returns to Las Vegas off back-to-back missed cuts in Mexico and Houston. Koepkas best performance in those four starts was a T-38 on his last trip to Sin City, which was five weeks ago, a stretch that has seen him tumble from ninth to 16th in the Official World Golf Ranking.

With each passing appearance, Koepka looks more and more like the solid-but-unspectacular tour pro of his early days than the big-game maestro who won four major titles between June 2017 and May 2019. Thats a lot of heavy lifting in 23 months, even for a buff physical specimen whose body has betrayed him on numerous occasions over the last 2- years.

Its not just the effects of the injuries themselves, but the rehab time and subsequent rust-removal process. With all that shaping the big picture, Koepka simply hasnt been the same player. Too many misses inside 6 feet. Too many drives sailing left a side of the golf course Koepka rarely visited before knee issues began curbing his ability to fly a 300-yard fade off the box without a care in the world.

Despite his own beastly lashes with the driver, DeChambeau has remained injury-free, at least below the neck. He has managed just one victory in the last 15 months, and though that came against a premium field at Bay Hill, he failed to crack the top 25 at any of the four majors held in 2021. That gravity-defying, final-nine meltdown at the U.S. Open seemed to knock the SMU physics major off his tracks. It would have been a much bigger story if Jon Rahm hadnt turned into a superhero down the stretch.

DeChambeau dominated Patrick Cantlay from tee to green at the second FedEx Cup playoff event but couldnt make a thing when it mattered most. Cantlays scalding putter made all the difference in what was clearly years most exhilarating finish; he locked up the season-long sweepstakes the following week.

So it was a good year for BDC, not a great one. Far better than Koepkas, which is why DeChambeau is an easy pick to win the 12-holer on Friday. He was an ever-so-slight favorite when the sportsbook industry began posting odds last month. DraftKings had both players at -110 in late October. Koepkas recent lackluster form has bumped him to +100 at the same shop, but that payoff has emerged as an outlier compared to other prices.

A dozen holes of hit-and-giggle is a difficult proposition to predict for anyone, especially the oddsmakers themselves, so we turn to that funky intangible known as common sense. Koepka hasnt played this poorly for this long in quite a while. After missing the cut at the Masters, he was his usual omnipresent self at the majors, finishing T-6 or better at all three, but the British Open was his last top 20 anywhere.

Thats how the big boy rolls. At tournaments of huge significance and historical prestige, Koepka is fully engaged and highly effective. At gatherings that really dont matter, hes just another man in the field. They dont come any more meaningless than Fridays tee party.

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Brooks vs. Bryson Prediction: History Shows Who's Going to Win at Wynn Las Vegas - Sports Illustrated

Nov 23, 2021, 8:06pmUpdated 1h ago

By: News 12 Staff

A local woman is resurrecting an important landmark and piece of history in her town.

The Redding Grange has been dormant for years. Granges were used back in the 1860s as a place for farmers and their families to get together.

Elizabeth Jensen says she was able to gather a small group of about 13 volunteers to get the grange back off the ground. She got the charter reinstated, which goes back to 1906.

She says she just had the dedication Nov. 6.

"So, to me the grange is already doing what it was meant to do in terms of bringing community together, which I thought was really terrific," said Jensen.

Jensen says people need a place to get together, even to have a cup of coffee or a laugh.

She says she's hoping in the future that the grange will also serve as a farmers market.

There are over 60 local grange chapters in Connecticut. They're committed to bettering communities through service projects and family-oriented activities.

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Redding woman resurrects forgotten piece of history in town - News 12 Bronx

Every effective American teacher seeks the trust of society, of parents, and of the young people they teach. Public education as a whole depends on these bonds of trust. Our divisive politics regarding how to teach children about slavery, race, and other difficult subjects in school has broken that trust.

Anyone who has ever taught for one day knows that trust must be earned. Facing a classroom full of 14- or 16-year-olds with varying degrees of attention and preparation on any subject is one of the hardest and most important of all professions.

What American teachers most need is autonomy, community respect, the right to some creativity within their craft, time to read, and, perhaps above all, support for their intellectual lives. Most would not mind a pay raise.

Sylvia Allegretto: For teachers, the money keeps getting worse

The last thing teachers need is to contend with what House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has called a bill of rights for parents. Such an idea has no relation to reality except as a political wedge. In most education systems in this country, parents are welcome to visit schools at appropriate times, to become involved in extracurricular activities, and to communicate regularly with teachers about their childrens performance. Teachers often beg parents to become engaged with students learning.

The curriculum, however, is another matter. Trained teachers, curriculum directors, and school principals are responsible for organizing the content and methods by which a subject such as history is taught. Maintaining parent and community trust in schools ability to do this well requires that educators are properly credentialed, that teachers get continued training, and that the best and brightest are getting recruited into teaching. But this trust is now being derailed by the preposterous claim that critical race theory has infested our schools via the secret satchels of radical teachers and their distant, elitist accomplices in university history departments.

For nearly three decades, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI), and many other institutions, foundations, and agencies, including the federal Education Department, have sponsored summer seminars that bring secondary- and middle-school history instructors to university campuses, where they are treated as professionals and intellectuals. They discover the mysteries and joys of archives and original documents, and they learn through the best scholarship from the people who wrote it. They take seminars about presidential history, the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, westward expansion, Native American culture and dispossession, gender and womens history, the civil-rights movement, immigration, urban history, industrialization, constitutional history, and yes, slavery, abolition, and racism as central threads in the American experience.

