Spring Cleaning
After centuries of built-up detritus and grime, Gianluigi Colalucci led the restoration effort for this series of frescoes between 1980 and 1994, although artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg insisted that Pope John Paul II halt the initiative.
What is the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Known also for pioneering the field of sociobiology and explicitly defining the evolutionary concept of character displacement, this American biologist specialized in entomology, especially ants, on which he wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book in 1990.
Who is E. O. Wilson?
This flower has become an international symbol of World War 1 and wartime military casualties more generally, especially in Commonwealth countries, as immortalized in the 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian poet John McCrae.
What is the poppy/remembrance poppy?
In Edgar Allan Poe’s story of immurement, "The Cask of Amontillado", Fortunato and Montresor dress up for this festive season, believed to descend from revelrous pagan festivals such as the Dionysian Anthesteria and the Roman Saturnalia.
What is Carnival?
This figure in Greek mythology, attested to in Homeric Hymn to Demeter, symbolized springtime and the renewal of the Earth, returning cyclically from her marriage with Hades to her mother goddess and fostering the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Who is Persephone?
This 1989 environmental disaster still ranks as the costliest in history with no human casualties, as an oil tanker struck a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and released 11 million gallons of oil into the water, spurring up to 7 billion dollars in cleanup costs and legal damages.
What is the Exxon Valdez oil spill?
In a demonstration of the falsity of dichotomies, this Chinese philosopher famously dreamed of being a butterfly and, upon awakening, could not determine whether he had dreamed of being the butterfly or if the butterfly was dreaming of being him.
Who is Zhuangzhi/Zhuang Zou?
Famously undeciphered, this vellum codex, whose parchment dates back to the 15th century, has changed hands at least fifteen times and has mesmerized readers with its mysterious botanical illustrations, with 126 pages containing unidentified flora.
What is the Voynich manuscript?
International Workers’ Day, or May Day, commemorates this event that occurred May 4th, 1886, when violent confrontations between Chicago police and workers striking for an eight-hour day culminated in an unknown person throwing a bomb, killing seven officers and four to eight civilians.
What is the Haymarket Affair?
Every equinox, you can see the sun seem to rise directly over the top of the central lotus tower of this Buddhist temple, which many interpret as an eternal sacred reminder of the reign of Suryavarman II, the “Sun-King” of the Khmer Empire.
What is Angkor Wat?
Some trace the origin of spring cleaning to this Iranian equivalent for New Year’s Day, celebrated between the 19th and 22nd of March, which originates in Mithraism and Zoroastrianism and entails a “shaking of the house”, or house cleaning, shortly beforehand.
What is Nowruz?
Socrates was not the only famous Grecian “gadfly”; in Greek mythology, Hera sent a gadfly to torment this mistress of Zeus, who he had turned into a cow, as she swam across an appropriately named sea to reach Egypt.
Who is Io?
This symbolist Belgian poet, known best for plays such as The Blue Bird and Pelleas et Melisande (the later operatized by Debussy), also wrote the essay “The Intelligence of Flowers”, wherein he claimed that plants possessed their own form of intelligence different from humans’.
Who is Maurice Maeterlinck?
You’ve heard of the Easter Bunny, but what about this Australian cousin, belonging to an endangered species of Australian marsupial, which was created by 9-year-old Rose-Marie Dusting in 1968 and helped catalyze interest in saving the species from extinction.
What is the Easter Bilby?
After a civil war, this seventh Abbasid Caliph led a period of peace and learning, particularly in scientific research, constructing the first observatory in Baghdad and ordering his astronomers to calculate the tilt of the Earth, which determines Earth’s seasons.
Who is al-Ma’mun?
Alongside the British standard system for screw thread measurements and one of the earliest sniper rifles, this English engineer also invented a mechanical street sweeper to help remove trash from the streets of Manchester, the world’s first industrialized city.
Who is Joseph Whitworth?
The provocative claims of The Fable of the Bees, written by this Anglo-Dutch philosopher, implied that maintaining personal vices and rejecting virtue could lead to collective social benefit, influencing classical economics and the Scottish Enlightenment.
Who is Bernard Mandeville?
Located mostly in Brazil’s Amazon Basin, this incredibly fertile soil dates back thousands of years, cultivated by pre-Columbian civilizations by mixing charcoal-infused soil with tiny pottery shards, animal bones, manure, and other substances to foster organic activity.
What is terra preta de Indio?
Although the Torah only prohibits Jews from eating foods with leavening agents (or chametz) during Passover, Ashkenazi Jews began prohibiting this type of plant as well starting in 13th century France, arguing that the potential for mistaking this with chametz was too high.
What is kitniyot/legumes?
Millions of tourists will see the cherry blossoms bloom in Washington, D.C., this spring, initiated on March 27th, 1912 when Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese consulate, and this American First Lady planted the first two trees in West Potomac Park.
Who is Helen Herron Taft?
Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 19th century specialized in laundries, as represented by this landmark 1886 supreme court decision, wherein the Court ruled against discriminative state action toward Chinese laundry owners, even if they lacked American citizenship.
What is Yick Wo v. Hopkins?
From Herodotus’ Histories to Li Shizhen’s Great Pharmacopoeia, cultures considered this substance, created by marinating a human corpse in bees’ honey for one hundred years, a valuable medicinal concoction, purportedly healing broken limbs and curing diseases.
What is mellified man/human mummy confection?
Designed by Venetian nobleman Daniele Barbaro, the world’s oldest still-existing botanical garden resides in this Italian city, holding a 441-year-old Mediterranean Dwarf Palm that Goethe saw in-person and described in his essay "Geschichte meines botanisches Studiums".
What is Padua?
During Bohag Bihu, the first of three Bihu festivals held in Assam, India, and among the Assamese diaspora, expect to see people dancing briskly to the beat of this double-sided barrel drum, derived from clay instruments made by the Indus Valley Civilization.
What is a dhol?
Due to the partial nudity of its celebrants, videos of this ceremony, celebrated in Eswatini during the African spring season, have been censored on YouTube, wherein thousands of unmarried girls and women participate in a collective dance and parade.
What is Umhlanga/the Reed Dance?