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(5) Oscar Wilde An Aesthetic Life Cool History - YouTube

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Learn more abour Rebecca Nurse, victim of the Salem Witch Trials

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Learn more abour Rebecca Nurse, victim of the Salem Witch Trials

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In Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," the playwright notes that "gentleness exudes from" a sick, elderly woman named Rebecca Nurse.

At age 71, Nurse became the oldest woman killed at the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693. About 200 people were tried for witchcraft in Puritan New England and 19 of them, mostly women, were hanged for the crime.

Now, many people claim Nurse and the other victims as ancestors.

Nurse's home in Danvers, Massachusetts, is now a museum. When the Rebecca Nurse Homestead invited people to send cards for her 400th birthday, they were stunned at how many came in, mostly from her descendants.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is the only home of someone executed during the witch trials that's open to the public. Kathryn Rutkowski, curator and president of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, says two types of people come to visit: People fascinated with the witch trials and descendants of Nurse from across the country and beyond.

When she started working at the homestead at age 14, Rutkowski was surprised to see so many descendants as someone who isn't related to anyone from the colonial era. And now, people can easily learn about their ancestry.

The list of descendants of Nurse includes former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, "Scrubs" star Zach Braff and "I Love Lucy" star Lucille Ball.

"The majority of the people that come in day to day are ancestors," she says, "and even sometimes [they] find out that the same people visiting are from the same line and they're cousins."

Historians say witch trials were an attempt to keep women in line. But in Salem, the young women who claimed others had cast a spell on them fell very ill and had seizures. Some now speculate it might have been a virus.

Visitors often ask what really happened during the time of the trial, but Rutkowski struggles to respond with one answer. Historians describe the time as "the perfect storm" as conflict with Native Americans coincided with a harsh winter, she says.

At the time, Puritans believed that whatever happened - good or bad - signaled a punishment or reward from God, she says.

"I think as modern people, we really want to villainize them and make them into these bad people," she says. "But they were people reacting to a very real threat in their village."

The strict religious group believed their life goal was to go to heaven after death, she says, and that the threat of witches could prevent them from making it there - a terrifying thought.

People now understand that modern-day witches and Wiccans uphold a nature-based practice that isn't "dark or evil," but the witch trial victims were accused of "signing their soul to the devil and wreaking havoc in their religious community," she says.

Based on court documents and surviving records, Nurse didn't call the girls liars or deny the accusation of witchcraft. Instead, she looked inward and questioned what she did to deserve such an accusation, Rutkowski says.

"[Nurse] even offers to pray for the afflicted girls to hope that maybe whatever is afflicting them will pass," Rutkowski says. "She was just very gracious about the whole thing and very accepting of what was about to happen, knowing that she would be executed very likely."

Beth Lambright's journey to discovering her ancestral connection to Nurse started with her father's peculiar first name. Her father, Wildes, didn't know the origins of his unique name until Lambright sought an explanation.

"Sarah Wildes was hung with Rebecca Nurse on the same day," the Corvallis, Oregon, resident says. "And that's where it came from."

Lambright is directly related to Nurse's brother, Jacob, which makes Nurse Lambright's eighth great aunt. And Lambright is also related to five other people who were executed in the trials.

When she found out she was related to victims of the trials, she says she discovered that she's also related to someone who was on the jury.

"When I saw a death date 1692 in Salem, the first thing I had in my throat was fear," she says.

On top of reading "The Crucible" herself, Lambright watched her daughter portray the role of Susanna Sheldon, one of the accusers, in a high school production.

"That was a gripping moment for me," she says, "sitting in the audience, watching my child acting out accusing her ancestors."

Known for her high moral character, Nurse raised eight children on her husband's farm, Lambright says.

Bedridden and deaf at age 71, Nurse went in front of a court to face the accusation of witchcraft. A group of 39 neighbors signed a form supporting her innocence but the court ignored it.

"Her life was actually not anything we would have written a book about until she was 71," Lambright says.

Miller portrays Nurse as saintly and morally superior to everyone else in the play. She walked with her head held high to the gallows to meet her demise on July 19, 1692.

Lambright considers Nurse one of her heroes. When she visited the Rebecca Nurse Homestead a few years ago with her family, Lambright stood in the great room looking at an average spinning wheel and fireplace.

"Yet this ordinary life became an extraordinary moment of really heroism," she says. "Standing in the truth, [Nurse] paid for that with her life."

While finding other relatives through the homestead is fun, Lambright says what matters most is that her kids learn from how their ancestors took a stand.

Lambright uses Nurse's story as a teachable moment: Regardless of what your community or church may say about you, examine what's in your heart and maintain your truth, she says. It's an important lesson in today's political climate.

"We're seeing loud voices. They might look like the majority for a while, but it doesn't mean that they're always speaking truth," she says. "We have to be really careful that we understand who we are and what our truth is."
Julia Corcoran produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.

