nimrod

Looney Tunes, What Makes Daffy Duck, 1948

27 September 2024

(30 September 2024: added reference to the 1951 Looney Tunes cartoon)

In current usage, nimrod is often used as a disparaging term for an inept or foolish person, but its original and basic meaning is as a term for a hunter. This inept usage is often said to come from young viewers misinterpreting a pair of Looney Tunes cartoons, but while these cartoons undoubtedly played a role in popularizing the sense of an inept person, it’s not the origin.

The name Nimrod is biblical, from the Hebrew נִמְרוֹד (Nimród). Nimrod was a great-grandson of Noah. The name is probably a variant of Ninurta, a Mesopotamian god of war and the hunt. He appears in Genesis 10, with early English translations spelling his name as Nenroth, Nemroth, and similar variations. From the Old English translation of Genesis:

An þære wæs Nenroth; þe Nemroth wæs mihtig on eorþan. & strang hunta ætforan Gode. Be þam wæs gecweden bigword, swa swa Nemroth strang hunta ætforan Gode. His rices angin wæs Babilon & Arah, & archat & Cahanne on þam lande Sennar. Of þam [l]ande ferde Asur, & getimbrode þa buruh Niniuen, & burhga streta. Oþre burh he getimbrode eac, þe hatte Chale. Oþre burh he getimbrode eac, þe hatte Chale. The þriddan burh þe he arærde het Reson, betwux Niniuen & Cale; þeos is micel burh

(Another [son of Cush] was Nimrod; this Nimord was mighty on earth and a powerful hunter before God. A proverb was said about him, just as Nimrod a powerful hunter before God. His kingdomes were Babylon and Uruk, and Akkad and Kalneh in the land of Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria, & built the city of Ninevah, & the streets of that city. He built another city also, which is named Calah. The third city that he erected is named Resen, between Ninevah and Calah; this is a great city.)

In folklore, Nimrod is often associated with the Tower of Babel, often depicted as the king who ordered it constructed. But this association has no biblical basis. The Middle English poem The Story of Genesis and Exodus, probably composed in the mid thirteenth century and with a manuscript witness penned sometime before 1325 depicts him as a conqueror who seized the land where the tower had stood:

Babel, ðat tur, bi-lef un-mad,
ðat folc is wide on lon[de] sad;
Nembrot nam wið strengðhe ðat lond,
And helde ðe tur o babel in his hond.

(Babel, that tower, remained unmade,
That folk were widely throughout the land scattered;
Nimrod took with force that land,
And held the tower of Babel in his hand.)

Geoffrey Chaucer makes mention of him in his poem The Former Age. That poem ends with this stanza, depicting Nimrod as a conqueror who built “towers high” and symbolic of the evil that had befallen the world:

Yit was not Jupiter the likerous,
That first was fader of delicacye,
Come in this world; ne Nebrot, desirous
To regne, had nat maad his toures hye.
Allas, allas, now may men wepe and crye!
For in oure dayes nis but covetyse,
Doublenesse, and tresoun, and envye,
Poyson, manslawhtre, and mordre in sondry wyse.

(Jupiter, the lecherous, that first was the father of wantonness, had not yet come into this world; nor had Nimrod, desirous to reign, made his towers high. Alas, alas, now may men weep and cry! For in our days there is nothing but greed, deceitfulness, and treason, and envy, poison, manslaughter, and many ways to murder.)

And in Early Modern use, the idea of Nimrod as a conquering tyrant was the dominant one. Here’s another example, this one from John Bale’s c.1548 The Image of Bothe Churches, in which Nimrod is used as a general epithet for a tyrant, in this case the ruler of Sodom:

The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester, and the execrable cyteʒe[n]s of Gomorra w[ith] their shorne smered captaines, wyll sturre abought them.

(The boisterous tyrants of Sodom with their great Nimrod Winchester, and the execrable citizens of Gomorrah with their shorn, smeared captains, will stir about them.)

By the sixteenth century the English form settled on nimrod, probably from influence from Hebrew sources. And early in the next century, nimrod starts to be used as a metaphor for a hunter, recalling his description in Genesis. From a 1623 poem by William Drummond:

This World a Hunting is,
The Prey poore Man, the Nimrod fierce is Death,
His speedie Grayhounds are,
Lust, Sicknesse, Enuie, Care,
Strife that neere falles amisse,
With all those ills which haunt vs while wee breath.

