The History of Catalog Shopping
Long before smartphones and Amazon, shopping from home was already a global phenomenon thanks to the printed catalog. Peaking at more than fifteen hundred pages, the massive Sears Catalog became an A...
9 Aug 15min
Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z
In the early 20th century, a British explorer became convinced that somewhere deep in the Amazon lay the remains of a sophisticated civilization. He spent years gathering clues from old manuscripts, ...
8 Aug 15min
Deterrence and The Spectacle of Punishment
The idea of crime and punishment dates back to the earliest societies. As societies have evolved, so too have punishments, transitioning from overt, public forms of discipline to more discrete metho...
7 Aug 13min
Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson
In the early 20th century, one title in sports stood above all others: the boxing Heavyweight Champion of the World. It was the epitome of athletic prowess, and at that point, every champion had been...
6 Aug 15min
The French Resistance
In June 1940, France suffered one of the most humiliating military defeats in its history. The country was divided, its government surrendered, and millions of people suddenly found themselves livin...
5 Aug 15min
The Peasants' Revolt of 1381
In the late 14th century, England was recovering from the Black Death, fighting an expensive war, and struggling with a labor shortage that had upended the traditional social order. When the governme...
4 Aug 15min
The Rare Earth Hypothesis
In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a very simple yet important question: If the universe has intelligent civilizations, as so many people believe, where are they? This became known as the Fermi Par...
3 Aug 15min
