Category Archives: History

IN 1937, Life magazine sent a journalist to Vassar College to observe student life at the wealthiest of the Seven Sisters. Along with ho-hum details about academics, the ensuing article included a revelation that altered the way American women dress: an illustrated breakdown of what Vassar girls woretweed skirts, Brooks Brothers sweaters, polo coats, saddle shoes and jeans.

So enthusiastic was the response to Lifes fashion reporting that Macys hurriedly launched an ad campaign announcing that anyone could buy every item Life listed at its stores, a development the magazine trumpeted under the headline Vassar Girls Set Styles for Millions. Preppy, a look whose name comes from the prep schools its adherents attended, had germinated in Americas elite universities. But now it had slipped loose the bonds of the quad and implanted itself in both the countrys closets and its brainpan.

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A History of Preppy Style: From the College Quad to the Runway - The Wall Street Journal

Golf is not a game conducive to streaks, with so much changing week to week, hole to hole, even shot to shot. Which is what makes the precipice Jin Young Ko stood on all the more impressive.

Heading into this weeks BMW Ladies Championship, the World No. 2 had carded 14 consecutive scores in the 60s, matching the LPGA marks of Annika Sorenstam (2005) and So Yeon Ryu (2016-17) for most in tour history.

Of course, that's not my sole goal. When I go on course, I focus on myself. But I think that it helps you as a player to have some motivating factors, Ko said ahead of the opening round on Thursday at LPGA International Busan in Busan, South Korea. I will be happy to break a record and make a new record. I think it's really important for me to focus and concentrate on my game and also enjoy the game. And I think that at the end of the day, the records will be determined by how I play on the course and what kind of attitude I have.

So the pressure is there, but I think that I can keep the pressure in check. And I also think that having that ambition, I guess, to break records and that desire is also what drives players in general to be better.

Unfortunately for Ko, the streak came to an end Thursday when she shot a one-under 71. Yet her performance in matching Sorenstam and Ryus all-time records got us thinking: Where does her feat stand against other streaks in golf?

So, went back through the history books to look at record streaks in pro golf and came up with, in our humble opinion, a list of the most impressive:

Most consecutive years with a win

Kathy Whitworth pulled off this remarkable stretch on the LPGA for 17 straight years, with Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer doing the same for the men.

Jack Nicklaus Open Championship streak

The Golden Bear finished no worse than T-6 for 15 straight years at the Open Championship, with three wins and six runners-up in that span.

Most bogey-free holes

Jin Young Ko is no stranger to streaks. In 2019, she bested Tiger Woods mark of 110 holes without a bogey by going 114 holes, a stretch that saw Ko win the Canadian Women's Open.

Byron Nelsons win streak

Arguably the most famous streak in the sport, Nelson won 11 straight PGA Tour events from March to August in 1945including the PGA Championship, the only major played that year. The streak eventually ended with a T-4 finish at the Memphis Invitational.

Nelsons other streak

That would be 65 straight events finishing inside the top 10, a stretch that spanned over four years.

Most consecutive under-par rounds

Lydia Ko and Annika Sorenstam share this record at 29 consecutive rounds under par. On the PGA Tour the record is owned, perhaps surprisingly, by Tim Petrovic at 26 rounds.

A very familiar winner

Heres another impressive accomplishment by Sorenstam: She had holds the record for most consecutive years winning the same tournament, having been the champion of the Mizuno Classic five straight times from 2001-2005. The PGA Tour record is four, accomplished by Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Tiger Woods (twice).

The ultimate fairway finder

For 10 consecutive years on the PGA Tour (1981-1990), Calvin Peete was the leader in driving accuracy. In his best year, 1983, he hit 1,029 of 1,217 fairways, for a driving percentage of 84.55 percent, the best on record.

Weeks at World No. 1

Tiger Woods holds the record for most consecutive weeks as World No. 1 at 281. Hes also second on the list at 264 weeks. In a distant third is Greg Norman at 96 weeks.

Tigers cut streak

Tigers cut streak at 142 tournaments is well-known. Just as impressive: Woods beat the field average in 89 straight events.

Most consecutive birdies in a round

Nine, shared by Mark Calcavecchia and Kevin Chappell. Calcavecchia accomplished his feat at the 2009 Canadian Open, with Chappell matching it in 2019 on the way to a 59 at the Greenbrier Classic.

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

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The 11 most impressive streaks in pro golf history - Golf Digest

Corning N.Y. (WETM) The days of Incandescence in Corning have a deep history in the towns creation of glass products all the way back to the late 1800s.

The celebration is inspired by the events of Thomas Edison sending someone from his company to Corning Flint Glass Works to see if they could make the special glass required for his incandescent lamps back in 1880. The lamps could not be made using window glass, so a special request was made.

These events led to the first-ever glass bubble being made by a mysterious shop boy. Now, those moments are celebrated every October in the form of The Days of the Incandescence.

This 11-day event began today, Oct. 21, and stretches all the way to Halloween with different events happening almost every day.

The celebration kicked off today with a properly themed farmers market in Cornings Gaffer District that included live music, from the times of the late 1800s, and invited everyone to partake in dressing in costume while vendors sold fruits, vegetables, and handmade crafts.

For those that may have missed out on the farmers market, another is scheduled to take place on Oct. 28, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and will be exactly the same as the one from today.

On Oct. 22, 23, 28, and 29th haunted ghost tours will be held around the town by residents of 1880s Corning, tours begin and end spaces are limited, and registration must be done in advance and can be found here.

On Oct. 30 the Days ofIncandescenceCelebrationat Heritage Village will take place from noon-5:00 p.m.

