Kyle turns his obsession with coffee towards the civil war era.

What’s your sign? In Western astrology, it’s a constellation determined by when your birthday falls in the calendar. But according to the Chinese zodiac (生肖), it’s your shuxiang, meaning the animal assigned to your birth year. Of the many myths explaini...

Chopsticks have been the go-to eating utensil in East Asia for the better part of three millennia. But why did they emerge there in the first place and (more importantly) why did they become popular?

Before becoming Nikola Tesla's lab assistant in 1888, Charles Scott worked several jobs in the electricity field. In this video recorded in 1933, he describes those experiences. This video has been colorized, speed-adjusted and restored with audio enhan...

During our last several episodes, Europe and the European-controlled world have been in crisis. Wars, disease, climate changes, and shifts in religious and political power threw the European world into turmoil. People were looking for a scapegoat, and for...

In which Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the stories we tell about witches and hags. It's definitely unfortunate that a lot of social orders have generated stories about evil women with magical powers. Today we're going to look at a few of those stories,...

Born in Salem, Massachusetts,Thomas A. Watson (January 18, 1854 – December 13, 1934) was a bookkeeper and a carpenter before he found a job more to his liking in the Charles Williams machine shop in Boston. He was then hired by Alexander Graham Bell, who...

Let’s bust one Great Depression myth right off the bat, courtesy of Megan McArdle: “even at the height of the Depression, when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, most people were not on relief, and most were not suffering malnutrition.” Even if it...

If the word “Nahua” sounds unfamiliar to you, it’s probably because you’re more used to hearing them referred to as the Aztec. The history is complicated, but the name Aztec was popularized by a German explorer in the 1800s to describe the powerful Mesoa...

Before there were skyscrapers, space stations, or AI companions with poetic flair, there were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—a roll call of humanity’s most astonishing achievements in architecture, artistry, and sheer audacity.

We remember Edgar Allan Poe for his tales of horror and the macabre as well as inventing the entire Detective Fiction Genre. But unlike many of the great authors of Western classic literature, he has become an icon unto himself, recognized to this day by...

Who are the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert? A people that lived in the same way for about 100,000 years up until very recently. These San Bushmen give us a glimpse into the world of our ancestors, the world of hunter-gatherers. For the vast majority o...

In June 2019, an Algeria banned protestors from waving the Amazigh flag. Stating it was an assault on Algeria’s Arab identity. Why? Because the Amazigh are the indigenous people that have occupied North Africa since...well pretty much forever.

A hundred and twenty years ago, divers discovered a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in Greece. What they found changed our understanding of human history.

Tracing the origins of the Vampire, its etymology and historical descriptions and powers, links to other European creatures, witches, werewolves and the hungry dead of ancient days.