Though it’s named for the city of Fez, Morocco, the fez is a man’s hat that dates back to ancient Phoenicia.  The Phoenicians were active traders and colonizers all over the Mediterranean, including in what is today Morocco, so it’s not surprising that the fez caught on there.  What is remarkable is that it’s still worn today. Like all fashions, the fez has come and gone in different parts of the world.  It disappeared from the eastern Mediterranean, where it originated, but was reintroduced centuries later.  The fez caught on in the Balkans sometime around the Renaissance, possibly inspired by a kind of military cap resembling the fez that was common in the Mediterranean at the time. In 1826 the fez got a real boost when Sultan Mahmud II banned the turban throughout the Ottoman Empire.  His thinking was that he wanted to modernize Turkey, and saw the turban as a symbol that separated east from west.  “Modernization” in 19th century Turkey often meant “becoming more like Europ

Archbishop James Ussher, the man who calculated the Biblical age of the earth. We often hear religious Christians claim that the world is 6,000 years old (or 6,024 years old, plus six or seven weeks, to be exact).  I won’t weigh in on the veracity of that claim, but it does raise an interesting question: where do they get that number?  The Bible provides exactly zero dates, so how can anyone claim to figure it out? The first man who claims to have figured it out was James Ussher, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland in the middle of the 17th century.  A scholar and influential churchman, Ussher studied the Bible and concluded that the famous creation of the world, in the Book of Genesis, must have taken place on October 22, 4004 BC, at around 6:00 PM, local time, according to the Julian calendar. It seems arbitrary, doesn’t it?  But Ussher didn’t just throw a dart at a calendar.  It was based on a literal reading of the Old Testament, and incor

In English, we say a bad penny always turns up.  Today we use it to refer to a person we’d rather not see but who keeps coming around anyway.  We don’t think of it as referring to a literal bad penny, a counterfeit penny.  Really, how many of us have ever seen a counterfeit penny?  I’ve been collecting coins for most of my life and I haven’t run across one, or even heard of anyone counterfeiting them.  Why bother?  They wouldn’t be worth the effort you put into making them.  If you’re going to counterfeit, go for $20 bills, or even quarters, at least. There was a time when pennies were worth a bit more, and were worth the effort to counterfeit.  In 15th century England.  At this time, the English penny was a silver coin, not copper.  (There were coins called farthings which were smaller than pennies, and these were made of copper.)  The penny was a fairly valuable coin—more valuable than we think of pennies today, anyway.  It makes a kind of sense, then, that people would counter

Every presidential election season, you’re liable to hear pundits and other prognosticators make bold predictions about how the upcoming election is going to hinge on how one or two certain states vote.  It’s certainly true that in most election years, everything tends to hinge on a handful of states.  In the 2016 election, there were six or seven states that were watched and analyzed and pondered more than any of the other forty-some states, and in the end, the election really did come down to how those few turned out.  Talking heads made the same conclusion about this year’s presidential election, and while recently talk has moved away from that as new variables begin to change the dynamics of this election in most atypical ways, the fact remains that there are certain states that we usually regard as bellwethers.  In the past, there have been other states that have lost their bellwether status.  Today’s fact, then, will be a handful of facts, looking at these statuses, both curren