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R.V. Jones (left), DCI James Woolsey, and Jeanne de Clarens. Early life and education R.V. Jones was born on September 29, 1911, in Herne Hill, London, to a family of modest means. From an early age, he exhibited an intense curiosity for how things worked, which led him to pursue studies in physics. Jones attended […]
Boundaries of the lost state of Franklin. Wikimedia Public Domain. It’s one of many tales of the founding of America. Settlers from England were exploring more and more of the New World, and as they did, they set up new communities far from the comfort of home. We know these stories as well as the […]
The Lebensborn Naming Ceremony from Master Race by Catrine Clay and Michael Leapman (1995). When I first learned about Hochland Home, the setting for The Sunflower House, it seemed like the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Few people knew about this state-run baby factory, created to perpetuate Hitler’s so-called Master Race. In retrospect, that isn’t […]
A 1915 advert for Cascade Whisky from the Rock Island Argus. Nashville From the 1890s through the tumultuous years leading to Prohibition, the city of Nashville was very much like the wild west—a bustling, exciting, changing, and dangerous place. Political debates and rallies were frequently held in the downtown streets with hordes in attendance. Legal […]
Phineas Gage in the time after his accident. Phineas Gage is perhaps the most famous neurological patient in modern history, called one of the “great medical curiosities of all time” and a “living part of medical folklore.” Malcolm MacMillan of the University of Melbourne records that two-thirds of introductory psychology textbooks cover Gage and his […]
Episode 120 (The Prairie Chicken in Wisconsin: Highlights of a Study of Counts, Behavior, Turnover, Movement, and Habitat) The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary, story-driven shows. Music We move between three different pieces from Camille Saint-Saens’: Suite, Op. 90: II Menuet, and two from Carnival of… Source […]
What is it, why do we have it, and why hasn’t it changed? Born from a rushed, fraught, imperfect process, the origins and evolution of the Electoral College might surprise you and make you think differently about not only this upcoming presidential election, but our democracy as a whole. If you would like to read […]
Barnes Neville Wallis. Early life and education Wallis’s early life provided the foundation for his eventual career in engineering. His father, Charles Wallis, was a doctor, but young Barnes developed an early fascination with mechanical objects, much to his father’s frustration. After attending Christ’s Hospital school in Sussex, where he displayed a knack for mathematics […]
The Uffington White Horse. Source: World Wind, available here. The description of this activity has been termed “leucippotomy” for the carving of horses and “gigantotomy” for giants (there are currently four of this kind in Britain). Whether these adopted terms are intended to be applied seriously is debatable since they do not appear in the […]
A teacher, Mary R. Hyde, and students at the Carlisle Indian Training School. Source: here and here. At least two years before 2016, large numbers of Central American families, nearly all from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador began to arrive in walking caravans at the Texas Border. Well before Donald […]