Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2023 i National Geographic History

In 1957 a group of the titans of physics gathered in a lecture hall at Princeton University to be addressed by a diminutive Chinese American woman. As she told the crowd about her recent experiment and its results, men like J. Robert Oppenheimer and George T. Reynolds listened in silence. Then she asked the audience if there were any questions. “The response was dead silence for two minutes,” an observer recalled afterward. “Then thunderous applause and a standing ovation.” The woman was Chien-Shiung Wu, and her experiment had just demolished a long-standing pillar of her field—a concept crucial to scientists’ understanding of the world around them. Her results would skyrocket her from an already prominent career into the history books as one of the founding mothers of science. But today…

ENTRYWAY 1 The main entrance consists of a small vestibule, with a landing, a door to exit, and a ramp leading down into the tomb. CORRIDOR 2 Long hallways descend from the entryway to chambers waiting below. MYSTIC WELL 3 The well chamber in KV35 has 4 a side room designed for holding floodwaters. Its total surface is equal to that of the first pillared chamber and greater in volume. The priests gave the well a mystical meaning: that it was the place where the pharaoh would be transformed into Osiris. From the entryway to the well, Amenhotep’s name is rendered as “King of Upper and Lower Egypt,” but from the well to the end of the tomb the inscriptions change to “the Osiris Amenhotep II.” Letting in a small…

At the close of the first century A.D., someone wrote a letter to a soldier stationed at a Roman fort in northern Britain. The writer told the recipient that he would be sent “socks … two pairs of sandals, and two pairs of undergarments.” The letter ended by greeting “all your messmates with whom I pray that you live in the greatest good fortune.” This missive was discovered in 1973 during excavations at the site of the fort of Vindolanda, which today lies in the English county of Northumberland, close to the border with Scotland. Together with other items of writing found and deciphered since, the Vindolanda tablets have yielded rich information on the makeup of the Roman garrisons a few decades after the conquest of Britain began. Written on…

Though often referred to as the Ellis Island of the West, the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco harbor was built in 1910 not to welcome people to America but to prevent many, particularly those from China, from entering the country. In the 30 years it operated as the West Coast’s main immigration center, Angel Island processed some 500,000 immigrants from 80 countries, including Russia, India, Mexico, Korea, and the Philippines. The majority, however, came from China and Japan. Experts estimate that some 175,000 Chinese and 60,000 Japanese were detained there. Chinese Exclusion Asians immigrating to the United States faced blatant racism. Discrimination against Chinese people especially had been brewing for decades—since they first arrived in large numbers in California in the 1850s. Lured by a gold rush and…

In 1930, when Egypt was under the military occupation of Great Britain, a group of mostly British officers, cartographers, and surveyors met in the Sudanese village of Wadi Halfa to share their exploits over some cold beer. During the previous decade, a series of expeditions into the vast and forbidding Libyan Desert had found oases previously unexplored by Europeans, mapping them for the first time. Only the legendary Zerzura oasis remained unidentified. The gathered explorers agreed to form the Zerzura Club in honor of their quest for the elusive “oasis of the little birds,” from the Arabic zarzar, for starling or sparrow. Zerzura was first mentioned as an abandoned village by a 13th-century provincial administrator. It next appears in the 15th-century Book of Hidden Pearls, which locates it in a…

In the sixth century B.C., hellebore was the toxin of choice for the Amphictyonic League when it laid siege to the city of Kirrha during what has become known as the First Sacred War. The conflict was sparked when inhabitants of Kirrha began seizing land from the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, as well as ambushing pilgrims passing through on their way to the sanctuary. Kirrha enjoyed a strategic location on the route between the Corinthian Delta and Delphi. The Amphictyonic League, which had been set up to protect the sanctuary, retaliated. Different versions of events place the blame on different people, but all agree on the fundamentals. In order to defeat the inhabitants of Kirrha, the Amphictyonic League used the hellebore plant, which grew abundantly in the area, to…

On November 30, 1916, with the Great War still raging in France, the people of Vienna poured into the streets to pay their last respects to Franz Josef I, who had been their emperor for 68 years. His death ended a long chapter in Austrian history, remembered now for its glorious waltzes, composers, and art. Vienna had been the capital of an empire that governed the destinies of half of Europe, an empire whose days were numbered. Franz Josef’s diligent leadership brought his empire great stability, but his personal life proved far more turbulent over the course of his long life. Beloved by his people, the emperor struggled to connect and direct the relationships within his own family. Heir to the Empire August 18, 1830, was a day of great…