Read: What American history classes arent teaching

If Republican politicians and the parents they have disingenuously inflamed need a target for their fears, let them blame the American historians, like me, who spend months of their lives helping teachers build better bases of knowledge about real history. The finest historians of the late 20th and early 21st centuriesfar too many to namehave been teaching teachers in classrooms and on field trips bursting with knowledge, sizzling conversations, astonishing documents, and most of all, a hard-earned, even joyous mutual trust.

So let the Republicans blame us. Bring it on. The American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians have signed on to a coalition of more than 25 such groups called Learn From History, which seeks to combat deliberate misinformation about the current state of history education. This is one history war we have to win.

GLI reports that since 1995, approximately 28,000 teachers have participated in its summer seminars (Ive taught at least one seminar through this program each summer for more than two decades), as well as in online courses and public lectures. Its website has become an alternative Google for history teachers. The numbers may be even larger for the NEH. Teachers with a passion to improve their game embrace these experiences, learning an inspiring, pluralistic American history; parents and politicians would do well to observe. Come listen to teachers debate the books they read, and wrestle with how to create pedagogical stories about both the darkest and the most uplifting history. Listen to them figure out the balance in their own classrooms between the heroic and the tragic, between war and peace, as they wrestle with how to teach about the changing character of racism, and about the forces of change in history that humans can only hope to withstand, if never control. Come feel their intensity, see them move in and out of the irony of human folly and aspiration, as they confront their own assumptions and beliefs.

Parents and Republican politicians should come listen to serious teachers grapple with the question: What is this thing called history? History is not a fable told to make us feel good or bad, not a plaything or a pageant of progress toward some goal of equipoise above the human condition. We are always and everywhere in the middle of history; we cannot escape it. In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois made a compelling appeal while writing about Reconstruction: Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all of this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?

Some of the most hopeful moments of my teaching life have come in working with secondary teachers. We are not on the clock, and everyone has temporarily escaped their normal lives to simply learn together in a rare kind of teacherly communion. I was once, after all, one of them. I spent the first seven years of my career as a high-school history teacher in my hometown of Flint, Michigan, in the 1970s. I still maintain that in those years I did the most important teaching of my life. My students were Black, white, and Hispanic, mostly stable working class, and no one left guilty because they were learning about slavery for the first time. My fellow teachers and I blundered our way through curricular revolutions; we were committed simply to offering our students ways to forge a sense of history, of why the past matters, how it has shaped us, whatever the subject. No one owns history, but we are all responsible for it, bound by our humanity to know as much of it as we can.

Read: How to teach history in a divided country

In his Talks to Teachers, a series of lectures delivered in 1899 and 1900, the great American philosopher William James found inspiration in the fermentation among secondary-school teachers at the turn of the 20th century, admiring their searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their profession. James said the good teacher needed tact in front of pupils, a good deal of ingenuity, and, above all, knowledge of their subjects. The teachers of this country, he declared, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index of the nations probabilities of advance in all ideal directions. James trusted teachers as he challenged them. He offered several maxims for teachers, one of which endures in our own historical moment: Dont preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. Is there a greater purpose for teaching than those three aims? Reaching for those aims, James contended, makes teaching a very high calling.

Trust the teachers. Some will stumble and some will soar. Historians have their backs. If William James could trust teachers in the violent racial, ethnic, and class conflict of 1900, why cant we today? Is our democracy so broken that we cannot do the same?

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What Parents Dont Understand About Teaching History - The Atlantic

Building History: How the Old War Office was Reimagined as a New London Landmark

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The Grade II listed Old War Office building has been reimagined in central London. As a new destination for the city and rebranded as The OWO Residences, 85 homes are available in the Old War Office, which has been closed to the public for over a century. EPR Architects are working to restore and convert the building into residences and the first Raffles hotel in London.

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Once complete at the end of 2022, the former Old War Office will span 760,000 square feet comprising 85 branded residences, 120 hotel rooms and suites, nine restaurants and bars, amenity offerings, anda spa.Formerly the site of the original Palace of Whitehall - home to monarchs between 1530 - 1698, the building has witnesseda wide range of events whilst political and military leaders including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, and Lord Kitchener held office. It was also John Profumos base when he was Secretary of State for War and inspired Ian Fleming to write the Bond series after working for Britains Naval Intelligence Division.

The Hinduja Group is behind the project, an international multi-billion turnover group founded in 1914 and involved with the building since its acquisition in 2014. It has worked with a team of experts including Historic England and Museum of London Archaeology. The hotel interiors are being designed by New York-based designer Thierry Despont. The Hinduja Group has partnered with Raffles Hotels & Resorts, who will be operating the 125-room and suite flagship hotel at The OWO, as well as the 85 branded residences.

Scottish architect William Young first embarked on the design of The Old War Office in 1898, but the project was taken over by his son, architect Clyde Young, when William died in 1900. The building took five years to build and cost 1.2million, finally completing in 1906 and spanning 580,000 sqft with 1100 rooms set over 7 floors and 2.5 miles of corridors.

Originally completed in 1906 and designed by British architect William Young, the Old War Office is the site of the original Palace of Whitehall, home to Henry VIII and other monarchs. Located in Whitehall opposite Horse Guards, the OWO lies within walking distance of the capitals highlights. Residents and hotel guests will be near Buckingham Palace, The National Gallery, The Tate, The Royal Academy, St Jamess Park, Embankment and South Bank.The OWO is also adjacent to 57-acres of St. Jamess Park.

