Ancient Greek geographer Strabo believed the founder of the discipline of geography was not an explorer or a natural philosopher but Homer, for the epic poet had “reached the utmost limits of the earth, traversing it in his imagination.”
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When Booker T. Washington and Austrian ambassador Ladislaus Hengelmüller visited the White House on the same day in November 1905, Hengelmüller took Washington’s overcoat by mistake. According to the Washington Post, he noticed the mix-up on finding in the pocket “the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, killed in the dark of the moon,” which he “heroically relinquished.”
“Darkness has come upon me,” a hymn in the Rig Veda laments. “O Dawn, banish it like a debt.” The morning light is here asked, suggested translator Wendy Doniger, to act as a collection agency—to “make good what darkness had incurred or ‘exact’ the darkness from night as one would exact money.”
To celebrate King Henri III of France’s visit to Venice in 1574, a banquet table was prepared with some 1,286 items—from napkins and cutlery to figures of popes—all made from spun sugar.
First documented in the Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica Classic of the first or second century, the bark of the mimosa tree, known as he huan pi (“collective happiness bark”), is thought to harmonize the emotions and render a person worry-free. The manual advises that “protracted taking may make the body light, brighten the eyes,” and induce one to feel “as if one had acquired whatever one desired.” Modern practitioners sometimes call it “herbal Prozac.”
In 2003 about one-third of American babies between six months and two years old had watched a video from the Baby Einstein series, which promised exposure to culture, poetry, music, and foreign languages. A 2007 study reported that babies who watched the videos performed “10 percent lower on language skills” than babies who didn’t. Soon afterward, Disney spent about $100 million offering refunds to anyone who bought the videos between 2004 and 2009.
Scholars in the 1970s compiling the first comprehensive Sumerian dictionary struggled to interpret a phrase that translated into English as “He put a hot fish in her navel.”
Russian legend holds that the first dog was created without fur. He soon lost patience waiting for it and so ran after a passing stranger, who turned out to be the devil. Owing to this evil allegiance, the fur originally intended for him went instead to the first cat, from which derives the antipathy between their descendants: dogs believe cats have stolen their property.
Primo Levi’s 1971 short story “Heading West” describes a group of indigenous people who refuse to partake in an experiment requiring them to take a new drug purported to end a suicide epidemic; the chief writes that his people “prefer freedom to drugs and death to illusion.” A few years later, after Levi’s German teacher was found hanged, Levi refused to sign a petition claiming that he had actually been murdered, insisting that “suicide is a right we all have.” In a letter, Levi described suicide as “an act of will, a free decision.” His own death in 1987—from a fall down his apartment building’s stairwell—was ruled a suicide, though some contemporary scholars have contested this.
“Were it possible that the sea could be drained of its waters and emptied by some extraordinary accident, what incredible numbers, what infinite variety of uncommon and amazing sea monsters would exhibit themselves to our view, which are now entirely unknown!” wrote Reverend Erich Pontoppidan in his Natural History of Norway, published in 1753. Ninety-five percent of the ocean remains unseen by humankind, and it is believed that up to sixty-five percent of its plant and animal life has not yet been undiscovered.
As a result of technological advances and shortages of enslaved workers, water power became used more widely in the Roman Empire around the late third century; the earliest known depiction of a water-powered stone sawmill was produced around this time in Hierapolis. Later, in 371, the poet Ausonius wrote an ode to the Moselle River: “He turns his millstones in furious revolutions and drives the shrieking saws through smooth blocks of marble.”
In 1903, Mark Twain comforted Helen Keller, who had been accused of plagiarizing her story “The Frost King,” telling her in a letter, “All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” He took a harder line on his own intellectual property, however, campaigning so vigorously for stringent copyright laws that the American Bar Association later recognized him for his efforts.
Referring to the printers’ strike that began in St. Petersburg in 1905 and helped to inaugurate the October Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote, “They demanded a shorter working day and a higher piecework rate per thousand letters set, not excluding punctuation marks. This small event set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike—that is, a strike which started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism.”
“In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes,” wrote Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul: Memories and the City. “When we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we ‘remember’ our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person.”
Valhalla, the mythical hall for slain Norse warriors, is said to cater a nightly feast of boar meat but to offer no water to wash it down. According to the chief speaker of Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning, the warriors would have received a disappointing reward for their agonizing deaths in battle if served merely water. The menu instead includes mead supplied from the udder of a she-goat named Heidrun.