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Humans First Started Enjoying Cannabis in China Circa 2800 BC
Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week....
Beautifully-Preserved Frescoes with Figures from the Trojan War Discovered in a Lavish Pompeii Home
Image via Pompeii Archaeological Park Imagine visiting the home of a prominent, wealthy figure, and at...
An Archive of Vividly Illustrated Japanese Schoolbooks, from the 1800s to World War II
If you want to appreciate Japanese books, it helps to be able to read Japanese books....
How the Berlin Wall Worked: The Engineering & Structural Design of the Wall That Formidably Divided East & West
More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few...
How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel
Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and...
How Was the Great Pyramid Built?; What Did the Ancient Egyptian Language Sound Like?; Were There Bars in Ancient Egypt?: An Egyptologist Answers These Questions & More from Internet Users
What did ancient Egyptians sound like? What did they eat and drink? What ancient Egyptian medicine...
When a Medieval Monk Crowdsourced the Most Accurate Map of the World, Creating “the Google Earth of the 1450s”
If we want to know the precise geographical location of, say, a particular church in Madrid,...
Download 9,200+ Free Films from the Prelinger Archives: Documentaries, Cartoons & More
Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to...
Is America Declining Like Ancient Rome?
Pursued to any depth, the question of whether the United States of America counts as an...
The Song From the 1500’s That Blows Rick Beato Away: An Introduction to John Dowland’s Entrancing Music
In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a collaboration with Bosnian lutenist...
Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35
More than a quarter of a millennium after he composed his first pieces of music, different...
The Evolution of Animation, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistiscope to Pixar
This year has given us occasion to revisit the 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie, what with...
Laurence Fishburne Reads a Former Slave’s Incredible Letter to His Old Master (1865)
Lawrence Fishburne brings a degree of gravity to his roles offered by few other living actors....
A Day in Tokyo: A 1968 Film Captures a City Reborn 23 Years After Its Destruction
During World War II, Tokyo sustained heavy damage, especially with the bombings conducted by the U.S....
180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943
For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere...
When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Plan to Turn Ellis Island Into a Futuristic Jules Verne-Esque City (1959)
The very words “Ellis Island” bring to mind a host of sepia-toned images, shaped by both...
An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Audacious Cathedral That’s Been Under Construction for 142 Years
In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be...
An Animated Introduction to the Rosetta Stone, and How It Unlocked Our Understanding of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing...
An Introduction to the Astrolabe, the Medieval Smartphone
Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in...
The Book of Colour Concepts: A New 800-Page Celebration of Color Theory, Including Works by Newton, Goethe, and Hilma af Klint
The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing...
The Founder of the Red Cross Creates a Diagram of the Apocalypse (1887)
History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and...
6,000 Years of History Visualized in a 23-Foot-Long Timeline of World History, Created in 1871
A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal...
How Engineers Straightened the Leaning Tower of Pisa
?si=WxyK2XAukThVTpa7 Construction on the Tower of Pisa first began in the year 1173. By 1178, the...
