Category Archives: History

When the Broncos travel to Arlington to face the Cowboys this Sunday, itll mark just the 14th time ever these two teams have faced off against one another. And yet, one of the most memorable moments in Cowboys franchise history came against Denver.

That would be Super Bowl XII. Tom Landrys Cowboys had been on a tear through the regular season, finishing 12-2 and earning the top seed in the playoffs. They beat both the Bears and Vikings by three or more touchdowns to reach the Super Bowl in New Orleans.

There, they faced the similarly 12-2 Broncos, who Dallas actually beat 14-6 in their regular-season finale. Coincidentally, Denver was led by former Cowboys starting quarterback Craig Morton. Die hard fans remember that Morton had led Dallas to its first ever Super Bowl appearance - a loss to the Colts in whats since been deemed the Blunder Bowl - and now Morton was leading the Broncos to their first ever appearance in the game.

Things didnt go any better for Morton this time around, as the Doomsday Defense picked him off four times, each by a different player, and held the former Cowboy to a mere 26.6% completion rate and 39 total yards.

Dallas, meanwhile, did plenty on offense. Roger Staubach threw a touchdown to Butch Johnson, Tony Dorsett ran in another, and they even added some trickery when fullback Robert Newhouse threw a 29-yard touchdown pass to Golden Richards. (follow the link for the video)

By the time the final whistle blew, Americas Team had notched a 27-10 victory to claim their second Super Bowl championship in just their 18th season in the NFL. The blowout victory upped Dallas total playoff point differential that year to 87-23, one of the more thoroughly dominant playoff runs any team has enjoyed.

Speaking of games between the Cowboys and Broncos that ended in blowouts, the last time these teams met was a game Cowboys fans tried to forget about before it even ended. It was Week 2 of the 2017 season and the 1-0 Cowboys went into Denver against rookie head coach Vance Joseph. Nothing worked for Dallas as they lost 42-17 and most of the discussion following the game was on Ezekiel Elliotts lack of hustle during an interception return.

That game was arguably the first real sign of trouble for the Jason Garrett era, as his Cowboys rarely had games where they seemed to quit on him up to that point. It also remains the only time Dak Prescott has faced the Broncos in his career, and the quarterback will likely have that memory in the back of his mind come Sunday.

Of course, the second-most recent time these teams met wasnt a blowout for either team but instead one of the most entertaining football games in recent memory. It came during an otherwise forgettable 2013 season for the Cowboys. It was none other than the Tony Romo/Peyton Manning duel. (follow the link for the video)

This game had just about everything a football fan could ask for. Two quarterbacks playing at the highest level trading punches for a game that had 99 total points scored. Romos 506 yards and five touchdowns went toe-to-toe with Mannings 414 yards and four touchdowns (and that one rushing touchdown). Terrance Williams caught his first career touchdown pass in this one, and second-year pro Morris Claiborne became the first defender to intercept Manning all season.

The only way this game couldve been any better is if it ended with a Cowboys victory, but nothing is perfect. In fact, the Cowboys havent gotten a win over this team in quite some time. Youd have to go all the way back to 1995 to find the last time the Cowboys beat the Broncos. That season ended with a Lombardi Trophy being brought to Dallas, their last one to date.

But the Cowboys are being talked about as Super Bowl contenders now, and they have a chance to snap a six-game losing streak to the Broncos on Sunday and improve to 7-1 on the year. This team did something similar a few weeks ago on the road against the Patriots. Can they do it again?

The Dallas Cowboys should win on Sunday, but if they are going to then they need to take care of business in a couple of certain ways. We discussed them in our official Dallas Cowboys Preview Show on the Blogging The Boys YouTube Channel. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel (which you can do right here) so you dont miss any of our videos!

WATCH OUR DALLAS COWBOYS PREVIEW SHOW RIGHT HERE.

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Know Your History: The Cowboys vs Broncos matchup - Blogging The Boys

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For the past few centuries, the Yupik peoples of Alaska have told gruesome tales of a massacre that occurred during the Bow and Arrow War Days, a series of long and often brutal battles across the Bering Sea coast and the Yukon. According to one account, the carnage started when one village sent a war party to raid another. But the residents had been tipped off and set an ambush, wiping out the marauders. The victors then attacked the undefended town, torching it and slaughtering its inhabitants. No one was spared.

For the last 12 years, Rick Knecht has led an excavation at a site called Nunalleq, about 400 miles west of Anchorage. When we began, the hope was to learn something about Yupik prehistory by digging in an average village, said Dr. Knecht, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Little did we know that we were digging in something approaching the Yupik equivalent of Troy.

Their most astonishing discovery was the charred remnants of a large communal sod house. The ground was black and clayey and riddled with hundreds of slate arrow points, as if from a prehistoric drive-by shooting. In all, the researchers and native Yupik people who live in the area unearthed more than 100,000 well-preserved artifacts, as well as the singed carrion of two dogs and the scattered bones of at least 28 people, almost all women, children and elders. Several of them had evidently been dragged out of the house, bound with grass rope and killed some beheaded. It is a complex murder scene, Dr. Knecht said. It is also a rare and detailed archaeological example of Indigenous warfare.

Until recently, the site had been deepfrozen in the subsoil known as permafrost. As global temperatures gather pace, permafrost and glaciers are thawing and eroding rapidly across vast areas of Earth, releasing many of the objects that they had absorbed and revealing aspects of life in a once inaccessible past.

The circumpolar world is, or was, full of miraculously preserved sites like Nunalleq, Dr. Knecht said. They offer a window into the unexpectedly rich lives of prehistoric hunters and foragers like no other.

Glacial archaeology is a relatively new discipline. The ice was literally broken during the summer of 1991 when German hikers in the tztal Alps spotted a tea-colored corpse half-embedded on the Italian side of the border with Austria. Initially mistaken for a modern-day mountaineer killed in a climbing accident, tzi the Iceman, as he came to be called, was shown through carbon-dating to have died about 5,300 years ago.

A short, comprehensively tattooed man in his mid-40s, tzi wore a bearskin cap, several layers of clothing made of goat and deer hides, and bearskin-soled shoes stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm. The Icemans survival gear included a longbow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a copper ax and a kind of crude first-aid kit full of plants with powerful pharmacological properties. A chest X-ray and a CT scan showed a flint arrowhead buried deep in tzis left shoulder, suggesting that he may have bled to death. His killing is humankinds oldest unsolved cold case.

Six years later, in the Yukons snow fields, hunting tools dating back thousands of years appeared from the melting ice. Soon, similar finds were reported in Western Canada, the Rockies and the Swiss Alps.

In 2006, a long, hot autumn in Norway resulted in an explosion of discoveries in the snowbound Jotunheimen mountains, home to the Jtnar, the rock and frost giants of Norse mythology. Of all the dislodged detritus, the most intriguing was a 3,400-year-old proto-Oxford most likely fashioned out of reindeer hide.

