What the Middle Ages Can Teach Us About Pandemics, Mass Migration, and Tech Disruption
The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemicsmass migration, an...
9 Jan 202553min
Did Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Really Cause a Mass Panic?
On a warm Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Orson Welles held his hands up for radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of pe...
7 Jan 202548min
A Talk With The Polar Geographer Who Discovered Shackleton’s Endurance Under 10,000 ft of Frozen Water
On August 1, 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed from England, set on making history as the first to cross Antarctica. Their ship never returned from her maiden voyage. On...
2 Jan 202543min
The Founding Fathers Were 20 and 30-Somethings. Why Is America Now a Gerontocracy?
A house on the Florida coast. An assisted living program. A lively retirement community. Medicare. Our modern concept of old age—and even the idea of old age as a distinct stage of life—are products o...
31 Dec 202442min
A Pre-WWI French Philosopher Was More Popular Than Elvis and Possibly Entered the US Into the Great War
In New York City, 1913, French philosopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture at Columbia University, resulting in fanfare, traffic jams, and even fainting spells among the thousands of people clamoring for...
26 Dec 202443min
While Starving at Besieged Leningrad, Scientists Hid Drought-Resistant Crop Seeds That Could Prevent Future Famines
In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly...
24 Dec 202440min
Surviving Nearly 2 Years of Shipwreck on a South Pacific Island in the 1880s
Today, half of the world’s population lives around the Pacific Rim. This ocean has been the crossroads of international travel, trade, and commerce for at least 500 years. The economy was driven by w...
19 Dec 202443min
How Did 450 Boers Defeat 15,000 Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838?
By the 1830s, the Zulu kingdom was consolidating its power as the strongest African polity in the south-east, but was under growing pressure from British traders and hunters on the coast, and descenda...
17 Dec 202448min
