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One century ago, women's suffrage swept America
In this 1915 map, Lady Liberty shines her light in the West on women in the East, still in electoral darkness

Lady Liberty carrying the torch of women's suffrage from West to East.
- One century ago, the main electoral issue moving public opinion was women's suffrage.
- This 1915 map shows how votes for women were won in the West, and yearned for in the East.
- In 1920, the 19th Amendment granted 26 million women the vote, just in time for that year's presidential elections.
“Some very pointed things to say”
Front cover and inside cartoon from the 20 February 1915 issue of Puck Magazine – the 'Woman Suffrage Number'.
Image: Hathi Trust Digital Library, public domain
't Is the season of electoral maps, but this one is unlike most others you will see today. Called The Awakening, it recalls an electoral revolution sweeping the nation a century ago – women's suffrage.
On the left, we see a torch-bearing, toga-wearing woman, her cape emblazoned with the slogan Votes for Women.
Clearly an ambulant version of the Statue of Liberty standing guard over New York Harbor, she's carrying the flame of freedom from the enlightened West to the still-dark East.
Here, women are as yet unenfranchised, and yearningly stretch out their arms and necks towards Lady Liberty, bestriding the other half of the country. Below the image is printed a poem by feminist and suffragist Alice Duer Miller (1).
Created by Henry Mayer, this map was published as a centerfold in the issue of Puck Magazine for the week ending on 20 February 1915, a special 'Suffrage Number', guest-edited by the New York State Women Suffrage Association, the Equal Franchise Society, the Men's League for Woman Suffrage and other local suffrage groups.
Yearning for Liberty's light
1915 Map by Henry Mayer for Puck Magazine, showing the Western promise and Eastern yearning for women's suffrage.
Image: Library of Congress, public domain
In its editorial, the magazine vowed not to lose sight of the issue: "We shall have something to say about the cause next week, and the week after, and so on, until certain short-sighted gentlemen now enjoying a brief sojourn in Washington awaken to their plain duty (…) From now on until the battle for woman suffrage is won, Puck will have some very pointed things to say about the matter."
The female figure on this map not only references Lady Liberty, but is also a clear reference to the famous 1872 painting American Progress, showing a giant woman guiding settlers on their westward trek to fulfil Manifest Destiny. What will have struck everyone familiar with that image as significant, is the reversal of direction: progress now comes from the West and is heading East.
In 1869, women in Wyoming Territory obtained the right to vote and stand for office – a first in the United States (and the world). By the end of 1914, more than four million women in 11 states, all in the West, had voting rights equal to men. Millions of women in the East were still waiting for the same freedom.
Manifest Destiny: Progress moves Westward
Popular depiction of settlers going West, protected by 'Columbia' (the symbolic representation of America), fulfilling the Manifest Destiny of the United States.
Image: 'American Progress' (1872), painting by John Gast. In the public domain.
Up until the first two decades of the 20th century, it was individual states that granted women the right to vote in different types of elections. Some gave women full suffrage, but others required that women owned property, or only granted women voting rights in local elections.
Things changed dramatically in 1920, when Congress passed the 19th Amendment. This prohibited both the states and the federal government to restrict voting rights on the basis of sex – enfranchising 26 million women.
As may be observed, the faces of the ladies yearning for the vote are all white. This despite considerable contributions by African-American women to the suffrage movement. Said black suffragist Adella H. Logan: "If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot, how much more do black Americans, male and female, need the strong defense of a vote to help secure their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?"
The 19th Amendment failed to fully enfranchise colored women. Although legally entitled to vote, African-American women were denied the vote in practice in numerous Southern states until 1965.
Map found here and painting found here at the Library of Congress. Puck front cover and cartoon found here at the Hathi Trust Digital Library.
Strange Maps #1055
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
(1) Here it is in full:
Look forward, women, always; utterly cast away
The memory of hate and struggle and bitterness;
Bonds may endure for a night, but freedom comes with the day,
And the free must remember nothing less.
Forget the strife; remember those who strove –
The first defeated women, gallant and few,
Who gave us hope, as a mother gives us love,
Forget them not, and this remember, too:
How at the later call to come forth and unite,
Women untaught, uncounselled, alone and apart,
Rank upon rank came forth in unguessed might,
Each one answering the call of her own wise heart.
They came from toil and want, from leisure and ease,
Those who knew only life, and learned women of fame,
Girls and the mothers of girls, and the mothers of these,
No one knew whence or how, but they came, they came.
The faces of some were stern, and some were gay,
And some were pale with the terror of unreal dangers;
But their hearts knew this: that hereafter come what may,
Women to women would never again be strangers.