And Washington Irving in his 1835 A Tour on the Prairies uses the word to refer to hunters:

I have observed that the wary and experienced huntsman and traveller of the prairies is always sparing of his horse, when on a journey; never, except in emergency, putting him off a walk. The regular journeyings of frontier-men and Indians, when on a long march, seldom exceed above fifteen miles a day, and are often about ten or twelve; and they never indulge in capricious galloping or curvetting. With us, however, many of the party were young and inexperienced, and full of excitement at finding themselves in a country abounding with game. It was impossible to retain them in the sobriety of a march, or to keep them to the line. As we broke our way through the coverts and ravines, and the deer started up and scampered off to the right and left, the rifle-balls would whiz after them, and our young Nimrods dash off in pursuit.

Ben Hecht’s and Gene Fowler’s 1933 play The Great Magoo uses nimrod to refer to a hunter of a different type, a man who relentlessly pursues women. The following exchange is between an older woman and a younger one who has fallen for an unfaithful lover:

TANTE: Now, dearie, I wouldn’t let anybody else in the world say one word against him, but I’m beginning to get disillusioned. He’s got a dame now….

JULIE: Please don’t tell me.

TANTE: Might as well know the truth, and not make a monkey of yourself. She’s an equestrienne. A fine little piece, and he’s in love with her. That makes about the tenth. The same old Nimrod. Won’t let her alone for a second. Jealous of her horse, even. But he claims it’s forever this time. It’s disgusting. It’ll wind up just the same, with this poor little circus artist crying her heart out, just like you—and Nicky hop-scotching after some new victim.

And in the 1940s, we start seeing the phrase nitwit nimrod used to refer to inept hunters. Here is one from an advertisement for a car dealership that appears in Greenville, Pennsylvania’s Record-Argus on 17 November 1948, around the same time as the Daffy Duck cartoon:

1948 advertisement for a Pontiac car dealership

The relevant line in the caption reads:

We’re sorry, but there’s nothing we can do about Knucklehead Newt, the nit-wit nimrod.

The ineptitude here is being carried by nitwit, but as nitwit nimrod becomes something of an alliterative catchphrase, nimrod starts to become guilty, as it were, by association.

This is where the Looney Tunes cartoon comes in. In the 1948 the animated short What Makes Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, the hunter, and Daffy Duck, the putative prey, have this exchange:

ELMER FUDD: How am I ever going to catch that screwy duck?

DAFFY DUCK: Precisely what I was wondering, my little nimrod.

Daffy is using nimrod to simply denote hunter, but he is using it in a condescending tone, and Elmer is most certainly inept, so it would be easy, especially if one is unfamiliar with the biblical reference, to hear nimrod as meaning an inept person. And that is precisely what a generation of children raised on Saturday-morning cartoons on television would do.

The usage is repeated in another Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1951 Rabbit Every Monday, in which Bugs Bunny says of Yosemite Sam (who is a hunter in this animated short), “Nah, I couldn’t do that to the little Nimrod.”

By the 1970s, an era when young adults would have grown up watching Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd on Saturday-morning cartoons, the slang sense of nimrod, divorced from hunting, is in place. We see this enigmatic personal ad in the 19 April 1977 issue of the Connector, the student newspaper of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell:

Bll Boob: Heard you are a Philly fan. What more can you expect from a nitwit, nimrod, R.O.T.C.

                 Anti C.T.O.R.

P.S. I hope you don’t pretend not to read this.

While the main point behind this ad is lost to the ages, it’s another example of nitwit nimrod, only this time apparently divorced both from any hunting context and, by a comma, from the word nitwit.

Finally we see the unadorned nimrod used as an insult in Lawrence Swaim’s 1980 novel The Killing:

“Buy me a drink!”

Quinn lit a cigarette. “The knifethrower is outta money.”

“I got more money than you got trouble.”

“Well—money talks and bullshit walks. Ask old Escobar there.”

“My good looks ain’t good enough?”

“If good looks could get you a trip to the moon, you wouldn’t get ten feet off the ground." Quinn turned to the other patrons. “The poor bastard is down there at that City Hall zoo getting reamed every day by those uncouth bastards, and he thinks it’s because of his good looks! It’s a fringe benefit—haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Fuck you nimrod!”

“Fuck you? I ain’t even kissed you, yet!”

There was more appreciative laughter. Quinn bought his friend a drink and Old Escobar brought sandwiches. Now that the insult part of their meeting was over, they could get down to more substantive matters. They went to a booth at the back and spoke in low voices.

There are certainly instances that predate 1980 to be found.

So while Daffy Duck did not invent the insult, its use in the cartoon certainly did popularize and cement the sense in American slang.

