Knowledge

Demosthenes was one of the greatest orators of his time, using his profound rhetorical skill to steer the course of ancient Athens, one debate at a time. But it was not always so. When Demosthenes […]

Rene Descartes is well known as a philosopher and mathematician. He tended to view the world in concrete, definable terms. As such, he was obsessed with the idea of the repetitive, predictable behavior of living […]

Captain William Kidd has come down through history as a notorious pirate, but his true history is full of complex nuance that speak to the strangeness of the era he lived in. Kidd was actually […]

Sentenced to death at a sham trial of revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette delivered a blistering rebuke to the court, saying “I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my […]

You might have imagined that Mongol executions were a bloody affair. But you’d be wrong. The Mongols were deeply squeamish about blood. The blood of important people, especially, was never supposed to touch the ground. […]

[Warning: this is gross]. The Thirty Years War was an exceptionally violent and chaotic event in European history. As the territory of the area that would one day become Germany descended into a bloody internecine […]

The medieval Mongols had a few unusual drinking habits that gave their foreign associates (notably Marco Polo) a bit of a pause. Firstly, the Mongols had a ritualistic approach to drunkenness during their great feasts. […]

Anyone whose ever flown a kite should be familiar with the sickening feeling – however fleeting – that the kite might pull you into the sky. Well, the ancients were well aware of this feeling, […]

Winter is usually a time when armies disband and wars go on pause. The logistics of feeding people and maneuvering an army were such that it was generally recognized as impossible to wage war effectively. […]

Those who die are dead. As much as we might want them back, there’s generally an agreement that it’s for the best if they don’t actually come back. Various cultures have various practices to ensure […]