Influenced by popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Barack Obama may be populating his cabinet with a "team of rivals" in hopes of creating the same tension and energy that helped Abraham Lincoln win the War Between the States. But hold on! According to Civil War historian Matthew Pinsker, the mixture of enemies and rivals nearly proved disastrous for Lincoln, with scandal, backstabbing, and petty infighting drowning out healthy debate.
A new series of podcasts from Britain's National Archives breathes life into history's raw materials. In commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the first world war, the National Archives launched "Voices of the Armistice," a series of recordings made from diaries, correspondence, and official records relating to the First World War. Read by actors and spiced with the sounds of battle, they evoke the urgency, drudgery, and terror experienced by Britons, from private to Field Marshal, who fought on the Western Front.
Socrates's last words, recorded by Plato in the Apology, have long posed a puzzle for young students and great philosophers alike. Writer Colin Wells thinks he can explain the enigma--and the answer's not found in abstruse philosophy, but in the simple rituals of ancient Greek religion.
Along a bustling harbor street in Maryland in the early 1700s, someone hung a West African spirit bundle, perhaps invoking Elegu Eshba, Yoruba trickster and god of crossroads. Like the spirit bundle itself, its maker stood at a crossroads between the straits of the middle passage and the scourge of the slave years to come.
The ruins of ancient Greek temples are evocative. But what drew worshippers to these sites in the first place? Were they simply convenient locales? Or was their meaning more organic? New research shows that the types of soil present at ancient sacred sites conforms to the work with which the resident deity was identified.
