The Country Lady

12/30/2025

This area of Colorado is so beautiful and historic. I can't imagine the stories that were told at this old general store.

Lee, Russell, photographer. General store. Ophir, Colorado. San Miguel County Colorado United States Ophir, 1940. Sept. Photograph. Library of Congress 2017787670

12/30/2025

“They tried to erase her name before she learned to write it—history answered by making her unforgettable.”

In 1196, when William FitzPatrick, Earl of Salisbury, died, his nine-year-old daughter Ela inherited vast lands and titles. In medieval England, wealth in a child’s hands was dangerous. Heiresses were not shielded; they were seized. Before royal protection could reach her, Ela was abducted and carried across the Channel to Normandy, hidden in a fortress tower. Her disappearance was not an accident of chaos but a calculated move—remove the girl, claim the inheritance, rewrite the future. Many children vanished this way, swallowed quietly by power. Most were never found.

What makes Ela’s story remarkable is not only that she survived, but how she was recovered. Contemporary accounts tell of an English knight, William Talbot, who searched for her for nearly two years. Disguised as a pilgrim, he moved from castle to castle, singing beneath their walls. The method sounds poetic, even strange to modern ears, but it relied on something deeply human: recognition. One day, a voice answered from a tower window. Ela was alive. History does not preserve the details of her escape, but it records the result—she was returned to England and presented to King Richard I, who safeguarded her claim.

As an adult, Ela did not fade into the background of marriage, as so many noblewomen did. She married William Longespée, the king’s half-brother, and together they ruled their estates as partners. They founded Salisbury Cathedral, not as distant patrons but as hands-on stewards of land and labor. When William died in 1226, the old pressures returned. Powerful men sought to control her property through remarriage. This time, Ela refused. She invoked Magna Carta—specifically its protection of widows—and asserted her legal right to remain unmarried. It was not rebellion; it was law, used with precision.

Then she did something almost unheard of. Ela assumed her late husband’s public authority and served as High Sheriff of Wiltshire, administering justice, collecting revenues, and answering directly to the Crown. Only two women are known to have held this office in medieval England. Later, she founded Lacock Abbey and eventually entered it herself, becoming abbess and leading the community for nearly two decades. She negotiated charters, managed estates, and safeguarded legal documents, including a copy of Magna Carta. Her life moved from captive child to governing official to spiritual leader—each role chosen, not imposed.

Ela of Salisbury reminds us that power is not always loud, and resistance is not always sudden. Sometimes it is patient, lawful, and enduring. In daily life, we may not face towers or kidnappers, but we know what it means to be underestimated, spoken over, or quietly pushed aside. Ela’s legacy whispers across centuries that dignity reclaimed becomes authority, and survival, when guided by resolve, can reshape history itself.

“Those who try to lock you away may delay your story—but they often end up enlarging it.”

12/29/2025

12/29/2025

She got married at the age of 14, and at the age of 20, she became a single mother. The first female millionaire who made a fortune with her 10 fingers.
She entered the Guinness Book of Records as the first woman to become a millionaire independently, without inherited money.
Sara Breedlove was born in 1867 in the south of the USA, in the state of Louisiana. Her parents, older brothers, and sister were slaves in the cotton fields. But Sara was born free. When she was 7 years old, she lost her parents. After her parents died, she moved in with her sister and her husband.
As a child, Sara worked as a housekeeper and did not have time for schooling. She later shared that she only had 3 months of formal education when she attended Sunday school.
She was only 14 when she married Moses McWilliams. She didn't do it because she loved him. The truth was that her sister's husband was a very violent man, and marriage was the only way for Sara to escape from that family. Four years later, Sarah and Moses had a daughter, Alleluia. Two years later, Sarah's husband dies. So Sara became a single mother and a widow at the age of twenty.
In 1888, Sara moved to St. Louis. Her brothers worked there as barbers. She started working in a laundromat and as a cook to pay for her daughter's education in a public school. Sara earned about $1.50 a day.
Like all the workers in the laundry, Sara got sick from chemicals: skin disease, lack of water, and heating in the house made Sara almost lose her hair. Thanks to her brothers, she learned the basics of hair care. A little later, Sara learns about the Eni Malon series of hair products and later meets Eni in person. He starts selling her products on the street.
Still working for Malon, Sara, now at the age of 37, moves to Denver with her daughter and begins to think about her own line of cosmetics for African-American women. After many experiments, she succeeds. He starts building his own business.
In 1906, Sara married Charles J. Walker and later became famous under his surname. Charles becomes her business partner: He does advertising and helps his wife with promotion.
Sara went door to door trying to sell her products, but also to teach women how to care for and style their hair.
In the same year, Sara decided to expand her business, so she and her husband traveled around South and East America. Her daughter had grown up and graduated from school, so she helped her mother with all the shipments from Denver.
Two years later, Sara moved to Pittsburgh. The family opens a beauty salon, but also a school that trains people to know everything about hair care so that they can apply Sara's products.
In 1910, Sara moved to Indianapolis, where she opened the headquarters of the company Madam C. J. Walker.
He builds a factory with a laboratory, a hair salon, and a beauty school where he teaches his sales agents. By 1917, Mrs. Walker employed about 20,000 women. Her agents earned from 5 to 15 dollars a day. Sara wanted African-American women to be financially independent, so she encouraged women to open their own businesses and taught them how to handle money.
The richer she became, the more time she spent on charities and giving. She gave lectures, fought against social injustice, and donated money to funds. Before she died, she donated more than 100,000 dollars to the poor and various organizations and social institutions.
In her will, she stated that 2/3 of her future profits should be given to charity.
She died at the age of 51. She was considered the richest African-American woman. When she died, her fortune was thought to be between $500,000 and $1 million. During her lifetime, Sara was not a millionaire, only 2 years after her death, her wealth increased, but while she was alive, she hoped that she would be. And not because she needed the money, but because she wanted to do more good