This special 1-dayevent centers around the supernatural taleThe Legend of the Gathersinspired by the mysterious boy who blew the first light bulb and phantom folk who arrive each October to help get light out into the world.

The event has various different things happening in the village from the blacksmith, cooking, and dancing demonstrations, to free apples and cider, craft beer tasting, live music, and much more.

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When history and supernatural collide: The Days of Incandescence returns to Corning - WETM - MyTwinTiers.com

Celebrating its 11th anniversary as a First Lady initiative, Artistree 2021 asks artists, or any West Virginia resident, to create an ornament that Celebrates the magic of Christmas.

I want to know what makes Christmas magical for West Virginians all over our state, First Lady Cathy Justicesaid.Art is a great way to express yourself and your favorite memories. So, when youre creating an ornament for our tree, keep that idea in mind.

Ornaments must be hand-crafted and suitable for hanging on a tree. Size and weight should be taken into consideration.

Submissions must be mailed to:

Elizabeth YeagerWest Virginia Department of Arts, Cultureand HistoryThe Culture Center1900 Kanawha BlvdE, Charleston, WV 25305ATTN: Artistree

The submission form and additional details can be downloaded at the following link:bit.ly/Artistree2021.

Participating artists will also be featured in the 2021 Artistree catalog.

For more information, please contact Elizabeth Yeager at 304-558-0240 or Elizabeth.A.Yeager@wv.gov.

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First Lady Cathy Justice, WV Dept. of Arts, Culture and History invite artists to create ornaments for the 2021 Artistree - Governor Jim Justice

Visualizing the Global Silver Supply Chain

Although silver is widely known as a precious metal, its industrial uses accounted for more than 50% of silver demand in 2020.

From jewelry to electronics, various industries utilize silvers high conductivity, aesthetic appeal, and other properties in different ways. With the adoption of electric vehicles, 5G networks, and solar panels, the world is embracing more technologies that rely on silver.

But behind all this silver are the companies that mine and refine the precious metal before it reaches other industries.

The above infographic from Blackrock Silver outlines silvers global supply chain and brings the future of silver supply into the spotlight.

Although silver miners operate in many countries across the globe, the majority of silver comes from a few regions.

Mexico, Peru, and Chinathe top three producerscombined for just over 50% of global silver production in 2020. South and Central American countries, including Mexico and Peru, produced around 390 million ouncesroughly half of the 784 million ounces mined globally.

Silver currency backed Chinas entire economy at one point in history. Today, China is not only the third-largest silver producer but also the third-largest largest consumer of silver jewelry.

Poland is one of only three European countries in the mix. More than 99% of Polands silver comes from the KGHM Polska Mied Mine, the worlds largest silver mining operation.

While silvers supply chain spans all four hemispheres, concentrated production in a few countries puts it at risk of disruptions.

The mining industry can often be subject to political crossfire in jurisdictions that arent safe or politically stable. Mexico, Chile, and Peruthree of the top five silver-producing nationshave the highest number of mining conflicts in Latin America.

Alongside production in politically unstable jurisdictions, the lack of silver-primary mines reinforces the need for a sustainable silver supply chain. According to the World Silver Survey, only 27% of silver comes from silver-primary mines. The other 73% is a by-product of mining for other metals like copper, zinc, gold, and others.

As the industrial demand for silver rises, primary sources of silver in stable jurisdictions will become more valuableand Nevada is one such jurisdiction.

Nevada, known as the Silver State, was once the pinnacle of silver mining in the United States.

The discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, one of Americas richest silver deposits, spurred a silver rush in Nevada. But after the Comstock Lode mines began declining around 1874, it was the Tonopah district that brought Nevadas silver production back to life.

Tonopah is a silver-primary district with a 100:1 silver-to-gold ratio. It also boasts 174 million ounces of historical silver production under its belt. Furthermore, between 1900 and 1950, Tonopah produced high-grade silver with an average grade of 1,384 grams per tonne. However, the Second World War brought a stop to mining in Tonopah, with plenty of silver left to discover.

Today, Nevada is the second-largest silver-producing state in the U.S. and the Tonopah district offers the opportunity to revive a secure and stable source of primary silver production for the future.

Blackrock Silver is working to bring silver back to the Silver State with exploration at its flagship Tonopah West project in Nevada.

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Smashing Atoms: The History of Uranium and Nuclear Power - Visual Capitalist

At the southern edge of Sweden,not far from the picturesque town of Ronneby, lies a tiny island called Stora Ekon. Sprinkled with pine trees, sheep and a few deserted holiday cottages, the low-lying island is one of hundreds that shelter the coast from the storms of the Baltic Sea. For centuries, the spot was a popular anchorage point, but the waters are now mostly quiet; the most prominent visitors, apart from the occasional pleasure boat, are migrating swans.

For a few weeks in May, however, a new island intruded on this peaceful scene: A square wood raft topped with two converted shipping containers just a few hundred feet from Stora Ekons shoreward coast. The floating platform was busy with divers and archaeologists, here to explore what lies beneath the waves: the wreck of a ship called Gribshunden, a spectacular floating castle that served as the royal flagship of King Hans of Denmark more than 500 years ago. Historical sources record how the ship sank in the summer of 1495, along with a large contingent of soldiers and Danish noblemen, although not the king himself, who was ashore at the time.

Shipwrecks from this period are exceedingly rare. Unless a ship is buried quickly by sediment, the wood is eaten away over the centuries by shipworm, actually a type of saltwater clam. But these organisms dont survive in the fresher waters of the Baltic, and archaeologists believe that much of Hans vessel and its contents are preserved. That promises them an unprecedented look at the life of a medieval king who was said to travel with an abundance of royal possessions, not only food and clothing but weapons, tools, textiles, documents and precious treasures. More than that, the relic provides a unique opportunity to examine a state-of-the-art warship from a little-understood period, when a revolution in shipbuilding and naval warfare was reshaping geopolitics and transforming civilization. What Gribshunden represents, researchers think, is nothing less than the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world.

