I don’t know if high school kids today read Samuel Pepys’ Diary. Back in the 50s even parochial school students were exposed to bits of the diary — mostly Pepys’ accounts of the Great London Fire of 1666 and the plague.
Articles with History
Samuel Pepys, from a portrait by John Hayls (Public Domain)
A Gutenberg Bible at the New York Public Library • Photo by Kevin Eng (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The one who changed the world
Let’s get a jump on end-of-year hoopla and ask now: Who is the “Person of the Millennium”?
Detail from ”Saint Francis in Meditation“ by Caravaggio (ca. 1610)
Who was the real St. Francis?
I watched a truly awful movie the other night. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” a life of St. Francis of Assisi made in 1973, perhaps the silliest movie ever made by a major director.
Enlightenment visionary Thomas Jefferson
Waiting in the dark
The Enlightenment has been taking its knocks lately.
The culmination of the Manhattan Project • US Department of Energy (Public Domain)
Our family album of the bomb
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the father of atomic physics, was skeptical.
DDT being sprayed over an Oregon forest in 1955 • USDA Forest Service (Public Domain)
Well, so science isn’t perfect
Two stories from the Science section of Time magazine:
Photo by Zachery Perry on Unsplash
No stuffed moose could get in the way of his story
This is the story of the moose that went to Paris. It is the story of how Thomas Jefferson got stiffed for a stiff.
Chickamauga Dam and Peter Palchinsky (Public Domain)
Martyred by technology run amok
On a cold night in April 1928, Stalin’s secret police knocked on the door of Peter Palchinsky’s Leningrad apartment.
Photo by Al Soot on Unsplash
What most everyone knew in 1492
When I was a kid I had a picture book about Christopher Columbus. One page showed a Spanish galleon sailing off the edge of a flat Earth.
Galileo demonstrating his telescope
Scanning the skies — past and future
As the sun goes down on the last day of the 20th century, Mars will be shining in the southwestern sky. In the south, Jupiter and Saturn will be brilliant neighbors in the constellations Pisces and Aries. The next morning, as the sun rises on a new millennium, Venus and a crescent moon will precede the sun into the sky.