I use a calendar to keep up with my work as a science cat. I also love calendar apps that count down to big events—like my birthday. People have always tracked time for work and holidays.

I talked about this with my friend Nikolaus Overtoom. He’s a professor of ancient history at Washington State University.

He told me we use the Gregorian calendar today. That’s a revised version of the Julian calendar. The Romans invented the Julian calendar.

But there were calendars before that. Ancient people all over the world had calendars—including a detailed calendar made by the ancient Maya.

“Early people looked to the heavens to understand the movement of planets and stars,” Overtoom said. “They used that information to help structure their societies. They needed to know when to plant crops or move their herds.”

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How do you learn—and save—a history that was often too dangerous to write down?

To mark Pride Month 2023, we hunted through the Atlas Obscura archives for stories that have long been overlooked in mainstream American history: tales of people across the centuries—from as long ago as Colonial Williamsburg—who would now be thought of as part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Among them:

The Forgotten Trans History of the Wild West
By Sabrina Imbler

People who did not conform to traditional gender norms were a part of daily life in the Old West, according to Peter Boag, a historian at Washington State University. While researching a book about the gay history of Portland, writes Sabrina Imbler, Boag stumbled upon hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who dressed against their assigned gender. Trans people have always existed all over the world. So how had they escaped notice in the annals of the Old West?

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Atlas Obscura

A pirate’s life was dangerous. They attacked other ships and battled other pirates as well as the law. But they were also at the mercy of another foe: sickness.

I talked about this with my friend Lawrence Hatter. He’s a history professor at Washington State University.

He told me the big era for pirates was 1710 to 1730. It was a time when lots of sailors were out of work. Some of them became pirates.

Here are four kinds of disease they might face on the job: scurvy, mosquito-borne diseases, infectious diseases and gangrene.

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“Oooh, horsies,” Dru Holley’s 7-year-old daughter, Andrea, exclaimed at a Juneteenth festival in 2018.

Those words that so many parents have heard for generations sparked Holley’s first feature-length documentary, “Buffalo Soldiers: A War on Two Fronts,” airing for the first time Monday on PBS.

The documentary explores the roles the members of six all-Black cavalry and infantry regiments, known as Buffalo Soldiers, played in conflicts in the American West and abroad following the Civil War.

The documentary features Washington State University historian Ryan Booth, who studies the United States Indian Scouts. The scouts were Indigenous men acting as guides for the U.S. Army in the Indian Wars of the late 1800s.

In 2018, Holley’s daughter had spotted The Buffalo Soldiers of Seattle, a living history group that honors the regiments.

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Spokesman-Review