The Most Productive People in History, Part 1: From Archimedes to Ben Franklin
They never knew how he did it. Few composers write more than one or two symphonies in their lifetimes. Beethoven spent a year on his shorter symphonies but more than six years on his 9th Symphony. But...
29 Touko 20181h 8min
The Union's Secret Rebels: The Story of Gettysburg's Five Rebellious Double Crossers Who Returned as Foreign Invaders
The Civil War is called the war in which brother fought against brother. But few knew of the“Gettysburg Rebels”: the five privates from that very town who moved south to Virginia in the 1850s,joined t...
24 Touko 201846min
How to Reach Allied Territory When Your Plane Is Shot Down in Nazi-Occupied France
Lieutenant George W. Starks' worst fear came true when his B-17 was shot down over Nazi-occupiedFrance. Earlier that morning, the boyish 20-year-old and his crew were assigned to the most exposedsecti...
22 Touko 201857min
Anthology: How Switzerland Remained Neutral In Two World Wars
How was Switzerland able to remain neutral in the two world wars? Why was a tiny mountainous nation of watch-makers, bankers, and chocolateers able to dictate their own fate at a time when nobody else...
17 Touko 201841min
Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogarty) on the Strange History of the English Language
Mignon Fogarty has spent years helping others sort out the extremely peculiar grammar of the English language. But in the course of her research on how to navigate the weirdness of English, she learne...
15 Touko 201852min
History's Most Insane Rulers: From Emperor Caligula to Muammar Gaddafi
Few mixtures are as toxic as absolute power and insanity that comes from megalomania or severe mental illness. When nothing stands between a leader's delusional whims and seeing them carried them out,...
10 Touko 20181h 11min
Meet Pico, The 23-Year-Old Wunderkind Who Kicked Off the Renaissance
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Pico for short), was the wunderkind of the Renaissance. In 1486, at the age of 23 he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic...
8 Touko 201858min
Richard Burton: The Victorian Explorer Who Discovered the Kama Sutra, Made a Secret Pilgrimage to Mecca, and Knew 29 Languages
Everybody imagines the World's Most Interesting Man to be a fictional grey-haired lothario who drinks Mexican beer and boasts of his legendary exploits. But what if a man like this really lived?It tur...
3 Touko 20181h 8min
