Belisarius Reconquered Africa and Italy for Rome. Why Did Rome Destroy Him for It?
In 533, a twenty-eight-year-old general named Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with 15,000 men to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals, a kingdom that had held it for nearly a century since th...
25 Aug 52min
Summer of Death: America’s Heat Wave of 1936 That Killed 12,000
A coast guardsman named Earl Cunningham froze to death on Lake Michigan trying to rescue five fishermen trapped on a drifting ice sheet. His last words were "I wish I could see my wife and three child...
20 Aug 45min
New Archeological Tech Is Rewriting Everything We Know About the Ancient Past
Humanity’s story from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC (from the end of the ice age to the beginning of civilizations) follows this pattern: primitive hunter-gatherers slowly progressed to farmers, then to villa...
18 Aug 55min
The AI Jobs Panic of the 1890s: The Linotype Triggered Fears of Mass Layoffs but Created an Explosion in Newspaper Work
One of the most feared inventions ever was the Linotype machine. Debuting in 1886, it was designed to eliminate tens of thousands of newspaper jobs, specifically the hand-compositors—the highly skille...
13 Aug 57min
April 1945 in Berlin: The Final Month of the Third Reich
When Heinrich Himmler was appointed to command the army group defending Berlin in January 1945, his operations officer described briefing him as "talking about colors with a blind man." Himmler couldn...
11 Aug 1h 1min
Writing Was Invented for Accounting and Scrawled on Baboon Bones
A three-inch baboon bone bearing twenty-nine deliberate incisions was pulled from a South African mountain range in 1970. It is approximately 43,000 years old, and microscopic analysis shows the notch...
6 Aug 54min
It Took Russia 300 Years To Destroy the Final Pieces of Genghis Khan’s Empire
Before Ivan was the Terrible, he was a young tsar who had tried and failed to destroy the last fragments of Genghis Khan’s Empire in the Volga River Valley. In October of 1552, the 22-year-old Ivan st...
4 Aug 49min
The Wunderkind George Forster: Voyaging with Captain Cook at 10 and Dining with Benjamin Franklin in Paris in his 20s
A ten-year-old boy gallops across the Russian steppe on a Kalmyk horse, collecting plants for his father while German settlers starve in earth dugouts along the Volga. Seven years later, that same boy...
30 Jul 43min
