A revival of the fantasy genre in recent years has also brought about a revival of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. With an endless array of titles, we are sure that you can easily visualise scenes from some Hollywood, TV or streaming service production, in which mounted knights charge at a line of terrified spearmen, tattooed Vikings pillage […]

Living with the Animals While modern humans have existed for at least a few hundred thousands years, we didn’t really start massively progressing from our earliest ancestors until we began forming large and very complex societies after transitioning away from small hunter-gather groups for various reasons. Critical to all this being able to happen was creating sets of rules which […]

On the morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903, two brothers stood on a windswept beach outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and prepared to make history. After winning a simple coin toss, one of the brothers climbed into a strange wood-and-canvas craft dubbed the Flyer. With a clatter and a whir the twin propellers spun up to a blur, and a […]

It is a classic supernatural horror trope: a team of archaeologists dig through the desert sands to reveal the entrance of an ancient Egyptian tomb, sealed and forgotten for millennia. Carved over the door in hieroglyphics they find an ominous inscription, warning that anyone who dares disturb the tomb will suffer a terrible curse. Undeterred, our intrepid team ventures inside, […]

In 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest entry in the iconic adventure film series, everyone’s favourite swashbuckling archaeologist/grave robber hunts after the titular dial, a mechanism invented by Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes to predict the appearance of fissures in time, allowing the user to travel between the present and the past…because, sure, why not? But while […]

Your Majesty, Caesar, King, Emperor, Lord Protector, Excellency, Duke, these are only a handful of monikers given to leaders of nations throughout history. Picking from such official titles and honorifics to apply to one’s own leader when forming a new nation would seem rather straightforward… However, in a budding nation that vehemently rejected just about anything that was associated with […]

On May 8, 1945, the German armed forces signed their unconditional surrender to the Allied powers. WWII, at least in Europe, was over. And now that the guns had fallen silent, the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union had to face a daunting conundrum: how to deal with the active members of the National Socialist Party, the SS, the […]

Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. The more infamous recent examples of wayward science include widespread eugenics sterilization, Nazis Nazi-ing, similar rampant Japanese experimentation during WWII which the U.S. happily let literally everyone off for in exchange for the data, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, the CIA program MKULTRA, […]

Various religions have been popping up randomly seemingly as long as humans have been humaning- interestingly, not just with humans but our Neanderthal cousins, with signs of some form of religious practices with those Neanderthals going back at least 150,000 years. But one religion founded about 2,000 years ago triggered a marked shift in the way many in the world […]

On the first of September, 1939, nearly 1.5 million troops, 2,750 tanks, and 2,300 aircraft of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich stormed over the border into Poland. We all know what happened next: despite declaring war in solidarity, Poland’s allies Britain and France stood by and did nothing as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union overran and occupied the country in […]