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Celebrating The 400th Birthday Of Salem Witch Trials Victim Rebecca Nurse

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In Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," the playwright notes that "gentleness exudes from" a sick, elderly woman named Rebecca Nurse. At age 71, Nurse became the oldest woman killed at the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693. About 200 people were tried for witchcraft in Puritan New England and 19 of them, mostly women, were hanged for the crime.

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Written by Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

Keeping you in the know, Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to.

Romantic love is often regarded as the most important partnership one can have. But in the mid-1990s, when pop-rock group The Rembrandts released the now-famous "Friends" theme song "I'll Be There For You" -- an ode to a support system you have even when your love prospects are DOA -- they placed friendship in its rightful top spot.

If you are more in the mood to celebrate your friends this year instead of your valentine -- as Leslie Knope of the sitcom "Parks and Recreation" did when she founded the fictional holiday Galentine's Day -- consider the new pop-science book "Friends." In it, British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar asserts that the benefits of a circle of close friends far outweigh those of any single relationship, and that maintaining one is the best thing you can do for your health.

"The biggest predictor of your psychological health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, even your risk of dying, is the number and quality of close friendships you have," Dunbar said in a video call.

We often consider how well we eat, how much we exercise and the medicines and vitamins we take to keep us healthy. But Dunbar says while those factors are important, research has shown our social connections can be even more crucial. Bolstering his claim is a 2010 analytical review, which found that participants across 148 studies had a 50% increased likelihood of survival if they had strong social relationships.

Designed for complexity

To Dunbar, who turned his attention to human social behavior after a career as a zoologist, the human social world "is by far the most complex thing" in the universe.

"That's because it is so unpredictable, and it's constantly turning over and changing," he said. "People fall out with each other, they find better friends, they move apart, they just get bored."

Yet our brains are designed to navigate the intricate social networks we build, and extract benefits from them.

According to "Friends," strong social support systems are associated with a lower risk of depression and dementia and a better chance of survival, while loneliness -- which Dunbar calls an "evolutionary alarm signal" -- can be detrimental to our health. In one meta-analytical review cited in "Friends," researchers looked at 70 studies conducted over an average of seven years that involved nearly 3.5 million people. They found those who were socially isolated, living alone, or simply felt persistently lonely had about a 30% increased chance of dying.

Mood-boosting bonds

There are a few theories as to why your friendships keep you healthy, according to "Friends," from providing you help in crisis to giving you a fortifying mood lift. Studies show that friendships trigger the release endorphins, stress-relieving chemicals in our bodies, which then stimulate the production of the white blood cells that protect us from bacteria and viruses.

But the depth of those friendship also matters more than their quantity. Having loads of acquaintances won't give you the same benefits that a few close bonds will. In a 2020 survey of nearly 40,000 subjects aged 50 or older in 13 European countries, researchers, including Dunbar, found that having just a few close friends was associated with a lower risk of depression and better quality of life. Having many social connections did not appear to be beneficial, and could actually be detrimental.

"If you have more than about five (close friends) you're spreading yourself too thinly among all these extra friends," Dunbar said. "And so none of them quite have the same sense of bonding."

Though our ability to see our friends has become more limited due to the coronavirus pandemic, Dunbar said there's no need to panic. Virtual activities may not be a perfect replacement, but we can still derive some of the benefits of social bonding from afar, and keeping up with friends by phone or video call will help nurture our relationships until we can spend quality time in person again.

So keep that weekly Zoom game night going or start up a new one to give your endorphins a boost.
"Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships" by Robin Dunbar will be available through Little, Brown on March 4, 2021.
Add to queue: BFFS 4EVER

Leslie Knope's overzealous gift-giving (including 5,000-word essays to each of her friends on why they are awesome) is on full display in the now-classic episode that made February 13 an unofficial holiday to celebrate your girlfriends.

In 2014, long-distance best friends Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman began "Call Your Girlfriend," a podcast in which they ring each other to chat about politics and pop culture. Last year, they released a book about what it takes to ensure your friendships go the distance.

Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon changed the buddy road trip trope forever when they played best-friends-turned-wanted-criminals on a weekend trip gone wrong.

Four childhood best friends, played by Morris Chestnut, D.L. Hughley, Bill Bellamy and Shemar Moore, navigate love and family life as the prospect of marriage begins to shake their bond.

Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle relive their painfully awkward middle school years in this comedy series -- only they're adult actors and their classmates are all kids.

LISTEN: " I'll Be There For You" by The Rembrandts

Despite being off the air for nearly two decades, "Friends" continues to be one of the most popular shows to stream, making The Rembrandts title track a permanent fixture in any playlist about friendship.