The discovery of the Bronze Age shoe signified the beginning of glacial surveying in the peaks of Innlandet County, where the state-funded Glacier Archaeology Program was started in 2011. Outside of the Yukon, it is the only permanent rescue project for discoveries in ice.

Glacial archaeology differs from its lowland cousin in critical ways. G.A.P. researchers usually conduct fieldwork only within a short time frame from mid-August to mid-September, between the thaw of old snow and the arrival of new. If we start too early, much of the snow from the previous winter will still cover the old ice and lessen the chance of making discoveries, said Lars Holger Pilo, co-director of the Glacier Archaeology Program. Starting too late is also hazardous. We might get early winter snow, and the field season could be over before we begin. Glacial discoveries tend to be limited to what archaeologists can glean on the previously ice-locked ground.

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When the program started, the finds were mainly Iron Age and medieval, from 500 to 1,500 years ago. But as the melting widens, ever older periods of history are being exposed. We have now melted back to the Stone Age in some places, with pieces as old as six millenniums, Dr. Pilo said. We are speeding back in time.

To date, the Glacier Archaeology Program has recovered about 3,500 artifacts, many preserved in extraordinary delicacy. Norway has more than half of the prehistoric and medieval finds from the ice globally. A freshly unfrozen alpine pass at Lendbreen in use from about 600 to 1,700 years ago yielded evidence of the tradespeople who traversed it: horseshoes, horse dung, a rudimentary ski and even a box filled with beeswax.

Over the last decade, the relics melting out of the Alps have included the mummified remains of a Swiss couple missing since 1942 and the wreckage of an American military plane that crash-landed during turbulent weather in 1946. In Russia, scientists have regenerated reproductive tissue from unripe fruits of a narrow-leafed campion freeze-dried under the tundra for 32,000 years. A farsighted arctic ground squirrel had stored the fruit in its burrow.

Spectacular glacial finds invariably involve luck, as Craig Lee, an archaeologist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, can attest. Fourteen years ago, in the mountain ice outside Yellowstone National Park, he spotted the foreshaft of a throwing spear called an atlatl dart, carved from a birch sapling 10,300 years ago. The primitive hunting weapon is the earliest organic artifact ever to be retrieved from an ice patch.

In the Yukon, ice patch discoveries have given us new insights into the pre-European tradition of copper-working by Indigenous peoples, said William Taylor, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. In the Rockies, researchers have recovered everything from frozen trees that document important changes in climate and vegetation to the hunting implements of some of the first peoples of the continent.

Dr. Taylors own work focuses on the relationship between climate and social change in early nomadic societies. His ongoing survey of melting ice margins in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia has produced artifacts that upended some of the most basic archaeological assumptions about the areas history. Although people in the region have long been classified as herders, Dr. Taylors team discovered an icy killing ground of argali sheep, along with the spears and arrows used to slay them. Laboratory analysis revealed that big-game hunting has been an essential part of pastoral subsistence and culture in the Eastern Steppes for more than 3,500 years.

About 10 percent of the planets land mass is covered with glacial ice, and as the world defrosts, ancient creatures great and small are being unburied as well. In southern Chile, dozens of nearly complete skeletons of ichthyosaurs were disgorged near the Tyndall Glacier. The marine reptiles lived between the Triassic and Cretaceous periods, which extended from 66 million to 250 million years ago.

Three-million-year-old insect fossils have been recovered in eastern Alaska (blind weevils of the genus Otibazo) and the western Yukon Territory (the species Notiophilus aeneus, better known as brassy big-eyed beetles).

The flashiest archaeological finds in Yakutia, a republic in northeastern Siberia, have been the carcasses of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, steppe bison and cave lions big cats that once roamed widely across the northern hemisphere. The extinct beasts had lain suspended in their refrigerated graves for nine millenniums or more, like grapes in Jell-O.

In 2018, a perfectly intact 42,000-year-old foal a long-gone species known as the Lena horse was found entombed in the ice of Siberias Batagaika Crater with urine in its bladder and liquid blood in its veins.

That same year, in other parts of Yakutia, mammoth hunters chanced upon the severed head of a vanished subspecies of wolf, and researchers dug up an 18,000-year-old puppy that looked like nothing alive today. The canine may have been an evolutionary link between wolves and modern dogs, said Love Daln, a Swedish geneticist who has sequenced the creatures genome. It is named Dogor, which means friend in the Yakut language and is also a clever play on the question dog or wolf.

Dogor was exhumed in an icy lump of mud near the Indigirka River. Ice patches turn out to be where most discoveries are made. The basic difference between a glacier and an ice patch is that a glacier moves. An ice patch does not move much, which makes it a more reliable preservationist.

The constant movement inside glaciers damages both bodies and artifacts, and eventually dumps the sad debris at the mouth of the ice floe, Dr. Pilo, of the Glacier Archaeology Program in Norway, said. Due to the movement and the continuous renewal of the ice, glaciers rarely preserve objects more than 500 years.

Dr. Lee, of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, likens the destruction wrought by glacial degeneration to a library on fire. Now is not the time to stand around pointing fingers at one another trying to lay blame for the blaze, he said. Now is the time to rescue what books can be saved for the edification of the future.

Its a grim inside joke among glacial archaeologists that their field of study has been one of the few beneficiaries of climate change. But while retreating ice and snow makes some prehistoric treasures briefly accessible, exposure to the elements threatens to swiftly destroy them.

Once soft organic materials leather, textiles, arrow fletchings surface, researchers have a year at most to rescue them for conservation before the items degrade and are lost forever. After they are gone, Dr. Taylor said, our opportunity to use them to understand the past and prepare for the future is gone with them.

E. James Dixon, former director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, agreed. The sheer scale of the loss relative to the number of archaeologists researching these sites is overwhelming, he said. Its like an archaeological mass extinction where certain types of sites are all disappearing at approximately the same time.

Climate change has brought with it a cascade of consequences. Oceanfront erosion has been devastating. In some parts of Alaska, as much as a mile of coastline has receded over the last 80 years, and with it the entire archaeological and fossil record. Sites are not just being washed away, but literally rotting in the ground, Dr. Knecht said.

Saving what we can isnt just a matter of safeguarding Yupik culture or northern prehistory, but the heritage of all humanity, he said. After all, hunting and foraging is how all humans lived for the vast majority of our collective existence on earth.

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As Earth Warms, Old Mayhem and Secrets Emerge From the Ice - The New York Times

Michelle Wu made history this week when she became the first woman and first person of color to be elected to serve as mayor of Boston.

While most mayor-elects typically have a couple months to prepare for the office, Wu has just two weeks.

