Listeners to this podcast are certainly aware of the saying that all roads lead to Rome; and, given this audience, you might even be aware that this probably derived from the observation mlle viae

He was a bold man who first ate an oyster, observed Jonathan Swift; and in fact the first human interaction with the Atlantic Ocean was probably eating shellfish, traces of which can be found along

India has 2,000,000 million gods, and worships them all, wrote Mark Twain, following his 1896 speaking tour of British India. In religion other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

In the first months of 1939, before the world changed, Elzbieta Zawacka had an MA degree in Mathematics, and was an enthusiastic instructor in Polands Womens Military Training organization, establ

In the sixteenth century wealthy men and women began to collect books. With these they began to furnish a new room in the house which they called the studiolo. In the little study one could read in

Many college professors like to remind each other that no other nation on earth has the system of collegiate sports that has developed in the United States, one in which the mishaps of a mediocre foot

When did old age in America first begin? That is, when did we first begin to conceive ideas about a stage of life in which older people no longer participated in the labor force, but nevertheless had

Many were shocked in February 2022 by the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv and decapitate the Ukranian regime, thereby ending the war begun in 2014. But this was simply the latest in a long series of Rus

As todays guest writes in the introduction of her new book Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, For more than two hundred years, John Dickinson has suffered from an image problem t

A forensic reconstruction of Saint Rose of Lima - From the early 16th century, and for over two hundred years after that, a series of convulsions within the Christian church of Western Europe led to i