Tag: history

Kane has been found

Athenians and Spartans clashed at the isle of Kane in 406 BC, one of the last battles of the Great Peloponnesian War. Some 100 ships were sent to the bottom of the Aegean Sea as a result of the prolonged, hard-fought naval battle. Archaeologists have long debated the location of Kane, but none of the islands in the Aegean seemed to fit the descriptions. At long last, thanks to artifacts and core samples, the location of Kane has been identified, as has the reason it took so long to find it: It isn’t an island anymore.

Mailing Children

Have you ever wished you didn’t have to travel with your child (or grandchild)? If you lived in the United States in 1913 or 1914 you had an alternative. Send him or her by mail! You could use the US Parcel Post Service which began on January 1, 1913. Regulations stated that a package could not weigh more than 22 kg and not much else. The initial regulations included a provision that allowed shipping of live bees and bugs, but no rules allowing or against shipping of children. The rest of this article details several incidents of mailing children.

Mail at ransom

The project centers on an archive of undelivered letters — many of them unopened — sent from across Europe to The Hague between 1689 and 1707. The archive was established by the postmasters in an attempt to profit from their business. At that time, recipients were responsible for paying for any letters they received, and if the letters were undelivered, the postmasters would keep them in the hope that someday the recipient would search for the letter and pay them what was owed.

i think that’s my mail man!

In the beginning, there was lol

that explains a lot.

On October 29, 1969, engineers at UCLA sent the first host-to-host message over the new ARPANET to teammates at SRI. The system crashed as it was transmitting the word “login,” only sending “lo.” After a reboot, the full message was transmitted, meaning the first 3 characters ever sent over what would become the Internet were “lol.”

M-42

The sub-basement of Grand Central Terminal is New York City’s deepest basement, at least that’s what they’ll tell you. It’s also likely the safest and one of the most secure places in all of the 5 boroughs. It was never included on blueprints for the building, and its exact location remains confidential to this day. To make it all the more mysterious, the room is called M-42, which sounds like something straight out of The X-Files.

Hitler drug use

Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt in 1944 wounded Hitler more deeply than he let on, and he needed his dealer-doctor more than ever. He implored Dr. Morell for Eukodal. By winter of that year, Hitler had “long known no more sober days,” Ohler writes. Worse, “Morell’s supplies were dwindling,” and on April 17, 1945, a frenzied Hitler threatened to shoot Dr. Morell. The doctor fled, but was caught by the Americans and intensively interrogated. He died in Munich 2 years later, a victim of mental illness.

for more on political leaders on drugs, see JFK

After Aramaic

Aramaic is in a splintered and tenuous state. Yet it was the English of its time—a language that united a large number of distinct peoples across a vast region, a key to accessing life beyond one’s village, and a mark of sophistication to many. The Aramaeans themselves were in Babylon only temporarily: The Assyrians, who spoke a language called Akkadian, ousted them. But the Assyrians unwittingly helped the Aramaeans’ language extinguish their own. Namely, the Assyrians deported Aramaic-speakers far and wide, to Egypt and elsewhere. The Assyrians may have thought they were clearing their new territory, but this was like blowing on a fluffy milkweed and thinking of it as destruction rather than dissemination: The little seeds take root elsewhere. At this point, I am supposed to write that English’s preeminence could end as easily as Aramaic’s. Actually, however, I doubt it: I suspect that English will hold on harder and longer than any language in history. It happened to rise to its current position at a time when 3 things had happened, profoundly transformative enough to stop the music, as it were: print, widespread literacy, and an omnipresent media. Together, these things can drill a language into international consciousness in a historically unprecedented way, creating a sense of what is normal, cosmopolitan, cool even—arbitrary but possibly impregnable. If the Chinese, for example, rule the world someday, I suspect they will do it in English, just as King Darius ruled in Aramaic and Kublai Khan, despite speaking Mongolian, ruled China through Chinese translators 0.7 ka BP. Aramaic held sway at a time when a lingua franca was more fragile than it is today.