12/29/2025

She spent 50 years in cotton fields. Then at 53, she found something in the trash that changed art history forever.
Clementine Hunter was born on a Louisiana plantation around Christmas 1886. Her grandparents had been enslaved. Her parents spoke only Creole French and worked from dawn until the light disappeared.
When Clementine turned five, she walked to the segregated schoolhouse for the first time. Within days, the message became clear: education wasn't meant for children like her. Her future was in the fields, not in books.
She attended for less than a week. Then never returned.
She couldn't read. Couldn't write. Couldn't sign her own name.
For the next five decades, survival consumed everything. She picked cotton. Cooked. Cleaned. Raised seven children, two of whom were stillborn. The morning before delivering one baby, she picked 78 pounds of cotton, then walked home and called the midwife.
Days later, she was back in the fields.
This was existence, not living. No space for dreams. No room for anything beyond making it through another day under the merciless Louisiana sun.
Then in 1939, at age 53, something unexpected happened.
Clementine worked as a cook at Melrose Plantation, which the owner had transformed into an artist colony. Painters and writers from across the country came to create in the peaceful setting.
One visiting artist from New Orleans left behind tubes of paint and brushes after her stay.
Clementine found them while cleaning. She'd never held a paintbrush before. Never considered that someone like her could create art.
But she looked at those colors and thought: why waste them?
She picked up a brush and painted on a discarded window shade. Not canvas—she didn't have canvas. Just a window shade she found lying around.
The image showed a Cane River baptism. A scene from her memory. Her world. Her truth.
She sold it for 25 cents.
Then something remarkable happened. She kept painting.
On whatever materials she could find. Window shades. Cardboard boxes. Empty bottles. Dried gourds. Scrap wood. Jar lids.
She painted what she knew: Cotton fields at harvest. River baptisms. Saturday night dances. Wash days. Weddings. Funerals. Pecan harvesting.
The daily rhythm of Black Creole life in rural Louisiana—a world nobody else was documenting because it seemed too ordinary, too common, not worthy of galleries or museums.
Just people working and celebrating and mourning and surviving.
Her style was distinctive. Flat perspective. Bold colors. Stylized figures. No European painting techniques.
Because nobody taught her the "proper" way to paint.
And she had no interest in proper anyway.
François Mignon, a French writer living at Melrose, recognized something powerful in her work. He began promoting her paintings, getting pieces into local shops, selling them for one dollar each.
In 1949, when Clementine was in her sixties, she had her first real exhibition at the New Orleans Arts and Crafts Show.
Art critics examined her work and assigned labels: "Primitive." "Childlike." "Folk art."
They meant it as praise. But underneath those words was an assumption: not real art. Not sophisticated. Not formally trained.
Clementine ignored the labels and kept painting.
In 1955, she was commissioned to paint murals inside the African House at Melrose Plantation. For seven weeks, she covered the walls with scenes from her life—cotton picking, church gatherings, weddings, funerals, and a self-portrait of herself painting.
A complete visual record of plantation life. Her life.
Those murals remain today, permanent proof that art created without formal credentials can hold immense historical significance.
A 1953 Look magazine article brought national attention. By the 1970s, she was exhibiting on both coasts. President Jimmy Carter invited her to Washington for an exhibition opening.
Paintings she'd sold for 25 cents in the 1940s were now worth thousands.
Yet Clementine still lived in poverty.