With ceiling heights in residences that reach over 12 feet and full-length windows, the interior proportions reflect classic Edwardian architecture that has been adapted for modern living. The residences feature interiors created by design studio 1508 London with kitchens from British brand Smallbone of Devizes, Waterworks brass ironmongery and Onyx marble. Duplex, lateral and penthouse residences range in size from studios to five-beds; each residence is unique and specifically tailored to suit its location in the building.

The design team was captivated from the moment we entered the building, comments Lucy Savanis, Design Principal at 1508 London. Understated luxury and timelessness played a huge part in our design language for the project. Our brief was to preserve this chapter of history for future generations through authentic design; to create a home for the worlds most discerning residents and celebrate the buildings unmatched quality, in terms of history, character and architecture.

Savanis continues; The intricate William Young architecture ensures no two residences are the same, each with unique proportions and floorplans. In light of this, we have tailored each residence to suit its location within the building, whether that be a voluminous three-bedroom apartment overlooking the residents garden or the two residences incorporating their own private octagonal turret. We worked within the existing fabric of the building and exposed its unique features; extraordinary three meter wide corridors on some floors have been showcased as a central feature at the heart of the home and grand entrance hallways bring back a sense of ceremony to modern living, a feature unique to The OWO Residences.

In terms of the new part of the facade, the 6th and 7th floor roof extensions are a mix of stone cladding and a mansard roof style. Around the Residents Garden, a private residents-only landscaped courtyard and new stone facades have been built. Originally, this triangular open space was surrounded by glazed white brickwork and conceived as a lightwell rather than a courtyard.

In this area, the original facades have been principally retained and internalized adding a bay and therefore de facto moving the courtyard. This solution allowed the team to preserve the cellular nature of the spaces, retain the proportion of the original rooms and the legibility of the corridor spaces which would otherwise be fragmented by the creation of smaller spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms, which are now mostly located in the new section. This relocation of the courtyard has been one of the most important decisions made on the project, providing the space to enable the optimal layouts for these super prime residences whilst at the same time preserving the heart and soul of this historic building.

The striking architecture of the facade was in tune with the new Imperialism of the 1880s with domed turrets along with sculpture. With the advent of steel-framed construction, which arrived from the United States, domes became cheaper to build but when it came to the War Office, architect William Young used a different technique: the domes on his turrets are supported on cones of iron and concrete. There was a specific reason for using domes above the circular corner turrets on the War Office. Despite its bold Whitehall facade, which looks as though it should front a rectangular structure, the site was not in fact rectangular - the plan was in the shape of a trapezium, in which all four frontages are of different lengths.

Original features, such as ornate mosaic floors, detailed architectural moldings and ceiling heights have all been retained where possible throughout the building to create some of the living spaces. Former mailrooms (known as messenger screens in a nod to the boy scouts that acted as messengers in the building during the war) have been incorporated into a selection of residences and repurposed as home offices. Similarly, all the interior materiality was chosen to complement the historic elements of the building.

This feature is part of an ArchDaily series titled AD narratives where we share the story behind a selected project, diving into its particularities. Every month, we explore new constructions from around the world, highlighting their story and how they came to be. We also talk to the architect, builders, and community seeking to underline their personal experience. As always, at ArchDaily, we highly appreciate the input of our readers. If you think we should feature a certain project, please submit your suggestions.

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Building History: How the Old War Office was Reimagined as a New London Landmark - ArchDaily

The term Crusade has always been an anachronisma way of looking back at complex, often disconnected movements with a wide array of motivations, membership, tactics and results and organizing them into a single coherent theology or identity. Pictured:A 19th-century painting of the 1177 Battle of Montgisard byCharles-Philippe Larivire Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

In the middle of October, a diver off the coast of Israel resurfaced with a spectacular find: a medieval sword encrusted with marine life but otherwise in remarkable condition. He immediately turned the weapon over to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Two days later, before the artifact had been cleaned or definitively dated, the government agency released a statement in which IAA inspector Nir Distelfeld said, The sword, which has been preserved in perfect condition, is a beautiful and rare find and evidently belonged to a Crusader knight. The news rocketed around the world, with dozens of outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post,Smithsonian magazine and NPR, hailing the find as a Crusader sword.

In truth, we know very little about the artifact. Archaeology is slow, careful work, and it may be some time before scholars glean any definitive information about the sword. But the international news cycle whirred to life, attaching a charged adjectiveCrusaderto a potentially unrelated object. In doing so, media coverage revealed the pervasive reach of this (surprisingly) anachronistic term, which gained traction in recent centuries as a way for historians and polemicists to lump disparate medieval conflicts into an overarching battle between good and evil, Christianity and Islam, civilization and barbarism.

Although some scholars (including one of the authors of this piece) have argued that we need to do away with the term Crusades entirely, most understandably still feel it has value as a category description of a group of complex, interrelated series of Christian holy wars. But the term should never stand alone as an explanation in and of itself. Crusades were waged by Christians against Muslims, Jews and fellow Christians. They were launched in the Middle East, in the Baltic, in Italy, in France and beyond. In the case of the newly discovered sword, we must remember that not every person in the Middle Ages who traversed the seas off the coast of whats now Israel was a Christian, and not every person who was a Christian at that time was a Crusader. By claiming the weapon as a Crusader artifact, the IAA has framed the find (and the period of the swords creation) as one of intractable violence and colonialist pretensions.