Wu joined WBUR'sMorning Editionhost Rupa Shenoy live to discuss what's ahead.

Highlights from this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.

On having just two weeks to prepare to take office

Well, we jumped right in, and in some ways it's wonderful because the issues are very, very urgent and pressing, and so to have the opportunity to roll up our sleeves immediately has been incredibly meaningful. We celebrated election night and then the next day came right back to city hall for a city council meeting, my first official transition meeting with Mayor Janey, and we've been having a series of briefings with the administration since starting with [Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard.]

On being the first woman, first person of color and first millennialto be elected to the office

I grew up never imagining that I would be anywhere involved with politics or government because as the daughter of immigrants, it seems so far away and my family seems so invisible in so many of the systems.

But I now have a decade of experience working in city hall, working for former Mayor [Thomas] Menino, working on the city council, and I know the power to make change if we can get city government out of these big buildings and into our neighborhoods. So my focus is going to be on connecting every single person into government and taking on the big challenges that our residents are facing.

On her first priority in office

We're building out our team. No person can do this alone, and there are so many issues that we are going to be tackling urgently and so we'll build out a cabinet and workforce throughout city hall that reflects the diversity of Boston. That represents every bit of the expertise in our communities and will move with the urgency that's facing our families.

On her thoughts on the crisis at a tent encampment near Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard

Well, I want to be clear that in terms of support and what will happen next, we need to ensure that we are leading with a public health lens. So I support the emphasis on avoiding any sort of criminalization of people who are seeking treatment and in need of services and moving quickly so that we are connecting residents with those resources.

We need to establish more low-threshold, stable, supportive housing whether that is through city-owned buildings that are quickly retrofitted or vacant hotel rooms that can be repurposed and wrapped around with services when we can get support for someone into transitional housing off the streets. It is then much more likely that people can connect with stable housing.

What what we're facing now is a countdown against the clock. Every day that goes by, we are closer to winter and freezing temperatures. So we need to act quickly to establish those connections to treatment and to housing. We cannot have a criminalization of these crises: opiates, mental health and homelessness. It only destabilizes everyone in the community and perpetuates the inequities that got us here in the first place.

On whether she thinks it's possible for the Suffolk County jail special court session to be effective

You know, we need to have changes within our criminal legal system that ensure diversion and ensure a recognition of what the root causes are here, which is the lack of stable housing, the trauma that has led to mental health and substance use challenges. And so we need to keep tweaking and pushing for the court system to move in the right direction. But from the city's perspective, I'll move right away for leadership and accountability when it comes to coordinating our services, establishing that stable housing, and doing so quickly before it gets cold outside.

On her plans to make housing more affordable

Step one is seizing on this moment of opportunity. We are in an unprecedented time with federal funding and state funding from our recovery funds to be able to direct that and prioritize that for housing stability. The areas where we'll dig in on right away are first ensuring that we are directing those capital funds to create more affordable housing that is truly affordable for our residents, to use the city property and buildings that we have as part of that will speed up our processes so that affordable housing proposal can move through more quickly and then work to boost home ownership. This is the core of Boston's racial wealth gap. And so as we're directing these funds, we need to be very intentional about leading with equity and moving quickly to close gaps across our city.

On how she plans to respond to the pandemic

Well, we are now seeing imminent and continued approvals for the vaccination when it comes to younger children, and we can close that vaccination gap if we use every bit of our city organization that touches people's lives, whether it's through the Boston Public Schools or the Boston Housing Authority or the libraries or community centers. We need to ensure that we're making that available so that there are no barriers to getting vaccinated. And then again, as we head into the colder months, really following the data and the science closely so that we will be prepared and heading off any potential situations as more people are going indoors and gathering inside.

On whether she plans to continue taking the T

Oh, I'm taking the T actually every day since the election, so I've been on the Orange Line several times now. It's the usual routine and it'll stay that way.

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Michelle Wu discusses history-defining election, having just weeks to prepare to take reins - WBUR

LAS VEGAS (KTNV) Keeping the community safe means keeping pace with growth, while more people mean more criminals and evolving dangers that challenge police on a daily basis.

13 Action News' special coverage of the complicated issues that come with a growing Las Vegas continues as 13 Investigates looks back at the history of Nevada's largest police force and the influence of organized crime as Las Vegas transformed from meadows to metropolis.

Crime is so integrated into the history of Las Vegas that a historic downtown building that once housed the post office and federal courthouse has been converted to a museum on the topic. The Mob Museum attracts tourists from around the world to explore the Hollywood lure of organized crime figures like Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone and many more. But Las Vegas locals depend on law enforcement to curb criminals like that keeping crime rates down despite a growing population.

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It's a job Phil Ramos knows well. He went from high school to policing the streets of Sin City in 1972. He retired as a detective after 33 years but continues to work as an investigator with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's cold case unit.

When he first started his career in policing, Ramos says Las Vegas was still considered a "wild west town."

"You know, people were riding horses down the street and cowboys kind of were the norm here," he said. "The old nightstick and Mace days were in full effect."

In those years, Vegas continued its rise to big-city status but still had a small-town heart, Ramos recalled.

"People still left their doors unlocked and windows open and left their keys in the car," he said. "There were no such thing as home invasions."

In fact, the year Ramos started his policing career, Metro Police didn't yet exist. He worked for the Clark County Sheriff's Department, a separate agency from the Las Vegas Police Department. Back then, local officials were already debating how to keep up with explosive growth.

In 1973, Senate Bill 340 took effect and merged the sheriff's office and police department into the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

"I don't know that either agency, the sheriff's department or the police department, were quite prepared for that," Ramos said, "because I remember for several months you'd see City of Las Vegas police officer uniforms in Clark County sheriff cars. So they were the blue uniforms that the city wore, in the black-and-white patrol cars that the sheriff's department had, and vice-versa."

Eventually, the two agencies were fully integrated, a move Ramos said was well-received by the public.

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"Both city and county saw an increase in the visibility of officers that were not there before the merger because we had more officers to cover the same amount of area," he said.

The merger came just in time, as the crime rate in Las Vegas increased with its population.

"I think the level of violence has increased dramatically," Ramos said.

That perception has caused many over the years to question whether Las Vegas was better when the mob was in charge. But was it? Ramos said it depends who you ask.

"The old-school insiders will tell you, 'Yeah, it was a lot better when the mob ran the casinos because nobody got away with anything," he said. "And there was some truth to that. You know you didn't go in there and embezzle money from the Stardust when Lefty Rosenthal was running the place."

But the influence of organized crime wouldn't last.

"I think the turning point came at the end of the Spilotro era when the Spilotro brothers were found murdered in Illinois," Ramos said.

That was the summer of 1986, and there would prove to be other drastic changes that even tough mafia dons couldn't hold back. The Mariel Boatlift of 1980, for example, brought the migration of more than 100,000 Cubans.

