Mary Henrietta of England

The daughter of Charles I and mother of William III.

Wishing to imitate the French tradition of the firstborn daughter of the King being known as Madame Royale, the French-born Queen consort wanted to do something similar for her own daughter. So, in 1642 King Charles I gave Princess Mary the title of Princess Royal, establishing a new tradition in the British Royal Family. Even as a tiny child, the new Princess Royal was immediately the center of marriage negotiations. Originally, King Charles had wished his daughter to marry into the Spanish Royal Family to secure a long-lasting alliance between Britain and Spain. His own father had tried to see him married to a Spanish princess as King James had hoped that Britain could act as the great peace-maker between the Catholic and Protestant powers as the wars between the two sides were tearing Europe apart. This was a long-standing ambition of the House of Stuart, to emerge as the monarchy that restored peace, if not unity, to Christendom. (Read entire post.)

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President Trump Brilliant in Fourth State of the Union Address

 From AMAC:

President Donald Trump delivered his fourth State of the Union Address and the first of his second term Tuesday night before a packed House chamber, minus several dozen Democrats who chose to boycott the speech. In just under two hours, the longest State of the Union in modern history, Trump laid out a sweeping case that America is not simply recovering from the chaos of the Biden years, but entering what he repeatedly described as a “Golden Age.”

From his opening line, the tone was unmistakable. “Our Nation is back – bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before,” Trump declared, setting the stage for a speech that was equal parts report card, policy blueprint, and patriotic revival.

With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence just months away, Trump framed the moment in historic terms. “This July 4th, we will mark two and a half centuries of liberty and triumph, progress and freedom in the most incredible and exceptional nation ever to exist on the face of this earth,” he said. “And you’ve seen nothing yet, because we are entering the Golden Age of America.”

That sense of momentum carried through the first half of the address as Trump ran through what could fairly be called his second-term “greatest hits.”

One year ago, he reminded the country, he inherited “a nation in crisis—with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide-open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home, and wars and chaos all over the world.” Today, he argued, the turnaround is undeniable.

“Today, our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast, the economy is roaring, our enemies are scared, our military and police are stacked, and America is respected again,” Trump said. (Read more.)

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The Madrid Codices

 From Euro News:

Every year Spain celebrates one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century for studies on Leonardo da Vinci. On 13 February in 1967 the National Library of Spain conserved among its collections two original manuscripts of the Renaissance artist and engineer that had remained unnoticed for more than a century. The so-called Madrid I and II codices (source in Spanish),identified as Mss. 8937 and Mss. 8936, are part of a set of scientific notebooks written by da Vinci between the end of the 15th and the start of the 16th century. They were rediscovered when the American researcher Jules Piccus, who was working on the revision of the inventories of the institution's manuscripts, identified the relevance of some volumes that had not been correctly attributed.

According to official information from the National Library, the codices contain hundreds of pages of annotations and drawings devoted to statics, applied mechanics, gear systems, hydraulic machines, geometry and fortification studies. Unlike his paintings, these manuscripts allow us to observe Leonardo's intellectual process:calculations, diagrams, hypotheses and corrections that show his experimental method. Codex Madrid I, dated mainly in the 1490s, is considered one of the most important treatises on mechanics by Leonardo, with detailed studies on the transmission of motion and the functioning of mechanisms. Codex Madrid II, dated slightly later, brings together research related to civil and military engineering, as well as topographical studies and hydraulic projects. (Read more.)

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A Primer on Georgian Fashion

 

How did people really dress in the Wuthering Heights era? From InStyle:

Another year, another classic literature adaptation on the big screen. The latest book getting the Hollywood treatment? Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s gothic novel about the unbridled passions of free-spirited Catherine Earnshaw and her tortured soulmate, Heathcliff. Emerald Fennell directs the ultra-stylized interpretation of the story, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

When the first trailer dropped for the film, Robbie’s on-screen attire caught the Internet’s attention. A see-through bridal look even went viral. Wuthering Heights is set between 1771 and 1802, leading fans to wonder: was the real Georgian era that daring?  

 Not quite. The film’s costume designer, Jacqueline Durran, told British Vogue she and Fennell weren’t aiming for historical accuracy. “Our dates are all confused in the sense that we’re not representing a moment in time at all—we’re just picking images or styles that we like for each character,” she explained.

Wondering what the novel’s characters may have worn in real life? Here’s a breakdown of how people dressed in the late Georgian era, the historical period that backdrops Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Before putting on their gowns and coats, Georgian women had to assemble their base layer of clothing. First came a shift or chemise, typically made of linen, according to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Then, they put on stays—boned undergarments for shaping and offering structural support.