But the past is messier than that.

The term Crusades, as its understood by most modern audiences, refers to a series of religious wars fought by Muslim and Christian armies between 1095 and 1291. Its a long and fascinating story, dramatized in games, movies and novels and argued about by historians like us. The basics are clear, but the significance is contested. In 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermonthat launched a disorganized series of campaigns to conquer the city of Jerusalem; against all odds (and in no small part because the various Muslim-ruled states of the area were so disorganized), the city fell to conquering armies from Europe in 1099. Victorious leaders promptly divided up the territory into a small group of principalities that modern European historians have often called the Crusader states.

Crusading, or the idea of taking a holy vow to engage in military activity in exchange for spiritual reward, was refined over the next century, redirected to apply to whoever the pope decided might be an enemy of the faith (polytheists and Orthodox Christians in the north, Muslims in Iberia, heretics or rival European Christian powers in France and Italy). In the Middle East, Jerusalem fell back into Islamic hands with the conquest of the city by the famed sultan Saladin in 1187. The last Crusader principality on the eastern Mediterranean coast, based out of the city of Acre, fell to the Mamluk ruler Baibars in 1291.

The Crusades werent the only events happening during these two centuries in either the Middle East or Europe. Relatively few people were, in fact, Crusaders, and not everything that fell into the eastern Mediterranean Sea during this period was a Crusader artifact. The habit of referring to the era of the Crusades, or calling the petty kingdoms that formed, squabbled and fell in these years the Crusader states, as if they had some kind of unified identity, is questionable at best. Inhabitants of this part of theMiddle East and North Africa were incredibly diverse, with not only Christians, Muslims and Jews but also multiple forms of each religion represented. People spoke a range of languages and claimed wildly diverse ethnic or extended family identities. These groups were not simply enclaves of fanatically religious warriors, but rather part of a long, ever-changing story of horrific violence, cultural connection and hybridity.

When Stephennie Mulder, now an expert on Islamic art history at the University of Texas at Austin, was in graduate school in the early 2000s, she took part in a dig searching for Roman artifacts in Tel Dor, Israel. At that time, she says, anything medieval was automatically just called ... Crusader. Mulder, who was already thinking about focusing on medieval archaeology within Muslim-ruled states, says, I was floored by that. The team unearthed a number of ceramicsimportant artifacts, but not what the excavation was looking for. Instead, the objects clearly belonged to the period of the Islamic Mamluk sultanate. They were kind of just put into a box [and] called Crusader, says Mulder. I don't know if [the box] was ever looked at again. She adds, In calling this period Crusader, Israeli archaeology had, in some ways, aligned itself with a European colonial narrative about the Middle East that privileged the experience of Europeans over those of locals.

Whether the decision to center this discovery within this frame was conscious or unconscious is difficult to discern. The term Crusade has always been an anachronisma way of looking back at complex, often disconnected movements with a wide array of motivations, membership, tactics and results and organizing them into a single coherent theology or identity. As Benjamin Weber of Stockholm University explains, the phrase opened the way to complete assimilation of wars fought against different enemies, in varied places and often for similar reasons. ... [It] took on a legitimizing function. Any contested action could be justified by dubbing it a crusade. It, therefore, became a word used to wield power and silence denouncers.

The word Crusade came into use late, long after medieval Christian holy wars began. The Latin word crucesignatus, or one marked by the cross, first appeared in the early 1200s, more than a century after Urban IIs call to action in 1095. In English, Crusade and Crusader dont appear until around 1700; by the 1800s, the termdefined broadly as a military campaign in defense of ones faithhad become a convenient way for Victorian historians to mark the past as a battle between what they saw as good and evil, represented respectively by Christianity and Islam. These claims worked especially well as supposed historical justification for contemporary European colonialism, which used rhetoric like The White Mans Burden to paint land grabs as civilizing crusades against uncivilized non-Westerners.

Today, the terms Crusader and Crusade latch onto a nostalgic vision of the past, one that suggests there was a millennia-long clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity (or the West). This is what we have elsewhere called a rainbow connectionan attempt to leap over intervening history back to the Middle Ages. But as we argue in our new history of medieval Europe, The Bright Ages, the Crusades werent waged solely against Muslims. More importantly, the Crusades ended, ushering in a period of independence and interdependence between Europe and the Middle East. To use the term Crusader uncritically for an archaeological discovery in the Middle East is to suggest that the Crusades were the most important thing that happened in the region during the medieval era. Thats just not that case.

Instead of labeling all potentially relevant finds Crusader, historians must develop terminology that accurately reflects the people who inhabited the Middle East around the 12th century. A potential alternative is Frankish, which appears routinely in medieval Arabic sources and can be a useful generalized term for [medieval] Europeans, according to Mulder. It initially had pejorative connotations, being kind of synonymous with a bunch of unwashed barbarians, she says. But as there come to be these more sophisticated relationships, it just becomes a term to refer to Europeans.

This new phrasing is a start, Mulder adds, but even Frankish has its problems. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, hybridity [in the region] is the norm. The fact that another kind of group [establishes itself in the same area] is just part of the story of everything. It's always someone. ... If it's not the Seljuks, its the Mongols, its the Mamluks. Its you name it. Mulder isnt denying that medieval kingdoms were different, but she argues first and foremost that difference was the norm. I sometimes think that the Crusades looms so large in the European imagination that we tend to give them more of a space in the history of that period than they really deserve, she says.