"The vast majority, a huge majority, were good, decent citizens," Ramos said. "But there was a very high level of the criminal element, hardcore criminals that came from the prisons in Cuba."

MEADOWS TO METROPOLIS | Read more from our special series

Ramos says some of those "hardcore criminals" settled in Las Vegas, introducing more weapons and an increased level of violence.

"I don't know how many times I had a cocked .45 put to my head and said, 'If you're a cop, I'm going to kill you right here,'" he said.

Luckily, he was good undercover and under pressure, so he lived to tell those stories of Las Vegas crime lore. He's collected many clues about the valley's criminal history in his decades on the force.

"1980s was a defining decade, I think, for everybody in America," Ramos said. "But particularly here in Vegas, we saw an influx of street gangs coming from various places in the U.S., but particularly from Southern California."

So what do the numbers tell us about how much crime Metro is dealing with for the most recent decade?

According to the department's annual reports, the total crime index in 2020 was 55,709. That's actually a fraction of a percent lower than it was in 2010, at 55,866. But violent crimes dropped 24.6 percent by 2020. At the same time, the population in Metro's jurisdiction increased by more than 200,000.

As far as what areas of town are the most dangerous, Ramos said he's seen a lot of change over the years in that regard as well.

"Various neighborhoods particularly where the gangs moved into, there's high crime rate area there," Ramos said.

Other spots, like the area that used to be called the "west side," had a lot of crime in the past, but not so much today.

"The biggest change that we've seen in the distribution of crime is the Strip," Ramos said. "It's... it's heartbreaking. Honestly, it's heartbreaking because the Strip is the iconic image of Las Vegas."

Looking forward, Metro wants to keep a ratio of at least 2 officers per 1,000 residents, Deputy Chief Kelly McMahill explained. That's the consensus from academia and law enforcement leaders across the country, "....as far as being able to police in the way that you need to, to both suppress crime and react to crime."

"What we found in our research is most jurisdictions that serve 250,000 people or more, they're actually at about 2.2 officers per 1,000. And I do think that's optimal," McMahill said.

However, reaching that number in Las Vegas is tricky, she said. Because the city is so much more than its residents, Metro is currently operating just below the national standard. Add all the visitors, and "...we're really only at about 1.5 officers per thousand," McMahill said.

That means extra demand for the department and its officers.

"We're averaging about 900 officers a week working overtime," McMahill said.

"I think that the national sort of feeling against police has become a real challenge for us to both keep officers here and also go out and recruit for officers," she added.

Metro is bringing back its cadet program and expanding recruiting efforts to other states. But, McMahill says, it's not just about numbers.

"It's about getting officers that truly reflect the demographics of the people that live and visit the city," she said.

Policing has changed tremendously and become so much more than combating crime, McMahill pointed out. Now, police are picking up the mantle of all the social services that have gone unfunded for many years.

"It's a sad fact that the Clark County Detention Center is the number one treatment facility for the mentally ill that live here," McMahill said.

With a growing population, demand for police services is inevitable. "But the challenge is, and always will be, having enough police officers working this valley to keep the people that live here and visit here safe," McMahill said.

Metro's jurisdiction over the City of Las Vegas and unincorporated Clark County an area bigger than the state of New Jersey accounts for more than 70 percent of the county's total population.

Still, some of the fastest-growing parts of the valley are North Las Vegas and Henderson. Those police departments will weigh in on the issues facing them and their citizens as 13 Action News' "Meadows to Metropolis" coverage continues.

Tune in to 13 Action News at 6 p.m. throughout the month of November for in-depth reporting on how rapid growth impacts Las Vegans.

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Policing the population: Las Vegas' police history, recruiting challenges - KTNV Las Vegas

The idea that everyone should celebrate their birthday is, weirdly, not very old itself.

Not until the 19th centuryperhaps around 1860 or 1880did middle-class Americans commonly do so, and not until the early 20th century were birthday celebrations a tradition nationwide. In fact, the song Happy Birthday is not far beyond its own 100th birthday.

Throughout history there are scattered examples of birthday festivities around the globe, but the honorees tended to be either rulers, such as Egyptian pharaohs, or powerful members of an upper class. For a while, a similar pattern held in the United States: Birthdays were for rich people or national heroes. Americans celebrated George Washingtons birthday, for instance, but for everyone else, a birthdayif they even knew the datewas just another day.

The shift in the mid-19th century started with kids. Some scholars have emphasized the increased attention that began to be lavished on individual children as families started having fewer of them. Kids birthday parties may have been an early hint of how American children were starting to be viewed as less valuable economically (as workers) and more valuable emotionally (as family members).

Read: The over-celebration of life events

The rise in birthday celebrations was also part of a larger shift in how people conceptualized the passing of time. Clocks in preindustrial America were rare and seldom accurate, according to the historian Howard Chudacoff. As the 19th century progressed, the widespread production of household clocks and pocket watches made it possible for Americans to constantly know what time it was. And as more people followed the schedules of factories, streetcars, and trains, they had more reason to watch those clocks.

As Americans became more aware of time, they also became more aware of how it passed in their own lives, Chudacoff argues in his 1989 book, How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture. This newfound focus on age was visible in many 19th-century institutions: Schools started using age to separate students into grades, and doctors started using it to assess peoples health and development. Not coincidentally, this was the same era when people started noting their birthday.

The precision of and attention to time seem to be what link the process of industrialization to the observance of birthdays. As Hizky Shoham, a cultural-studies professor at Israels Bar-Ilan University, pointed out to me, the two have coincided in other times and places, such as in Sweden in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in rural Estonia in the mid-20th century.

Americas own period of industrialization in the 19th century was when the rituals and trappings of birthday parties went mainstream. The way we celebrate today is a mishmash of traditions: Cake can likely be traced back to ancient Roman birthday rites (though some accounts indicate that Americans used to be just as likely to celebrate with fruit). The candles appear to come from aristocratic German birthday celebrations, and date back at least several hundred years. And the expectation of wrapped gifts is a product of good old Western consumerism.

Relatedly, people started selling birthday cards in the late 19th century. Before long, card makers were releasing the same age-phobic dreck that you can find in drugstore aisles today. One 1926 card read, I know your age / But Ill keep it mum / If youll do the same / When my birthdays come.

Today, the idea of someone celebrating their birthday is noncontroversial, but in the decades when the tradition was still new, some groups resisted it. Researchers have noted that various birthday-party poopers thought that the celebrations were self-centered and materialistic, took attention away from God, and turned children into brats.

The haters, of course, lost. But they were right to suspect that birthdays have a dark side. As anyone past a certain age can attest, marking another year is not all balloons and ice-cream cakes. A birthday can be anxiety-provoking, in the sense that it provides a milestone by which individuals can compare their status, accomplishments, [and appearance] with other people who are the same age, Chudacoff told me. Its kind of like a train: Are you ahead of time, on time, or behind time?

