How do you govern a hundred million people with a few tens of thousands of officials, no telegraph and roads that turned to mud every spring? Chinese emperors managed it, on and…
Every time someone calls a politician left wing or right wing, they are describing where a group of deputies happened to sit in a crowded hall at Versailles in the summer of 178…
Some of the cavalrymen who rode to war in August 1914 still carried lances. Four years later the survivors were ducking aircraft, tanks and drifting clouds of gas. In between, a…
In 1989 a man who had once been sentenced to death in Texas walked out of prison, helped along by a film that restaged the murder he was convicted of over and over, each time th…
In 1959 the vice president of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union stood in a model kitchen in Moscow and argued, on camera, about washing machines. It sounds li…
In 1960 a Black citizen of Mississippi who tried to register to vote could lose a job, a home or a life, and the law offered almost no help. A decade later Black Mississippians …
In February 2003, as the United States made its case at the United Nations for invading Iraq, a woven copy of Picasso's Guernica hanging near the press area was covered with a b…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…