She gave tours of her tiny home for 25 cents. Charged one dollar for photographs with her. Created art on discarded materials because proper canvas remained unaffordable.
She couldn't write her name, so she marked her paintings with a backwards C and H, interlocking like an ancient symbol.
That signature became so valuable that forgers started copying it. In 1974, a man was charged with creating twenty-two fake Hunter paintings.
Her own artwork was worth stealing.
She painted past 70. Past 80. Past 90.
In 1986, at age 100, Northwestern State University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree.
She painted until one month before her death.
On January 1, 1988, Clementine Hunter died at 101 years old, leaving behind over 5,000 paintings documenting Black Creole life in Louisiana—a visual archive that would have vanished without her.
Today her work hangs in the Smithsonian, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture holds twenty-two of her works—the largest collection by any single artist in that museum.
Louisiana designated October 1st as Clementine Hunter Day.
An opera was written about her life. A documentary was made. Melrose Plantation became a National Historic Landmark partly because of her artistic contributions.
Recognition came too late to lift her from poverty. But it came.
Consider what those critics who dismissed her work as "primitive" failed to understand:
Clementine Hunter wasn't attempting to paint like European masters. She was preserving her community's story using visual language that honored her experience.
Her "technical simplicity" wasn't lack of skill. It was intentional efficiency that allowed her to create thousands of paintings while working full-time, raising children, and surviving poverty.
She documented Saturday dances and wash days and funerals—not as romanticized scenes, but as authentic representations of people whose stories were systematically excluded from galleries and history books.
The gatekeepers with access to museums weren't telling these stories.
So she did. On bottle caps and window shades and cardboard boxes. Because that's what she had.
Think about the mathematics of her life:
Fifty years picking cotton before finding paint tubes at 53. Five decades of crushing labor with no expectation that anyone would value her creative vision.
Then forty-eight years creating 5,000 paintings. More than 100 works per year. While working full-time. While raising a family. While living in poverty.
She painted until age 101.
Most formally trained artists with gallery support don't produce that volume in a lifetime.
Clementine did it with leftover paint on discarded materials.
There's nothing primitive about creating an irreplaceable historical record of your community. Nothing childlike about documenting five decades of Black Creole life with such detail that museums now study your work as essential cultural preservation. Nothing unsophisticated about producing 5,000 paintings while illiterate, impoverished, and working past 100.
Clementine Hunter's legacy proves what formal institutions constantly forget:
Creativity doesn't require credentials. Or youth. Or wealth. Or permission from critics.
It requires vision. Persistence. A story worth preserving.
And the determination to paint on bottle caps when proper canvas isn't available.
She picked cotton for 50 years. Found discarded paint at 53. Created 5,000 artworks before dying at 101.
She lived her entire life within 100 miles of where she was born. Never traveled. Never saw the museums that would eventually honor her work.
But she saw her world with absolute clarity. And she painted it with unwavering faithfulness.
Every baptism. Every funeral. Every wash day. Every Saturday celebration.
Until those ordinary moments the art world ignored became permanent.
Because Clementine Hunter refused to let them disappear.
Even on window shades. Even when critics dismissed her. Even when paintings sold for 25 cents while she struggled to survive.
She painted her truth for 48 years.
And now her truth hangs in the Smithsonian.
Image created by AI

