The Cousin Who Cut Tycho's Nose Off
Manderup Parsberg outlived the duel by fifty-nine years and outlived his cousin by twenty-four. He never spoke about either.
Read the story →The small, ordinary, and overlooked details of historical life.
24 stories in this theme.
Manderup Parsberg outlived the duel by fifty-nine years and outlived his cousin by twenty-four. He never spoke about either.
Read the story →King Mausolus died in 353 BC. His widow built him a tomb so spectacular that for two thousand years every grand tomb in Europe was called by his name.
Read the story →George Pullman built a model factory town south of Chicago in 1880. He ran it like a benevolent autocracy until 1894, when his workers stopped accepting the rent.
Read the story →On the same evening as the Great Chicago Fire, a wildfire two hundred and fifty kilometers north killed five times as many people. Almost nobody heard about it.
Read the story →In July 1374, after a major Rhine flood, hundreds of people in Aachen began to dance in the streets and could not stop. The plague moved with them up the river.
Read the story →The Colossus of Rhodes stood for fifty-four years and lay in ruins for nearly nine hundred. A Jewish merchant from Edessa bought the bronze.
Read the story →Before Eudoxus, Greek mathematicians could prove statements about simple shapes. Eudoxus invented the method that let them prove statements about curves.
Read the story →Frederick, Prince of Wales died in March 1751, aged forty-four. The story that a cricket ball had killed him survived for two centuries. His lungs had killed him.
Read the story →The Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned a quarter of the city. Mrs. O'Leary's cow had nothing to do with it. A reporter admitted he made the story up.
Read the story →In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast looking for Norse Christians who had been dead for three centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit.
Read the story →A decade after President Faure died in her arms, Marguerite Steinheil was charged with the murders of her mother and her husband. Paris had been waiting.
Read the story →Every November, Nova Scotia cuts down a 45-foot white spruce and ships it to Boston Common. The tradition is a thank-you for a relief train that arrived in 1917.
Read the story →From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.
Read the story →On 24 July 1915 a steamer chartered for a Western Electric company picnic capsized at its Chicago River mooring. 844 people died in twenty feet of water.
Read the story →In December 1566 the 20-year-old Tycho Brahe and his cousin fought in the dark with rapiers over a mathematical disagreement. Tycho lost the bridge of his nose.
Read the story →On the morning of 25 October 1760 the King of Great Britain rang for his chocolate, walked to the privy, and was dead before his valet got back.
Read the story →Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.
Read the story →In January 1962 three students at a Tanganyikan girls' school began to laugh and could not stop. By the end of the year a thousand others had joined them.
Read the story →Between 1608 and 1814 the river through London froze solid often enough to hold fairs on its surface. Then they tore down a bridge, and it never froze again.
Read the story →Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.
Read the story →For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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