THE ANTI-PASTA MOVEMENT OF 1930
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When Italian futurists tried to ban Pasta in Italy. The outrageous crusade against the country’s most beloved carbohydrate.
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A pasta vendor in Naples during the late 19th or early 20th century. Carlo Brogi, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
By Ellen Gutoskey
While speaking at a multi-course banquet in Milan on November 15, 1930, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti presented his fellow Italians with an incendiary call to action. Pasta, he said, was a “passéist food” that “[deluded people] into thinking it [was] nutritious” and made them “heavy, brutish,” “skeptical, slow, [and] pessimistic.” As such, pasta should be abolished and replaced with rice.
John Gordon Thomson, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Just 30 years after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, history was repeating itself. Faced with more failing crops, landlords in Ireland again began evicting the tenant farmers who could no longer earn their keep. The issue had never really gone away: The previous famine had revealed just how few farmers actually owned land, and citizens had been fighting for tenants’ rights since the 1850s. But the latest agricultural crisis caused tension to boil over.
In 1879, farmers launched the Land War, a widespread resistance to unfair rent prices and evictions. With it came the establishment of the Land League, an organization seeking to overhaul Ireland’s feudal system of land ownership.
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While the term
southpaw officially applies to any left-handed person, you probably hear it most often in baseball, where left-handedness can really impact a player’s game (for better or worse).
It’s generally assumed that the term originated within the sport a theory that s supported by this pretty convincing origin story: During the 19th century, baseball diamonds were built so that batters faced east, away from the setting sun. Pitchers faced west, which meant a left-handed pitcher threw with the arm on the south side of the mound. (That doesn’t address where
paw came from, though it’s been used to mean
Dale T. Johnson Fund, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
On the attendance list of 1787’s Constitutional Convention are some of the most recognizable names in American history, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. There are also several dozen who hardly ever get mentioned like Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris.
Born to wealthy New Yorkers on January 31, 1752, Morris attended King’s College (Columbia University) and secured a seat in New York’s congress in 1775. Just three years later, he represented New York at the Continental Congress, signed the Articles of Confederation, and soon took a financial position in the new government.