12/29/2025

They chained her hands to the bars above her head and left her there all night—because she quoted the President's own words back to him.
Washington, D.C., June 22, 1917. Lucy Burns stood outside the White House holding a banner. It didn't demand anything radical. It didn't threaten anyone. It simply quoted President Woodrow Wilson himself:
"We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments."
The police arrested her for it.
The charge? Obstructing traffic.
Lucy Burns wasn't obstructing traffic. She was demanding that American women get the same rights Wilson claimed America was fighting for in Europe during World War I. She wanted women to have a voice in their own government—the exact principle Wilson said was worth sending American soldiers to die for.
Apparently, that principle only applied to men.
Lucy and her fellow suffragist Alice Paul had founded the National Woman's Party and organized the "Silent Sentinels"—women who stood outside the White House in silent protest, six days a week, rain or shine, holding banners demanding voting rights.
For two and a half years, they stood there. Silent. Peaceful. Relentless.
And America punished them for it.
Lucy was arrested six times. She served more time in jail than any other American suffragist. But it was her sixth arrest—in November 1917—that revealed just how far the government would go to break these women.
The judge wanted to make an example of Lucy and Alice Paul. He gave them both the maximum sentence: six months in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia.
What happened next became known as the "Night of Terror."
November 14, 1917. Lucy arrived at Occoquan with 32 other suffrage prisoners. The Workhouse superintendent, W.H. Whittaker, was waiting for them with nearly 40 guards.
He ordered the guards to brutalize the women.
They beat them with clubs. They slammed them into walls. They twisted arms until bones cracked. They threw women into cells so violently some were knocked unconscious.
Medical attention was refused.
Lucy Burns, as the group's leader, was singled out for special treatment.
Guards beat her. Then they chained her wrists to the cell bars above her head—and left her there. All night. Arms stretched overhead, unable to sit, unable to rest, blood circulation cut off, pain radiating through her shoulders.
In the cell across from Lucy, the other women watched in horror.
Then, one by one, they stood. They raised their own hands above their heads and held them there—standing in solidarity with Lucy through the night.
Imagine that scene. Thirty women standing in the darkness, arms raised, enduring pain they didn't have to endure—because if Lucy had to suffer, they would suffer with her.
That's what solidarity looks like.
But the torture didn't end there.
In protest of the abuse and horrific conditions, Lucy and the others went on a hunger strike. The warden's response was force-feeding—a brutal procedure designed to break their will.
Historian Eleanor Clift documented what they did to Lucy Burns: it took five people to hold her down. When she refused to open her mouth, they shoved the feeding tube up her nostril.
Do you understand what that means? A tube forced through your nasal passage, down your throat, into your stomach—while you're awake, while you're struggling, while you're choking. It's excruciatingly painful. It can cause internal bleeding, infections, aspiration pneumonia.
It's torture.
And they did it to Lucy Burns and other suffragists repeatedly because these women dared to ask for the right to vote.
But here's what the government didn't count on: the press.
News of the "Night of Terror" spread. Newspapers across America published accounts of what happened at Occoquan. The public was outraged. How could America claim to be fighting for democracy abroad while torturing women who demanded democracy at home?
The hypocrisy became impossible to ignore.
In January 1918—just two months after the Night of Terror—President Wilson suddenly declared that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure." He asked Congress to pass it immediately.
The same President whose words Lucy had quoted on that banner. The same President whose administration had arrested, beaten, and tortured her for demanding those words apply to women too.
Two years later, in August 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified.
Women could finally vote.
It had taken 72 years—since the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Seventy-two years of speeches, protests, arrests, and sacrifices by thousands of women whose names most people never learned.
But Lucy Burns made sure the final push couldn't be ignored. She endured six arrests, months in jail, beatings, torture, and forced feeding—and she never stopped.
After the 19th Amendment passed, Lucy quietly retired from public life. She never sought recognition. She taught school. She lived with her family. She died in 1966 at age 77, watching as new generations of women built on the foundation she'd helped create.
Most Americans have never heard her name.
They know Susan B. Anthony, maybe. They might recognize Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But Lucy Burns—the woman who served more jail time than any other American suffragist, who was chained to cell bars all night, who endured torture rather than give up—remains largely forgotten.
That's the thing about real heroes. They don't do it for recognition. They do it because someone has to.
Lucy Burns stood outside the White House holding a banner with the President's own words because those words mattered. Democracy matters. The right to have a voice in your own government matters.
And when they arrested her for it, beat her for it, tortured her for it—she kept fighting anyway.
Because some things are worth suffering for.
The right to vote. The right to be heard. The right to exist as a full citizen in your own country.
Lucy Burns believed women deserved those rights. And she was willing to be chained to prison bars all night to prove it.
The next time you vote—or choose not to vote—remember Lucy Burns. Remember she was tortured so you could have that choice.
Remember that thirty women stood with their arms raised all night in solidarity with her suffering.
Remember that democracy isn't given freely. It's fought for. Bled for. Endured for.
And remember that sometimes the people who fight hardest are the ones history forgets.
Lucy Burns was chained to prison bars for quoting the President's own words about democracy.
She won anyway.

12/27/2025

She was three years old when her father realized his daughter could do something no human was supposed to do.

Bangalore, India, 1932. Shakuntala Devi was sitting with her father, playing a simple card game. Nothing unusual. Until he noticed she was not looking at the cards.

She was memorizing them.

After one glance at his hand, she could tell him every card he held. He shuffled. She knew the order. He asked her to add numbers. She answered before he finished the question. He gave her multiplication problems. She solved them faster than he could write them down.