At the edge of the raft, Brendan Foley, an archaeologist from Lund University in Sweden, and his chief safety officer, Phil Short, are getting ready to dive. Despite the springtime sun, a cold wind blows. Because the water temperature is below 50 degrees, the divers are wearing drysuits and heated underwear that will allow them to work for two hours or more. After extensive planning and a long pandemic delay, Foley is visibly eager to enter the water. Ive been waiting for this moment for two years, he says. He steps off the deck with a splash and makes an OK sign before disappearing from view.

The story of Gribshunden is preserved in several Chronicles, narrative histories written in northern Europe in the 16th century, and in an eyewitness account by a young nobleman who survived the disaster. The accounts describe how King Hans, who reigned over Denmark and Norway from 1481 to 1513, sailed east from Copenhagen in the summer of 1495 toward Kalmar, Sweden, to attend a political summit. Europe was then emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Dukes and kings ruled from giant castles, and every noblemans wardrobe included a suit of armor. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was starting work on The Last Supper. In Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus was beginning his studies in astronomy.

Across the Baltic Sea, Denmark, Norway and Sweden had been ruled together under an agreement called the Kalmar Union for close to 100 years, but Sweden had broken away, and rebels there, led by a nobleman named Sten Sture, sought independence. Hans was on a mission to quell the dissent and revive the union by becoming king of Sweden, too. According to the accounts, Hans took a suitably regal fleet of 18 ships, led by Gribshunden, which carried his courtiers, noblemen, soldiers, even a royal astronomer.

But many of them never arrived: Hans flagship sank while anchored just north of Stora Ekon. A 16th-century account of Hans life, only recently translated from Latin, suggests the ships store of gunpowder accidentally ignited, causing a fire that consumed the ship so quickly that many on board perished in the smoke and flames. Others threw themselves into the water and drowned. The source adds that the fire occurred while the king was attending a meeting of supporters, probably on Stora Ekon. Other sources record the treasures that sank with the ship: clothes, precious things, seals and letters, and silver, gold, charters and the kings best stores.

Local divers came across the wrecks protruding timbers in the summer of 1971, unaware of its historical significance, and they collected the curious lead balls they found nearby as souvenirs. One of the divers finally alerted local archaeologists to the wreck in 2001, after he found strange, hollowed-out logs resting on the seafloor: carriages, researchers realized, that once held cannons. This was no fishing boat or trading vessel, it turned out. It was a centuries-old warship of a type never before seen.

In northern Europe, boats were long built by riveting together overlapping planks to make a waterproof shell. Viking longships, with their rounded hulls and single, square sails, used this clinker construction method. In southern Europe, by contrast, there was a tradition of carvel construction, in which hull planks were placed edge to edge. In the 15th century, carvel planking spread north, becoming the design of choice for kings and noblemen throughout Europe. Carvel-built hulls gained their strength from the internal ribs, or skeleton, which also made it easier to build larger ships that could carry extensive cargo, crew and stores. And crucially, in contrast to clinker vessels, they could accommodate gun ports, which meant that heavy guns could be carried deep inside the hull without toppling a ship. Scandinavian ships were beautiful and elegant and sailed to Iceland and Greenland, says Filipe Castro, a nautical archaeologist previously based at Texas A&M University. But when the opportunity to put guns on them came along, he continued, they proved inadequate.

By the end of the 15th century, shipwrights in Portugal and Spain were combining northern and southern features to build heavily armed, uniquely large vessels that could cross oceans, spend months or even years at sea, and extend awesome military force. These were the space shuttles, as Castro calls them, that carried the explorers of the Age of Discovery: Christopher Columbus on his Spanish-sponsored voyage across the Atlantic in 1492; the Portuguese admiral Vasco da Gama, who sailed 12,000 miles around Africa, arriving in India in May 1498; and Ferdinand Magellan, who embarked on the first circumnavigation of the Earth (completed after his death in 1522). They allowed for a new globalization through colonization and exploitation, writes Johan Rnnby, a maritime archaeologist at Swedens Sodertorn University. The looting and transportation of gold, spices, sugar and many other goods across the oceans changed the world forever. Or, as Foley, puts it: This was the enabling technology for European domination of the planet.

But no example of these carvel-built ships of discovery, Iberian or otherwise, had ever been found intact, a deficit Castro describes as one of the big holes in our puzzle. Specialists have had to infer their design from artist interpretations and a few surviving miniature models, and had only the murkiest understanding of how this revolutionary technology spread through Europe.

That was about to change. In 2013, Niklas Eriksson, an archaeologist and expert in medieval ships at Stockholm University, inspected the wreck off Stora Ekon. The Swedish historian Ingvar Sjblom had speculated that the wreck was Gribshunden, based on its age and location, but others, including Eriksson, were skeptical. I thought it cant be, he told me.

But when he saw the wreck himself he was amazed. The hull was larger than reportednearly 100 feet longand there were remains of elevated, built-up areas, known as castles, that protruded out at the bow and stern. Moreover, the construction of the hull suggested the ship could only have belonged to the king. A chronicle of the life of Sten Sture, the Swedish rebel, described the long-lost Gribshunden as a rare kraffweel, or carvel, and what Eriksson realized during his dive was that the wrecks hull planks were laid edge to edge. It really was Hans royal ship: one of these pioneering vessels had been hiding in the shallow green waters of Sweden all along.