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Sources:

Bale, John. “Preface.” The Image of Both Churches. London: Richard Jugge, 1548, sig. Bv. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Brewer, J.W. (comment). “Nimrod.” Languagehat.com (blog), 29 September 2024.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Former Age.” In The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, lines 56–63, 651.

Crawford, S. J. and N.R. Ker, eds. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch (1922). Early English Text Society, O. S. 160. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, Genesis 10:8–10, 109. London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv.

Drummond, William. “This World a Hunting Is.” Flowres of Sion. Edinburgh: 1623, 20. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. nimrod, n.

Hecht, Ben and Gene Fowler. The Great Magoo. New York: Van Rees Press, 1933, 3.1, 183–84. Archive.org.

Irving, Washington. A Tour of the Prairies. London: John Murray, 1835, 138. HathiTrust Digital Archives.

Lucas Pontiac (advertisement), Record-Argus (Greenville, Pennsylvania), 17 November 1948, 9/1. Newspapers.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. nimrod, n.

Personal ad. Connector (Lowell, Massachusetts), 19 April 1977, 12/5. Archive.org.

Scott, Bill and Lloyd Turner, writers. What Makes Daffy Duck. Arthur Davis, dir. Looney Tunes, 1948.

The Story of Genesis and Exodus, second and revised edition. Richard Morris, ed. Early English Text Society London: N. Trübner, 1873, lines 671–74, 20. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credits: What Makes Daffy Duck (animated short), Warner Brothers: Looney Tunes, 1948, fair use of a portion of a single frame from a film used to illustrate the topic under discussion; Lucas Pontiac, 1948, fair use of a portion of an advertisement to illustrate the topic under discussion.

tennessine

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee

27 September 2024

Tennessine is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 117 and the symbol Ts. It was first synthesized in 2010 by an international team of researchers from Russia and the United States. The collaborating institutions included the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California; the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors (RINR) in Dimitrovgrad, Russia; and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tennessine has no practical applications other than pure research.

The element is named for the state of Tennessee, home to both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University, which participated in its discovery. The earliest mention of the name that I have found is in the April 2016 issue of Nature Chemistry, in which chemist Shawn Burdette speculated on what the name would be:

I have an inkling that the tripartite research collaboration between ORNL, LLNL and JINR on elements 115 and 117—while 118 is LLNL and JINR alone—is going to result in a compromise where each laboratory gets to take the lead on naming one of the three. ORNL is the outlier in the transuranium name game since they hadn’t been credited with an element before the most recent announcement. In pondering this, I wonder if they would follow suit with californium and use the state of Tennessee as the root name. I like the sound of “tennessine” as the halogen -ine suffix echoes the pronunciation of the state name itself.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced the proposed name in a press release dated 8 June 2016:

For element with atomic number 117, the name proposed is tennessine with the symbol Ts. These are in line with tradition honoring a place or geographical region and are proposed jointly by the discoverers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna (Russia), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA), Vanderbilt University (USA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA).

[…]

Tennessine is in recognition of the contribution of the Tennessee region, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, to superheavy element research, including the production and chemical separation of unique actinide target materials for superheavy element synthesis at ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (REDC).

IUPAC made the name official later that year.

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Sources:

Burdette, Shawn C., et al. “Another Four Bricks in the Wall.” Nature Chemistry, 8.4, April 2016, 283–88 at 284. DOI: 10.1038/nchem.2482.

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). “IUPAC Is Naming the Four New Elements Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson” (press release), 8 June 2016. IUPAC.org.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 2014, U.S. Department of Energy. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

Boston marriage / Wellesley marriage

Lithograph of “the Ladies of Llangollen,” Eleanor Butler (1739–1829), right, and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), left. Butler and Ponsonby, both born of upper-class, Anglo-Irish families, lived openly as a couple in North Wales.

23 September 2024

A Boston marriage is term for a long-term cohabitation of two women that dates to the late nineteenth century. The term allows for the possibility of the relationship being a sexual one, but it does not require it. As such it not only gave women more freedom in structuring their economic and familial arrangements, it also gave a respectable social cover for a lesbian relationship, allowing the women to be public as a couple without being scandalous.