Well likely never really know who specifically owned the newly discovered sword. Objects have lives of their own, and the weapons journey from ship to ocean floor may not have been its first voyage. But attaching the Crusader adjective to the sword matters a great deal because it reveals our own modern assumptions about the object, the regions past and the people who lived there.

An item like a sword has value. Its forged with the intention of being passed from hand to hand, taken as plunder, given as a gift or handed down to heirs. In the Middle Ages as a whole, but perhaps especially in this corner of the Mediterranean, objects, people and ideas moved across borders all the time. Lets celebrate the recovery of this artifact, study it, learn what we can and let it speak to us. Lets not speak on the pasts behalf with our own modern preconceptions, nor lock in the swords identity as a symbol of religious violence. Its a medieval sword, perhaps of Frankish design. Well know more about it soon. For now, let that be enough.

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The Many Myths of the Term 'Crusader' | History - Smithsonian

What do Frisbee, Slinky, Barbie and Hula Hoop all have in common?

Clearly they're all nostalgic childhood toys, but what you may not know is that theyre also a few of the toys that have helped shape America over the years.

Have you ever wondered how these toys came into being, and why they were so successful? That's where HISTORYs latest addition to its That Built franchise comes in, aptly titled the The Toys that Built America. The four-part docu-series will delve into the background of popular toys and the people who created them, exploring how they eventually influenced the culture and economics of America. Youll learn about the accidental discoveries that turned into some of the most famous toys of the 20th century and the stories behind the ingenious inventors who cater to the constantly changing consumers of the toy industry.

The Good Housekeeping Institute is no stranger to toys. Our engineers test hundreds of toys each year, offering recommendations for every age and varied interests and skills. Each year, it evaluates hundreds of new toys sending them to lucky kid testers across the country for consideration for its annual Good Housekeeping Best Toy Awards. Our Chief Technologist, Rachel Rothman, a mom of three and mechanical engineer, has been vetting toys for 15 years. If you watch The Toys That Built America, you'll get to see her weighing in with her expertise.

While toy trends often come and go, there are a handful that, according to The Toys That Built America, have stood the test of time, and decades later can still be found in most homes.

Toys That Get You Moving

In the first episode, youll be introduced to some of the businessmen and women behind popular American toys and their process behind creating them, including some of the creations that put the company Wham-O on the map, like the Slip 'N Slide, the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee. Looking for some exciting outdoor toys? Here are some of our favorites:

Incredibubble GIANT Bubbles Wand

$24.34

Stand-Up Sidewalk Chalk Holder

$13.99

Cozy Coupe 30th Anniversary Car

$110.50

Stomp Rocket Ultra Rocket Launcher

In other episodes, viewers will delve into the background behind even more iconic toys that inspire imagination and emotional development, such as Mr. Potato Head and its creator, Merrill Hassenfeld, and the Barbie doll and its inventor, Ruth Handler. As part of the wildly popular Mattel brand, Barbie is just one of the many innovative toys that had a unique origin story and went on to be a fan favorite for parents as well as the kids who played with them. Did you know Barbie and Ken were named after the inventor's children? Both Barbie and the Potato Heads are still going strong today; in fact, Barbie Extra and Create Your Own Potato Head Family each won a 2021 Good Housekeeping Best Toy Award. Old and new, here are some of the Good Housekeeping Institute's favorite action figures and dolls:

Create Your Potato Head Family

Rainbow High Deluxe Fashion Closet Playset

Board Games That Encourage Competition or Collaboration

Aside from general toys, the docu-series also explores the creation of some of the most popular board games that continue to dominate the industry to this day. Tune in to learn more about the inventors and their creative process for developing games that encourage collaboration and higher-thinking skills, such as Milton Bradley, the inventor of The Game of Life, and the Parker Brothers, who created Monopoly. Here are some of the Institutes favorite family board games to cozy up with on game night:

Pokmon Trading Card Game Battle Academy

$19.99

MasterChef Family Cooking Game

Marvel Villainous: Mischief & Malice

$24.99

Stories of The Three Coins

$25.95

Trivia Time: Guess the Toy

Eager to press play? Here are a few of the most interesting origin stories from children's toys that have retained their fame for decades; how many can you guess correctly?

You can tune in to The Toys That Built America on Sunday, November 28 at 9 p.m. EST on the History Channel for the premiere. Each one-hour episode will air live on The History Channel beginning Sunday, November 28. Episodes will be available to stream after their live via the History Channel App and with a cable/streaming provider login on History.com. Also check out their previous series, The Machines That Built America and The Food That Built America if you want to learn more about what shaped the US.

Answers: 1. Silly Putty; 2. Slinky; 3. Frisbee; 4. Play-Doh; 5. Super Ball

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The Duke basketball program saw The Citadel make history inside Cameron Indoor Stadium.

History was made inside Cameron Indoor Stadium on Monday night, and it did not involve the Duke basketball team.

In fact, the history was made against the Blue Devils as The Citadel broke the record for most 3-pointers made in a game by an opponent inside Cameron.

The Bulldogs put on a shooting clinic as 18 3-pointers were drilled despite Duke winning convincingly, 107-81.