When Foley first learned about the wreck, he didnt believe it either. I thought if it was important, Id have heard of it already, he says, sitting in a makeshift office on the dive platform. On the table is an espresso machine he proudly tells me is the same model featured in The Life Aquatic, Wes Andersons irreverent homage to the marine explorer Jacques Cousteau.

Foley is a 52-year-old American with a genial manner and a sense for the dramatic. He trained with the oceanographer Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, and he now specializes in exploring underwater vessels of all types, from planes to submarines. He spent several years excavating a first-century B.C. cargo ship near the Greek island of Antikythera that sank with clay vessels, coins, bronze and marble artworks, and, most famously, a sophisticated mechanical device described as the worlds oldest computer. Before he came to Stora Ekon, he had been working for the U.S. military, recovering the remains of servicemen from crashed World War II bombers, one off Croatia and another off Sweden.

His journey to Stora Ekon began in 2017, after he joined his wife, Maria Hansson, a Swedish geneticist based in Lund, from Massachusetts, where Foley had worked at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When his new colleagues told him about Gribshunden, he assumed they were hyping a local attraction. Then he attended a meeting with Rnnby, Eriksson and colleagues from the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. They were telling me about the wreck, and I said, Are you kidding me? The only known example of a ship of discovery, the first example of a purpose-built warshipand its sitting in just nine meters of water?!

The site had already been mapped, and a few artifacts salvaged, including a giant, fearsome figurehead, carved to resemble a monster swallowing a screaming man. But, partly because of the cost, only limited excavations had been carried out. Foley formed a consortium of Swedish and Danish institutions and secured funding from the Crafoord Foundation, founded by the entrepreneur behind Tetra Pak, a multinational food packaging conglomerate, to explore further. In 2019, Foley conducted an initial excavation with Rnnby, who had led several previous studies of the wreck. Foley has been trying to return ever since. Days before work was set to begin this spring, two members of the research team informed Foley they couldnt join (one was recovering from Covid, another had his visa rejected). Then Foley found himself in the hospital facing emergency surgery for gallstones. I almost called it off, he says.

Instead, with his doctors approval and orders to follow a strict diet, he went ahead. The international group of experts hes assembled has set up a white scaffold on the seabed to define their excavation trench, choosing a site near the sternan educated guess about where the royal quarters were located.

Down on the seabed, Foley and the other divers work in pairsan archaeologist with a dive specialist. They sift through layers of debris, including firewood and smashed barrels. Farther down, everything is encased in a fine black sediment that jiggles like jello, Foley says. To remove it, the archaeologists use trowels or paintbrushes and suck up the resulting debris clouds into the hose of a dredge pumplike a giant vacuum cleanerto keep the water clear. (Later, they sift through the dredge pile to make sure they dont overlook any items of interest.) They also record every stage of the excavations by taking hundreds of photographs and videos that Paola Derudas, a data specialist from Lund University, builds into 3-D virtual maps of the site. At the ships stern, ghostly timbers, covered in marine growth, jut upward out of the silt. Elsewhere, the hull has split open and fallen outward, resulting in a jumble of planks that lie scattered in the green light. Its a beautiful mess! says Mikael Bjrk, an archaeologist from Swedens Blekinge Museum. But once you get to know it, you get a sense of the ship, he says. You can feel the story.

Artifacts recovered in 2019 hinted at the ships luxurious cargo: a concreted lump of silver coins, high-quality chain mail, and a fine alder wood tankard incised with a crown symbol. Now, over the course of three weeks, the divers unearth a panoply of additional items. A louse comb, plainly made from wood, attests to everyday life on a cramped ship that probably housed more than 150 souls. But there are signs of riches as well: more silver coins, a delicately stitched red-and-black suede slipper, and stores of exotic spices, including peppercorns, cloves and an enormous stash of saffron that when first uncovered dyed the water red, says archaeologist Marie Jonsson, of Denmarks Viking Ship Museum, who found it.

Even more unexpected is the discovery of several panels of elaborately decorated birch bark. One is embossed with a detailed peacock design; another shows an enigmatic beast that resembles a unicorn and still holds traces of gold paint. Eriksson suggests that the king, who received audiences on board during his travels, would have made sure his chambers were sumptuously decorated with textiles and tapestries. I think it was very fancy on board this ship.

These extravagances were not only for Hans personal comfort. The king amassed on his flagship everything and everyone to impress the Swedish noblemen waiting in Kalmar, Foley says. Of course, Hans didnt rely on soft power alone. The riches on display were backed up by the threat of violence.

Two hours after Foley and Short enter the water they emerge with a small collection of new artifacts. Foley holds up what looks like a giant wooden fork. Nice back scratcher! jokes Bjrk. The oversized item is soon identified as a linstock, used in naval warfare to hold the burning fuse when lighting a cannon. A carved symbol on the handletwo vertical strokes and a slanted horizontalmay be an owners mark. The prongs are charred from use.

It is one of several items that attest to Gribshundens military might. The iron cannons themselves have mostly rusted away, but nine wooden gun carriages have previously been recovered, and Foleys team soon adds a tenth. These range from five to nine feet long and would have held swivel guns in the ships bow and stern castles, as well as along both sides of the deck. The archaeologists also discover a 13.5-foot-long gun carriage that is far larger than any other previously found. For the time, says Foley, it was enormoustoo large to have been positioned across the ship without blocking the deck. He suggests it may be an early example of whats known from later warships as a stern chaser, used to fire off the back.

