An Inventor’s Quest to Build a Pneumatic Subway System in 1870s New York
Alfred Beach built America’s first operational subway in secret beneath 1860s Manhattan, decades before the city’s official electric subway line in 1904. He designed and commissioned a 300-foot-long, ...
21 Okt 202545min
Spirited Rivalry: Did Ireland or Scotland Invent Whisky?
There’s a divide between Scotland and Ireland as fierce as the Protestant/Catholic split during the Thirty Years’ War or the battles between Sunnis and Shias in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It’s th...
16 Okt 202548min
The Horse That Ate the Legion: Rome’s Cavalry's Triumph Over the Infantry
The cavalry 'wings' that probed ahead of the Roman Army played a key role in its campaigns of conquest, masking its marching flanks and seeking to encircle enemies in battle. However, at the very begi...
14 Okt 202541min
Beyond Joan of Arc and Agincourt: How the 100 Years War Crushed Medieval Europe and Launched its Global Order
Modern France and Britain were forged in the fires of the Hundred Years War, a century-long conflict that produced deadly English longbowmen, Joan of Arc’s heavenly visions, and a massive death toll f...
9 Okt 202558min
Reverse Ellis Island: American Migrants Who Fought for Mussolini and Built Stalin’s USSR
America saw a significant reverse-migration in the 1800s and 1900s, with 20–50% of Italian immigrants returning to Italy as ritornati and tens of thousands of Americans, including ideologues and worke...
7 Okt 202538min
Don’t Use Rome as a Model of Why Societies Collapse; Use Crime Syndicates and Somalia Instead
12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves into hierarchies. The few dominated the many, seizin...
2 Okt 202549min
A Union General Found a Loophole in the Fugitive Slave Act, Causing 1 Million Slaves to Flee North
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, enslaved people feared running away to the North, as their return was mandated, and they faced brutal punishment or even death upon return to deter...
30 Sep 202545min
The Civil War’s Brutal Finale: A War of Attrition as Terrible as WW2-Pacific and the Napoleonic Wars
In 1864, the American Civil War reached a critical juncture with Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the brutal battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, which claimed over 60,000 casual...
25 Sep 202547min
