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History (Education)

Education

Voice recordings of people who were enslaved offer incredible first-person accounts of U.S. history

"The results of these digitally enhanced recordings are arresting, almost unbelievable. The idea of hearing the voices of actual slaves from the plantations of the Old South is as powerful—as startling, really—as if you could hear Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee speak." - Ted Koppel

Library of Congress

When we think about the era of American slavery, many of us tend to think of it as the far distant past. While slavery doesn't exist as a formal institution today, there are people living who knew formerly enslaved black Americans first-hand. In the wide arc of history, the legal enslavement of people on U.S. soil is a recent occurrence—so recent, in fact, that we have voice recordings of interviews with people who lived it.

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Education

When it comes to love, prehistoric humans have a lot to teach us all.

Discover seven things about pre-modern love that everyone — single, married, and everything in-between — really needs to know.

Canva

Maybe we've doe some DEvolving in the love department

We're taught that "traditional love" goes something like this: Be a virgin, find a soulmate, get married, NEVER CHEAT, share resources, have kids, and dance at your 50th wedding anniversary.

It's a lot of pressure. And, frankly, if it really worked that way, divorce rates would be at 0%.

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What's real and what isn't?

It’s feeling harder and harder to separate truth from fiction in the age of fake news.

But conspiracy theories and propaganda are as old as society itself. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the growing wealth of scientific evidence suggesting that we’re influenced even by news we know to be fake.

How many disproven JFK assassination theories are floating around in your brain thanks to Oliver Stone? Do you sometimes wonder if anyone has ever really landed on the Moon? And do you think just maybe it’s possible that Adolf Hitler actually survived World War II and lived out his days in Brazil? If so, you’re not alone.

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Louisiana painting had enslaved child camouflaged for 100 years.

There are parts of history that are overlooked or forgotten, but the truly astonishing thing is the lengths to which people will go to cover them up. The thing about hiding parts of history, though, is that they always find their way into the light, and that's exactly what happened with a child named Bélizaire.

In 1972, a painting of three white children was donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art by Audrey Grasser, who inherited the family portrait. When she dropped off the painting, she informed the museum that there was an enslaved Black child in the picture that had been painted over.

The painting was never displayed in the museum. It actually sat in the basement for more than 30 years, and when speaking to Audrey's son, Eugene, there's no family story on why the boy was painted over. The Grasser family didn't seem to have much information about the boy at all, but he was important enough to be painted with the enslaver's children.

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