One historical source suggests that Gribshunden sailed with 68 guns, and based on the finds so far this could be accurate. That means the ship represented a revolution not just in ship design but in naval warfare. Medieval sea battles were essentially land battles carried out on a shipthe aim was to board an enemy vessel and fight hand to hand with swords and spears. But the wide-scale transition to larger, carvel-plank ships, combined with the invention of explosive artillery, enabled purpose-built warships fitted with huge cannons and ports that could support massive guns. That led, during the 16th century, to ships that could destroy enemy vessels and battled almost exclusively from a distance, with a design that persisted with few changes until the 19th century.

But the early history of these purpose-built warships is surprisingly poorly understood, says Kay Smith, an independent expert who previously worked at the Royal Armories at Englands Tower of London. To discover Gribshunden is absolutely amazing, she says. The guns on board were essentially wrought-iron tubes, built from hoops and staves like a barrel, which sat in wooden beds and were lit via powder chambers at the rear. Despite the enormous stern chaser, no gun ports have yet been found, and Smith notes that the other guns are still relatively small: for shooting combatants rather than sinking ships. Its a key find for our understanding of how ships and armaments were developing.

The next day, Foley emerges from his dive with a broad smile. We found something that has never been recovered before, he calls from the water. A few minutes later, relaxing on deck with a mug of steaming coffee, he explains that deep in the trench, just above the ships hull, he uncovered an intact crossbow, more than three feet long. Showroom quality, he gushes. I mean, its still got the bow string! Its got all the decorations. Ive never seen anything like it. He puts down his coffee, runs to the edge of the deck and does a victory somersault into the sea.

Weapons experts are similarly thrilled. Guy Wilson, of the Royal Armories, who specializes in early hand weapons, says that dated examples of crossbows from this period are practically nonexistent. The new find appears to be of a relatively advanced design and will be crucial for understanding the development of this quintessential medieval weapon. In fact, the team seems to have stumbled across what Foley describes as a small arms locker. By June, they recover no fewer than four complete crossbows, as well as components from several others, plus numerous wooden arrows, known as quarrels, with their wood, leather or feathered flights intact. The team also recovers the wooden stock from an arquebus, or early handgun, as well as the suggestively carved handle of a bollock dagger, popular among sailors and used for penetrating an opponents armor. To have another dated example of European arms technology, 50 years before the Mary Rosea warship belonging to Henry VIII that sank in 1545is very exciting, says Wilson. Its going to be amazingly important.

The items will take years to study. Wilson points out that it took three decades to complete the analyses of the artifacts recovered from the Mary Rose. Already, though, Gribshunden is providing a glimpse of warfare on the cusp of transition, as hand weapons gave way to powerful artillery and, with that, the capacity to wage war from a distancea distinctly modern power that still shapes conflict today.

The sun sparkles on the water, and two swans make a synchronized landing on the waves outside the floating office. Foley opens up his laptop and focuses on detailed scans and graphs on his screen. Its here, as much as on the seabed, that the science gets done, he says. In addition to the excavation, Foley is collaborating with material scientists, chemists, geologists and others to analyze artifacts he recovers as well as those previously salvaged from Gribshunden but never studied. CT scans of silver coins found in 2019 reveal they are Danish. Intriguingly, however, little else is. Scans of chain mail uncovered the name of a 15th-century metalworker from Nuremberg, Germany. Isotope analysis shows the lead cannonballs are also German. Meanwhile, dendrochronology, the analysis of tree rings in wood, shows that storage barrels came from ports across the Baltic, from Sweden to Poland to Latvia. Combined with the exotic spices, the findings show that Hans was a surprisingly cosmopolitan king, Foley says. Eriksson agrees. Gribshunden shows just how global medieval Denmark was during this time, he says.

Perhaps most surprising is an analysis, published this summer, of oak timbers from the ship itself, showing that it wasnt Danish either. The trees were felled in the early 1480s, matching the ships presumed date of construction. (The ship was first mentioned in a 1486 letter written by Hans while on board.) But its timbers evidently came from hundreds of miles away, along the river Meuse, and it was likely built where the Meuse meets the sea, in whats now the Netherlands. The implication is that after Hans came to power he wanted a pioneering, world-beating ship, but he didnt yet have the resources or know-how to build it himself, so he ordered it from specialists abroad.

Despite its likely origin in a Dutch shipyard, however, a new analysis has revealed surprising details about the ships construction. The broader switch to carvel planking happened in different ways in different regions: Dutch shipbuilders, for example, built the hull first and added the internal ribs later, whereas the Iberians constructed the frames first using specialized gauges and molds. The Iberian methodwhich was itself borrowed from the Italians, who learned it from the Byzantinesrequired sophisticated mathematical knowledge, but it was ultimately more efficient, giving ship designers greater control over the shape of the finished vessel; it was no accident that these vessels came to dominate global exploration.

This year, Rnnby and his colleague Jon Adams, a maritime archaeologist at Englands University of Southampton, examined detailed measurements of the hulls timbers, and the early results suggest the hull was built according to the frame-first Iberian stylesomething no scholar expected. Castro, who was not involved in the study, says that seeing this ship design so far north at this time would be exciting and important, evidence of a porous world where knowledge was traveling a lot faster and residing in more places than we previously thought. And it means that shipbuilding in the Baltic was not that far behind, if it was behind at all. Like the famous explorers and conquerors of the Iberian peninsula, northern Europe was ready to build ships that could carry guns and sail into the horizon.

This shipbuilding effort underscores Hans ambitions as king, says Per Seesko, a researcher at the Danish National Archives. Records show that, before it sank, Hans had sent Gribshunden as far as England, to negotiate fishing rights, and possibly farther afield. When he sailed to Kalmar with Gribshunden, it was the equivalent, Foley says, of bringing a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier: a projection of political and military might and, Hans hoped, proof that he was Swedens rightful king. For audiences used to smaller, traditional longboats, the sight of it must have been jaw-dropping. And when it sank, it was more than an embarrassment, or an economic blow, or a tragedy for the lives lost on boardit was a military setback.

