Intellect Plus
History
1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 28.
- Star Wars exists because George Lucas could not buy the rights to Flash GordonIn early 1971 George Lucas tried to acquire the film rights to Flash Gordon, the space serial he had loved as a boy. The owners were courting Federico Fellini instead. So Lucas wr…
- Albert Einstein spent five years as a citizen of nowhereAt 16, Albert Einstein gave up his Württemberg citizenship to avoid military service and belonged to no country until Switzerland accepted him in 1901. Millions of people today sh…
- The Suebi left their name on Swabia and a kingdom in north-west SpainJulius Caesar met the Suebi as a single tribe between the Rhine and the Elbe. Within a few centuries the name covered a web of peoples who would found a kingdom in north-west Iber…
- Iron and copper turned thinly populated Sweden into a Baltic superpowerFor about a century Sweden ruled most of the Baltic shoreline, an empire more than twice the size of the modern country but home to only around 2.5 million people. Its rise was pa…
- The Pope's famous striped uniforms were designed in 1914, not the RenaissanceThe Vatican's Swiss Guard looks like a painting come to life, all red, blue and yellow stripes and plumed helmets. Yet that costume was worked out by a commander who studied 16th-…
- Before the katana, Japanese warriors carried the tachi, worn with its edge pointing downMost Japanese swords named National Treasures are not katana at all. About 70 percent are tachi, the longer, more curved blades that samurai slung from the waist edge-downward. Th…
- A royal summit in 1335 still names a Central European alliance todayIn 1335 the kings of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary-Croatia met at Visegrád castle and agreed to cooperate on politics and trade. Six centuries later, the post-Cold War Visegrád Grou…
- Humans and chimpanzees may have split slowly, over millions of yearsSomewhere in Africa lived the last ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos. No fossil of it has ever been confirmed, and estimates of when our lines parted swing from thirt…
- Humans left Africa long before Homo sapiens even existedUntil the early 1980s, researchers assumed early humans stayed in Africa until roughly 800,000 years ago. Now possible stone tools in central China are dated to 2.12 million years…
- Australia once had a wombat the weight of a small carDiprotodon, a marsupial shaped like a giant wombat, stood two metres at the shoulder and weighed up to 2,780 kilograms. It shared Pleistocene Australia with a kangaroo taller than…
- Australopithecines walked upright with brains barely bigger than a chimp'sLong before our own genus appeared, African hominins were striding on two legs with teeth much like ours and brains of roughly 350 to 600 cubic centimetres. The australopithecines…
- The humble pile of stones is one of humanity's most universal monumentsScottish clansmen once each dropped a stone on a heap before battle; survivors took one back, and the stones left over became a memorial to the fallen. From the Highlands to Hawai…
- A dead prince kept coming back to claim Russia's throneTsarevich Dmitry was officially reported dead in 1591, killed by his own knife during a seizure. Yet within a decade a man claiming to be him marched out of Poland-Lithuania, took…
- Japan's longest-ruling shoguns may have invented their own noble ancestryOnly descendants of the Seiwa Genji line could traditionally become shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu duly claimed that lineage, tracing his family back through the Nitta to the Minamoto. H…
- Japan's last shogun gave up power, then took up photography and cyclingTokugawa Yoshinobu never once entered Edo Castle as shogun. Within a year of taking the title he handed power back to the emperor, fled a battle his side outnumbered, and retired …
- Godzilla was a man in a suit stomping a miniature city, by designJapan's special-effects tradition, tokusatsu, rests on a gloriously physical trick: put an actor in a monster costume, surround him with scaled-down buildings and film from just t…
- A village bought in 1639 grew into British rule over most of South IndiaIn 1639 an East India Company agent named Francis Day secured a grant of land at a fishing village called Madraspatinam and built Fort St George there. From that foothold grew the…
- Flint helped define the Stone Age, yet nobody is sure how it formsPeople have been shaping flint into tools for more than three million years, and its toughness means those tools survive to be dated. It starts fires, fired flintlock guns and was…
- Lice genetics suggest humans started wearing clothes up to 170,000 years agoEarly clothes rotted away long ago, so scientists turned to an unlikely witness: the body louse, which dies within hours unless it can shelter in fabric. Counting the genetic muta…
- Every kind of Asian rice traces back to one domestication in China 9,000 years agoMore than 40,000 cultivars of Asian rice exist today, from sticky japonica to long-grain indica. Genetic studies point to a single starting point: wild rice tamed in China's Yangt…
