History

Stories from history that are stranger than they have any right to be.

Reading

• War of the Heavenly Horses (Article) — in 104–102 BC, Han China marched 60,000 troops across the desert to seize a legendary horse breed, and came away controlling the Silk Road trade routes.
• Second Carib War (Article) — Saint Vincent, 1795–97: the Caribs and their French allies against the British. Their leader Joseph Chatoyer was killed five days into the uprising; the British ended it by deporting 4,195 survivors to the bare islet of Baliceaux, where roughly half died of famine and disease before the rest were shipped on to Roatán. Historians describe the removal as ethnic cleansing.

Videos

• The origin of every European country’s name (Video) — RobWords works across the map country by country, tracing what each name meant to whoever first used it and how often the name outsiders use has nothing to do with the one locals do.
• The Printing Press (Video) — a near-hour documentary on how Gutenberg’s movable type made printing cheap and rewired religion, science, and literacy across Europe.

Sites

• History Today (Magazine) — a monthly history magazine first published in January 1951, the idea of Brendan Bracken, who took the name from Churchill’s reply after Bracken remarked they had “made history today”. The site holds an archive of almost every article since, plus most of History Review, its student periodical from 1995–2012.
• Today Happened (Website) — one page per calendar date listing what happened on it, newest year first, each entry linking out to Wikipedia. No ads or images, just arrows to step a day forward or back.

Damn Interesting (Website) — twenty years of obscure-but-true stories from science, history, and psychology, told with narrative flair.

• The Forgotten Fire (Article) — the Peshtigo firestorm of 1871, the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history, overshadowed to obscurity by the Great Chicago Fire on the very same night.
• The King’s Letters (Article) — how King Sejong invented Hangul in the 1440s to give ordinary Koreans literacy, and why the elite fought it for centuries.