Memes

Everybody knows the names Newton and Einstein. Maybe Hubble because of the telescope. But scratching a little deeper to find names such as Maxwell, Planck and Dirac, and boy let me tell ya I got hooked well and proper on physics and its' history.

Then you find the pivotal achievements of women like Henrietta Leavitt, Emmy Noether and Vera Rubin. I cannot even begin to imagine the harassment, both institutional and informal, that these brilliant minds had to contend with on a daily basis back then.

About Henrietta Leavitt at Harvard's astronomy department, she hired a team exclusively of deaf women, so they could remain focused on their task of analyzing photographic glass plates in search of variable stars, oblivious to the heckles and taunts from the male research faculty.

This was Harvard, mind you. Supposed to be a place where proper conduct and appearances matter, where high society young men become refined adult gentlemen. The only way to get the job done was to hire only hearing-impaired women.

So you scratch on one subject, like physics, you find the pioneers in the history of equal rights and the mindless environment they lived in, what they had to struggle with on a daily basis.

Another good example is baseball.
If you start scratching on its' history, pretty quickly you will land on Jackie Robinson, players' rights (or lack thereof), and abhorrent figures like Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Baseball could not and would not become desegregated until after this shit-mountain was literally dead and buried in the mid-1940s.