It’s very likely that Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. When/if she does, some talking head will likely call her “the first women to run for president.” That talking head will be wrong. Women have been running for president for decades. The first woman to do so was Victoria Woodhull, a former Wall Street trader, traveling clairvoyant, spiritualist, newspaper publisher, and advocate for women’s suffrage. Woodhull advocated strongly for free love, i.e., the ability for women to marry whomever they chose, and for the disentangling of marriage as a social institution from the law.

Woodhull obviously lost the 1872 election (Ulysses S. Grant won it) but many of her ideas about gender, women’s rights, free love, and marriage, have been integrated into what is now considered “normal.” Woodhull was a firebrand and a revolutionary at the time and, even though she lost that electoral contest, we now very much live in her world.

Related Links:

victoriacwoodhull.org is a site devoted to, obviously, Victoria Woodhull.

An 1871 report of one of Woodhull’s campaign speeches. (Requires login)

Woodhull was demonized for her support of free love. As in, cartoonists drew her as a demon. A famous caricature of her declared her to be “Mrs. Satan.”

If you were out and about in San Francisco between 1860 and 1880, you might have seen a curious figure on the streets. Joshua Abraham Norton wore a uniform reminiscent of European nobility, made proclamations, and styled himself as “Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.” Norton seems to have been embraced by the city he “ruled” over, to the point where citizens actually used the currency that he issued. His proclamations were popular reading in the city at the time, and often reprinted and imitated by newspapers of the era. He’s best known for proposing a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, and renaming the Bay Bridge in honor of Norton has been proposed numerous times.

Norton today is remembered as an eccentric and benevolent monarch, and his grave, just south of San Francisco, proclaims him simply as “Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.”

Related Links:

Emperor Norton’s grave on Atlas Obscura.

Read a collection of Norton’s proclamations from the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco, who have tried to suss out which ones are genuine and which are hoaxes or pranks.

Renaming the Bay Bridge as the Emperor Norton Bridge is a perennial topic of discussion, and (unsurprisingly) there’s a change.org petition out right now to do exactly that.

There’s a tour guide who apparently dresses up as Norton and does walking tours of San Francisco. That sounds absurd, and I’m totally signing up for one of those the next time I’m in the Bay Area.

This episode is a little different. About a year ago I was approached by a team of documentary film makers who were making a movie about Polybius, Portland’s mythical video game of doom. I’d previously spoken about Polybius at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and they asked if I would also like to talk about it on camera for the movie. I said yes. They set up an event at Velo Cult, a bike/bar/event space here in Portland, and I had a great time talking to people about a creepy nonexistent video game that, supposedly, did weird things to people’s brains.

The Polybius Conspiracy is running a Kickstarter campaign to help with the funding of the film. If you want to see a movie about a legendary video game with me in it (and I hope you do) then consider giving them some of your dollars.

Related Links:

Help fund the Polybius Conspiracy on Kickstarter.

The post on coinop.org that started the whole Polybius myth.

Polybius, a song by James Houston and Julian Corrie.

Imagine a medieval dungeon. You probably imagine prisoners chained to the wall, a torturer in a black mask tormenting the occupants, several machines of torture such as the rack or the Catherine wheel, and, most imposingly, the dreaded iron maiden, a casket lined with spikes that would slowly bleed a prisoner to death in a grim mockery of an embrace.

In all probability, though, the iron maiden was never an actual torture device, at least not in the middle ages. There may have been machines that resembled the famed spiked sarcophagus, but in all probability the most famous and feared resident of the medieval dungeon was probably a hoax dating back to the late 1700s.

Related Links:

The Museum Scholoss Kyburg’s listing for their replica iron maiden.

A reference to the iron maiden in the New York Times in 1863.

Polybius on Nabis’ iron “wife.”

Time Magazine on Uday Hussein’s iron maiden.

The British Empire and other colonial powers did a lot of things wrong, and they famously ignored actual human patterns when drawing borders of Africa. In 1899, the British drew a border between Egypt and Sudan that simply ran in a straight line across the 22nd parallel, ignoring how people in the area moved and identified. A few years later, in 1902, they corrected their mistake and re-drew the boundary.

The result has led to a border dispute between Egypt and Sudan where Egypt claims the 1899 border, and Sudan the 1902 border. This dispute means that a small patch of desert, Bir Tawil, is not claimed by either nation. In 2014 a man from the United States attempted to claim the land and declare it to be the Kingdom of North Sudan. Why? So his daughter could be a princess, of course.

The image below shows Bir Tawil on Google Maps, with the pin in its location. Next to it is the Hala’ib Triangle, which both countries claim.

Related Links:

Bir Tawil on Atlas Obscura.

An opinion piece about Jerimiah Heaton and his micronation over at the the Independent. The author points out, with cause, how bad it looks for a white westerner to suddenly be claiming to own a chunk of Africa.