Afterward, Hans continued on to Kalmar without his flagship, but his rival, the Swedish leader Sture, was delayed, and Hans, perhaps nervous about the comparison between Stures military resources and his own now-depleted fleet, didnt wait for him. He returned home without the Swedish crown. Two years later, he conquered Stockholm by force, but he soon lost the country again. He spent the rest of his reign fighting to get it back. In 1523, Sweden won outright independence from Hans son, Christian II.

Scholars such as Seesko and Foley like to play a parlor game about what might have happened if Gribshunden hadnt sunk. It was a turning point in history, says Foley. You might have had this Danish Nordic state emerge as a great power, a united Scandinavia to rival England under Henry VIII. Theres no telling how the map of Europe would have come to look. Even today the European Union might be balanced by a separate northern force.

There are also hints that Hans had bigger ambitions than control of the Baltic. A 16th-century letter reveals that Hans father, Christian I, dispatched his own northern voyage of discovery, financed by the Portuguese, that may have followed a route past Greenland into the North Atlantic that we know the Vikings traveled centuries earlier when they temporarily settled in North America. Some historians read the evidence as showing that, 20 years before Columbus arrived in the Americas, Christians ship reached cod country: Newfoundland.

Seesko says that Hans would have been aware of his fathers explorations, and Foley believes that Hans may well have had ambitions to cross the Atlantic. We have this dynamic, forward-looking, ambitious king, he says. If Hans had conquered Sweden in 1495, perhaps he might have pushed even farther. Hans was trying to do something new, Foley says. He was trying to empire-build. Rather than being built like a ship of discovery, then, meant to project power among his rivals in the region, perhaps Hans intended for Gribshunden to be a ship of discovery itself, with a mission to reach across the northern Atlantic toward an unknown world.

Its another day on the temporary island. The cold wind has gone and the water is as calm as a mirror. Its time for another dive, and Foleys head is full of what else might be hidden in the sediment. King Hans writing desk? The earliest known gun port? Human bones, from crew or noblemen trapped on board as Gribshunden sank? The joy of this wreck is that we never know whats going to come up, Foley once told me. Every day there is something new. He adjusts his mask and steps into the water. Bubbles rise as he descends half a millennium back in time.

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An Extraordinary 500-Year-Old Shipwreck Is Rewriting the History of the Age of Discovery - Smithsonian

With Homecoming weekend approaching, Penn State football will break out its throwbackGenerations Of Greatness uniforms when the team takes the field against Illinois on Saturday.

Despite being known for their simplicity, Penn States uniforms have changed quite a bit since the teams first official game in 1887. As the Nittany Lions honor the history and tradition of the program with the throwback uniforms, take a deep dive into the history books and look over the history of the Nittany Lions iconic threads.

Penn State adopted college football and a few other sports in 1887 when the Nittany Lions stepped onto the gridiron on Old Main Lawn for the first time to play Bucknell. Due to the early introduction, there wasnt a lot of interest surrounding the team or the rest of college football at the time. Players needed to provide their own uniforms and equipment to play, which caused teams to have a wide variety of colors and uniform styles on the field.

According to author Mark Harrington, Penn State players would give the balls to opposing players thinking they were on the same team. The Nittany Lions decided to pick matching colors for everyone to wear during games, and the team then chose to wear pink and black Penn States original school colors.

After playing nine games over the course of the next three seasons, the uniforms underwent normal wear and tear, as washing them bleached the pink to white while the sun lightened the black to navy blue. Thus, the student athletic association changed the teams colors to blue and white in 1890. The student body then officially made the iconic blue and white the schools official colors later in the year, according to Harrington.

To help the players identify each other, the Nittany Lions added numbers to the front and back of their uniforms in 1930.

In his fourth year as head coach, Rip Engle added stripes down the side of the teams pants and around the arm sleeves, similar to the Generations of Greatness uniforms that Penn State debuted in 2017. This later changed to a single stripe on the blue and white jerseys in the late 1950s, and the stripe on the pants was removed in the mid-1960s. The single stripe on the sleeves was removed in 1966 but reintroduced in 1980.

Once former head coach Joe Paterno took the reins from Engle, Penn States uniforms got one of its most iconic additions with numbers added to the helmets. Even though the numbers made a brief debut in 1961, they were quickly taken off and not permanently implemented until 1968. The numbers were removed from the helmets again in 1974.

After the 1970s, there were not any major changes to Penn States uniforms for a long while. The Nittany Lions made a few adjustments, the first coming in 1987 when the facemasks on the helmets were changed in color from gray to navy blue.

In 1993, Penn State signed a three-year deal with Nike worth $2.3 million. The Nittany Lions then added the iconic Nike swoosh to their sleeves. It was then moved toward the jerseys upper left over the players chests in 1994.

The Nittany Lions made their first change to the uniform in 2011 when the stripes were removed from the sleeves and collars. It was the first noticeable change to the naked eye since 1980.

Bill OBrien was hired as Penn State footballs head coach in January 2012, and he wanted to do something to honor the players who stayed through the sanctions imposed from the NCAA in response to the Sandusky scandal. He chose to do something that no coach has done at Penn State before him: put the players last names on the back of their jerseys. The Nittany Lions also added the Big Ten logo to the front of its jerseys, too.

