Over the course of World War II, Germany’s submariners sank over three thousand Allied ships, nearly three-quarters of Allied shipping losses in all theaters of the war. Winston Churchill famously ...
America’s growth from a rugged frontier nation to the globe’s industrial superpower in the space of 100 years can be explained by one word: coal. Before coal dominance, American buildings were defi...
For almost two centuries, Ancient Athens—the most successful democracy in history—selected citizens by lottery to fill government positions. Athens adopted sortition—a random lottery system—to sele...
The "Madman Theory" was Richard Nixon's foreign policy strategy during the Vietnam War era, where he deliberately cultivated an image of being unpredictable and irrational—hinting he might escalate...
The famous street artist Banksy shocked the art world in 2018 when his painting, Girl with Balloon, partially shredded itself moments after selling it for over a million dollars. at a Sotheby's auc...
The greatest energy source for civilization before the steam engine was wind. It powered the global economy in the Age of Sail. Wind-powered sail ships made global shipping fast and cheap by harnes...
Maps have always had problems. Five hundred years ago, maps were wildly inaccurate simply because cartographers were drawing the edge of the known world, limited by slow ships and nonexistent satel...
In the 1800s, it seemed like mathematics was a solved problem. The paradoxes in the field were resolved, and even areas like advanced calculus could be taught consistently and reliably at any schoo...
The Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, known as the "shot heard round the world," marked the first military engagements of the American Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson named it that be...
The brain acts in strange ways during wartime. Even in active combat situations, when soldiers are one mistake away from death, many can’t fire on their enemies because their brain is trigger...
William F. Buckley Jr., the charismatic intellectual who defined modern American conservatism, was famously skilled at forging friendships across the ideological divide, a talent that helped him bo...
The Collapse of the Soviet Union was twice as devastating as the Great Depression for those who lived there. It immediately led to widespread economic chaos and a breakdown of public services, plun...
From Shakespeare's 'band of brothers' speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose names are immediately recognized around the wo...
J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles E. Mitchell are names that come to mind when thinking of the most prominent icons of wealth and influence during the Roaring Twenties. Yet the one figu...
The American Indian leader Wakara was among the most influential and feared men in the nineteenth-century American West. He and his pan-tribal cavalry of horse thieves and slave traders dominated t...
Rome began as a pagan, Latin-speaking city state in central Italy during the early Iron Age and ended as a Christian, Greek-speaking empire as the age of gunpowder dawned. Everything about it chang...
Gunslinging, gold-panning, stagecoach robbing, whiskey guzzling – the myth and infamy of the American West is synonymous with its most famous town: Deadwood, South Dakota. The storied mining town s...
Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, was in Havana in 1898, investigating the terrible conditions endured by Cubans whom the Spanish government had forced into concentration camps, where an ...
Nearly 16.4 million Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, and for millions of survivors, the fighting left many of them physically and mentally broken for life. There was a 25%...
Robert S. McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense during JFK and LBJ’s administrations, and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam war, made a shocking confession in his 1995 memoir. He said “We...
