Mabila was the Indian fortress-settlement of yore where Chief Tuskaloosa and his army of braves fought Hernando de Soto and his conquistadors - and lost to them - in a bloody maelstrom on October 18 of 1540. De Soto lived another two years before dying from a fever on the banks of the Mississippi. Present day Mobile, Alabama takes its name from Mabila and the Mabilian language - a Choctaw-based pidgin used as a lingua franca for trade and general communication amongst various tribes in and around the Gulf of Mexico. The "mobiles" of the art world, however, derive their name from the Latin movere, meaning "to move." Alexander Calder built his first mobile in 1931, the same year the Empire State Building was completed. Marcel Duchamp coined the term.
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