Enough is Enuf, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell
No language is as inconsistent in spelling and pronunciation as English. Kernel and colonel rhyme, but read changes based on past or present tense. Ough has many pronunciations: ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (...
18 Mar 202539min
Did Haiti’s First and Last King Squander the Revolution or Succeed in Underappreciated Ways?
Slave, revolutionary, king, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow th...
13 Mar 202551min
What Ancient Greeks and Victorian Explorers Thought Was at the North Pole
The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation, and its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of...
11 Mar 202541min
Nothing Healed America’s Wounds After the Civil War Like Baseball
The nineteenth century was a time of rapid growth and development for the game of “base ball,” and players George Wright and Albert Spalding were right in the thick of it. These two young men, the fir...
6 Mar 202550min
How an 1870 Murder Created San Francisco
Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the cr...
4 Mar 202537min
Failed Futures: If Alexander The Great Hadn’t Died, He Might Have Conquered Europe, Circumnavigated Africa, and Built His Own Silk Road
And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer. That’s a quote from Hans Gruber in Die Hard, which is a very convoluted paraphrase from Plutarch’s essay collection Moralia. There’s ple...
27 Feb 202534min
Why the Anabasis is the Second-Most Influential Greek Epic (After Homer’s Works)
Imagine being stranded thousands of miles deep in enemy territory with 10,000 soldiers, no allies, no clear way home, and the only means of escape was by foot. This was the predicament faced by Xenoph...
25 Feb 202548min
The American Revolution Would Have Been Lost Without a Ragtag Fleet of Thousands of Privateers
Privateers were a cross between an enlisted sailor and an outright pirate. But they were crucial in winning the Revolutionary War. As John Lehman, former secretary of the navy under President Ronald R...
20 Feb 202559min
