For many Americans, the Thanksgiving meal includes seasonal dishes such as roast turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. The holiday feast dates back to November 1621, when the newly arrived Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians gathered at Plymouth for an autumn harvest celebration, an event regarded as America’s “first Thanksgiving.” But what was really on the menu at the famous banquet, and which of today’s time-honored favorites didn’t earn a place at the table until later in the holiday’s 400-year history?

TURKEY

By James McClure

When you hear the word "prohibition," alcohol and marijuana likely come to mind. But America has banned a number of other vices and recreations over the years - including, of all things, pinball.

The modern, coin-operated version of pinball was invented in Chicago in the 1920s, where it was seen as another game of chance that people could bet on at speakeasies and other nefarious joints during alcohol prohibition. As a result, it quickly became associated with gangsters and the rest of the city's criminal underworld.

The criminal association quickly led to pinball being seen as a gateway for harder vices (sound familiar?).

"Pinball machines are a harmful influence because of their strong tendency to instil desire for gambling in immature young people," said Lewis Valentine, who was New York City's police commissioner from 1934-1945.

New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia agreed. In the early 1940s, he launched a moral crusade against pinball, which he called an "evil" that robbed the public through the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money." The campaign resulted in New York becoming the first major American city to ban the game in 1942.

Other cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia and even Chicago, followed suit. But few enforced the ban with as much fervor as New York under Mayor LaGuardia, who orchestrated prohibition-style raids involving police smashing thousands of pinball machines with sledgehammers and axes before dumping them in the city's rivers.

Saved by the flipper

Like so many rounds of pinball, the machine itself was saved by the flipper. The iconic piece of today's game wasn't invented until 1947. Before then, players had to to shake and tilt the table to maneuver the ball, making pinball a game of chance like gambling on slot machines. But the flipper allowed the game's backers to argue that pinball was actually based on skill.

That's the case they made in 1976, when pinball had its day in court. In April of that year, Roger Sharpe - a writer for the New York Times and GQ, who also happened to be a savvy pinballer - was called as a star witnessof New York's Music and Amusement Association (MAA). Sharpe was asked to play rounds of pinball in a Manhattan courtroom to demonstrate that pinball was a game of skill, not chance. Sharpe did just that when he amazed legislators by calling his shot like a billiard player.

Thus New York overturned pinball prohibition, other cities soon followed and Sharpe became known as the Babe Ruth of pinball.

By Christopher Klein

In an era when women couldn’t vote and Native Americans were denied citizenship, Susan La Flesche shattered not just one barrier, but two, to become the first Native American woman doctor in the United States. A new book details how the 19th-century trailblazer overcame racial and gender biases in a white patriarchal world to graduate at the top of her medical school class, care for an entire reservation and raise children while pursuing a full-time career.

Eight-year-old Susan La Flesche sat at the bedside of an elderly woman, puzzled as to why the doctor had yet to arrive. After all, he had been summoned four times, and four times he had promised to come straight away. As the night grew longer, the sick woman’s breathing grew fainter until she died in agony before the break of dawn. Even to a young girl, the message delivered by the doctor’s absence was painfully clear: “It was only an Indian.”

That searing moment stoked the fire inside Susan to one day heal the fellow members of her Omaha tribe. “It has always been a desire of mine to study medicine ever since I was a small girl,” she wrote years later, “for even then I saw the need of my people for a good physician.”

Born in a buckskin teepee on the Omaha Indian Reservation in northeast Nebraska on June 17, 1865, Susan was never given a traditional Omaha name by her mixed-race parents. Her father, Chief Joseph La Flesche (also known as “Iron Eye”), believed his children as well as his tribe were now living in a white man’s world in which change would be the only constant. “As the chief guardian of welfare, he realized they would have to adapt to white ways or simply cease to survive,” says Joe Starita, author of “A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor.” “He began an almost intense indoctrination of his four daughters. They would have to speak English and go to white schools.”

While Iron Eye insisted that Susan learn the tribe’s traditional songs, beliefs, customs and language in order to retain her Omaha identity, he also sent her to a Presbyterian mission school on the reservation where she learned English and became a devout Christian. At the age of 14, she was sent east to attend a girls’ school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, followed by time at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, where she took classes with the children of former slaves and other Native Americans.

Female physicians, late 19th century. Susan LaFlesche is in the second row from the back, fourth woman from the right. (Credit: Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine)

Omaha means “against the current,” and few members of the tribe embodied the name better than La Flesche, as she proved by enrolling in the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania at a time when even the most privileged of white women faced severe discrimination. Starita points to articles published in journals such as Popular Science Monthly that argued that women faced an intellectual disadvantage because their brains were smaller than those of men or that their menstrual cycles made them unfit for scientific pursuits. A Harvard doctor even wrote a 300-page thesis asserting that women should be barred from attending college because the stress would harm their reproductive organs. “When you read these theories in scientific journals, you realize what all women were facing,”

Still, La Flesche persevered and graduated in 1889 at the top of her 36-woman class to make history by becoming the first Native American woman doctor. Although prodded to remain on the East Coast where she could have lived a very comfortable existence, the 24-year-old La Flesche returned to the reservation to fulfill her destiny.