Of course, nobody can forget the emotional end to Penn States season when players put No. 42 on the left side of their helmets to honor then-injured captain Michael Mauti on Senior Day. This was the first time Penn States helmets had numbers since 1974.

Penn State made another subtle adjustment to the uniforms when it added Penn State Athletics logo to the center of the collar.

In James Franklins second year as head coach, Penn State took the last names of the players jerseys, giving us the uniform that we are all used to seeing every Saturday at Beaver Stadium.

Do you have a favorite Penn State uniform? Which iteration of black shoes and basic blues looked the best in your eyes? Let us know in the comments!

Frankie is a junior accounting and economics major from Long Island, NY. You can probably recognize him as the typical Italian-American with slicked back black hair. He is an avid fan of the Rangers, Mets, Jets, and every Penn State Athletics team. Follow him on Twitter @frankiemarzano for obnoxious amounts of Penn State and Rangers content or email him at [emailprotected]

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Penn State History Lesson: Football Uniforms Through The Years - Onward State

Joyce Mullen was tapped as Insights new president and CEO earlier this week and said shes well prepared for the role after having more than a dozen roles at Dell Technologies throughout her 21 years there.

Insights current CEO, Ken Lamneck, announced in May he will be retiring at the end of this year. Mullen has been Insight for the past year and has served as the Tempe, Ariz.-based solution providers North America. Prior to that she was the president of Global Channel and Embedded & Edge Solutions for Dell Technologies.

Ive got so much to learn, so its great, Mullen told CRN of her new role. Ken [Lamneck] is going be helpful for a while and its fantastic. I feel very lucky to be in this position, very honored, very humbled and super, super excited.

The $8 billion solution provider ranked No. 15 on CRNs 2020 Solution Provider 500.

Click through to see CRNs exclusive interview with Mullen about how she feels about her new role and her thoughts on growing the company.

Read more:

Insight's Incoming CEO Joyce Mullen On Making History, M&A And Top Challenges - CRN

Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didnt know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.

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Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius. Not an extremely intelligent persona genius. Theres a qualitative difference. The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension. I had never experienced anything like it before. I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.

That person was David Graeber. In the 20 years after our lunch, he published two books; was let go by Yale despite a stellar record (a move universally attributed to his radical politics); published two more books; got a job at Goldsmiths, University of London; published four more books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a magisterial revisionary history of human society from Sumer to the present; got a job at the London School of Economics; published two more books and co-wrote a third; and established himself not only as among the foremost social thinkers of our timeblazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well readbut also as an organizer and intellectual leader of the activist left on both sides of the Atlantic, credited, among other things, with helping launch the Occupy movement and coin its slogan, We are the 99 percent.

On September 2, 2020, at the age of 59, David Graeber died of necrotizing pancreatitis while on vacation in Venice. The news hit me like a blow. How many books have we lost, I thought, that will never get written now? How many insights, how much wisdom, will remain forever unexpressed? The appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is thus bittersweet, at once a final, unexpected gift and a reminder of what might have been. In his foreword, Graebers co-author, David Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London, mentions that the two had planned no fewer than three sequels.

And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.

Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilizationliteracy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are stages in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).

It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, weve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the nextall this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. Weve had choices, they show, and weve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything were used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.

The bulk of the book (which weighs in at more than 500 pages) takes us from the Ice Age to the early states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There was no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other wordsno Tanzanian plain inhabited by mitochondrial Eve and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and therefore the emergence of our cognitive capacity for culture, and the actual development of culturea gap of many tens of thousands of yearsthat, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.

That evidence and morefrom the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groupsdemonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Gbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state. They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.

The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choicesconscious, deliberate, collectiveabout the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasnt worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possiblea process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, puritans who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

The authors carry this perspective forward to the ages that saw the emergence of farming, of cities, and of kings. In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably. (It also didnt start in only a handful of centersMesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, the same places where empires would first appearbut more like 15 or 20.) Early farming was typically flood-retreat farming, conducted seasonally in river valleys and wetlands, a process that is much less labor-intensive than the more familiar kind and does not conduce to the development of private property. It was also what the authors call play farming: farming as merely one element within a mix of food-producing activities that might include hunting, herding, foraging, and horticulture.

Settlements, in other words, preceded agriculturenot, as weve thought, the reverse. Whats more, it took some 3,000 years for the Fertile Crescent to go from the first cultivation of wild grains to the completion of the domestication processabout 10 times as long as necessary, recent analyses have shown, had biological considerations been the only ones. Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call the ecology of freedom: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.

From the December 2020 issue: The next decade could be even worse

The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern themthat scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that land of kings, urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, popular councils and citizen assemblies, Graeber and Wengrow write, were stable features of government, with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.

If anything, aristocracy emerged in smaller settlements, the warrior societies that flourished in the highlands of the Levant and elsewhere, and that are known to us from epic poetrya form of existence that remained in tension with agricultural states throughout the history of Eurasia, from Homer to the Mongols and beyond. But the authors most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. Many citizens, the authors write, enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.

And so we arrive at the state, with its structures of central authority, exemplified variously by large-scale kingdoms, by empires, by modern republicssupposedly the climax form, to borrow a term from ecology, of human social organization. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package thats persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only onewhich means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.

Is civilization worth it, the authors want to know, if civilizationancient Egypt, the Aztecs, imperial Rome, the modern regime of bureaucratic capitalism enforced by state violencemeans the loss of what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? Or does civilization rather mean mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others?

These are questions that Graeber, a committed anarchistan exponent not of anarchy but of anarchism, the idea that people can get along perfectly well without governmentsasked throughout his career. The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the indigenous critique. In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectualsindividuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.