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How New York's largest hospital system is predicting COVID-19 spikes
Northwell Health is using insights from website traffic to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations two weeks in the future.
- The machine-learning algorithm works by analyzing the online behavior of visitors to the Northwell Health website and comparing that data to future COVID-19 hospitalizations.
- The tool, which uses anonymized data, has so far predicted hospitalizations with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.
- Machine-learning tools are helping health-care professionals worldwide better constrain and treat COVID-19.
The value of forecasting
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Credit: Northwell Health
<p>One unique benefit of forecasting COVID-19 hospitalizations is that it allows health systems to better prepare, manage and allocate resources. For example, if the tool forecasted a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations in two weeks, Northwell Health could begin:</p><ul><li>Making space for an influx of patients</li><li>Moving personal protective equipment to where it's most needed</li><li>Strategically allocating staff during the predicted surge</li><li>Increasing the number of tests offered to asymptomatic patients</li></ul><p>The health-care field is increasingly using machine learning. It's already helping doctors develop <a href="https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2020/06/09/dc19-1870" target="_blank">personalized care plans for diabetes patients</a>, improving cancer screening techniques, and enabling mental health professionals to better predict which patients are at <a href="https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ehr-data-fuels-accurate-predictive-analytics-for-suicide-risk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">elevated risk of suicide</a>, to name a few applications.</p><p>Health systems around the world have already begun exploring how <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315944/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">machine learning can help battle the pandemic</a>, including better COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, contact tracing, and drug and vaccine development.</p><p>Cruzen said these kinds of tools represent a shift in how health systems can tackle a wide variety of problems.</p><p>"Health care has always used the past to predict the future, but not in this mathematical way," Cruzen said. "I think [Northwell Health's new predictive tool] really is a great first example of how we should be attacking a lot of things as we go forward."</p>Making machine-learning tools openly accessible
<p>Northwell Health has made its predictive tool <a href="https://github.com/northwell-health/covid-web-data-predictor" target="_blank">available for free</a> to any health system that wishes to utilize it.</p><p>"COVID is everybody's problem, and I think developing tools that can be used to help others is sort of why people go into health care," Dr. Cruzen said. "It was really consistent with our mission."</p><p>Open collaboration is something the world's governments and health systems should be striving for during the pandemic, said Michael Dowling, Northwell Health's president and CEO.</p><p>"Whenever you develop anything and somebody else gets it, they improve it and they continue to make it better," Dowling said. "As a country, we lack data. I believe very, very strongly that we should have been and should be now working with other countries, including China, including the European Union, including England and others to figure out how to develop a health surveillance system so you can anticipate way in advance when these things are going to occur."</p><p>In all, Northwell Health has treated more than 112,000 COVID patients. During the pandemic, Dowling said he's seen an outpouring of goodwill, collaboration, and sacrifice from the community and the tens of thousands of staff who work across Northwell.</p><p>"COVID has changed our perspective on everything—and not just those of us in health care, because it has disrupted everybody's life," Dowling said. "It has demonstrated the value of community, how we help one another."</p>3,000-pound Triceratops skull unearthed in South Dakota
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," said lead paleontologist David Schmidt.
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
- The triceratops skull was first discovered in 2019, but was excavated over the summer of 2020.
- It was discovered in the South Dakota Badlands, an area where the Triceratops roamed some 66 million years ago.
- Studying dinosaurs helps scientists better understand the evolution of all life on Earth.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"</p><p>Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2010.483632" target="_blank">8.2 feet long</a>.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a <em>Triceratops prorsus, </em>one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.</p>Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p>The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the T<em>yrannosaurus rex</em>. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">headlines</a> after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.</p><p>Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a>.</p>Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
Triceratops illustration
Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
World's oldest work of art found in a hidden Indonesian valley
Archaeologists discover a cave painting of a wild pig that is now the world's oldest dated work of representational art.
Pig painting at Leang Tedongnge in Indonesia, made at 45,500 years ago.
- Archaeologists find a cave painting of a wild pig that is at least 45,500 years old.
- The painting is the earliest known work of representational art.
- The discovery was made in a remote valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Oldest Cave Art Found in Sulawesi
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a9734e306f0914bfdcbe79a1e317a7f0"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-wAYtBxn7E?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>What can Avicenna teach us about the mind-body problem?
The Persian polymath and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age teaches us about self-awareness.
The incredible physics behind quantum computing
Can computers do calculations in multiple universes? Scientists are working on it. Step into the world of quantum computing.