- Nearly every vine in Europe now grows on American rootsIn the late 19th century a tiny American aphid called phylloxera chewed through the roots of Europe's vineyards. Almost every vine had to be replaced by grafting onto resistant Am…
- Species are vanishing 100 to 1,000 times faster than nature's usual paceExtinction is normal; species have always come and gone at a slow background rate. What biologists call the Holocene extinction is different. Today's losses are estimated to run 1…
- Hong Kong moved its airport to an island to escape a runway in the cityOld Kai Tak airport sat in crowded Kowloon, its lone runway poking into the bay, with jet noise above 105 decibels disturbing an estimated 340,000 people. Its replacement was buil…
- Beans and peas fertilise the soil by housing bacteria that pull nitrogen from airMost crops drain nitrogen from the ground. Legumes add it back. Bacteria living in lumps on their roots convert nitrogen gas from the air into ammonia, and when the plant dies tha…
- From Devon to Borneo, people independently built homes as long communal hallsEurope's first farmers, the Haudenosaunee of the American northeast, Bronze Age Koreans and the Dayak of Borneo never met, yet all settled on the same design: a long, narrow build…
- Chester's Roman fortress may have been meant to be a provincial capitalAround 75 AD a Roman legion built a fort on the River Dee called Deva Victrix. It was a fifth larger than the fortresses at York and Caerleon, which has led some to suggest it, no…
- Japan abolished its outcaste status in 1871, but the stigma survivedJapan's burakumin look no different from other Japanese people and share the same ethnicity. The prejudice against them rests on ancestry and address: descent from pre-modern outc…
- The bottle gourd may have floated to the Americas on its ownPeople were growing an African gourd in the Americas more than 8,000 years ago, long before any known ocean crossing. One theory said ice-age hunters carried it from Asia. A 2014 …
- To read Vietnam's own script, you first had to master ChineseFor centuries Vietnamese was written in chữ Nôm, a script that adapted Chinese characters and invented thousands more. The catch was that you needed to know written Chinese first,…
- Genghis Khan's second son founded a dynasty that lasted until 1930When Genghis Khan died in 1227, his son Chagatai inherited the heart of Central Asia. His descendants would lose most of it to Tamerlane's heirs, then to the Dzungars. Yet a branc…
- The dead language that Uzbek and Uyghur both call their ancestorFor centuries poets and rulers across Central Asia wrote in Chagatai, a Turkic literary language. Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, wrote his memoirs in it. By the early 20th c…
- Cornwallis lost America at Yorktown, then got India and IrelandCharles Cornwallis is remembered in America for surrendering at Yorktown in 1781, the defeat that effectively ended the war. Britain didn't hold it against him. Five years later h…
- Charles the Bold wanted to be Alexander and died at NancyAs a boy Charles of Burgundy read chronicles and dreamed of conquest like Alexander the Great, pleased that both of them had fathers named Philip. As duke he tried to forge an ind…
- Belgium's independence began with an opera audience spilling into a Brussels riotOn 25 August 1830, people leaving a performance of La muette de Portici, an opera stirring with national feeling, joined crowds looting shops in Brussels. Within weeks Dutch troop…
- Brandenburg wraps around Berlin and gave birth to the Kingdom of PrussiaThe German state that completely encircles Berlin began as a frontier march carved from Slavic lands in the 900s. Under the Hohenzollerns it merged with Prussia, rose to a kingdom…
- Aryan once meant people who performed the right rituals, not a raceIn the Rigveda and the Avesta, being Arya was about language and worship: sacrifice to the proper gods with the proper hymns and you belonged. The notion of an Aryan race was a ni…
- Ashanti was the first woman to hold the top two Hot 100 spots at onceBefore her own album came out, Ashanti was singing the hooks on other people's rap hits. In 2002 her voice was on the number one song in America and she held the number two slot t…
- In Aztec myth, the sun only moved because the humblest god leapt into fireThe gods gathered at Teotihuacan to set the sun in motion, and the handsome favourite lost his nerve at the edge of the flames. A small god covered in boils jumped first, and time…
- Bengal's Tiger Jatin earned his nickname by killing a tiger with a small bladeIn 1906 Jatindranath Mukherjee went looking for a tiger troubling his home village, fought it at close quarters and killed it with a short dagger to the neck. Bengal's colonial go…
- Jakarta spent more than three centuries named after an ancient Germanic tribeIn 1619 a Dutch governor burned the Javanese port of Jayakarta to the ground and built a fortress on its ruins. He wanted to call it after his hometown; the company board chose Ba…