In fact, the era when birthdays exploded was also the era when those termson time, ahead of time, behind timeentered the lexicon. They were used to talk about daily logistics, but they were also applied to peoples progress through life in a way that quickly laced birthdays with anxiety. I lay in bed this morning thinking, forty-six years old and nowhere yet, one woman wrote in her diary in 1921.

A century later, cultural expectations have loosened around when and whether people should reach milestones such as getting married and having kids. But the pernicious stigma associated with being behind time persists. So on your next birthday, as a gift to yourself, kick back with a nice big bowl of fruit, dont look at the clock, and take the day off from neurotically comparing yourself with everyone else.

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The Strange History of Birthday Celebrations - The Atlantic

Outside of a backdoor cover that some bettors were interested in during the final minutes of the Indianapolis Colts' win over the New York Jets, Bobby Okereke's interception off Josh Johnson sealed a piece of NFL history. The Colts defeated the Jets 45-30, which ended up the 1,069th unique final score in NFL history.

NFL scorigami was following along the unique final score -- the third new final score we've had in the league this year. The Arizona Cardinals defeated the Houston Texans 31-5 in Week 7 -- a more unique final than this one -- and the Los Angeles Rams beat the New York Giants 38-11 in Week 6. One would have believed 45-30 could have been accomplished before, yet this was the first final score of this number.

The scorigami was in jeopardy in the final minute as Johnson and the New York Jets were driving to make the game a one-score affair. Johnson got the Jets to the Colts' 7-yard line with 50 seconds left and faced a first-and-goal when his pass intended for Keelan Cole was intercepted by Okereke, preserving the scorigami.

If the Jets scored a touchdown and kicked an extra point, the 45-37 score would have been the first in the NFL since 2005 -- when the Colts beat the Chicago Bears. If the Jets scored a touchdown and went for two -- and failed to convert -- the 45-36 final would have been a first in NFL history (which would have been a different scorigami). If the Jets converted the two-point attempt, the 45-38 final would have been the first final score with those totals since 2011.

Of course the Jets scoring a touchdown would have been a backdoor cover (New York was +10 entering the game), which seemed impossible considering they trailed 42-10 in the third quarter. At least the league was fortunate to get a scorigami.

The three scorigamis are still well below the 12 last year. There's still nine more weeks to catch up to that total.

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Colts' victory over Jets ended in final score that's never happened before in NFL history - CBS Sports

In 1980, one of Frederickss closest colleagues at Bennington, Bernard Malamud, offers to act as an intermediary with F.S.G., which publishes Malamuds novels. This time, Fredericks sends journals from 1966 and 1967, which chronicle his time at the Buddhist monastery in Kyoto and a failed relationship with a Japanese man who joins him back in Vermont. Months go by without word from Giroux. But in January of 1981 Fredericks visits New York, where he stays in an Upper East Side apartment belonging to Merrill. He has an appointment to meet Giroux for lunch at the Players club: Monday a little after eleven, the 19th. It could be one of the more important days in my life. Certainly whatever I have been moving towards finds its happy fulfilment.

The happy fulfilment is not just about Giroux and the journal: Fredericks has met an attractive waiter at a French restaurant, and he has bought tickets for them to attend a new production of Un Ballo in Maschera, at the Met. For once, the haste of a journal entry makes perfect dramatic sense.

When Fredericks sits down to write again the following day, his mood has changed drastically:

Whatever little order I had has swiftly crumbled, and a random paragraph or two here is all I can manage. Im not really sure what happened yesterday. How can I? And how could I possibly have thought there would be any simple and clearcut gesture? I hardly expected to come home with a contract under either armand yet... what did happen?

The lunch with Giroux has been amiable enough, but his message about the journal and its prospects is confusing. He began first by saying it really couldnt be published until after I was dead, Fredericks reports, because passages concerning the lives and the intimacies of others pose legal difficulties. There is also the problem of some anti-Semitic remarkseveryone has thoughts that other people would find offensive, Giroux explains, but you simply cant say those things in print and get away with it. But these arent the only issues: It was too long as it was. It repeated many thingseven the obsessively constant concern with sexual adventuretoo often.... There were too many names and incidents that everywhere needed... footnoting and the knowledge of other volumes of the journal.

Most bewildering, Fredericks writes, is the fact that Girouxeven as he offers no compliments on the writingspeaks as if it were inevitable that the journal will eventually be published and admired, as if he himself took its importance and value as something so obvious one did not even mention it. Any book fashioned from the journal should be marketed as fiction, Giroux advises. Fredericks writes:

Puzzled by how specific he was and yet how entirely lacking in praise or enthusiasm, I askedin saying I trusted his judgment more than anyonesIs it really worth doing, reducing these pages to a novel. Yes, he said quite briskly and then almost tenderly, of course its worth doing.

This is one of the few passages I have found in the archive where Fredericks actually fulfills his stated ideals about the journal as a living thing. We eagerly follow the protagonist into a series of dramatic events that he cant foresee, and feel that we have been granted privileged access to a life as it unfolds. The author is both narrator and protagonist of a story so palpableso true, to use one of Frederickss favored wordsthat it feels like were there. And we sympathize with him as both a literary figure and a human being.

At Christmastime, 1983, Donna Tartt was home from Bennington with her family, in Mississippi, working on her fiction and studying Latin and French. In one of several letters to Fredericks archived at the Getty, she describes a household aflutter with telegrams and phone calls and parties and presents and flowersher sister is about to have her dbutante ball, and seamstresses are going in and out. Tartt tells Fredericks that she has insulated herself from the excitement by moving into a playhouse in the back yard where she spent time as a little girl; its quite small, she writes, but so is she. Tartt finds it comforting to live amidst all the tea sets and stuffed animals and rag rugs she grew up with. Her family, however, is upset. Each night, her mother comes out to the playhouse, dressed elegantly for a party, and offers her extra blankets, begging her to come home. Its a potent image: the young writer, marooned with her family for the holidays, taking refuge where she first learned to invent. Its a boon to Tartts future biographers, especially as it brings to mind a line of Julian Morrows in The Secret History which was almost surely uttered first by Fredericks. When Richard Papen, the student narrator, makes the mistake of referring to classroom assignments in Greek as work, Julian issues a grandiloquent correction: I should call it the most glorious kind of play.

