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When Hannibal wiped out a Roman army at Cannae, killing tens of thousands in an afternoon, Rome refused to negotiate and won the war anyway. A little over a century later the sa…
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Benjamin Franklin spent the Revolution helping to break up the British Empire, while his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey, sat in a Patriot jail for staying loyal t…
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Beneath the steps of a temple at Meroe, in what is now Sudan, archaeologists found a bronze head of the Roman emperor Augustus, buried where every worshiper would tread on it. K…
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In November 2024 a banana, stuck to a wall with a strip of gray duct tape, sold at auction in New York for about $6.2 million. The buyer then ate it. Many people laughed, some w…
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In the Jack Hills of Western Australia, geologists have found grains of zircon smaller than a grain of sand that formed about 4.4 billion years ago, when the planet was young an…
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Mail two identical résumés to the same employers, change only the name at the top, and the phone may ring far more often for one of them. Nothing about the applicants differs. S…
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Blaise Pascal once apologized to a reader for sending a long letter: he had not had time, he explained, to write a short one. More than three and a half centuries later the joke…
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In 1960, about one American in twenty said they would mind if their child married someone from the other party. Fifty years later, about half of Republicans and a third of Democ…
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In 1812 a band of masked weavers crept through the Yorkshire dark to smash the machines that were taking their wages, signing their threats with the name of a general who never …
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In 1854 a London doctor persuaded local officials to take the handle off a water pump on Broad Street, and a cholera outbreak that had killed hundreds faded away. In 1977 a hosp…
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In 1856 a scientist and women's rights campaigner in upstate New York set glass jars of different gases in the sun and noticed that the one filled with carbon dioxide grew hotte…
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In 1762 a Protestant shopkeeper in Toulouse was tortured and executed for a murder that never happened. An aging writer living near the Swiss border read about the case, investi…
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In 1964 two radio astronomers in New Jersey scrubbed pigeon droppings out of their antenna, trying to silence a faint hiss that would not go away. The hiss turned out to be the …
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In ancient Athens there were no lawyers. If your neighbor sued you, you stood before several hundred jurors and argued your own case while a jar of water drained away your time.…
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Sweden has a king who is not allowed to choose the prime minister. Iran holds real elections, then lets a council of clerics strike candidates off the ballot. Switzerland is run…
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In 1747 a ship's surgeon cured scurvy with two oranges and a lemon a day, and the navy took almost fifty years to act on it. In 1984 a doctor drank a flask of bacteria to prove …
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A railway foreman survived an iron rod through his skull and, his friends said, came back a different man. A Russian scientist set out to study digestion and ended up teaching d…
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Three hundred Spartans held the pass at Thermopylae, the story goes, and died to a man. In fact there were about seven thousand Greeks at the start, the Spartans had seven hundr…
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A priest's son from a mountain village on the edge of the Austrian Empire walked into New York in 1884 with a few cents in his pocket and an idea he had first scratched into the…
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In 1770 a chess-playing automaton dressed as a Turkish sorcerer toured the courts of Europe and beat almost everyone it played. Its secret was a human champion folded up inside …
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The oldest printed book with a date on it is a Buddhist scripture from 868, found in a sealed cave in western China. Korea was casting metal type nearly eighty years before Gute…
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In 1945 Winston Churchill wanted the surviving Nazi leaders shot as soon as they were identified. Instead they were given defense lawyers, headphones in four languages and a yea…
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The most famous charter of liberty in history spends a surprising amount of its length on fish traps, inheritance fees and the size of a measure of ale. It was written for a few…
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In 1789 the richest colony on Earth was a strip of mountains and sugar fields on the island of Hispaniola, worked by half a million enslaved people. Fifteen years later it was a…
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