- Pinkie 1547: England tried to force a royal marriage and Scotland remembered Black SaturdayHenry VIII wanted the infant Mary, Queen of Scots to marry his son. When Scotland refused, England invaded, a campaign later dubbed the Rough Wooing. At Pinkie near Musselburgh in…
- Less than thirty seconds of shaking made Haiti's 2010 quake the century's deadliestAt 16:53 on 12 January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just 13 kilometres beneath Haiti, about 25 kilometres from the capital. It lasted under half a minute. Because it wa…
- Which shoulder carries an aide-de-camp's gold cord tells you whom they serveAn aide-de-camp, French for helper in the military camp, is the personal assistant to a general, governor or monarch. Their badge is a braided cord called an aiguillette. In Canad…
- Alta California once spanned Nevada, Utah and slices of Wyoming and ColoradoBefore California was a state, it was the far northern edge of Spain's and then Mexico's empire, a province that also took in all of Nevada and Utah. Its traces survive in city na…
- The Angevin Empire never called itself an empire; a Victorian historian named itIn the 12th century one family controlled England, roughly half of modern France and pieces of Wales and Ireland, yet held court mainly in Anjou, not London. Nobody at the time ca…
- Anne of Denmark married James VI at fourteen, with 300 tailors on her dressBefore she ever met him, fourteen-year-old Anne of Denmark embroidered shirts for her Scottish fiancé while hundreds of tailors stitched her wedding gown. At their proxy wedding i…
- The Gentleman Pirate bought his ship and paid his crew wagesStede Bonnet was a rich Barbados landowner with a wife, young children and no idea how to sail. In 1717 he commissioned his own ten-gun sloop, hired more than seventy men on salar…
- A future King of England logged a sighting of the Flying DutchmanBefore dawn on 11 July 1881, off Australia, a royal midshipman's log recorded a glowing phantom brig crossing the bows, seen by thirteen people before it vanished on a calm, clear…
- Frank Hamer exposed a Texas bounty scheme that paid only for dead robbersIn the 1920s Texas bankers offered 5,000 dollars for dead bank robbers and nothing for live ones. Ranger Frank Hamer discovered that some police were setting up petty drifters to …
- Jack Sparrow was written as a sidekick and partly modelled on Keith RichardsCaptain Jack Sparrow was meant to be a supporting part, with Elizabeth Swann planned as the trilogy's lead. Johnny Depp built the pirate from Keith Richards, Groucho Marx and Loon…
- The CIA's plan to poison Castro ran through mobster Johnny RoselliIn September 1960 the CIA sent a former FBI agent to approach a Chicago mobster about killing Fidel Castro. Johnny Roselli, a smooth operator with friends in Hollywood, connected …
- Our Flag Means Death turned a hopeless real pirate into a cult romanceStede Bonnet was a real Barbados landowner who abandoned his comfortable life to go pirating, with no talent for it whatsoever. David Jenkins's comedy set him in 1717, paired him …
- Sam Giancana dodged the famous Apalachin raid by simply staying indoorsWhen police stumbled on the Mafia's 1957 summit at Apalachin in upstate New York, mobsters scattered into the woods and many were arrested. Chicago's Sam Giancana stayed put insid…
- An undercover FBI agent got the Bonanno family thrown off the Mafia CommissionFrom 1976 to 1981 an FBI agent named Joseph Pistone lived inside the Bonanno crime family under the alias Donnie Brasco. When the deception came out, the other New York bosses exp…
- One lost battle in 176 BC sent the Yuezhi across AsiaThe Yuezhi were herders on the grasslands of what is now Gansu, trading jade and horses for Chinese silk. A crushing defeat by the Xiongnu in 176 BC split them in two and set off …
- The Vandals took Carthage while its citizens were watching the racesIn 439 Gaiseric's Vandals walked into Carthage, Rome's greatest city in Africa, without a fight, because most residents were at the hippodrome. From that base a migrating people b…
- Bulgaria's seaside city of Varna holds the world's oldest gold treasureGraves unearthed in Varna in 1974 contained more than 3,000 gold objects dated to around 4600 to 4200 BC, the oldest large find of worked gold anywhere. The city built on top of t…
- Vitellius tried to quit as emperor, and his own guard would not let himIn AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, Aulus Vitellius held the throne for eight months. As Vespasian's armies closed in, he agreed terms to step down and set off to surrender h…
- Vitoria-Gasteiz kept a promise to its expelled Jews for 460 yearsWhen Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the town council of Vitoria pledged to protect their cemetery, a hill still called Judizmendi, 'mountain of the Jews'. The Basque capital hon…
- The Winged Victory's ship-shaped base was left lying on a Greek beachWhen a French diplomat dug up the headless Winged Victory on Samothrace in 1863, he shipped the marble goddess to Paris and left behind a heap of grey blocks he took for a tomb. Y…