She became the sole doctor for 1,244 patients spread over a massive territory of 1,350 square miles. House calls were arduous. Long portions of her 20-hour workdays were spent wrapped in a buffalo robe driving her buggy through blankets of snow and biting subzero winds with her mares, Pat and Pudge, her only companions. When she returned home, the woman known as “Dr. Sue” often found a line of wheezing and coughing patients awaiting her. La Flesche’s office hours never ended. While she slept, the lantern lit in her window remained a beacon for anyone in need of help.

La Flesche preached hygiene and prevention along with the healing power of fresh air and sunshine. She also spoke out against the white whiskey peddlers who preyed on the tribe members, continuing her father’s work as a passionate prohibitionis.

As difficult as it may have been to straddle two civilizations, La Flesche “managed to thread the delicate bicultural needle,” according to Starita. “Those with no trust of white doctors flocked to Susan,” he says. “The people trusted her because she spoke their language and knew their customs.”

La Flesche again shattered stereotypes by continuing to work after her 1894 marriage to Henry Picotte, a Sioux from South Dakota, and the birth of their two boys at a time when women were expected to be full-time mothers and home makers. “If you are looking for someone who was ‘leaning in’ a century before that term was coined, you need look no further than Susan La Flesche,” Starita says. “She faced a constant struggle to serve her people and serve her husband and children. She was haunted that she was spreading herself so thin that she wasn’t the doctor, mother and wife she should be. The very fears haunting her as a woman in the closing years of the 19th century are those still haunting women in the opening years of the 21st century.”

The evils of alcohol that La Flesche railed against came into her home as her husband struggled with the bottle. He contracted tuberculosis, exacerbated by his alcoholism, and died in 1905, leaving La Flesche a widow with two small boys. By this point, the physician needed some healing herself, as her long hours led to chronic pain and respiratory issues. She pressed on, however, and in 1913 opened a hospital near Walthill, Nebraska, the first such facility to be built on reservation land without any support from the federal government. Her hospital was open to anyone who was ill—no matter their age, gender or skin color.

Starita believes that La Flesche, who passed away at the age of 50 on September 18, 1915, faced greater discrimination as a woman than as a Native American. “When I got into the research, I was stunned by how deeply entrenched gender bias was in the Victorian era. White women were largely expected to just raise children and maintain a safe Christian home. One can only imagine where that bar was set for a Native American woman.”

As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.

Many of these “computers” are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.

“These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women’s lives and accomplishments. The book is being adapted into a movie that will receive a wide release release in January.

“We've had astronauts, we’ve had engineers—John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft,” she says. “Those guys have all told their stories.” Now it’s the women’s turn.

Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) as the space race gained speed.

The West Computers were at the heart of the center’s advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects—Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete.

The first black computers didn’t set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One 1992 study estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly’s own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.

Johnson at NASA in 1966

As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist. “They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs,” she says. “And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley.”

Surrounded by the West Computers and other academics, it took decades for Shetterly to realize the magnitude of the women’s work. “It wasn't until my husband, who was not from Hampton, was listening to my dad talk about some of these women and the things that they have done that I realized,” she says. “That way is not necessarily the norm”

The spark of curiosity ignited, Shetterly began researching these women. Unlike the male engineers, few of these women were acknowledged in academic publications or for their work on various projects. Even more problematic was that the careers of the West Computers were often more fleeting than those of the white men. Social customs of the era dictated that as soon as marriage or children arrived, these women would retire to become full-time homemakers, Shetterly explains. Many only remained at Langley for a few years.

But the more Shetterly dug, the more computers she discovered. “My investigation became more like an obsession,” she writes in the book. “I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end.”

She scoured telephone directories, local newspapers, employee newsletters and the NASA archives to add to her growing list of names. She also chased down stray memos, obituaries, wedding announcements and more for any hint at the richness of these women’s lives. “It was a lot of connecting the dots,” she says.

“I get emails all the time from people whose grandmothers or mothers worked there,” she says. “Just today I got an email from a woman asking if I was still searching for computers. [She] had worked at Langley from July 1951 through August 1957.”

Dr. Christine Darden. Courtesy NASA

Langley was not just a laboratory of science and engineering; “in many ways, it was a racial relations laboratory, a gender relations laboratory,” Shetterly says. The researchers came from across America. Many came from parts of the country sympathetic to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, says Shetterly, and backed the progressive ideals of expanded freedoms for black citizens and women.

But life at Langley wasn’t just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. “That was incredible courage,” says Shetterly. “This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes.”

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

The women fought many more of these seemingly small battles, against separate bathrooms and restricted access to meetings. It was these small battles and daily minutiae that Shetterly strove to capture in her book. And outside of the workplace, they faced many more problems, including segregated busses and dilapidated schools. Many struggled to find housing in Hampton. The white computers could live in Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory that helped alleviate the shortage of housing, but the black computers were left to their own devices.