The previous record of 3-pointers made by an opponent in Cameron was 15 by Florida State in 2017.

However, the game had a scary beginning as The Citadel head coach Duggar Baucom collapsed on the sidelines 63 seconds into the game and had to be helped off the floor with medial personnel.

ALSO READ:Mike Krzyzewski reveals retirement plans

Baucom was transported to the Duke University Hospital, where he was undergoing more tests as the game continued.

The Blue Devils only led by ten at halftime before pulling away in the early stages of the second half.

Duke was led by junior captain Wendell Moore and freshman Paolo Banchero in the victory as Moore, who already has a triple-double this season, came within two rebounds and one assist of reaching his second triple-double of the season.

The Charlotte native ended the night with 22 points, eight rebounds, and nine assist on 8-of-14 shooting while Banchero led the team with 28 points, eight rebounds, and six assists.

All five starters reached double digits for the Blue Devils, including 14 points and seven rebounds from Mark Williams.

It is a six-game winning streak for the Blue Devils, and Duke will now head out on the road for the biggest week of its non-conference season.

Mike Krzyzewski will bring his team to Las Vegas to play No. 1 Gonzaga on Friday night in the Continental Tire Challenge before going to Ohio State to play the Buckeyes in the ACC vs. Big Ten Challenge.

ALSO READ:Duke has X-Factor emerge

Gonzaga, who already dismantled No. 5 Texas at home this season, will be playing No. 2 UCLA on Tuesday night in Vegas.

Tip-off is scheduled for 10:30 p.m. EST on Friday.

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Duke basketball allows The Citadel to make history in Cameron Indoor - BallDurham

What makes a buffalo wing a buffalo wing?

Nothing puts the kick in kick-off like a plate of Buffalo Wings. But not all wings are created equal! Here's how to tell the difference...

10Best Editors, USA TODAY 10Best

In the city of Buffalo, the Buffalo wing does not exist. There are only wings. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that the wings were born in Buffalo.

Alongside Rick James and the Goo Goo Dolls, the hot wing stands as Buffalos most famous export of the past 60 years. On Super Bowl Sunday alone, sticky-fingered Americans might pickclean 1.4 billion of the chickens dinkiest, boniest cut.

The wings rudiments are by now so well-known to every college-town sports bar they might as well be a natural resource. There are the crispy-fried chicken wings cracked into drumettes and flats, so they look like the limbs of a much smaller bird. The butter and Franks Red Hot mixed to the tolerance of each digestive tract. The celery of varying freshness. The gentle fights over blue cheese and ranch.

But the Buffalo wing is still new, dating back only to the 1960s. And its history is far from settled. The wings origin is the source of a long-simmering dispute that is barely known outside its citys limits part of a very old story about who gets credit in America, and who doesnt.

In Buffalo, what you believe about the origins of the wing might dependheavily on the side of town where you grew up.

On one hand, there is the tale told all over the world.

This involves an Italian-born couple with the mellifluous names of Frank and Teressa Bellissimo, consummate hosts known for singing to entertain the guests at their decades-old Italian restaurant, Anchor Bar located on the dividing line between the Black and white sides of segregated Buffalo.

The way the Bellissimos told it, serving a soup-stock part like wings was unthinkable until they thought of it, andthe idea arrived with the sort of sudden and accidental inspiration that often crops up in old fish tales about food origins. In 1964, one version of their story goes, their son Dominic arrived at Anchor Bar one fateful Friday night with a pack of friends hungry for something new. His mother obligingly improvised a snack from the materials at hand.

They looked like chicken wings, a part of the chicken that usually went into the stock pot for soup, reads the bars official history, posted on a placard outside its door. Teressa had deep fried the wings and flavored them with a secret sauce. The wings were an instant hit.

Anchor Bars wings with spicy orange-red sauce spread across town so quickly that by 1980, when writer Calvin Trillin catalogued the citys love of wings in the New Yorker, Trillins Buffalo friends could not imagine a time when wings werent served. Anchor Bar is now a multi-state franchise with bottled sauce sold as far away as Japan, so famous that even Homer Simpson has visited in cartoon form.

Yet, if you ask a Black Buffalonian of a certain age who first got popular selling chicken wings in Buffalo, Anchor Bar is rarely mentioned.

Anybody that was around back then will tell you that John Young was the originator, said 74-year-old Theodore Clyburn. When he graduated high school in 1964, Clyburn said, he practically lived on the tangy-saucedwings made by restaurateur John Young, at one of the busiest spots on a bustling Jefferson Avenue that amounted to Black Main Street.

About a mile east of Anchor Bar, Young had been serving whole, breaded wings at events and multiple restaurants on Jefferson since 1961 or even earlier, according to Youngs daughter Lina Brown-Young, multiple former customers, and accounts from Young in the 80s and 90s.

Those early fans included 82-year-old Ron Duff, of wing chain Duff's Famous Wings, who said John Young's wings were his favorite gametime meal after the Bills arrived in 1960 wellbefore he or the Anchor Bar started serving wings.

"They cost a nickel.And we used to buy a couple hundred of them and take them to the game. So that's my first introduction, that was at least 1961," Duff said. "They sold a lot of wings in the Black section forever."

By the mid-sixties, the wings at John Youngs Wings andThings arrived with a spicy-tangy-sweet orange-red sauce called mombo saucethat former City of Buffalo councilman James Pitts has called the lip-smacking, liver-quivering sauce (that) titillated our taste buds down to our toes.

