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
Every 2 Weeks a Language Dies: Whether By Assimilation or Targeted Extinction
When the 7.8 magnitude earthquake tore through southeastern Turkey in 2023, the government posted that it would provide translation support in seven languages: Turkish, Arabic, Persian, English, Russi...
28 Jul 59min
The Boston Tea Party Was a Protest Against the East India Company Being Too Big to Fail
The Boston Tea Party is the most misunderstood event in American history. Every schoolchild learns it was an antitax protest, proof that Americans have always hated paying taxes. But the Tea Act of 17...
23 Jul 48min
The 1873 Global Financial Meltdown that Cause 20 Years of Deflation and Destroyed 2 Empires
On May 9, 1873, as the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed and thousands of speculators were wiped out in a single afternoon, young Salbert von Rothschild and two colleagues from the Schey and Goldschmidt...
21 Jul 44min
Johnny Appleseed's Trees Were for Booze, Not Pies, and He Dressed Like a Hobo for Marketing Purposes
The Disney version of Johnny Appleseed has a cheerful barefoot man in a tin pot hat scattering apple seeds for grateful pioneers to bake into pies. The real John Chapman collected his seeds for free f...
16 Jul 53min
All the World’s Empires Became Nations in Less Than 100 Years, and What That Means for the Next 100
For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single legal canopy...
14 Jul 49min