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forget your valentine -- friends are your most important relationships - cnn

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Forget your valentine -- friends are your most important relationships

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Written by Jacqui Palumbo, CNN Keeping you in the know, Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to. Romantic love is often regarded as the most important partnership one can have.

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in the NY Times

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In our 2021 Culture issue, out April 18, T celebrates friendship - the importance of which we've felt especially deeply this past year - in all its many forms.

AMONG OTHER THINGS, this past year will be remembered as a period in which certain long-held delusions came to an end. The most troubling of those revelations concerned systemic problems. But some revelations were quieter, and more personal. Twenty twenty was a year in which we were forced to reconsider every relationship in our lives. Some people, shut indoors with their families or partners, realized that they valued them more than they knew; for others, these past 12 months have brought long-overdue (and, often, unpleasant) recognitions: The people they have made their lives with are no longer the people they want to be with. "When this is over" is a promise, but it is also a challenge, and, as restrictions continue to fall away, we will see, in a million small revolutions, how people decide to finish that sentence.

For those of us without partners or families, though, this year brought a different kind of reckoning, and many of us found ourselves relying on our friends in ways we never seriously imagined we would. The quality that makes friendships singular - that they are the one serious relationship in our lives not bound by money or law - is also what makes them fragile, and over the months, many of us found that the most important friendships in our lives were changing. These changes weren't always for the better: Close friendships fractured or even splintered, hurt by distance, time apart and gaps in circumstance. Once-overlooked inequalities - of devotion, money and privilege - became unignorable, and the subject of resentments.

On the other hand, there was also a flourishing of renewed (and new) friendships. Circumstance accelerated an often-slow process, and some of us found ourselves growing close to, and even dependent upon, people who heretofore had been peripheral figures in our lives. This past year has been a reminder of how vital friendship is (perhaps especially in cities, where many people are single or without families), how sustaining it is and how elastic it can be. There are no rules about what a friendship can be: It needs only effort, and mutual commitment.

When the lockdowns in New York began last March, a friend who was visiting from Paris found himself trapped in the city, and what was an inconvenience for him became a salvation for me. Four or five times a week, we met in Washington Square Park and took hourslong walks, discussing the new information about Covid-19; how lucky we were to have our jobs and homes; how much we missed friends whom we couldn't see. And although we had been close before the pandemic, the period moved our friendship into a new territory. Every day we walked, therefore, we were venturing deeper into the same beautiful landscape together. On Wednesdays, I'd pick out a recipe, and on Fridays, he and his boyfriend would make dinner. I'd come with a small gift - a bunch of Easter lilies from the corner bodega; a bit of marzipan from the market - and leave with leftovers, fresh-baked bread, a log of frozen cookie dough. For many weeks, the three of us saw only one another, and I could not have survived those weeks without them. In June, my friend returned to Paris, but the friendship has endured - a treasured and unexpected gift from this strangest of years.

THIS ISSUE IS a celebration of friendship, and the many different permutations it takes. It is also a feat of magazine-making. Our dedication to respecting various, ever-changing Covid-related restrictions meant that shoots were canceled and rescheduled at the 11th hour (you can read about the safety precautions our art and photo teams took here). The pandemic also made several editorial determinations for us: We weren't, for example, able to photograph as many elderly people as we wanted to, nor those with serious medical conditions. Travel was complicated, which meant that most of the shoots were concentrated in major cities.

Along with smell, Covid robbed us of another sense: touch. We prioritized people who had been sheltering or working together so we could capture them holding one another - poses that, a year after this illness changed the world, startle with their intimacy.

But even those who could not or preferred not to touch were able to convey their affection for one another. That, too, has been a lesson of this year: that as much as the context may change, our need for our friends remains. Of all the new skills we've been forced to learn, this may be one of the greatest - as long as we can stay forgiving and gracious, then friendship can withstand the most punishing of climates. And if its shape may be different, the love that gave it meaning is not. We just have to learn to see it anew. - HANYA YANAGIHARA

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A Celebration of Friendship in All Its Many Forms

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In our 2021 Culture issue, out April 18, T celebrates friendship - the importance of which we've felt especially deeply this past year - in all its many forms. AMONG OTHER THINGS, this past year will be remembered as a period in which certain long-held delusions came to an end.

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Meet the most famous reader in English literature

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Meet the most famous reader in English literature

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Le manuel numérique max, c'est le complément indispensable du manuel papier ou numérique. 22 manuels numériques max avec tous les contenus des manuels Belin Éducation nouveaux programmes de lycée, organisés en base de données, et des milliers de ressources.

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Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of the Usher

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Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of the Usher

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Short story 2

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Short story 1

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST by OSCAR WILDE - FULL AudioBook | Greatest Audio Books

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Jordan Peterson on the Importance of Reading

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Jordan Peterson on the Importance of Reading

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Emma Watson Hid Feminist Books All Around NYC For Internatio