Interesting History Online

  Thank you to all of our new subscribers, and all of you who have liked our Facebook page. We have taken a week off from publishing, but have been preparing a couple new long articles that will be published over the next week.

  Please feel free to submit your own arti...

"Virtue is debased by self-justification."

"One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say."

"He looked on everything as imitation. The most original writers, he said, borrowed one from another. Boyardo has imitated Pulci, and Ariofio Boyardo.The instruction we find...

  The political structure of France from the Late Middle Ages until the French Revolution is known as the Ancien Régime. It refers to the French Monarchy.

  In 1788, facing mounting debts, and the inability to generate funds, Louis XVI called for the convening of the Es...

  Scott Nations weaves together the history of the United States, with an eye on both economic history and cultural history, in his book A History of the United States in Five Crashes. 

  The book features an intriguing cast of characters, and many famous names portraye...

  Baltasar Gracián was a writer and philosopher. He was a Jesuit, and was ordained in 1627. He is mostly known today for his wit, especially his collection of maxims known as The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Here is a small selection of the shorter maxims:

"Not believing othe...

"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself."

"Virtue refuses facility for her companion … the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny r...

  Göbekli Tepe, or "potbelly hill" in english, dates back to somewhere between 11,000 to 12,000 years ago. The site was rediscovered by an archaeological team in 1963, but it was thought to be from to be from much later, and not much was made of the discovery.

  It...

Quick Notes #1: Iconoclasm and Trump tweeting

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  In our last long article, the story of the Münster rebellion,  we did not mention one of the other topics within the story: that of iconoclasm. In the context of what happened during the "rebellion", the iconoclasm was no...

  Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox was his most popular essay. It was meant as an "intellectual game" in which he expands on an old Greek fragment written by Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

  Berlin defines a...

  The events that transpired in the northwestern German town of Münster in 1535 have continued to intrigue and shock readers hundreds of years later. The radicalism that had been sown through both political and religious actors, while veiled in mystery, has engendered...