In response to fact-checking inquiries, Tartt replied, In public, and whenever I have been asked about it through my career, I have denied that the character of Julian Morrow is based on the Claude Fredericks I knew and lovedexcept in the most superficial respects. To me, this confusion is both tragic and unfair to the memory of Claude. As a student at Bennington, I was struck by how students and literature faculty alike loved to gossip and spin tales and embroider anecdotes and invent rumors about Claude that invariably cast him as a sinister, ridiculously wealthy, and larger-than-life personage that he was not, a tradition that unfortunately, and insidiously, persists. It was these erroneous and larger-than-life fictions that caught my imagination as a young writer and went into the formation of the fictional character of Julian Morrow rather than the kind and generous person of Claude himself, and when the novel was published, in 1992, I was horrified when journalists in Europe and America presumed to state flatly that the character of Julian Morrow was Claude, treating their surmise as established truth, a problem that continues to this day. But unfortunately, now as then, people prefer to see fiction as fact.

Tartt and Fredericks were close. In letters that she sent to him while still his studentshe calls him magister, a Latin form of address to scholarsshe clearly craves his respect and tries to meet him as an equal. But Tartt is already the superior writer. The letter about the playhouse shows a precocious gift for characterization, and she nimbly conveys her familys bustle in a single atmospheric paragraph. (In fact, the Salingeresque glamour may be confected: a new podcast, Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College, suggests that Tartts family origins are humbler than she depicts.)

She exerts similar skill in transforming Fredericks into a fictional character: to heighten the sense that Julian is a figure of mysterious allure, Tartt initially gives the reader only tantalizing glimpses of him, as when he is seen peeking through a cracked door, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding. When one of the student characters has to complete an evaluation form about Julians teaching, he leaves the comments section blank, asking how he can possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?

If Julian is a divinity in The Secret History, he is a deeply ambiguous one. By the end of the novel, his aestheticism and his cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death have come to appear disquieting to Richard: His voice chilled me to the bone.... The twinkle in Julians eye, as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.

This dramatic reappraisal of Julian may have occurred entirely in the playhouse of Tartts imagination. Or perhaps she just looked with a merciless eye at the professor who inspired her charactera man whose dark complexities served her pursuit of art.

In January of 1973, Fredericks writes, I awoke this morning thinking perhaps that I had after all squandered my lifepursuing dreams that could not be realised, pursuing one infatuation after another. Others were famous or rich. Others had families. Had I not squandered all those extraordinary talents I had as a writer? Self-recrimination is a familiar trope in Frederickss journal, but the sombre tone is new. He is middle-aged and beset by bills and debts; the seemingly effortless life of sensual indulgence that he has shared so freely with others has not come cheap. His closest friend, the wealthy and well-travelled Merrill, has been publishing steadily, with increasing recognition that he is a great poet. In earlier entries, Fredericks has remarked how strange it was to have his two closest friends, Merrill and Malamud, each win a National Book Award in 1967. He feels left behind, and a bit bored, and the journal reflects his enervation.

Meanwhile, Bennington, originally a school for women, has turned coed. Before long, almost half the students signed up for Frederickss Religious Experience class are male. His journal is reshaped by this change: the diaristic entries of past years start being replaced by copies of notes or letters written to students. It isnt clear if the versions recorded in the journal are first drafts or later transcriptions. Sometimes he is pursuing four or five young men simultaneously, and for months at a stretch the letters supplant any other kind of entry. Reading the pages from this period, at the Getty, I began to wonder if they constituted a journal at all.

Robert Sternau was one of Frederickss students in the seventies, at the time when Peter Golub was an undergraduate at Bennington, and he has similar memories of tutorials at the Pawlet farmhousein his case, on Dantes Commedia. Once a week, Fredericks would read a canto aloud in Dantes Italian, and Sternau would read it aloud in English translation. Then we would discuss it, he recalled. It was just an unbelievable opportunity to have someone who knew the material that well, and who devoted that kind of one-on-one time to me. Sternau helped out in the yard and went for walks with Fredericks along the wooded edges of the property to post no trespassing signs. They cooked with vegetables from the garden; Fredericks showed Sternau how the letterpress worked, and they collaborated on some printing projects. He tutored me on shakuhachi flute, Sternau recalled. Claude was quite adept. He did everything with perfection. Sternau sensed from the start that Fredericks was attracted to him, but, he said, I think I was a bit naveat that point in his life, he told me, he was trying to be chaste.

The turn in their relationship came when they reached the end of the Dante tutorial, with a joint reading of Purgatorio. Sternau said, of Fredericks, He was like my Virgilhe took me as far as Paradise. Claude could be quite dramatic. Sternau realized that Fredericks, despite his talk of chastity, had developed an abiding sexual interest in him. He asked me if I would be the executor of his journal, Sternau recalled. Being eighteen or nineteen at the time, it was somewhat frightening. I think it was his way of trying to commit to me. Id been shown about thirty-five thousand pages of it, and I knew it was a massive opus. Not something that I wanted to commit to. Fredericks, he said, accepted his demurral. (You assured me so stubbornly that it was my friendship and not my love you wanted, Fredericks complains to Sternau, in a letter preserved in the journal. But when indeed I did just that, offering you friendship instead of love, you seemed somehow disappointed and distant.)

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The Most Ambitious Diary in History - The New Yorker

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One August night in 2020, David Graeber the anthropologist and anarchist activist who became famous as an early organizer of Occupy Wall Street took to Twitter to make a modest announcement.

My brain feels bruised with numb surprise, he wrote, riffing on a Doors lyric. Its finished?

He was referring to the book hed been working on for nearly a decade with the archaeologist David Wengrow, which took as its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies.

Even before the Occupy movement made him famous, Graeber had been hailed as one of the most brilliant minds in his field. But his most ambitious book also turned out to be his last. A month after his Twitter announcement, Graeber, 59, died suddenly of necrotizing pancreatitis, prompting a shocked outpouring of tributes from scholars, activists and friends around the world.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, out Nov. 9 from Farrar Straus and Giroux, may or may not dislodge the standard narrative popularized in mega-sellers like Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiens and Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs and Steel. But it has already gathered a string of superlative-studded (if not entirely uncritical) reviews. Three weeks before publication, after it suddenly shot to #2 on Amazon, the publisher ordered another 75,000 copies on top of the 50,000 first printing.

In a video interview last month, Wengrow, a professor at University College London, slipped into a mock-grandiose tone to recite one of Graebers favorite catchphrases: We are going to change the course of human history starting with the past.

More seriously, Wengrow said, The Dawn of Everything which weighs in at a whopping 704 pages, including a 63-page bibliography aims to synthesize new archaeological discoveries of recent decades that havent made it out of specialist journals and into public consciousness.

Theres a whole new picture of the human past and human possibility that seems to be coming into view, he said. And it really doesnt resemble in the slightest these very entrenched stories going around and around.

The Big History best-sellers by Harari, Diamond and others have their differences. But they rest, Graeber and Wengrow argue, on a similar narrative of linear progress (or, depending on your point of view, decline).

