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                                                2020 Hindsight

With 2020 hindsight we look back on 20’s of the past to seek reassurance for the one upcoming–

1120- Walcher of Malvern, Prior of Great Malvern Priory in Worcestershire, England, drawing from his knowledge of Arabic astronomy, measures the Earth using the degrees, minutes and seconds of latitude and longitude.

1220–Genghis Khan overruns Islamic Asia laying waste to scores of civilizations and insuring himself a place in the genome of half the population of the earth–

on the other hand, Trial by Ordeal was (supposedly) abolished in England.

1320–Dante‘s Quaestio de Aqua et Terra,  a discussion of how a land and water planet like ours fits into Aristotle’s concentric elemental circles is published to mixed reviews, yet shows hints of The Divine Comedy yet to come.

1420–The long-lasting and last Imperial Dynasty of China the Qing (1420-1912) comes to power, puts the finishing touches on The Forbidden City, changing all the new bi-lingual nameplates to emphasize Harmony instead of Supremacy.

1520–Ferdinand Magellan discovers the Strait of Magellan by sailing through the treacherous, barely navigable snake of water between Chile & Tierra del Fuego, to the Pacific Ocean. While Portuguese, the always flexible Magellan claimed the strait and everything to the north for Spain.

1620–Bad year for mothers as Johannes Kepler’s is arrested for witchcraft while  French king Louis XIII defeats his mother, Marie de’ Medici, at the Battle of Les Ponts-de-Ce, Poitou.

1720–Johathan Swift begins “Gulliver’s Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships,” a satire of human nature and travelers’ tales.

Swift said he wrote Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it”.

1820–The Venus de Milo is discovered on April 8, 1820 by a peasant named Yorgos Kentrotas, inside a buried niche within the ancient city ruins of Milos, in what was then the Ottoman Empire.

She was initially to be sold to the French, who like this kind of thing, when the Turks claimed birthright to the statue. The French intervened in Greece to stop the sale to Turkey and shipped her to Paris, where she still resides, leaving the Turkish Sultan the small consolation of executing the Greek ambassador. And the arms? Well, good thing they were lost if the reconstruction by art historian Adolf Furtwangler is anywhere near the truth.

1920–OK, the rise of Hitler and Prohibition, but the National Football League is established at a meeting at the Canton, Ohio, Hupmobile showroom between  representatives of the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Muncie Flyers, Rochester Jeffersons, Rock Island Independents, Decatur Staleys, Chicago Cardinals, Columbus Panhandles & Detroit Heralds.

The vision is complete when, in 1921,  the Indian Packing Company of Green Bay joins the league with Curly Lambeau’s Green Bay Packers.