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In the 1420s a man trained as a goldsmith, not an architect, promised to roof the biggest hole in Florence, a cathedral opening more than forty meters across, without any of the…
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The Roman Empire did not fall in 476. In the east it carried on for almost another thousand years, with emperors in Constantinople who called themselves Romans, ran the world's …
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Five hundred citizens, one day, a jar of draining water to keep time. That was all the machinery Athens needed in 399 BCE to sentence its most famous thinker to death. Socrates …
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Somewhere on the Egyptian coast, a king's agents once searched every ship that sailed into port, not for weapons or gold, but for books. They kept what they found and handed the…
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In August 1920 a 24-year-old legislator in Nashville wore a red rose that marked him as an opponent of votes for women, while his pocket held a letter from his mother telling hi…
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A bolt of Chinese silk could pay a soldier's wages in a desert fort, change hands for a horse, cross the Pamirs on a camel's back and end its days wrapping a saint's bones in a …
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On the night a government fell in Petrograd, much of the city carried on as usual: trams ran, restaurants served dinner and the theaters stayed open. A few streets away, armed w…
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The architect who gave Istanbul its most famous skyline was born a Christian in a village in central Anatolia, levied for the sultan's service as a young man, converted, and tra…
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In 1254 a Flemish friar watched Christians, Muslims and Buddhists argue about God in a tent city on the Mongolian steppe, at the invitation of a grandson of Genghis Khan. A gene…
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Around 1750 BCE a man named Nanni pressed an angry letter into clay. The copper he had paid for was poor, he told the merchant Ea-nasir, his messenger had been turned away rudel…
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For most of the last thousand years, Japan's emperors reigned without ruling. Regents governed through marriage, shoguns through armies, oligarchs through a constitution and gen…
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Picture a child born in Lagos, Hanoi or Algiers in 1945. That child is a colonial subject, ruled by officials no one local elected, from a capital thousands of miles away. Befor…
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In 1781 the crew of a British ship pushed more than a hundred chained Africans into the sea, and the lawsuit that followed was argued as a dispute about insurance. That one fact…
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Around 1157 BC the men who carved the royal tombs at Thebes put down their tools, walked to the temples on the west bank and sat down. Their grain was weeks late, they said, and…
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Somewhere in northern Iraq, a king sat beside the body of his best friend for seven days and refused to let him be buried, until he could no longer pretend death had not happene…
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Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer, kept fighting in the jungle of a Philippine island until 1974, because no one he trusted had told him the war was over. In a sense …
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In 1521 a friar stood before the most powerful ruler in Europe and said he could not act against his conscience. Within a generation, Christians who prayed the same Lord's Praye…
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Around the age of twelve, an enslaved boy in Baltimore spent fifty cents on a battered schoolbook full of speeches and read it every chance he got. Frederick Douglass grew up to…
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A spider once bought every story in the world from the sky god, paying with a python, a leopard, a swarm of hornets and a fairy, each caught by a trick. Akan tellers in Ghana st…
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Sing the first two notes of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and you have just doubled a frequency. Hum the "Amen" at the end of a hymn and you have played a cadence that composers …
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In 1772 a prince's orchestra, kept too long at his country palace, played a new symphony in which the musicians stopped one by one, snuffed their candles and walked out until tw…
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In January 1077 the king of Germany stood barefoot in the snow outside an Italian castle for three days, waiting for a pope to forgive him. Two decades later knights from France…
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In 1545, the story goes, an Andean herder chasing a stray llama up a bare mountain found silver showing through the ground. Within a generation the mountain, Potosí, had a city …
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A thirteenth-century student in Paris who wanted to understand Aristotle would probably read him alongside the commentaries of a Muslim judge from Cordoba, and if that student f…
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