On Buffalos predominantly Black East Side in the 1960s, John Youngs name meant wings, Pitts told USA TODAY Network. And you wouldnt think of wings without thinking of John Young.

But by 1970, after riots and escalating racial tensions, Young moved away from a Buffalo he no longer considered safe. When he returned a decade later, he found a wing-crazy town that had given all credit to Anchor Bar.

They wouldnt have dared claim they invented the wing while my father was still around, Brown-Young said. They just wouldnt.

Young went back into the wing business in Buffalo, and to any local newspaper who would listen, he told his story.He also told it to the New Yorker in 1980.

"I am the true inventor of the Buffalo chicken wing," he told Buffalo News food critic Janice Okun in 1996, two years before his death. It hurts me so bad that other people take the credit."

The fact that Youngs tale is less told than Anchor Bars, said Pitts, amounts to a historical wrong.

If you talk about one of the hallmarks of Buffalos cultural contributions when it comes to food, chicken wings, there was an African American man there who if it was parallel circumstances, or some kind of linear progression he was doing it on the East Side, Pitts said. He was serving up stuff to his community because he couldn't get to any other community.

Young didnt invent the idea of serving a platterof fried wings, of course. And neither did Anchor Bar. And neither invented the idea of dousing wings in orange-red sauce.

Wings are a long tradition in African American food, such that starting the history of the fried chicken wing with Anchor Bar is a little like starting the history of rock and roll with Elvis.

African Americans in the South had been serving whole fried chicken to their families for generations, according to food historian Adrian Miller, author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time.

On Sundayfried chicken dinners, the visiting preacher often took the choicest bits of the fried chicken dinner,the preachers parts, Miller said. Children, last in line, often got wings.

But the food you eat in childhood has a powerful pull. By the 1950s and 60s, amid the Great Migration of the postwar years, wings started cropping up as a stand-alone dish at Black-owned restaurants in the North.

John Young was raised as one of 14 children on an Alabama farmbefore coming to Buffalo as as teen for work. Alongside ribs, Young was already serving his wings by the time he came across a traveling boxer named Sam Anderson. Anderson told him about carryout restaurants in Washington, D.C., who were making money selling wings slathered in a tangy, sweet, spicedtomato-based sauce.

Mumbo sauce, it was called. Sometimes mambo or mombo or mumble. The oldest of these carryouts on record, from 1962, bears much the same name as the one Young founded shortly thereafter: Wings N Things.

Even that D.C. wing sauce, still popular at Chinese and Black-owned restaurants, likely has deeper roots. In the 1950s the name was first pinned toArgia Bs Mumbo Sauce, perhaps the most enduring example of an old Chicago barbecuetradition called mild sauce.

When Young concocted his own mombo sauce eventually adding tropical fruits after a visit to Jamaica his wings took flight.

The first day I opened the doors, I realized I had created a monster, he wrote in a handwritten autobiography left to his daughter. People came from everywhere in droves to try the wings with the mombo sauce.

Young served his wings whole, 10 for a dollar in a little cardboard container. He didnt believe in tampering with the wing by cutting it up. And in the Southern tradition, he served them breaded and seasoned so you didnt need sauce to enjoy them, customer Theodore Clyburn remembered.

Hed dip them in the sauce, so when they come out theyre smoking, Clyburn said. And a lot of people liked them that way. But I said, John, dont dip them all the way. Just take the tongs and sprinkle the mombo sauce on there.

Celebrities from the Buffalo Bills Cookie Gilchrist to singers Joe Tex and Rick James were reportedly fans of those wings.

But John Youngs whole and breaded wings were not what Buffalo became known for. No matter how popular, food cooked at Black-owned restaurants in those days was rarely given credit unless it was barbecue, said historian Miller.

As for how Anchor Bar also came to serve wings with a spicy red sauce? Teressa and Frank and Dominic Bellissimo all dieddecades ago, but they told many competingstories over the years.

According to the version Frank told the New Yorker in 1980, the wings were a mistaken delivery.They'd actually meant to order backs and necks to make spaghetti sauce.Frank asked his wife to make a more dignified snack out of the wings that arrived instead.

Maybe she spent the whole night cussing about a mistaken delivery before coming up with the idea all by herself. Or maybe the wings were ordered on purpose after all, for use in stock, and a bigger-than-usual batch of wings made Teressa decide to serve them as a snack.

The real story, said Anchor Bars current CEO Mark Dempsey, citing the bar's official history,is that Teressa and Frank were working in the restaurant one night with their son Dominic... and Dominic went back in the kitchen and asked his mother to, you know, create something a little something different.."

Multiple people who said they attended the first wing feast have told their own versions of the tale, each one a little different.

The Youngs, on the other hand, maintain that no epiphaniesor accidents were needed: The Bellissimos knew about wings because John Young was serving them to crowds a mile away.

Youngs widow, Christine, told the Southern Law Review she remembered Frank Bellissimo coming down to the restaurant after hours to jaw about the wings that Young served. Pitts said Bellissimo had come to a dinner where Young was the caterer.

I don't know how many occasions my father said, the people who owned the Anchor Bar at the time had visited his restaurant and had his wings, Brown-Young said.

Longtime Anchor Bar manager Ivano Toscani, who died in 2018, repeatedly disputed that the Youngs could have anything to do with the wings at Anchor, saying all credit was due to Teressa Bellissimo.

