“One of the wonders of the human heart,” wrote twelfth-century poet Usama ibn Munqidh, “is that a man may face certain death and embark on every danger without his heart quailing from it, and yet he may take fright from something that even boys and women do not fear.” He relates the story of a battle hero his father knew who “would run out fleeing” if he saw a snake, “saying to his wife, ‘The snake’s all yours!’ And she would have to get up to kill it.”
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As he watched the mushroom cloud form at the first atomic-bomb test in July 1945, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
At the 1883 trial of Alferd Packer, who ate five members of his prospecting party in Colorado after the group got lost during a winter trek, the judge was said to have told the convicted, “There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you’ve ate five of them, God damn you. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you is dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democrat population of the state.”
In the 1860s editor William Bullock invented a printing press that used continuous-roll paper; it made double-sided copies in mass quantities and transformed publishing. Two years later Bullock got his leg stuck in the press’ belt mechanism while installing one at a Philadelphia newspaper, developed gangrene, underwent an amputation, and died during the operation.
To avoid the wrath of his lover’s father in Poland, Tadeusz Kościuszko went to America via France in 1776, later helping the colonists win the Battle of Saratoga and construct fortifications at West Point. At the end of the war, he was given U.S. citizenship and the army title of brigadier general.
After the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, initiating a series of property seizures that delivered coal-rich church lands in England to gentry who had it mined and sold to consumers in the cities. Over the next two centuries, the English coal-mining industry ballooned in scale; coal replaced wood as the country’s main energy source and fueled its rapid urbanization.
A cuneiform tablet dating to around 1950 bc describes residents of the Assyrian merchant colony of Kanesh, situated in what is now central Turkey, resolving conflicts by majority vote. This early example of a protodemocratic decision-making process is a sharp contrast with the consensus-based systems more commonly found in primitive societies, where “the restoration of social harmony is the primary goal,” notes Assyriologist Mogens Trolle Larsen. “This was clearly not a realistic aim for the Old Assyrian merchant society.”
“When summer and winter separate,” wrote Hildegard of Bingen circa 1158, “so that either summer recedes and winter arrives or winter recedes and summer arrives, then a certain mixed substance appears, flying in the air, like a whiteness of threads, where the air is purifying itself.”
The year 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer” because the previous year’s weeklong eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, clouded the sky with volcanic ash and sulphate aerosols, lowering the earth’s surface temperature for years to come. After thousands of horses either starved to death or were slaughtered for food, transportation and industry across much of Europe began to fail. Around 1817, Karl von Drais, a German nobleman, experimented with wheel arrangements and came up with his two-wheel Laufmaschine (“running machine”), an early precursor to the bicycle.
“As if I swallowed a baby,” said William Makepeace Thackeray about eating his first oyster.
Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan reported on a pink blazer and black V-neck shirt worn on the Senate floor in 2007. “There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2,” Givhan wrote. “It belonged to Senator Hillary Clinton.”
“Your minds are full of all kinds of treacherous plans,” wrote Indian activist Tarabai Shinde, addressing men in an 1882 pamphlet. One plan: “Let’s bluff this moneylender and pocket a thousand rupees from him.” Another: “That woman Y, what a coquette she really is! What airs she gives herself! Must corner her one of these days and see whether some affair with her can be managed.” Such “insidious perfidies,” she concluded, “never enter a woman’s mind.”
On July 23, 1995, in New Mexico, the astronomer Alan Hale saw an unidentified fuzzy object in the sky. He emailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. In Arizona, Tom Bopp saw the same thing. He telegrammed the bureau. The comet was named Hale-Bopp the following day. Believing that a UFO was traveling behind it, thirty-eight members of The Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide on March 26, 1997, six days before the comet reached its perihelion.
In 1978 Janet Parker, a medical photographer at the UK’s Birmingham Medical School, worked one floor above the microbiology department, where smallpox research was being conducted. She became ill on August 11 but was not diagnosed with smallpox until nine days later. A subsequent investigation concluded Parker had been infected either through the building’s duct system or by visiting the microbiology department. She died on September 11, 1978, becoming the last known person to die of smallpox.
One of the oldest extant terrestrial globes, dating from around 1510, the Lenox, is the only map known to use the phrase “here be dragons,” designating an area in Southeast Asia near to the island of Komodo, known for its large lizards.