“A pair of stays was a sort of early example of a corset,” curator Anna Reynolds explained in a video promoting the Royal Collection Trust exhibition Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians. “They shaped the body and they provided support, a bit like a modern bra. They fasten at the back with a single lace.” Next came the ever-important petticoat, an underskirt which was often purposely exposed when worn with a robe à la polonaise—more on that later. 

Finally, there was the matter of shaping the skirt to achieve a fashionable silhouette. By the late 18th-century (aka the Wuthering Heights era), wide panniers—side hoops extending from the hips to dramatically spread out a skirt—had fallen out of fashion everywhere but the court, per FIT’s Fashion History Timeline. Taking their place? Rumps, or bum pads filled with cork, which created the appearance of an exaggerated posterior. (Read more.)

 

There is a trend of anachronistic costumes in historical films, although Netflix's The Leopard has dazzling and relatively authentic costumes, to show it can be done. From The Guardian:

 For some, this current mood for anachronisms is being overstated. Helen Walter, costume and visual historian at the Arts University Bournemouth, isn’t “sure it’s as big or as unprecedented a shift as people are making it out to be”. Costume design, she says, “often says much more about the people who are making it than the original setting … it always says something about the time that it’s being made.”

True historical accuracy is also not actually possible. According to Waddington: “Every period thinks that they’re doing the period, but they never really are [there are] always telltale signs.”

When Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell did Shakespeare in Love, she says “all of the silhouettes were the correct period cuts for all the clothing, but you can’t necessarily find period-accurate fabrics because they’re just not made in the same way now”. Powell remembers upsetting somebody by using an art deco lace to make an Elizabethan collar. “I thought, ‘Well, I don’t care,” she says. “It looks good. And actually, this isn’t a documentary’.”

Costume, says Walter, “like any other art form is not immune to fashion and general cultural trends”. But designers will ultimately be led by the film in question. “I do whatever feels right for the piece,” says Powell. Her upcoming work on The Bride! starring Jessie Buckley, is true to period but takes an anachronistic mood to “how clothes are worn more than the actual items of clothing”.

“It’s almost as if the punk that we know from, let’s say, the 70s or 80s, existed in the 1930s. What would it look like?” Often working with a lot of artistic license, with The Bride! she “had free rein to have fun and go mad with it but all within the period.” (Read more.)

Where was Heathcliff from? From Down to Earth:

Today, Liverpool is celebrated globally as the birthplace of the Beatles. However, the city is much more than that. Located strategically at the estuary of the Mersey river as it ends into the Irish Sea along the northwest coast of England, Liverpool once ruled the seas.

“The city was a center of commerce, and its famous docks formed a continuous line of sea wall for six miles. It surpassed all other English ports in terms of foreign trade particularly in Asia, Africa, and the East in general.  In fact, by mid-century, by any criteria, Liverpool was England’s “first port of empire,” writes Diane Robinson-Dunn from the University of Detroit in Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England.

In Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901, Alisha Renee Walters writes that, “Susan Meyer underlines that in 1769, “the year in which Mr. Earnshaw found Heathcliff in the Liverpool streets, the city was England’s largest slave-trading port.” She also suggests that Heathcliff may be “the child of one of the Indian seamen, termed lascars, recruited by the East India Company.”

The story of the Lascars begins with the establishment of trade links between Mughal India and Stuart England. The East India Company was established in 1600 AD after being given a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth I. Later, Thomas Roe, Emperor James I’s envoy, led a mission to India and had an audience with Emperor Jehangir in Agra. This led to the opening of English (later British) ‘factories’ across the subcontinent.

British trade with the subcontinent meant that Indian goods like spices, cotton, silk, jute, indigo, tea, porcelain and opium, made their way to docks in London, Liverpool, Hull, Cardiff, Glasgow and other British port cities. By the 1720s, Bengal alone contributed over half of the East India Company’s imports from the Indian subcontinent.

This trade in goods opened passages to migration between India and Britain.

The term ‘Lascar’ is derived from the Urdu/Hindustani and ultimately Persian word ‘Lashkar’ meaning ‘army’. The Portuguese, great rivals of the British, first used it and it soon found its way into the British lexicon as well.

The Lascars really entered the picture after 1757. That year, the British under Robert Clive won the rich province of Bengal after defeating Siraj ud Daulah, its Nawab.

According to the portal South Asians in Britain, “South Asian seafarers, seamen and mariners, known as ‘lascars’, were first hired to work on ships by the East India Company in the seventeenth century. As the Company increased its control of territory in India and trade and merchant shipping expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were recruited in ever increasing numbers. Employed on so-called ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Lascar’ Articles, which determined their rates and condition of employment, lascars were a source of cheap labour for shipping companies, who paid them significantly less than their European counterparts.”

