8 days ago by jonathan

Are markets always glorified Ponzi schemes?. When the market collapsed for Dutch tulips on this day in 1637, prices for a single bulb could reach 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. The beautiful flowers had become all the rage, particularly since a lull in the carnage of the Thirty Y ...

8 days ago by keira

There are a lot of really interesting instruments out there, in addition to the common ones that you hear about regularly. One example of a not so well known instrument is the cittern. The cittern is a musical instrument possessing strings, and it originally came from Europe. It is said to have desc ...

14 days ago by jonathan

Today a discovery might have been discovered. When Galileo built his first telescopes in the early 1600s, he was already a follower of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory (putting the sun at the center of nearby planetary revolutions, and the motion of stars more independently distant). It was as much a ...

24 days ago by jonathan

Today a UFO was sighted? America’s first unidentified flying object was sighted over Boston Harbor on this day in 1644 (or evening, more accurately); three witnesses saw two lights rise out of the water over the spot where a pirate ship loaded with ammo had sunk more than a week earlier; the lights ...

26 days ago by jonathan

Today the world’s first novel was published. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s life reads like a work of fantastic fiction. He was first a soldier, losing the use of his left hand to a war injury when he was 24. Then he was captured by pirates and spent five years as a slave in Algiers, getting ransome ...

27 days ago by jonathan

Today a curious collection became a national treasure. Hans Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660, about the same time as the European Enlightenment began. Generations of explorers and thinkers would emerge with a conviction that collecting things was the way to discern patterns, form, and purpose in t ...

28 days ago by jonathan

Today, history was clouded with smoke. Many libraries have been destroyed by fire, both purposefully and by mistake or default. The action of book burning — “libracide” — is always a conscious act, intended to not only destroy the messages contained therein, but stage a public event that sends a mes ...

29 days ago by jonathan

Today, a community received another patent. When the Pilgrims set sail for North America in 1620 in search of religious freedom, they were backed by entities in search of things far more tangible. They’d secured a grant from The London Company, which had been formed in 1606 with monopoly rights for ...

29 days ago by Neale Sourna

Samurai Nights by Neale Sourna Kyoto, Japan; 1600s We were encamped within in sight of our lord's favored family temple. His entire core retinue was in attendance, to be of service to his every noble whim. He is a good lord, a great lord, who is extremely clever and most brave, and

37 days ago by jonathan

Today a divorce made headlines. Although 20,000 or more Puritans emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England between 1629 and 1640, it wasn’t until this day in 1643 that colony courts granted the first divorce (to Anne Clark, whose husband Denis had abandoned her and their children and st ...