She was three years old.

And her mind worked like a machine that did not exist yet.

By the time she was five, Shakuntala was solving complex mathematical problems that left adults stunned. Her father, a circus performer, began taking her to shows where she demonstrated her abilities. Crowds could not understand how a child could calculate like this.

But to Shakuntala, numbers were not problems.

They were a language.

Arthur Jensen, a researcher at UC Berkeley, later studied her and said that numbers came to her the way a native language comes to a child, while for most people math feels like a foreign language learned with effort.

She was not calculating.

She was speaking.

And she proved it again and again.

In 1977, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, researchers gave her what they believed was an impossible task. They asked her to extract the 23rd root of a 201 digit number. A number so long it filled lines of paper.

A Univac computer was standing by to verify the result.

The timer started.

Shakuntala looked at the number. Her lips moved slightly. Fifty seconds later, she gave her answer.

The computer was still working.

Twelve seconds later, the computer finished.

She was right.

She had beaten a machine built for calculation using only her mind.

Then came 1980.

At Imperial College in London, she was asked to multiply two 13 digit numbers. Numbers so large most people struggle just to read them.

The clock started.

She closed her eyes.

Twenty eight seconds later, she opened them and spoke the answer. A perfect 26 digit result. And those twenty eight seconds included the time it took her to say the entire number out loud.

Guinness World Records added her in 1982 and the world gave her a name.

The Human Computer.

But Shakuntala Devi was never just a spectacle.

She was a woman from India in the mid twentieth century, traveling the world, standing on stages at elite universities, forcing Western scientists to rethink what the human brain could do.

She wrote books to make mathematics joyful instead of frightening. She spoke openly for LGBTQ plus rights in India decades before it was accepted. She ran for parliament. She lived entirely on her own terms.

When people asked her how she did it, she never had a technical explanation.

Because to her, it was normal.

“Numbers have life,” she once said. “They are not just symbols.”

She died in 2013 at the age of eighty three, in the same city where her father first realized she was different.

By then, computers were billions of times faster than anything in the 1970s.

But they still could not explain her.

Because computers follow rules.

Shakuntala Devi understood numbers.

She did not just beat machines at math. She reminded the world that human intelligence is not only about speed or power, but intuition, creativity, and something machines still cannot replicate.

She was three years old when her gift was discovered.

She spent the rest of her life proving that the human mind, at its most extraordinary, can still do the impossible.

The next time someone says humans cannot compete with computers, remember Shakuntala Devi.

The woman who did math the way others breathe.

12/27/2025

The Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve known as 'las uvas de la suerte' or “the grapes of luck” is one of the most iconic and widely practiced customs in Spain. As the clock strikes twelve, people across the country eat one grape for each chime, trying to finish all twelve before the last bell. The ritual is believed to bring good luck for each of the twelve months ahead. Families gather around televisions broadcasting the countdown from Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where the tradition is most famously observed, creating a moment of shared anticipation and joy.

Interestingly, this custom didn’t begin as a religious or ancient ritual, it was born out of clever marketing. In 1909, Spanish grape farmers faced a surplus harvest and needed a way to sell the excess. They promoted the idea of eating grapes at midnight for good luck, and the public embraced it. What started as a commercial solution quickly became a cultural tradition, blending superstition, celebration, and community. The image of people gathered in town squares or around radios and TVs, grapes in hand, became a symbol of unity and renewal.

Today, the tradition has spread beyond Spain to many Latin American countries, often adapted with local flair. Some people prepare their grapes in advance, peeling and deseeding them for speed; others add personal wishes or intentions to each grape. Despite its humble origins, 'las uvas de la suerte' has become a cherished ritual, one that turns a simple fruit into a vessel for hope, laughter, and shared beginnings. It’s a reminder that even the most ordinary things can carry extraordinary meaning when tied to community and the turning of time.

12/27/2025

Ohio / West Virginia, 1896-1912...

Taken by traveling photographer Albert J. Ewing, ca. 1896-1912, this photograph shows a family posing outside a large two-story frame house. Like most of Ewing's work, it was likely taken in southeastern Ohio or central West Virginia...

Source
Ohio History Connection

12/27/2025

I'd love to hear the stories and conversations that took place around this fireplace.

Delano, Jack, photographer. Son of Mr. Wilson, tenant farmer in Heard County, Georgia. Georgia Heard County United States, 1941. Apr. Photograph. Library of Congress 2017794204

12/27/2025

Curious Chicagoans Pack the Cook County Morgue to View the Body of Slain Fugitive John Dillinger on July 22, 1934