Passenger Pigeons Once Numbered in the Billions and Blotted Out the Skies for Days. They Went Extinct in 30 Years.
In America’s first hundred years, the animal you were most likely to see was a passenger pigeon. And you saw a lot of them. Flocks were so numerous they literally blotted out the sun for days and thei...
30 Apr 43min
Tooth Enamel Tells All: Genetic Testing and Why It’s Rewriting Our Understanding of Early Medieval Migration
Europe's borders in the Middle Ages were created by one man, and he wasn't even born in the Middle Ages, nor was he Christian. It was Emperor Diocletian, who ruled Rome from 284 to 305. His reforms th...
28 Apr 53min
95% of Ancient Greek Theater Is Gone. Here's How One Classicist Resurrected 500 Lost Playwrights
Of the estimated 1,500 plays written in ancient Greece, only 33 complete works survive today—the rest were lost because medieval scribes deemed low-brow comedies and mass entertainment unworthy of exp...
23 Apr 37min
How Medieval Monks Used the 7 Deadly Sins to Map Human Behavior…and LinkedIn Weaponized them Against Us
When medieval historian Peter Jones found himself spiraling into depression while teaching at a frigid Siberian university with icicles sprouting from his eyelashes, he asked himself what a medieval s...
21 Apr 53min
1,000% Profit Per Voyage: The Economics of Civil War Smuggling and Blockade Running
In August 1863, as Lee's army retreated from Gettysburg and Vicksburg fell to Grant, the Union's Anaconda Plan deployed hundreds of ships to strangle 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline, triggering h...
16 Apr 39min
The Lost Voices of Pompeii: Lives Cut Short When Vesuvius Erupted, Including a Fish Sauce Tycoon and an Isis Priest
Pompeii's story is usually told through the lens of catastrophe—perfectly preserved bodies frozen in ash, a civilization erased in hours, sort of like a Roman version of the Chicxulub impactor that ki...
14 Apr 50min
The Body Worth Stealing: Why Medieval Cities Fought Over Francis of Assisi’s Corpse
When St. Francis of Assisi was near death in 1226, he joked with companions that his corpse would be practically as valuable as gold. And he was right: In medieval Europe, relics, or the physical rema...
9 Apr 38min
The Alphabet as Artifact: How Egyptian Pictograms Became Your ABCs
The alphabet you're reading right now is a 3,800-year-old archaeological artifact, preserving ancient decisions in plain sight—from the upside-down ox head that became the letter A to the demotion of ...
7 Apr 57min