The heyday of the Lascars was from the 1850s to the 1950s. That was the time when steam ships replaced sail ships. European sailors were not willing to work in the gruelling conditions aboard steamers. The labour shortage thus created was largely filled by Lascars.

Once they arrived in British ports though, the Lascars were in for a tough time. They were often abandoned to fend for themselves and often ended up destitute on the streets.

This was the situation especially before the Revolt of 1857, when the East India Company employed Lascars. Post the Revolt, the Company was abolished and the British Crown took over.

Many Lascars settled in British port cities where they worked as crossing-sweepers, ran lodging-houses or set up cafes and restaurants.

South Asians in Britain notes that “Men from diverse religious, regional and cultural backgrounds signed up as mariners mainly in the large port cities of Bombay and Calcutta. Initially recruited from the coastal regions of East Bengal, Gujarat and the Malabar coast in south-west India, as demand for their labour grew, workers from more rural areas of India, such as Assam, Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab also signed up.”

In East Bengal, the Lascars mainly came from the Sylhet region. In his book, Bengali Settlement in Britain, author Faruque Ahmed notes that it was mainly Bengali Muslims, rather than Bengali Hindus, who became Lascars as religious injunctions forbade Hindus from crossing the Kaalapani.

Sylhet today is located in the northeastern corner of Bangladesh. At the time of the Partition of the Subcontinent, it was a part of Assam. (Read more.)

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Maryland Sheriffs DEFY Governor’s New State Ban on Partnering With ICE

 From WLT Report:

In Maryland, Democrat Gov. Wes Moore has enacted a law to ban local law enforcement partnerships with ICE. But, it doesn’t seem to be going how he expected. The new law has nine sheriffs in the state absolutely furious! They say that they will defy the ban and continue cooperating with immigration authorities. Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis called the ban “the biggest betrayal to law enforcement and public safety” that he has ever seen....

Specifically, the new law banned 287(g) partnerships with ICE.

But, it doesn’t prevent local authorities from notifying ICE when an illegal alien is arrested.

Fox Baltimore has more details:

Maryland sheriffs who previously participated in the federal 287(g) program say they plan to keep working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in other ways, even after the governor signed a ban on formal 287(g) agreements. Although the new law eliminates formal memorandums of understanding (MOU) with ICE, it does not end all cooperation with the agency.

(Read more.)

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The Suicide of Neanderthals

 From EL PAÍS:

In his latest book, the paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak recounts how, as a young man, he spent his time observing people as he played the bagpipes in a kilt on the dirty streets of Marseille. Driven by an unconscious impulse, he had decided to master the instrument, and he succeeded, even leading a famous band in France. Then his first child was born, he found himself traveling from gig to gig, and eventually, he gave it up. But he was able to earn his PhD with the money he made from music.

The French scientist has been able to spend the last 30 years observing and studying one of the most decisive moments in the history of evolution: the encounter between our species and the Neanderthals, our closest human relatives. One of his latest discoveries is Thorin, a Neanderthal who lived around 42,000 years ago, very close to the moment of extinction. From then on, Homo sapiens became the only human species on the planet.

 In his new book The Last Neanderthal: Understanding How Humans Die, Slimak, 52, reflects on the reasons for the disappearance of these human cousins, and what it reveals about ourselves. “It’s a sad book,” he underscores, because despite the latest evidence that Neanderthals controlled fire, created cave art, and had sex and children with our own species — leaving a trace of their DNA in our genome — this scientist from the French National Center for Scientific Research believes they went extinct in isolation and abandonment. Slimak answers EL PAÍS’ questions via videoconference from his beautiful home, where he lives with his wife and two children, halfway between Toulouse and the Pyrenees. (Read more.)

40,000-year-old Stone Age symbols may have paved the way for writing, long before Mesopotamia. From Phys.org:

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures. According to a new analysis by linguist Christian Bentz at Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History) in Berlin, these sign sequences have the same level of complexity and information density as the earliest proto-cuneiform script that emerged tens of thousands of years later, around 3,000 B.C.E.

Using a computational approach, the team examined over 3,000 signs found on 260 objects to reveal insights into the origins of writing. Their findings, which have been published in the journal PNAS, were clear—and surprised even the researchers.

Paleolithic objects dating back between 34,000 and 45,000 years bear mysterious sign sequences—often repeated lines, notches, dots and crosses. Many of these artifacts were discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, such as a small mammoth found in the Vogelherd Cave in Lone Valley in southwestern Germany.

