A vanished sea, an unremarkable last meal, migration or death, 2,000 years of gymnastics
|  | Monday, July 26, 2021 | | | | |
| In today’s newsletter, farewell to stereotypical images, lucky Vermont, when Queen Elizabeth got snubbed by a president, Operation Gomorrah, and the bog body's last meal. | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON MILLER, GETTY IMAGES | |
| By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY
It’s been a long time coming.
After more than 100 years, Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team announced Friday that it will now be known as the Guardians. The announcement came in a Tom Hanks-narrated video, shown above presented to fans at Progressive Field.
The tireless efforts of Native American leaders, who for many years decried the horrible offense, led protests and negotiated with the team to change its name, have helped correct decades of reducing people to caricature and mascot for sport. Historically, marketing gimmicks have been used to mock first Americans. “They are caricatures, symbols of the European-American narrative that ignores the genocide, disease, and cultural devastation brought to our communities,” Mark Trahant wrote for National Geographic in 2018.
As the former editor of the daily newspaper in Cleveland, The Plain Dealer, I cringe at the language of the team which calls itself the Indians and whose fans are known as The Tribe. For too many years, Chief Wahoo was the mascot and horribly offensive costumes were the norm even as the team in recent years has tried to move away from such racist imagery. For every community member who fought to restore dignity in Native American representation, this is for you.
I remain convinced that the team lost its 2016 World Series run, despite leading the Chicago Cubs, because of the curse of the ancestors. My colleague and longtime Cleveland fan David Beard, in the stands when the Florida Marlins came from behind to take Game 7 of the 1997 World Series from Cleveland, had the same thought. Those celebrations—with that mascot and nickname—were never supposed to happen.
The name change has sparked a national conversation, most of it about the likeability of the new name, the Guardians. I’ve been flooded with messages from people who either don’t like or don’t get the name change. Like it or not, the new name is fitting for Cleveland. In the shadow of Progressive Field, eight 43-foot-tall statues, called the Guardians of Traffic (pictured below), watch over the 1932 Hope Memorial Bridge, also known as the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. My former colleague Steve Litt wrote for cleveland.com that the new name has “pride of place, legacy, nostalgia, stewardship, and strength all wrapped up in one rough, tough beautiful, powerful word: Guardians. | | | |
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| The discussion of the names of the baseball teams in Cleveland and Atlanta, the Washington Football Team, which announced last summer that it would change its name, and more than 2,000 elementary, middle, high schools and colleges across the U.S. is part of a broader movement to foster cultural and social change as the country reckons with its past.
In a 2018 National Geographic story about streets named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Wendi C. Thomas wrote, “A new name can signal a brilliant future, as when the Old Testament’s Abram, ‘exalted father,’ was divinely renamed Abraham, the ‘father of many nations.’ When the name of a place is changed, it’s also a sign of power and influence—it reflects who is in charge and who has made an impression on the culture.“
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| Only Vermont has been spared (so far): The other states in the country have seen dramatic rises in the Delta variant of COVID-19, prompting widespread calls to resume local mask mandates, Nat Geo reports. Vermont has the highest percentage of vaccinated people in the country, nearly twice as high as COVID hotspots Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Thanks, but no thanks: Then-President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, turned down tea with Queen Elizabeth during a 1997 state visit, CNN reports. The Clintons preferred to eat Indian food and go shopping, recently released classified documents show.
Going for gold: Widely considered the greatest gymnast of all time, Simone Biles is also the most decorated. Her efforts to redefine the gravity-defying sport are just the latest chapter in a 2,000-year-old drastic evolution of the sport. Here’s our take on the development of modern gymnastics, and a Smithsonian look at the journey of the beloved sport over the last two millennia.
Migration or death: Hunger used to be a seasonal issue in the villages of eastern Guatemala. But it’s become more pronounced after hurricanes, droughts, and six rainy seasons of little rain. Those who can are migrating to the United States in droves; those who can’t struggle to keep their children alive, Nat Geo reports.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROLYN DRAKE, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | | The vanished sea: Once, Central Asia’s Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest lake. Now it has mainly dried up, its remnants now much-smaller lakes, after the Aral’s water was drained for large-scale cotton farming and other agriculture. In this photo, recently resurfaced in our popular Photo of the Day feature, boats that used to haul in tons of fish a year rust near Muynog, a former port in northern Uzbekistan. “This is what the end of the world looks like,” a 2015 National Geographic story quoted a local researcher as saying.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | | An unsurprising last meal: Tollund Man (above), perhaps the best known of the bog bodies, was hanged with a leather noose and tossed into a peat bog in Denmark 2,400 years ago. Researchers of the preserved remains have been able to determine the man’s unremarkable last meal: slightly burnt porridge with barley, flax, wild weed seeds, and some fish, Elizabeth Djinis reports for Nat Geo.
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 | | If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. | | | | Emily St. John Mandel | Canadian novelist, on deluded, self-proclaimed prophets and their believers
From Station Eleven
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| On Tuesday, Rob Kunzig covers the latest in the environment. If you don't get the daily newsletter, sign up here for Victoria Jaggard on science, George Stone on travel, Rachael Bale on animal and wildlife news, Debra Adams Simmons on history, and Rachel Buchholz on families and kids. | |
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| | Operation Gomorrah: The 1943 weeklong air bombardment of the German city of Hamburg was the first time in World War II that the Allies had targeted civilians. The operation, named after the town the Bible said was destroyed by fire and brimstone, was a precursor to the horrific U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima. One tactic the Allies used—launching paper strips coated in aluminum along with the bombs—rendered Nazi radar anti-aircraft methods ineffective, Erin Blakemore reports. (Pictured above, trails of light from incendiary bombs over Hamburg during the attack.) | | | |
| | Today's newsletter was curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams. Jen Tse selected the photographs. Have an idea or link to a story you think is right down our alley? Let us know at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading. | | | |
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