The earliest use of the term that I know of is in a 5 January 1893 letter to the journal The Open Court by Ednah Cheney (1824–1904), a Boston writer and social reformer. I quote the letter at length because it is an excellent example of how the term’s euphemism operates:

This seems very strange to one, who for many years has been accustomed to the existence of ties between women so intimate and persistent, that they are fully recognised by their friends, and of late have acquired, if not a local habitation, at least a name, for they have been christened “Boston Marriages.” This institution deserves to be recognised as a really valuable one for women in our present state of civilisation. With the great number of women in our state, in excess of the men, and with the present independence of women, which renders marriage, merely for a home, no longer acceptable, the proportion of those who can enter into that relation is diminished, and the “glorious phalanx of old maids” must find some substitute for the joys of family life. These relations so far as I have known, and I have known many of them, are not usually planned for convenience or economy, but grow out of a constantly increasing attachment, favored by circumstances, which make such a marriage the best refuge against the solitude of growing age.

In some cases women of the medical or other professions form a partnership at once social and professional; or frequently a physician finds comfort for her leisure hours in the society of one of literary tastes or possessing the fine art of housekeeping. Sometimes a wealthy but solitary woman is delighted to share heart and home with one less favored by fortune.

In some cases where family ties still have their claims, the parties do not live together, but are constant companions in the summer excursions or the winter studies and engagements, in which they are mutually interested. As far as I have known, these “Marriages” are of long continuance, and I can hardly recall an instance where a decided rupture has occurred. Of course I do not include in this statement those girlish intimacies which are only what flirtations are to serious matrimonial attachments. Naturally these relations are generally between women of middle age, who have learned much from the duties and sorrows of life, and perchance have known the pleasure, or more often the pains and disappointments of love. To such the tie affords a home for the heart, intellectual companionship, and often help in the pecuniary support, which gives value and worth to a period of life, too often very sad and lonely. As such I must look upon them as a great blessing which should not be interfered with or unduly fostered, but recognised in all simplicity and friendliness.

There is one danger attending such unions, when they are entered into by those who are not destitute of family ties, and the married woman and the mother, even sometimes the aunt and sister should be cautious of assuming a relation which may make her less faithful to the natural ties of family life. I rejoice to say that instances of such mistakes are rare, and that in many cases the friend becomes also one of the family, and helps to preserve and deepen the family affection.

I do not propose that we should formally adopt the Boston Marriage into our civil code, and celebrate it with ceremonies and festivities, for simplicity and privacy especially become it, but I do think it is good to think of it with respect, and welcome it as one of the helps to human welfare, and not let any jealous feelings mar the happiness of those concerned in it.

The term may have been inspired by Henry James’s 1886 novel (serialized 1885–86) The Bostonians, whose primary plot arc concerns a triangle between Basil Ransom, his cousin Olive Chancellor, a feminist living in Boston, and Verena Tarrant, Olive’s young protégée. Olive and Verena live together, and Olive is training Verena to become a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. Basil wishes to marry Verena, who in turn is ambivalent about her feelings—she cares for both Olive and Basil. In the end, Verena elopes with Basil, but the narration indicates that their marriage will not be a happy one. The subtext that Olive is a lesbian who has sexual and romantic feelings for Verena is obvious, but the novel is less clear about whether or not a sexual relationship between Olive and Verena exists. The novel does not, of course, contain any explicit references to same-sex attraction. The book was not well received by critics upon its publication because of its negative portrayal of the suffrage movement as well as the lesbian subtext, which many considered indecent (but which probably helped its sales).

One often sees the claim that the term Wellesley marriage was used for such a cohabitation among female professors at Wellesley College (outside Boston) and other women’s colleges in the late nineteenth century. But the only primary source evidence that I have found for this term existing is a footnote remarking that Dorothy Walcott Weeks, a 1916 graduate of Wellesley, said in a 1978 interview with Patricia Palmieri that Wellesley marriage had been in use at the college during Week’s matriculation there. Recollections of usages like this one should be viewed skeptically, as memories are malleable and anachronistic language is often inserted into them, but in this case Weeks may very well have remembered accurately. The Wikipedia articles that discuss the term invariably point to Lillian Faderman’s 1999 book To Believe in Women as evidence for the term, but Faderman provides no primary source evidence for her claim that the term existed. But, given its slang nature and its subject being limited to the faculty of women’s colleges, the fact that Wellesley marriage does not appear in published sources from the period is not surprising. If more evidence for Wellesley marriage is to be found, it will likely be in archived letters and papers of professors and students at women’s colleges.

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Sources:

Cheney, Ednah D. “Correspondence: Letter to ‘The Open Court.’” Open Court, 7.1, 5 January 1893, 3517–18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. Boston marriage, n.