A Stone Age human carved the mammoth figurine out of a mammoth tusk and carefully engraved it with rows of crosses and dots. Other artifacts found in the Swabian Jura are also etched with signs. (Read more.)

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The Spell of Posey Rings

Mary of Great Britain and Ireland

From Country Life:

Gold rings with poesies (‘little poems’) — poésie being the Old French for ‘poetry’ — quickly became the single most popular type of jewellery in the country. They were exchanged by lovers, would-be lovers, family members and best friends, but their most common use was as a betrothal or wedding ring. Henry VIII gave a posy ring to Anne of Cleves inscribed: ‘God send me well to kepe.’ William of Orange gave one to Princess Mary inscribed: ‘I’le win and wear you if I can.’ Jewellers used to keep a stock of blank rings, and booksellers promoted inspirational handbooks, such as Loves Garland or Poſies for Rings, which was published in 1624.

I was still in my teens when a friend of my mother’s showed me his collection of posy rings. I was transfixed by their beauty — the soft, almost pure yellow gold, the finely wrought decoration (flowers, leaves, hearts and other symbols) and the elegant script, but what really fascinated me were the inscriptions. ‘I like my choyce.’ ‘True love appears/In midst of tears.’ ‘God has brought to pass that which unlikely was.’ It was as if I were listening to the voices of the long-dead givers and receivers. 

The physical appearance of posy rings changed over time. Lombardic script was replaced by Gothic script, which, in turn, gave way to Roman capitals and then italics. Earlier rings carried much more decoration, too. Niello — a hard black paste — was used to fill in the letters and the costlier rings were enamelled in bright colours. The language of courtly love was, of course, Norman French (‘sans de partier’ or ‘without parting’) although some poesies were in Latin (‘Non Auri Sed Amor’ or ‘not gold but love’) and others in a sort of proto-franglais (‘Autre ne wile and evere you best’, which hardly needs translating). Later, they were almost all in English. (Read more.)

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FBI Internal Emails Reveal Biden White House Coordinated with DOJ on Mar-a-Lago Raid

 From The Gateway Pundit:

Fox News on Friday obtained internal FBI emails proving that the Biden White House coordinated with the Justice Department to raid Mar-a-Lago. Biden’s FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and seized boxes of records from Trump’s Florida estate. More than 3 dozen machine-gun-toting agents descended on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, and by November, Biden’s DOJ appointed a special counsel to investigate the documents stored at the Florida residence.

The raid came after the National Archives (NARA) visited Mar-a-Lago in early 2022 and demanded documents from Trump. Court documents revealed that Biden’s FBI authorized the use of deadly force during their raid on Mar-a-Lago, which was authorized by US Attorney General Merrick Garland. Corrupt FBI agents released staged photos of the ‘classified’ documents laid out on the floor of Mar-a-Lago. (Read more.)

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Roundup

 From Tierney's Real News:

In simple terms, spraying glyphosate at the end of the season works like a chemical “off switch” to kill the crop and help it dry down more quickly so it can be harvested on schedule. This practice is called pre‑harvest application. It is used on some wheat acres, especially in cooler or wetter northern climates, but it is not universal on all U.S. wheat.

Why do farmers do this?

• In cold or wet years, wheat can stay green and “wet” too long. Killing the plant helps it dry faster so the farmer can harvest before rain, frost, or snow.

• Sometimes part of a field is ripe while another part is still green. Spraying helps the entire field reach a similar dryness so the combine doesn’t plug with green stems.

• Late‑season green weeds can tangle in machinery and slow everything down. A pre‑harvest spray helps “burn down” those weeds and smooths out harvest.

Farmers wait until the wheat is mature – meaning the grain is fully formed and the moisture in the kernels has dropped to around 30% or less. A common “thumbnail test” is pressing a fingernail into a kernel; if the dent stays, the grain is mature enough for a pre‑harvest treatment.

At that point, a sprayer applies either true desiccants like diquat or systemic herbicides like glyphosate over the field. Contact desiccants kill green growth very quickly and dry the crop in a few days; glyphosate works more slowly and is technically labeled for weed control, but in practice it also helps the crop finish drying and ripening in bad conditions.

Once the plants are brown and brittle and grain moisture is down near storage levels (around 14%), the combine goes in and harvests.

Glyphosate has been around since the mid‑1970s, but its use as a late‑season tool became more common in the late 1980s and 1990s and expanded in the 2000s in places like Canada, the northern U.S., and the U.K., where early cold and wet weather can shut down the season fast. (Read more.)

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