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.
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Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has employed the consulta publica, or plebiscite, on several occasions since being elected to office in 2018. Mexican voters opposed the construction of a $13 billion air terminal in Texcoco de Mora.
In the weeks surrounding Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, the minister of culture, eight of forty-one party regional leaders, fourteen of ninety-eight Luftwaffe generals, and eleven of fifty-three admirals committed suicide. In Berlin, 3,881 Germans killed themselves in April alone; 7,057 suicides were reported by the end of the year.
At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce asked T.H. Huxley, who came to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” if it was on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side that he was descended from a monkey. To which Huxley reportedly replied, “I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin; but I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.”
In Natural Theology, published in 1802, William Paley posited that there was a difference between finding a stone and a watch on the ground. He wrote, “the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer: who comprehended its construction and designed its use.” Paley used the watchmaker analogy to justify the existence of God.
The medieval Occitan troubadour known as the Monk of Montaudon was a master of the enueg, “song of annoyance.” “I can’t stand a long wait,” he complains in one composition, written around 1200, “Or a priest who lies and perjures himself / Or an old whore who is past it, / And—by Saint Delmas—I don’t like / A base man who enjoys too much comfort.” The song goes on in this fashion for nine more verses.
Wikipedia editing guidelines ask that page authors avoid including mission statements in entries. “These usually focus on platitudes rather than specifics,” the site warns. “In short, they rarely tell us anything useful.”
“There is a physical basis for all meteorological phenomena,” wrote the founder of the National Weather Service in 1901. “There are laws of mechanics and heat that apply to the atmosphere, and as fast as we acquire the ability to discover these and reason out their consequences, we shall perceive that law and order prevail in all the complex phenomena of the weather and the climate.”
In an 1899 treatise written while in exile, Vladimir Lenin critiqued the capitalist growth of Russian industries in which factory workers had replaced skilled craftsmen. Among his concerns was a shift toward the mass production of cheap accordions, which, he complained, “have nearly everywhere displaced the primitive string folk instrument, the balalaika.”
A king in twelfth-century-bc China enjoyed women wearing dangling pearls and jade in a “Hair-knot Which Sways at Every Step”; the emperor who built the Great Wall favored the “Hair-knot Which Rises Above the Clouds”; Tang women wore the “Hair-knot of the Homing Bird”; and a writer in the last years of the Manchu dynasty offered the name “Hair-knot of Disintegration and Homeless Wandering” for a style of the day. “The times are indeed out of joint!” he wrote. “I tremble to think of what is to come.”
In Dialogue on Miracles, the thirteenth-century preacher and historian Caesarius of Heisterbach tells of a man curious to discover the origin of the migratory swallows that appeared at his house every spring. Catching one of them, he attached a note to its leg that read, “O swallow, where do you live in winter?” The following spring, a bird appeared with a reply attached to its leg: “In Asia, at Peter’s house.”
Having surrendered at the Appomattox Court House earlier that year, Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1865 became the president of Washington College—now Washington & Lee University—where he suggested, “The study of the mother tongue in any country is an important element of polite education, and is moreover valuable for its practical utility and necessary relation to other branches of learning.” He established in 1869 a chair in English language and literature, the first of its kind in the United States.
A late nineteenth-century concern for the nerve-racking speed of modern life prompted neurologist George Beard to introduce the term neurasthenia for a sickness whose symptoms include headaches, anxiety, impotence, insomnia, and lack of ambition. The condition was so prevalent in the United States that William James—who received the diagnosis along with his sister, Alice—referred to it as Americanitis.
Malingering amnesia, in which a person fakes symptoms of memory loss, is often associated with attempted financial gain, typically among personal-injury claimants. According to a 2003 study, 29 percent of criminals sentenced to life imprisonment claimed at their trials that they suffered from amnesia. A visual recognition test, such as the Test of Memory Malingering, can be used to detect fraud of this kind.
Advocating in 1790 for the adoption of card catalogues, the German librarian Albrecht Christoph Kayser cited the “common mistake of employees that they believe they will live forever.” Workers “arrange their shops without regard for their successors, considering them well kept in their own memory, without written notes, thus making it impossible for those eventually taking their place, or at least making it infinitely more complicated for anyone to pick up the thread of those who have been called to meet their maker.”