A piece about Disney’s Princess of North Sudan on Deadline Hollywood.

The official website for the Kingdom of North Sudan.

Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping rebels successfully founded a new kingdom in southern China. The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace sought to overthrow the Manchurian Qing Dynasty and form a new, radically different China. Hong, the supposed younger brother of Jesus Christ, retreated to a life of luxury in an opulent palace, and the actual governance of the kingdom was carried out by his cousin Hong Rengan, who acted as essentially the Heavenly Kingdom’s prime minister. Hong sought out aide from foreign powers to assist the Taiping in their struggle against the Qing, but none came.

Instead, the Manchurian Dynasty and the United Kingdom would join forces to crush the rebels, and the supposed brother of Christ would die ingloriously while besieged in his palace. The image below is a memorial Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Guanxi.

Related Links:

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom on Powells.com.

A brief biography of Zeng Guofan.

A brief biography of Charles Gordon.

In the 1850s a man who styled himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ led China into a bloody rebellion. China in the early 1800s was ravaged by famine, natural disasters, and British meddling that introduced opium (and the Opium Wars) to the population. The country was ripe for rebellion against the Qing Dynasty who, being Manchurian, were often perceived as foreigners by many of China’s Han population. Into all of this chaos and discontent came a man called Hong Xiuquan who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Hong founded an organization called the God Worshipping Society, and he and his Christian rebels would attempt to destroy not only the Qing Dynasty, but also prevailing Chinese ideas of religion and civilization.

This week’s show tracks the reasons behind China’s Taiping Rebellion, and gives a bit of background about Hong himself. Next week’s show will focus on the war itself, and the eventual fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The image below (made some time after the Taiping rebellion in 1886) shows Chinese Imperial soldiers retaking a provincial capital from Taiping rebels.

Related Links:

A website all about the Taiping Rebellion with a fairly obvious URL.

A timeline for the Taiping Rebellion.

BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time (one of my all-time favorite shows) on the Taiping Rebellion.

The foreboding form of Alcatraz Island looms just beyond San Francisco, an obvious symbol of isolation and punishment. Alcatraz was never the biggest, or worst, or longest-lived prison in American history, but it’s definitely the most iconic. The island fortress seems to invite resistance and escape attempts, a setting like Alcatraz demands a narrative just as striking. In 1946 a handful of convicts attempted to violently escape from the island, giving that dramatic setting a dramatic narrative to match it. The resulting conflict, known today as the Battle of Alcatraz, claimed the lives of five people and wounded just over a dozen others. Ordinary San Franciscans were able to watch from their city as guns, explosives, and conflict raged just beyond the bounds of civilization.

The image below shows the exterior of Alcatraz as U.S. Marines pelt the prison with mortars in an attempt to kill and suppress the rebels inside.

Related Links:

Watch 1946 newsreels of the events here and here, in all of their retro media glory.

Read more about the battle and other Alcatraz history here.

This map via Wired of how other Alcatraz escapees could have, possibly, maybe survived.

One of the most persistent myths of the Middle Ages was that of Prester John, a mythical Christian king whose supposed domain was located beyond the eastern Muslim regions. Probably the most vivid portion of the myth is a letter received by the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos in 1165 claiming to be from the monarch. The letter (ostensibly written from one king to another, but with an arrogant, bragging tone that glorifies Prester John’s position relative to that of Byzantium) details a kingdom flowing with milk and honey, populated by fantastical animals such as centaurs and fauns, and featuring such wonders as Mount Olympus and the Fountain of Youth.

Some writers, most notably Marco Polo, identified Prester John with the Mongols, and later versions of the story would move his kingdom to Ethiopia. Below is a 15th century painting depicting Ong Khan, a rival to Genghis Khan, as the legendary king Prester John.

Related Links:

Prester John is profiled in chapter three of S. Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages from 1867.

Prester John and Europe’s Discovery of East Asia from East Asian History, June, 1996.

This YouTube video by a medieval studies grad student nicely illustrates the legend of Prester John with action figures. I have a serious amount of admiration for that kind of thing.

Today’s episode is slightly different than our other entries. We have another interview episode, this time with Joseph Barker, who has a PhD in artifical intelligence, and whom I quoted in the last episode about the mechanical Turk. Instead of talking about fake, illusory artificial intelligence, this episode is devoted to how real, actual machines play games and formulate strategy.

The picture below shows Claude Shannon (whom Barker mentions in the podcast) and his chess machine at MIT in 1950. The machine, impressive at the time, could handle all of six chess pieces.

Related Links:

Barker mentioned John Von Neumann and Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone is an excellent introduction to Von Neumann and his ideas.

Read more about Claude Shannon, a pioneer of chess programming.

A good rundown from Slate about everything wrong with A Beautiful Mind.

Play Dots and Boxes online courtesy the UCLA math department.