Blogroll

Are bagpipes a weapon of war?

To Scots, bagpipes aren’t just a musical instrument. They also have political symbolism. So political, in fact, they’ve been considered a war weapon.

Treating bagpipes as weaponry stems back to the last and most famous of the Jacobite Risings, which sought to restore the House of Stuart to the throne of England. In 1745, Charles […]

War booty helped create Oxford’s renowned Bodleian Library

Oxford University’s Bodleian Library is one of Europe’s oldest libraries and one of the world’s eminent research libraries. Yet, some of its books carry a taint of unscrupulousness given the time of its founding. One of its founding collections is plunder from Portugal in 1596.

Between 1584 and 1604, Protestant England and Catholic Spain fought […]

Did a meteorite change Christianity?

St. Paul is widely considered as perhaps the most important person after Jesus in the history of Christianity. The Bible’s Acts of the Apostles gives three accounts of how he went from Saul of Tarsus, a zealous persecutor of Christians, to Paul, a man who traveled thousands of miles spreading Christianity. Based on those accounts, […]

The politics of Thomas Jefferson’s donation to the Library of Congress

In 1800, the seat of the U.S. government relocated to the District of Columbia. Among final preparations for the move, in April 1800, Congress appropriated funds for what would become the Library of Congress. With the U.S. Capitol as its home, the library’s first books arrived the following year. But in August 1814, the library […]

A Selective History of Eating Those Words

Where and when the phrase “You’ll eat those words,” the standard idiom to suggest something said or written will be retracted, originated is unknown. As far back as the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos must eat a book held by an angel. A book of proverbs printed at Cambridge University in 1670 contained the […]