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New faces on quarters: Poet Maya Angelou and pioneering NASA astronaut Sally Ride will appear on the U.S. 25-cent pieces. The coins will be part of the American Women Quarters Program, which will feature as many as 20 women “from a wide spectrum of fields including, but not limited to, suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space, and the arts,” the U.S. Mint said in a statement.
Medieval cancer: We think of cancer as a byproduct of the industrial age, but a new study shows that was a gross undercalculation. Research on bones from centuries-old burials have determined the incidence of cancer in pre-industrial Britain may have been at least 10 times higher than previously thought, Erin Blakemore reports for Nat Geo.
The bloody history of anti-Asian violence in the American West: It was one of the largest mass lynchings in the United States. The terror, 150 years ago, targeted Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles. “The Ku Klux Klan was just one manifestation of an anti-Chinese fervor that reached into the highest echelons of power within California,” Kevin Waite writes in this account for Nat Geo.
China’s version of Marco Polo: In the 13th century, he headed west from China, to Baghdad, Constantinople, and France. He met khans, kings, and a pope. Rabban Bar Sauma, a monk trusted by Mongol leaders, accomplished as much as Polo, the much-heralded 13th-century traveler from Italy. Bar Sauma helped engineer an extraordinary Mongol-Christian alliance, Nat Geo’s History magazine reports. Subscribers can read the account here.
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