Primo Levi wrote that at Auschwitz “a large amount of alcohol was put at the disposal of” members of the Special Squad, inmates of the concentration camp who were forced to work the crematoriums, “and that they were in a permanent state of complete debasement and prostration.” One such inmate said, “Doing this work, one either goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.”
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Before the nineteenth century, a conductor’s baton was a baseball-bat-size implement that was banged against the floor to keep time. This could be dangerous. In 1687, while conducting a symphony playing Te Deum for Louis XIV, who had just recovered from serious illness, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully accidentally struck his foot with his baton, causing inflammation in his toe. He refused amputation, and an infection spread, killing him two months later.
A fourteenth-century-bc peace treaty recorded on a cuneiform tablet contains an invocation to Mithra, the Indo-Iranian god of the sun as well as of oaths and mutual obligation. In the Roman Empire, Mithras was honored as the god of loyalty to the emperor, while in Indian Vedic texts, he represents friendship and benevolence and, along with the god Varuna, is entrusted with the maintenance of the gods’ essence.
A sect of violent Islamic agents founded in eleventh-century Persia to fight the Fatimid caliph in Egypt became known as the Hashshashin, which translates as “eaters of hashish”; their grand master supposedly administered the drug to demonstrate the paradise that would follow agents’ service. From the name Hashshashin, Christian Crusaders derived the word assassin.
The wardrobe that accompanied Tutankhamen to the afterlife included ninety sandals, four socks, 145 loincloths with thread counts of two hundred, and a fake leopard skin made of linen with sewn-on spots.
When an “aggressive, independent woman” rejected his sermons in the fifteenth century, Heinrich Kramer prosecuted her as a witch. After she was acquitted, he and James Sprenger wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on witchcraft that courts throughout Europe used to identify and prosecute witches. A century later a German eyewitness observed that “throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers…The children of those convicted and punished were sent into exile; their goods were confiscated.”
Thirty to sixty million—the estimate of buffalo in the United States in the early 1800s. 1,200—the estimate some ninety years later.
“I must admit, ‘the Mitfords’ would madden me if I didn’t chance to be one,” Diana Mitford—the sister who had wed the leader of the British Union of Fascists in 1936 at the house of Joseph Goebbels—wrote at the age of seventy-four in 1985 to her youngest sister, Deborah, who had married Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, in 1941.
In 2016, Better Business World Wide hired “mystery shopping providers” to evaluate customer service around the world. The results were compiled in a Smiling Report, which found that Ireland scored the highest: 100 percent of customers received a smile. Shoppers in both Spain and Switzerland were greeted with a smile 97 percent of the time, while the lowest score was recorded in Hong Kong, where smiles occurred in only 48 percent of customer interactions.
“A horrid-looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man,” declared a Stephen Douglas–leaning newspaper of Abraham Lincoln during the presidential race of 1860.
Ezra Pound began his radio broadcasts for Benito Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture on January 21, 1941. Familiar with his friend’s admiration for fascism and his vocal anti-Semitism, William Carlos Williams wrote him on November 26 of that year, asking, “Can’t you see that every word you utter reveals to any intelligent and well-informed man that you know nothing at all?…You’re a wonder. Barnum missed something when he missed you.” Postal delivery to Italy was halted in December; the letter was returned to its sender. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Pound for treason on July 26, 1943.
A fourteenth-century Egyptian encyclopedia includes a recipe to “tighten the vagina.” One should grind “the scorched skin of a jackal, the scorched hooves of a goat, the scorched hoof of a donkey, scorched thorn apple, a scorched sea crab, scorched polypody, and Persian thyme,” then administer as a suppository. “The woman,” promises the compiler, “becomes like a virgin.”
The first Olympic champion on record, Coroebus, was a cook. He won the sprint in 776 BC.
In 2020 bioarchaeologists found evidence that six individuals buried in southern Peru’s Chincha Valley during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries began their lives hundreds of miles away, on the country’s upper coast. The findings support colonists’ descriptions of the Incan Empire forcibly resettling populations to quell dissent and increase the procurement of natural resources. “The state generally sought to put people in ecological zones similar to their home,” the researchers noted, and the Chincha Valley would have been “a prime destination for the resettlement of northern water-management specialists and miners.”
A hand’s primary function, Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power, is as “a claw to grasp whole branches” while climbing; both hands partner in “grasping” and “letting go.” This is like trade, he argues: “one hand tenaciously holds on to the object with which it seeks to tempt the stranger” while the other “is stretched out in demand.” Trading, then, offers “profound and universal pleasure” as “a translation into nonphysical terms of one of the oldest movement patterns.”