Who is Alan Smithee
If you look at the Internet Movie Database, one of the most prolific directors over the last 70 years has been Alan Smithee. He has been credited with directing over 156 feature films, shorts, and m...
7 Mar 15min
The East African Slave Trade
Most people are familiar with the transatlantic slave trade, which enslaved over ten million people over a period of centuries. Fewer people are aware of the other African slave trade, which was cent...
6 Mar 14min
The Plot to Steal the Body of Abraham Lincoln
The 1876 plot to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln is one of the strangest and most audacious crimes in American history. The scheme aimed to ransom the corpse of the assassinated president in exchan...
5 Mar 15min
The Inca Empire
The Inca Empire was the largest and most sophisticated state ever created in the pre-Columbian Americas, stretching along the Andes from present-day southern Colombia to central Chile and Argentina by...
4 Mar 14min
The History of Tobacco
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, members of his crew observed the Taíno people offering them dried leaves as gifts. They had no clue why, but they soon found out that native people ...
3 Mar 16min
The Young Turks
The 19th-century Ottoman Empire was in decline and was called the “sick man of Europe”. The Ottoman Empire, like Qing China and Imperial Russia, failed to implement the forces driving European nation...
2 Mar 15min
Questions and Answers: Volume 40
March is upon us. Here in the northern hemisphere, the days are getting longer, temperatures are getting warmer, and people are about to go nuts over college basketball for several weeks. There is a...
1 Mar 16min
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most influential and haunting voices in American literature, a writer whose imagination reshaped horror, detective fiction, science fiction, and the modern short story ...
28 Feb 15min
