Artists often come to resent their greatest hits, and while inventor Alexander Graham Bell didn’t hate his most famous creation, the telephone, it was far from his only priority and passion. An inveterate tinkerer, throughout his long life Bell pursued hundreds of projects across dozens of fields, inventing early versions of the metal detector and… Read More »
Slavery in some form or other has seemingly been a thing for as long as humans have been humaning, and accepted across most civilizations throughout history. But perhaps no other period in human history has the issue been more highlighted than during the colonization period of the Americas- most ironically in one of the nations… Read More »
On August 4, 1945, William Averell Harriman, United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, received a delegation of the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts. As a symbol of cooperation between the two Allied nations during the still-raging Second World War, the Young Pioneers presented Harriman with a gift: a… Read More »
In 1789, French General – and later Emperor – Napoleon Bonaparte led a military expedition to capture Egypt from the Ottoman Empire. According to legend, shortly before leading his troops to victory in the Battle of Embabeh, Napoleon decided to spend a night alone inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. The next morning, the General… Read More »
One of the lasting legacies of Rome in modern society is the concept of a Senate, though it wasn’t really what we think of as a Senate today. In many countries today, you can find a similar governing body of elected or appointed representatives. If you dive a little deeper, you can see different countries… Read More »
Ask people to note conspiracy theories they’ve heard of, and inevitably you’ll hear the name Freemasons brought up. Our conceptions of them are influenced by arcane symbols on the American greenback and older government buildings, vague conjectures of their involvement in revolutions, wacky fringe radio hosts rambling about conspiracy theories, and popular culture. Freemasonry is… Read More »
Films, books, TV series and even video games have narrated, and often celebrated, the story of the Italo-American Mafia. A story of violence, oppression, corruption at all levels of society, which swings between the two extremes of turning Mafia dons into folk heroes, and painting the entire Italo-American community as a criminal minority. Both extremes… Read More »
The Nazis weren’t exactly shy about the fact that they didn’t really care for individuals of a race other than the one they idealized. Further, the Japanese seemingly had no problem with peoples like the Jews, even going so far as in WWII taking in Jewish refugees from German occupied lands. Further, unlike Germany’s European… Read More »