Anchor Bar CEO Dempsey saidhe's not personally familiar with Youngs story, but honors the many contributionsvarious people have made to wing history over the years.

Whatever happened, the earliest written record of each version of wing is the same year, and its not 1964. Its 1966.

Customer Theodore Clyburn pegs those mombo-sauce wings to the year of his high school graduation in 1964. But Young gave multiple accountings of when each of his restaurants began, and didnt file for a business license for John Youngs Wings andThings until 1966 though at the time it was common for small, Black-owned businesses to exist in a legal gray area.

He didnt always set things up the right way, Brown-Young said, simply.

The year 1966 is also the first written record of Anchor Bar selling wings of any kind.

A 1969 Buffalo Courier-Express feature about Anchor Bar didnt mention wings at all despite Frank Bellissimos later claims they were selling 3,000 pounds of wings a weekwithin a month of first serving them.

But a 1966 advertisement in the Courier-Express, unearthed in the past year by Buffalo History Museum librarian Cynthia Van Ness, does list an unlikely specialty for an Italian restaurant: barbecued chicken wings.

Barbecue in the 1960s meant different things to different people, said food historian Miller, including backyard hamburger grill-outs. And store-bought barbecue sauce from companies like Kraft was molasses-sweet.

In the North at that time, barbecue served at restaurants was a predominantly African American tradition.

At African American restaurants, you would often find a hot option, Miller said. That was often a thinner sauce.

'Reclamation': A Black descendent of Thomas Jefferson brings her ancestors out of the shadows

The form of Anchor Bars wings may also have undergone some evolution. In a 1972 article about the newfound mania for wings, Dominic Bellissimo told Buffalo News critic Okun that Anchor Bars wings were baked in a spice bath and then basted with barbecue sauce.

That surprised Ron Duff.By the time he started serving them at Duff's in 1969, after learning them from a pizzeria across the street called the Hacienda, the wings that had already spread across the city were deep-fried with Frank's and butter.

But whatever the competing timelines, and whatever the original sauce and cookery, Anchor Bars place in wing history is assured.

The wings that spread like wildfire across Buffalo and then the world the food that Canadas Globe and Mail in 1982 called beer-drinkers caviar were the spicy drums and flats invented at Anchor Bar, served with blue cheese and celery.

And indeed, the Bellissimos' idea of serving them naked and halved in hot sauce is a significant innovation in a long, mostly Southern and African American history of fried wing.

John Young had to fight much harder to secure his place in the annals of Buffalo wings, in a yearslong campaign his daughter said took its toll.

His whole, breaded, saucy wings didspread to a number of takeouts on Buffalos predominantly Black East Side, many with catchy rhyming names like the Git & Split, the Stop & Cop or A Meal for a Steal. Young's brother, Paul, owned the last.

But Youngs final restaurant closed in the 1980s, and his brother stopped selling wings in the 90s. Mombo sauce disappeared for decades in the Queen City even as Buffalo-style wings continued their ascendance nationwide. Mombosaucebecame just a story people told.

That all changed last year.

Now, if you want to try what may be Buffalo's original wing sauce, all you've got to do is get on a bicycle.

Marc Moscato, founder of tour company Buffalo Bike Tours, learned the story of John Young in 2019 and became obsessed with the idea of reviving mombo sauce.

He haunted the stacks of the Buffalo History Museum library, prompting librarian Van Ness to start a voluminous wing file, tracing the on-again-off-again history of fried wings in Buffalo as far back as an 1857 hotel menu.

Moscato contacted anyone he found on Facebook named Young. He wore out the phone book. Finally, he just got lucky: In honor of Black History Month last year, local reporter Madison Carter interviewed Lina Brown-Young about her fathers wings.

Every few years, Brown-Young told us, somebody calls me up for Black History Month.

It turned out that Brown-Young was game to make up special batches of mombo sauce as part of a historical wing ride through Buffalo.

This did not come, however, without worries from her mother, whobelieved her late husband's years of restaurant toil, and the long struggle to get credit for his wings, had driven him to an early grave. She didnt want her daughter to suffer the same fate.

When asked to talk about her husband's wings even so many years later, Christine Young just couldnt do it.

When I brought it up, she broke down in tears, Brown-Young said.

But Brown-Young believes its important to pass on her fathers story as he told it to her. "We've never stopped trying to keep this story alive," she said. "I've never stopped."

And so at occasional pop-ups or whenever a group books a wing tour, she makes up a batch of that lava-hot pot of mombo, which she has had to reconstruct in part from her memories of cooking countless batches at her father's restaurant. And she makes a batch of wings to share.

There were people waiting in line around the corner for these wings, Brown-Young told a tour group in September. These are whole wings, all connected. Not just drums and flats. These are the original wings."

Before meeting with Brown-Young, the tour had first visited the apartments where Rick James and Aretha Franklin once lived, and pedaled through years of Buffalo civil rights history and the saga of John Young's various restaurants.

The tour ended at Anchor Bar, where Moscato recountedthe Bellissimos' version of the wing story. But on a tour in August, he wasnt allowed to finish this tale.

Thats not true! called out a man who happened to be walking past, determined to set the record straight.

John Young," he said."John Young was the first.

Follow Matthew Korfhage on Twitter: @matthewkorfhage

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The secret contested history of Buffalo wings and the Black chef who got left out - USA TODAY