The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of Frenchand, by extension, Europeansociety: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. Were richer, went the logic, so were better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

The Dawn of Everything is not a brief for anarchism, though anarchist valuesantiauthoritarianism, participatory democracy, small-c communismare everywhere implicit in it. Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.

How did we get stuck? the authors askstuck, that is, in a world of war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others suffering? Its a pretty good question. If something did go terribly wrong in human history, they write, then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence. It isnt clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline It Didnt Have to Be This Way. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - The Atlantic

As part of the most recent Nintendo Direct, the company unveiled plans to expand the Nintendo Switch Online service. Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack costs $50 USD a year instead of the usual $20 and gives players access to Animal Crossing: New Horizons DLC as well as a limited number of emulated Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: The expansion is too expensive. At $50, the price point is comparable to PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live, both of which retail at $60 for a 12-month subscription. Both of those services offer a handful of free games a month and discounts on their digital storefronts, in addition to online multiplayer for paid games (on both Xbox and PlayStation, free-to-play games don't require a subscription). At around $5 a month, that's a good deal, especially if you buy most of your games digitally. Unlike Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation also don't lock basic online features like voice chat behind a paywall--you get that without having to pay for Xbox Live or PlayStation Plus.

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Now Playing: Nintendo Switch Online and Expansion Pack Overview Trailer

At $20 USD, Nintendo's first basic online price point, it feels a tad scant. At $50, with only a couple of additional features, it feels stingy. That's especially true in light of the fact that the Switch launched without a paid online service--only later did the multiplayer in Splatoon 2, for example, become a feature of a paid online service. In comparison to its competitors, the Nintendo Switch Online expansion's inadequacy is plain to see. However, the details of what Nintendo's expanded service offers also show Nintendo's disregard for its history.

As has often been noted, the libraries of retro games on Nintendo Switch Online are severely limited. It's curation by a company man, sticking to established first-party classics while skipping over missteps or oddities or even just classics from third-party companies. It's difficult to imagine a definitive NES library without Mega Man or Castlevania, an SNES without Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger, or even an N64 without Banjo Kazooie, but this is exactly what Nintendo's online service offers. The Sega Genesis library does open this up a bit, but at least out of the gate, it is still missing major titles like Sonic and Knuckles and cult classics like Shadowrun.

Nintendo's own canon suffers from this, but the real cost is in the margins. NES and SNES alone had a wide variety of titles that go unrepresented here, from the horrific (like Clock Tower) to the tactical (Ogre Battle). Some never made their way to the US, playable now only through fan translations and ROM patches. Official releases, even on an online service, would open up these games to a broader audience. It would encourage a playful approach to gaming history, rather than the sterility of playing the hits. The service also focuses exclusively on home consoles, as opposed to handhelds, and entirely excludes more recent history. That emphasis shows its limits when one cannot play Metroid Fusion ahead of its sequel Dread. Nintendo relies on and encourages nostalgia for its own products, while simultaneously denying access to them, often limiting fans to either expensive or extralegal methods of playing.

To be clear, there are undoubtedly reasons both legal and practical why the service cannot offer more games. Why would Capcom or Konami or Square Enix offer up their games to Nintendo's online service, when they can force customers to pay a premium for their own proprietary nostalgia grabs? Including classic licensed games like Super Star Wars or Disney's Aladdin presents its own problems. However, because there are obstacles does not mean there are no solutions. Nintendo has worked with major companies to produce collaborations before; take a look at nearly every Smash DLC character. Other companies have faced similar issues in getting older games on their platform and nevertheless succeeded, at least partially. Xbox One gained comprehensive backward compatibility only after several updates. PSN offers PlayStation 2 games like Dark Cloud. It's also unlikely that every game would be a huge hurdle to get on the service. If Sora can be in Smash, I would hope it'd be possible to get Super Mario RPG on the Switch.

Setting aside the issue of the library itself, Nintendo Switch Online does have some convenient features. Online multiplayer is a fun treat with games like Kirby's Dream Course. The rewind feature is a lifesaver in brutal titles like Ninja Gaiden. These features, though, often serve to highlight the limited appeal of the service, rather than make it stand on its own. Save states and rewinding are foundational features of many emulators, at no additional cost. It's not surprising that emulation remains popular, when the official means of accessing these games is more expensive and, at best, only moderately less difficult. Additionally, what's the point of retro online multiplayer if I can't get some friends together for Mario Party? The reason for that, of course, is Nintendo's $60 Mario Party throwback releases later this month. The promise of the online service, easy and affordable retro gaming, extends into a labyrinth of costs.

In conversations like this, it is important to keep in mind that video games are, by nature, somewhat exclusionary. Video games and their consoles are expensive. Games often do not come with accessibility options for disabled players. The mechanics of interacting with the medium can be unintuitive or frustrating for the uninitiated. However, this does not mean that even for-profit companies cannot work to make the hobby more financially and practically accessible. It does not mean that Nintendo can't at least feign a desire to preserve its history. What if Nintendo included retro titles as a bonus for purchasing the system? This would let users, especially kids and families, access a history they might never have known, as well as boost sales for an already popular system. What if the service were constantly updating with new games, with resources devoted to newly translating or highlighting forgotten titles?

Nintendo likes to present itself as providing gaming for all, but its actions show a company like any other, one with a narrow vision of nostalgia and a disrespect for its own history. A historian or curator must cut and omit of course. A good one, though, keeps an eye toward the whole, both the known and obscure, and always grants resources for further reading. Nintendo will only show history on its own terms, thereby limiting exploration and, ironically, play. Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack's price point is only a symptom of that fundamental problem.

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Nintendo Disrespects Its Own History By Making It So Hard to Play - GameSpot