Why the Renaissance Began in Italy
In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Italian peninsula was not a country. It was a quarrelsome collection of city-states, some ruled by merchant oligarchies, others by…
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Did Magellan Actually Sail Around the World?
Ferdinand Magellan is remembered as the man who circled the globe. Statues, textbooks, and even a strait bear his name, all celebrating a voyage that supposedly proved the…
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How the Steam Engine Rewired the Rules of Human Power
In the flooded coal mines of early 18th-century England, workers faced a problem that no amount of muscle could solve. Dig deep enough for coal, and water seeps…
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Why Martin Luther Turned Against the Church He Once Served
In the fall of 1517, an Augustinian friar in the small German town of Wittenberg sat down to write a letter to his archbishop. He was not trying…
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Why the Middle Ages Ended and the Renaissance Began
In the 1330s, Florence was one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, its wool merchants and bankers extending credit across the continent. By the 1350s, nearly half its…
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How Gutenberg’s Printing Press Rewired the Flow of Human Knowledge
In 1450, if you wanted to own a Bible, you needed either a fortune or several years of a scribe’s life. A single hand-copied Bible could take a…
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What Was the Civil Revolution? How Citizens Overthrew the Old Political Order
In the summer of 1789, a crowd in Paris broke into a fortress-prison that held only seven inmates. The Bastille was not militarily significant, and it barely resisted….
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How America Won a War It Was Supposed to Lose
The Colonies Had No Business Winning In 1775, Britain possessed the most powerful navy on Earth, a professional army with decades of combat experience, and a treasury that…
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How Nuclear Weapons Rewrote the Rules of War
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, physicists watched the sky turn brighter than daylight for a fraction of a second. The blast…
