“By its policy,” wrote Vitruvius between 30 bc and 15 bc, the Roman Empire “curbs the courage of the northern barbarians; by its strength, the imaginative south. Thus the divine mind has allotted to the Roman state an excellent and temperate region in order to rule the world.”
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Ancient Greek geographer Strabo believed the founder of the discipline of geography was not an explorer or a natural philosopher but Homer, for the epic poet had “reached the utmost limits of the earth, traversing it in his imagination.”
Menstrual taboos persisted in nineteenth-century Europe. In the Rhine it was said that women on their periods turned fermenting wine to vinegar, in France that they were unable to whip up a successful batch of mayonnaise, in Britain that “women should not rub the legs of pork with the brine-pickle at the time they are menstruating, or the hams will go bad.”
In 1639 Puritan settlers in Massachusetts authorized the expulsion of “pauper aliens” in what is thought to be the first case of deportation in the country. Soon after, Virginia and Pennsylvania passed laws heavily restricting “the importation of paupers,” which included criminals and “foreigners and Irish servants.”
William Petty’s device for “double writing” made it possible, he claimed, that “any man, even at the first sight and handling, may write two resembling copies of the same thing at once.” Petty wrote one of the first-known English claims for patent rights, in his 1648 “Brief Declaration Concerning Double Writing.” “Should I have given it away for nothing?” he asked. “The thing...would have been condemned as of no use, because of no price.”
Charles Mackenzie, a fur trader in Missouri in 1805, noted that the local American Indians with whom he traded held a low opinion of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s party when it came through. “The Indians admired the air gun, as it could discharge forty shots out of one load,” Mackenzie reflected, “but they dreaded the magic of the owners. ‘Had I these white warriors in the upper plains,’ said the Gros Ventres chief, ‘my young men on horseback would soon do for them as they would do for so many wolves, for, there are only two sensible men among them, the worker of iron and the mender of guns.’” The “sensible men” in question included neither Lewis nor Clark.
Researchers at Yale and UC San Diego found that among a sample of almost two thousand subjects, none of them related, pairs of friends were significantly more likely to share gene variants than pairs of strangers; on average, close friends were the genetic equivalent of fourth cousins, making them “functional kin.” “Not only do we form ties with people superficially like ourselves,” said sociologist Nicholas Christakis, one of the study’s authors, “we form ties with people who are like us on a deep genetic level.”
After the suicide of one of his former patients, Zimbabwe-based psychiatrist Dixon Chibanda began training local grandmothers in evidence-based talk therapy. Since 2006 over four hundred grandmothers have been trained to deliver free services in more than seventy communities across the country while sitting on a “friendship bench” next to a local clinic. Friendship-bench patients were found after six months to have improved more significantly than patients receiving standard care. “I value human beings so much,” said one grandmother in the program. “I introduce myself and I say, ‘What is your problem? Tell me everything, and let me help you with my words.’ ”
Analysis of lead pipe from the buried city of Pompeii revealed in 2017 that the Roman water supply may have had high levels of antimony, a toxic element likely used to increase the pipes’ strength. “It’s bigger than the diarrhea,” said an expert in archaeological chemistry about antimony’s possible effect on the population. “It’s the decline of the Roman Empire in 476.”
“Kings embodied the whole period of their reign,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power. “Their death, whether it came with the decline of their strength or, as later, coincided with their natural span of life, indicated a break in time. They were time. Between one king and the next, time stood still. There was a gap in it—an interregnum—which people sought to keep as short as possible.”
An ongoing international study of people who have survived severe cardiac arrest has led researchers to believe that the brain experiences a “hyper-alerted state” after clinical death. This means, they theorize, that consciousness could continue after the body stops showing signs of life; a person may be able to hear and perceive the pronouncement of their own death.
Concerned about pigeons carrying military communications, German troops in occupied Belgium during World War I would shoot at overhead flocks. Such fears had not abated by World War II, when the British government ordered a systematic slaughter of pigeons throughout the UK, and inmates at British and Australian interment camps were banned from approaching birds on compound grounds.
In the Arabian Nights, Shahrazad tells of a merman who guides a fisherman around the ocean floor, where underwater societies shun clothing, commerce, and religious restrictions. “I have seen enough,” the fisherman says after eighty days, “for I am getting tired of eating fish.”
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.”
When a former leader of the Tijuana cartel was shot in the back of the head by a man dressed in a clown costume, five hundred clowns from around Latin America joined together at the International Clown Meeting in Mexico City and staged a fifteen-minute laughathon “to demonstrate their opposition to the generalized violence that prevails in our country.”