“History is the sum total of what all of us do on a daily basis,” says Shetterly. “We think of capital “H” history as being these huge figures—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King.” Even so, she explains, “you go to bed at night, you wake up the next morning, and then yesterday is history. These small actions in some ways are more important or certainly as important as the individual actions by these towering figures.”

The book and movie don’t mark the end of Shetterly’s work She continues to collect these names, hoping to eventually make the list available online. She hopes to find the many names that have been sifted out over the years and document their respective life’s work.

The few West Computers whose names have been remembered, have become nearly mythical figures—a side-effect of the few African-American names celebrated in mainstream history, Shetterly argues. She hopes her work pays tribute to these women by bringing details of their life’s work to light. “Not just mythology but the actual facts,” she says. “Because the facts are truly spectacular.”

Nicole continues her series: UK OK!, by visiting the historic town of St. Andrews.  Its home to the one of the oldest English speaking universities in the world…and its considered the “home of modern golf”.

BY Andrea Aronson

In the sports-obsessed United States, many students assume that the ticket to a hefty college scholarship is athletic prowess on the field, on the court, or in the pool.

Not so.  Just look at the total numbers.

Between the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) about $3.2 billion in athletic scholarships are disbursed every year.  While that might sound like a hefty chunk of change, the reality is, when you do the math and look at the overall dynamics of athletic scholarships, you’ll see that number can be misleading.

Remember that of that $3.2 billion, only approximately one-quarter of it will be available to graduating high school seniors.  With an estimated 54,000 incoming first-year athletes potentially receiving scholarships each year, that means that, on average, an athlete might expect to receive around $15,000 in scholarship dollars. Not bad, you may be thinking, but not the mother lode either when you consider the average cost of a college education.

Further, keep in mind that “full-ride tuition scholarships” only really exist for a few sports (men’s football and basketball, women’s basketball, volleyball and gymnastics) and for a few players in that sport, and that most athletic scholarships are only a fraction of those averages.  Note, too, that many players at all levels of varsity play are on their teams with no scholarship money, at all.  While Division 3 players never receive athletic scholarships, Divisions 1 and 2 teams carry several players who receive zero award dollars.

Contrast all this with the facts and figures of academic scholarships.  Individual colleges and universities give away approximately $24 billion in scholarship awards, and the Federal government gives away another $22 billion in need-based aid.  About 13.2 million students attend four-year colleges and universities.  Obviously, if we did some math, the amount of money, on average, going to a student at a four-year college or university would be pretty tiny.

But it’s not distributed evenly—just as the athletic scholarship money is distributed unevenly, so too are academic scholarship dollars. No surprise: the best athletes (in certain sports) get more money than other athletes (in other sports).  The best students with the best grades and tests scores get more money than other students.

But which is the better bet? Where you should spend the most time and energy in order to get a better scholarship and reduce the cost of college?

Well, we’re betting on academics.

Here’s why:  no matter what the scenario, having strong academic credentials is appealing for both colleges and college coaches, and yes, it can even help you be recruited for that varsity collegiate spot on the team.

At best, college athletic recruiting is a crapshoot.  Even the most seemingly talented players may not get the kind of coach interest that they believe that they deserve.  Every year, every coach seeks something different for their team and needs that different something to varying degrees.  Depending upon how much they need it, and whether you offer it, the calculus of whether you’ll get recruited, and how much money you might be offered can change.  Add into this that many sports are not well-supported financially at many colleges, and that the large majority of sports are “equivalency sports” that have a bucket of money that has to be divided up across all players, and suddenly you have a recipe for total scholarship unpredictability.  Will you get recruited?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Will you get scads of scholarship money?  Highly unlikely.

On the other hand, everybody wants a good student, and many institutions are more than willing to provide significant scholarship dollars to get that high-flyer.  There is no gray here. No unpredictability.  No complicated calculation.  And, what constitutes a strong student is generally objectively agreed upon across all colleges: a solid performance in classwork as reflected by the high school transcript.  Contrast this to the subjectivity of athletic recruiting, and you’ll see why spending time studying may be a better bet than spending money on that extra session of private coaching.

Plus, coaches are desperate for good students that they can recruit since they help out the coach on many levels.  Coaches need to meet certain academic standards both with their recruiting class’ high school performance as well as ongoing with their varsity team’s collegiate academic achievements.  Often, coaches will have what they consider to be “academic recruits.”  These are players who may not be considered superstars in their sport but who can help buoy the team in the classroom, and, yes, they get actively recruited to be on the team. (Though, admittedly, these players don’t usually get much in the way of large athletic scholarships, they often do get sizable merit scholarships because of the strength of their academics).

So, which athletes get the biggest scholarships?  The ones who don’t rely on their athletic prowess to be the main driver of their potential scholarship dollars and who study, study, study!