Palmieri, Patricia A. “Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895–1920.” In Nancy F. Cott, ed., History of Women in the United States, 12: Education, Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993, 314–333 at 332, n.36. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Image credit: Richard James Lane, c. 1832, based on a drawing by Mary Leighton. Wellcome Collection. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

tellurium

Chunks of pure tellurium

20 September 2024

Tellurium is a chemical element with atomic number 52 and the symbol Te. It is a brittle, silver-white metalloid. It is rather rare on earth, but more abundant in the cosmos as a whole. Tellurium is chiefly used in copper and steel alloys to improve machineability and in solar panels and thermoelectric devices. The name was coined in German from the Latin tellus (earth).

The metal we now call tellurium was first discovered and described in 1782 by minerologist Franz-Joseph Müller von Reichenstein, but he was unable to fully identify it, at first confusing it with antimony before deciding that it wasn’t that metal. He gave it the labels auram paradoxum (paradoxical gold), metallum problematicum (problem metal), and aurum album (white gold). In 1798, after being reminded of von Reichenstein’s discovery, chemist Martin Klaproth successfully isolated the metal, gave credit to von Reichenstein for its discovery, and named it tellurium:

Und welchem ich hiermit den, von der alten Muttererde entlehnten, Namen Tellurium beylege.

(And to which I hereby give the name tellurium, taken from the ancient Mother Earth.)

Klaproth had previously discovered uranium, which he had named after the recently discovered planet Uranus, and his naming this metal tellurium may have been inspired by another planetary namesake.

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Sources:

Klaproth, M. H. “Ueber die siebenbürgischen Golderze, und das in selbigen enthaltene neue Metall.” Chemische Annalen Fur Die Freunde Der Naturlehre Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst Und Manufacturen, vol. 1, 1798, 91–104 at 100. Google Books.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2015, s.v. tellurium, n.

Weeks, Mary Elvira. “The Discovery of the Elements. IV. Tellurium and Selenium.” Journal of Chemical Education, 9.3, March 1932, 474–485. DOI: 10.1021/ed009p474.

Photo credit: Jan Anskeit, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

holy mackerel

18 September 2024

“Holy mackerel” is what is called a minced oath, a phrase where an offensive term is replaced with a non-offensive one. In this case, turning a potentially blasphemous utterance into a silly or humorous one. There are a number of “holy X” ones: holy cow, holy Moses, and holy smoke being common. Most of these holy oaths date originate in nineteenth-century America.

I recall the Batman television series from the 1960s (the best Batman) where Robin, played by Burt Ward would utter at least one holy X phrase in each episode. Once when stuck in a vat of glue he uttered, “Holy mucilage, Batman!” And Holy X, Batman! has become something of an internet meme.

In the case of holy mackerel, the mackerel has no significance. Like cow, smoke, or mucilage, it’s just a word that defuses a blasphemous phrase. The choice of mackerel has nothing to do with Lenten diets or the slang word for pimp. Although the latter is related to April Fool’s Day as practiced in France, see April fool. And, by the way, slang use of mackerel for pimp has been part of English slang too, borrowed from the French, since the fifteenth century, although it's not very common in English use.

As to why holy mackerel came into use, it’s probably just a random formulation playing off its absurdity. Someone said it, people laughed, and it caught on. There are many such examples in slang. Language does not follow logical rules; it’s just what people make of it.

The earliest example of holy mackerel that I’ve been able to find is from New York’s Atlas newspaper of 30 January 1853; there are probably earlier ones:

“Holy mackerel!” wouldn’t we like to be a collector of assessments in the Street Department? If our friends, who have supplanted the old collectors, just in time to take this big pool, have many more such jobs to come, won’t they be rich, in three years!

Examples of holy oaths in Green’s Dictionary of Slang include holy balls, holy biddy, holy bones, holy catfish, holy cats, holy Christmas, Holy Christopher, holy cow, holy crap, holy cripes, holy crow, holy cuss, holy dooley (Australian), holy Egypt, holy fly, holy frost (Australian), holy fuck, holy fuckballs, (these last two stretch the definition of minced, but they’re not blasphemous, so I guess they count), holy gee, holy guacamole, holy hailstones, holy hell, holy James Street (Irish), holy Joe, holy mac, holy mackerel, holy mackinaw, holy moly (this one is also reduplicative), holy monkey, holy Moses, holy Peoria, holy poker, holy pretzel, holy shit (see holy fuck), holy smoke(s), holy snakes, holy sneaking Moses, and holy wars.

I’m sure this list just scratches the surface.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. holy…! excl., holy mackerel!, excl.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. holy, adj. & n.

“Street Department—Fat Jobs—Boring the Treasury with a Big Anger!” The Atlas (New York), 30 January 1853. 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Dave Wilton, 2024, generated by imgflip.com.