According to this story, for the first 300,000 years or so after Homo sapiens appeared, pretty much nothing happened. People everywhere lived in small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups, until the sudden invention of agriculture around 9,000 B.C. gave rise to sedentary societies and states based on inequality, hierarchy and bureaucracy.

But all of this, Graeber and Wengrow argue, is wrong. Recent archaeological discoveries, they write, show that early humans, far from being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures, self-consciously experimented with a carnival parade of political forms.

Its a more accurate story, they argue, but also a more hopeful and more interesting one.

We are all projects of collective self-creation, they write. What if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

The books own origins go back to around 2011, when Wengrow, whose archaeological fieldwork has focused on Africa and the Middle East, was working at New York University. The two had met several years earlier, when Graeber was in Britain looking for a job after Yale declined to renew his contract, for unstated reasons that he and others saw as related to his anarchist politics.

In New York, the two men sometimes met for expansive conversation over dinner. After Wengrow went back to London, Graeber started sending me notes on things Id written, Wengrow recalled. The exchanges ballooned, until we realized we were almost writing a book over email.

At first, they thought it might be a short book on the origins of social inequality. But soon they started to feel like that question a chestnut going back to the Enlightenment was all wrong.

The more we thought, we wondered why should you frame human history in terms of that question? Wengrow said. It presupposes that once upon a time, there was something else.

Wengrow, 49, an Oxford-educated scholar whose manner is more standard-issue professorial than the generally rumpled Graeber, said the relationship was a true partnership. He, like many, spoke with awe of Graebers brilliance (as a teenager, a much-repeated story goes, his hobby of deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics caught the eye of professional archaeologists), as well as what he described as his extraordinary generosity.

David was like one of those Amazonian village chiefs who were always the poorest guy in the village, since their whole function was to give things away, Wengrow said. He just had that ability to look at your work and sprinkle magic dust over the whole thing.

Most recent big histories are by geographers, economists, psychologists and political scientists, many writing under the guiding framework of biological evolution. (In a cheeky footnote assessing rival Big Historians expertise, they describe Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, as the holder of a Ph.D on the physiology of the gall bladder.)

Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, write in the grand tradition of social theory descended from Weber, Durkheim and Levi-Strauss. In a 2011 blog post, Graeber recalled how a friend, after reading his similarly sweeping Debt: The First 5,000 Years said he wasnt sure anyone had written a book like that in 100 years. Im still not sure it was a compliment, Graeber quipped.

The Dawn of Everything includes discussions of princely burials in Europe during the ice age, contrasting attitudes toward slavery among the Indigenous societies of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, the political implications of dry-land versus riverbed farming, and the complexity of preagricultural settlements in Japan, among many, many other subjects.

But the dazzling range of references raises a question: Who is qualified to judge whether its true?

Reviewing the book in The Nation, the historian Daniel Immerwahr called Graeber a wildly creative thinker who was better known for being interesting than right and asked if the books confident leaps and hypotheses can be trusted.

And Immerwahr deemed at least one claim that colonial American settlers captured by Indigenous people almost invariably chose to stay with them ballistically false, claiming that the authors single cited source (a 1977 dissertation) actually argues the opposite.

Wengrow countered that it was Immerwahr who was reading the source wrong. And he noted that he and Graeber had taken care to publish the books core arguments in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals or deliver them as some of the most prestigious invited lectures in the field.

I remember thinking at the time, why do we have to put ourselves through this? Wengrow said of the process. Were reasonably established in our fields. But it was David who was adamant that it was terribly important.

James C. Scott, an eminent political scientist at Yale whose 2017 book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States also ranged across fields to challenge the standard narrative, said some of Graeber and Wengrows arguments, like his own, would inevitably be thrown out as other scholars engaged with them.

But he said the two men had delivered a fatal blow to the already-weakened idea that settling down in agricultural states was what humans had been waiting to do all along.

But the most striking part of The Dawn of Everything, Scott said, is an early chapter on what the authors call the Indigenous critique. The European Enlightenment, they argue, rather than being a gift of wisdom bestowed on the rest of the world, grew out of a dialogue with Indigenous people of the New World, whose trenchant assessments of the shortcomings of European society influenced emerging ideas of freedom.

Ill bet it has a huge significance in our understanding of the relationship between the West and the rest, Scott said.

The Dawn of Everything sees pervasive evidence for large complex societies that thrived without the existence of the state, and defines freedom chiefly as freedom to disobey. Its easy to see how such arguments dovetail with Graebers anarchist beliefs, but Wengrow pushed back against a question about the books politics.

Im not particularly interested in debates that begin with slapping a label on a piece of research, he said. It almost never happens with scholars who lean right.

But if the book helps convince people, in the words of the Occupy slogan, that another world is possible, thats not unintentional.

Weve reached the stage of history where we have scientists and activists agreeing our prevailing system is putting us and our planet on a course of real catastrophe, Wengrow said. To find yourself paralyzed, with your horizons closed off by false perspectives on human possibilities, based on a mythological conception of history, is not a great place to be.

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'The Dawn of Everything' Aims to Rewrite the Story of our Shared Past - The New York Times

A large crystal chandelier that sold to Hudson Valley Live, a new entertainment venue in Newburgh.

Chandeliers, fireplace mantels, large doorways complete with their original doors, grandfather clocks, bathtubs, stained glass windows and full window frames are all part of the offerings at Hudson Valley House Parts in Newburgh all salvaged pieces of architectural history saved from being thrown away during the processes of remodeling old homes and making them new again.

While Reggie Young, the stores owner, knows that not everyone wants such pieces, he cant help but occasionally try to convince some people to keep them.

Sometimes we beg people not to sell us this stuff, he said. I say to people, Please dont sell this to me. You should not be getting rid of this. But its the nature of the world, that people want new.

For those who prefer to outfit their homes with pieces of history, however, Hudson Valley House Parts saves those elements, bringing them to the designers, architects and homeowners who know their worth and how to reconfigure their presence into modern spaces.

Its nothing like an average antique shop, Young said.

We specialize in oversized things like 12-foot-tall mansion doors and columns, he explained. We have a lot of large-scale stuff, which is very difficult to do because you have to move it, install it, sell it and move it again. Its difficult to do, but thats an aspect that we love.

Young developed his own taste for vintage pieces and got his start in salvaging and restoring historic architecture in a few ways, including growing up on a farm with parents who worked as restorers.

His own first foray into the field was building a restaurant on Manhattans 42nd Street in 1979, when he was an architecture student at the Pratt Institute.

I went to United House Wrecking and bought doors to use to make the paneling for the bar that was my introduction to salvage, Young said.

After years spent similarly designing and building other restaurants, he spent two decades at his restoration company specializing in brownstone and historic mortar restoration.

