Did You See Mary Kies’ Bonnet?

America’s First Woman to Become a Patent Holder, Brains Plus Bonnets Equal a Historic First

Women make history all the time, but they usually do it with what’s in their head instead of what’s on it. But on this day, 207 years ago, a woman named Mary Kies used both brains and bonnet to become the United States’ first woman to receive a patent.

If the idea of a patent sounds like a snore, consider what a big deal it was to a woman in the early 19th century. At the time, American women had no political power and even less social power. Under the practice of coverture, women’s legal existences were melded with those of the men in their lives. As daughters, their property belonged to their father; as wives, it belonged to their husbands. If they were unmarried and lived in a household with an uncle or brother, that man controlled her legal destiny. In a land where women could neither own goods nor enter into contracts, there was little incentive for women to pursue patents.

But a Connecticut woman named Mary Dixon Kies had an idea worth patenting. It came to her during a time of fashion emergency in the United States. The Napoleonic Wars between France and Britain put the United States in an awkward political position in 1807. Britain in particular tested the United States’ ability to stay neutral by harassing American ships and slapping trade restrictions on seafaring traffic, so President Thomas Jefferson decided to prohibit the import of British goods with the Embargo of 1807. But the official freeze in trade proved disastrous, crippling the American economy and causing exports to drop from a reported $108 million in 1807 to a paltry $22 million the next year.

Just 15 months of embargo forced the American fashion industry to turn inward. Now that New England couldn’t ship goods, it had to make them instead. Kies wasn’t the first woman to improve hat making at the time. Take a young girl named Betsy Metcalf who, after pining for a straw hat in a store window that she couldn’t afford, went home and came up with an innovative technique to make her own. That idea turned New England into a hotbed of straw hat making, an activity that rural women could perform in their own homes. Women both braided straw and constructed bonnets at home, affording them financial independence of a sort and giving women elsewhere the chance to wear the latest fashions on top of their heads.

Though Metcalf never patented her straw hat-making technique, when Kies came up with her idea, she did. Her innovation was to weave silk or thread into the straw, creating a pleasing appearance that became a fashion fad. She took advantage of a relatively new law, the 1790 Patent Act, which allowed “any person or persons” to petition for protection of their original methods and designs, and was granted the first patent ever awarded to a woman on May 15, 1809. Kies’ method took off and fueled the growing straw hat industry; When President James Madison became president that year, he signed Kies’ patent and First Lady Dolley Madison apparently was so taken by Kies’ invention that she wrote to her and congratulated her for helping women in industry …….. Read more –>  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/

Thanksgiving’s Story Told in a Vanishing American Language

A new film could be a vehicle for saving a dying American Indian tongue.

The saga of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock has been told, for the most part, in just one language: English.  The voices of the Native Americans who were there—speaking in their own languages—have usually been left out.

The new film Saints & Strangers, which recounts the events surrounding the arrival of the Mayflower in the New World in the autumn of 1620, attempts to change that. In this telling, Native Americans are as much at the heart of the story as the Pilgrims. And those Native Americans are speaking in a native tongue, in a language called Western Abenaki.

“This was a huge challenge,” says Jesse Bowman Bruchac, 44, a fluent speaker of the language, who coached the film’s Native American actors on how to deliver their lines in Western Abenaki. (Watch Bruchac on the set of the film.)

The language has just a handful of living speakers. But Western Abenaki becomes a character of sorts in Saints & Strangers, creating a living window into personality, history and culture.

Abenaki is an amalgamation of a vast group of Algonquin languages once spoken throughout what’s now New England, including Vermont, New Hampshire, and parts of eastern Canada.

With the exception of one character whose role is to interpret for the Pilgrims, every line of native dialogue is delivered in Abenaki.

(Read “What They Ate at the First Thanksgiving.”)

By giving voice to real historical figures like the Wampanoag Indian chief Massasoit, his counselor and head warrior Hobbamock and the Patuxet interpreter Squanto—who served as a liaison to the religious Pilgrims and adventurer-outcasts of the Plymouth colony—the film is also a vehicle for growing efforts to keep endangered native languages from extinction.

Bruchac hopes that Saints & Strangers becomes a “permanent” audio record for future generations and for anyone who wants to learn Abenaki, which has just 12 fluent speakers left … read more plus vids —> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/

America’s Castles – The Breakers

The Breakers in Newport, R.I. withstood the Hurricane of 1938. (Image: Itub/Wikipedia)

The Breakers was originally built between 1893 and 1895 as a summer house for Cornelius Vanderbilt II. At the time, the home cost $12 million to build, a price tag that translates to more than $330 million today.

Although the price seems ridiculously high, the high-end materials were worth their salt. They survived the great New England Hurricane of 1938.

courtesy of:  http://www.weather.com/

 

The World’s Oddest Ice Cream Flavors

Garlic clove ice cream – Unsurprisingly, at the rather famous Gilroy Garlic Festival, they’ve made garlic into just about anything you can think of – including ice cream. Fans line up each year for a cone, and those who have tasted it swear that it’s not as, uh, pungent as you might imagine.

Spaghetti and cheese ice cream – Heladeria Coromoto ice cream shop in Merida, Venezuela makes a habit of mixing up unusual flavors. It’s rumored that, while they sell only about 100 flavors each day, they’ve offered as many as 900. Once you reach that number, you realize that at some point, spaghetti and cheese must be just about the only thing left you haven’t done.

Lobster ice cream – Where else but New England? Ben and Bill’s ice cream shops have been much hailed for their lobster ice cream. Their description sheds a bit of light on the flavor: Butter ice cream, mixed with chunks of lobster meat. If you can’t get to them at one of their locations in Massachusetts or Maine, they do ship the stuff…

Parakeet flavor – Don’t worry: Apparently, no parakeets were harmed in the making of this ice cream flavor. Nor cockatoos. Nor any other species of pet bird, though the Japanese café that created the flavors has several bird-inspired varieties. The descriptions provided by Torimi café are impressive if confusing; they claim that the ice creams variously conjure up the images of pressing a pet bird to your mouth, falling asleep and having a bird stick its foot in your mouth, or eating ice cream while smelling your pet bird. Yeeeeahhhhh.

courtesy of:  http://www.insuremytrip.com/