We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.
Free soloing is almost as old as climbing itself, with roots in the 19th century. Climbers are continuing to push the boundaries. There are certainly better technical climbers than me. But if I have a particular gift, it's a mental one - the ability to keep it together where others might freak out.
I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.
It's incredible being a woman. I was, of course, fortunate to have an Irish mother who is an empowered woman. She comes from the western culture where women's rights and empowerment happened much earlier in the 19th century.
In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting - it's sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.
Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th century. It was not an evolution. It was not a slow process.
The first Western attempt to save Africa from itself was in the late 19th century. It was led by Christian missionaries who claimed to be seeking to end poverty, disease and the slave trade.
Like all populist movements, the Tea Party will eventually peter out. It won't succeed in returning America to the minimalist state of the 19th century.
The scientists at the end of the 19th century had people coming to them with this weird behaviour, and they didn't know what was going on but there seemed to be a similarity. They needed an answer, so they made up one.