We did projects both in the Hudson Valley a ton of projects in Hudson before Hudson really happened and then up and down the river until the housing crash, at which point we had to go to Brooklyn because there was nothing happening upstate, Young said. We specialized in restoration of brownstones, so thats kind of my background.

Back to the Valley

Three years ago, Young decided to use his expertise to start Hudson Valley House Parts, recognizing that options were dwindling in the area for salvaged and restored house parts. During the pandemic he watched similar stores close, including Keystone in the town of Hudson and United House Wrecking in Stamford. According to Young, the latter was one of the oldest and largest salvage businesses in the area.

Newburgh, he thought, was an ideal location for the business, due both to its diverse population and historic architecture and its location.

I had worked on a building in Newburgh 20 years ago, on a preservation project, and thats how I discovered Newburgh, he recalled. I really wanted to move to Newburgh for a very long time because of the architecture, which is why people continue to come to Newburgh, actually theyre drawn to the history and architecture and incredible stock of historic buildings.

In addition, he said, Newburgh had a lot of abandoned housing stock, and a lot of buildings are being totally rehabbed.

Many of the materials also come from historic homes in Connecticut towns like Greenwich, Stamford, Darien and Norwalk, but Young also sources from connections with contractors and pickers all over the country, gaining new ones all the time.

The store has grown through the years with a decidedly local bent, helped along by the recent influx of new residents to the Valley. But the store is also taking steps to reach new customers from all over.

Young spends hours every day sourcing materials from connections in the construction industry, estate sales and other sources, delivering them to some clients who never set foot in the store, but might come across his store by way of its Instagram, which has almost 26,000 followers.

Covids changed everything because we survive now by selling to people who arent even coming into the brick-and-mortar store, Young said. Thats really how we survived, through Instagram and our website and online sales. Then in terms of people coming into the store, its people from Westchester, from everywhere that we see.

Young said his clientele fit a few main categories: homeowners working on their own restoration or remodeling projects or just looking to add some pieces; architects and designers looking for specialty pieces for professional home projects; and more niche clients like those in the film industry looking for specific period pieces, or people from across the country looking for unusual, higher-end pieces.

The uptick in filming activity in the Hudson Valley which isnt showing signs of slowing down anytime soon was a boon to the store during the pandemic, allowing it to score several sales and connections to high-profile projects with items that wouldnt be a good fit for homeowners and residential projects.

We carry a lot of period plumbing from all different periods, so recently weve been selling a lot to the show The White House Plumbers, Young said. Weve done a lot of work with the Gossip Girl set. During the pandemic they actually bought a lot of stuff from us, which kind of saved us through that period. Weve sold stuff for the sets for Mrs. Maisel.'

At home in Newburgh

Though gaining more high-profile clients over the years, Youngs pride at being a member of the Newburgh community shows through.

He said his work and the store are a way to preserve the history of the Hudson Valley, which he hopes to share with other members of the community and to show the rest of the world what the region has to offer.

Hudson Valley House Parts hosts community educational programming and resources like preservation classes and workshops, which Young reports are attended by people from all over the country, spanning an economically, racially and socially diverse group.

Young himself hosts mortar restoration classes, the next of which will take place on Oct. 30. Other local experts also contribute, like Ben Brandt of Newburgh Sash and Restorations, whose next window restoration workshop will take place Nov. 12 and 13.

Hudson Valley House Parts seems to have gained a firm footing as both a community business and one that brings the treasures of the region to those who appreciate it nationwide. Young himself is very invested in the recent changes and development of the city of Newburgh and the Hudson Valley as a whole, with many new large-scale residential and hotel projects in the works.

Its very interesting to watch all this happening, Young said, opining that Newburgh in particular offers something different than the trendiness of such towns as Hudson or Beacon.

(The city) is just too diverse to become one thing, he said. Thats what makes it, I think, so interesting to all of us who are here.

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Restoring history and homes with Hudson Valley House Parts - Westfair Online

The ancient Egyptians were carrying out sophisticated mummifications of their dead 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence which could lead to a rewriting of the history books.

The preserved body of a high-ranking nobleman called Khuwy, discovered in 2019, has been found to be far older than assumed and is, in fact, one of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever discovered. It has been dated to the Old Kingdom, proving that mummification techniques some 4,000 years ago were highly advanced.

The sophistication of the bodys mummification process and the materials used including its exceptionally fine linen dressing and high-quality resin was not thought to have been achieved until 1,000 years later.

Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and a leading expert on the history of mummification, told the Observer: If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised.

She added: This would completely turn our understanding of the evolution of mummification on its head. The materials used, their origins, and the trade routes associated with them will dramatically impact our understanding of Old Kingdom Egypt.

Until now, we had thought that Old Kingdom mummification was relatively simple, with basic desiccation not always successful no removal of the brain, and only occasional removal of the internal organs. Indeed, more attention was paid to the exterior appearance of the deceased than the interior. Also, the use of resins is far more limited in the Old Kingdom mummies thus far recorded. This mummy is awash with resins and textiles and gives a completely different impression of mummification. In fact, it is more like mummies found 1,000 years later.

It is among major discoveries to be revealed in National Geographics documentary series, Lost Treasures of Egypt, starting on 7 November. It is produced by Windfall Films, and the cameras follow international archaeologists during the excavation season in Egypt. The mummification discovery will feature in episode four entitled Rise of the Mummies on 28 November.

Ikram appears in that episode with fellow archaeologist Dr Mohamed Megahed, who says of the latest discovery: If its really Khuwy, this is a breakthrough in Ancient Egyptian history.

The mummys discovery in a lavish tomb in the necropolis at Saqqara was filmed in National Geographics earlier season. The investigation into its dating and analysis emerges in the new series. Hieroglyphs revealed that it belonged to Khuwy, a relation of the royal family who lived over 4,000 years ago.

Tom Cook, the series producer for Windfall Films, said: They knew the pottery in the tomb was Old Kingdom but [Ikram] didnt think that the mummy was from [that period] because it was preserved too well. They didnt think the mummification process [then] was that advanced. So her initial reaction was: this is definitely not Old Kingdom. But over the course of the investigation she started to come round [to the idea].

Ancient embalmers bathed bodies in expensive resins from tree sap, preserving the flesh before they wrapped the corpse. This mummy is impregnated with high-quality resins and wrapped in the highest-grade of bandages.

Ikram says in the programme: Its extraordinary. The only time Ive [seen] so much of this kind of good quality linen has been in the 21st dynasty. The 21st dynasty of Egyptian Pharaohs reigned more than 1,000 years after Khuwy lived.

Carolyn Payne, National Geographics commissioning editor, said that what makes this series so unusual is that it follows a whole group of different archaeologists across a season: We did see some amazing finds.

The documentary observes: With every new body archaeologists unearth, the story of the mummies of Egypt becomes clearer.

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Mummys older than we thought: new find could rewrite history - The Guardian