Intellect Plus
Society
1,092 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 19.
- Walter Lippmann gave us stereotypes and the Cold War, as wordsTwo phrases you probably use came from one newspaperman. Walter Lippmann gave stereotype its modern psychological sense in 1922 and made Cold War common currency with a 1947 book.…
- William Randolph Hearst built an empire on a paper won in a gambling debtThe San Francisco Examiner came to Senator George Hearst as payment of a gambling debt. His son William, freshly expelled from Harvard, took it over in 1887 and used it as the lau…
- Hookers, johns and a Latin verb: the vocabulary of prostitution decodedA popular tale says hooker honours a Union general in the American Civil War. The likelier source is a patch of 1820s Manhattan waterfront called Corlear's Hook. The rude English …
- From farmyard lessons to AIDS campaigns, how schools began teaching sexWartime Britain faced evacuated children, unsupervised teenagers and young men and women working side by side for the first time. Officials worried about pregnancies straining a b…
- A wobbly suspension bridge showed how easily people misread their own pounding heartsIn the 1970s an attractive woman approached 85 men, some standing on a frightening suspension bridge and some on an ordinary one. Those on the scary crossing wrote more sexual sto…
- Boots, penny jars and a brain map: the science behind fetishesResearchers have trained men to feel aroused by boots, geometric shapes and even jars of pennies simply by pairing those items with ordinary erotic pictures. Yet conditioning like…
- Why sexologists swapped sexual preference for sexual orientation, and what else changedThe phrase sexual orientation was coined by the sexologist John Money as a deliberate replacement for sexual preference. His point was that attraction is not something people simp…
- From a 1923 German coinage to an asterisk search engines can't readThe vocabulary for gender identity has been rebuilt several times in a century. Magnus Hirschfeld coined one German phrase in 1923, an English version followed in 1949, and by 199…
- How virgin travelled from green shoots to skydivers and unicorn huntsThe Latin behind virgin probably grew from a family of words about being green and fresh, including one for a strip of wood. English first used it around 1200 for consecrated chur…
- Woman has nothing to do with womb: the word began as wife-personOld English speakers used mann to mean simply a person, of either sex. A female adult was a wifmann, a wife-person, while a male one was a wer. After the Norman Conquest mann narr…
- Before the wildlife films, David Attenborough ran BBC Two and commissioned Monty PythonDavid Attenborough is known for his hushed, semi-whispered narration of the natural world, but in 1965 he became the controller of BBC Two. He scrapped its kangaroo mascot, commis…
- Edward R. Murrow's famous sign-off came from Londoners parting during the BlitzIn late 1940, as German bombs fell on London each night, people said goodbye with "good night, and good luck," unsure they would meet again. Edward R. Murrow borrowed the phrase f…
- Horace Greeley pushed "Go West" and built America's biggest newspaper from a lossIts first week, Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune took in $92 and spent $525. It sold for a penny, carried by newsboys, and in 1841 it faced a rival with more readers than all its…
- Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby to learn how Fitzgerald wroteWorking as a Time magazine copy boy for $51 a week in the late 1950s, Hunter S. Thompson sat at his typewriter copying out pages of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, trying…
- Joseph Pulitzer's first news story exposed a scam he'd fallen for himselfIn late-1860s St. Louis, a young Hungarian immigrant paid a smooth-talking promoter five dollars for a promised job on a Louisiana sugar plantation. A steamboat dropped him and do…
- Nellie Bly's famous pen name began as an editor's spelling mistakeElizabeth Cochran picked the pen name Nelly Bly, after a character in a popular Stephen Foster song. Her Pittsburgh editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake, and it stuck. Under that miss…
- How Freud's untested orgasm theory was taken apart by later sex researchersIn 1905 Sigmund Freud declared that grown women ought to switch from one kind of climax to another, and he offered no data at all. Decades of interviews and lab work later, Alfred…
- A scholar's polite word for writing about harlots grew into modern pornographyClassical scholars once used a Greek-built term as a dry, bookish label for texts about prostitutes. Within decades it had swollen to cover anything obscene in art. Along the way …
- Why surveys asking people how many partners they've had rarely add upIn a 2007 American survey, men's median count of female partners came out at seven, while women's median count of male partners was four. Both groups cannot be fully right, and re…
- The word bisexual began in a Victorian medical catalogue of sexualityThe term first appeared in German in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, a nineteenth-century sexology text, and reached English through an 1892 translation. Only in…
- The pill works by borrowing the body's own hormonal off switchEvery menstrual cycle contains a built-in brake: rising estrogen and progesterone tell the pituitary gland to stop releasing the hormones that ripen an egg. The combined pill, app…
- Demographers count fertility in half a dozen ways, and each one hides somethingTo a demographer, fertility means babies actually born, not the ability to have them, which is called fecundity and cannot be measured directly. So population scientists juggle a …
- In 1926 Fowler called using 'gender' for people a joke or a blunderFor most of its history in English, gender was a grammar word, sorting nouns into masculine, feminine and neuter. The usage authority Henry Watson Fowler insisted in 1926 that app…
- A 1923 dictionary listed heterosexuality as a morbid passionWhen Merriam-Webster first included 'heterosexual' in 1923, it defined the word as a medical term for a morbid sexual passion for the opposite sex. Only in its 1934 edition did th…
- Medieval law asked which sex 'prevails' before letting some people witness a willA twelfth-century collection of church law ruled that whether a hermaphrodite could witness a testament depended on which sex prevailed. Five centuries later the English jurist Ed…
- Ancient Persians kissed on the mouth or the cheek according to rankHerodotus reported that when two Persians met, they skipped words entirely. Equals kissed each other on the mouth; if one was slightly lower in status, the kiss went on the cheek.…
- The old English word for man survives only in 'werewolf'In Old English, mann meant any person, woman or child included. The word for an adult male was wer. When mann narrowed to its modern sense in Middle English, wer faded away, leavi…
- Alfred Kinsey's famous scale had a hidden extra category: XKinsey rated people from 0, exclusively heterosexual, to 6, exclusively homosexual. But he also set aside a category marked X for those with no sociosexual contacts or reactions a…
- Yaroslav the Wise appears in Norse sagas as Jarisleif the LameScandinavian sagas remembered the Grand Prince of Kiev as Jarisleif the Lame. When scientists examined Yaroslav's skeleton in the 1930s, they confirmed he really had walked with a…
- Yohannes IV helped a British army against his own emperor and gained its gunsIn 1868, when Britain sent an expedition into Ethiopia to free European captives held by Emperor Tewodros II, a Tigrayan rebel lord named Kassa helped supply the invading troops. …
- The Yongle Emperor seized power from his nephew and moved China's capital to BeijingZhu Di was the fourth son of the Ming dynasty's founder and was never meant to rule. In 1399 he rebelled against his nephew, the reigning emperor, and after three years of civil w…
- Zara Yaqob spent two decades locked on a mountain before ruling EthiopiaAround 1414 Zara Yaqob, the youngest son of Emperor Dawit I, was confined by his brother on Amba Geshen, a royal prison mountain. As one brother after another took the throne and …
- Queen Zenobia of Palmyra briefly carved an empire out of Rome's eastIn 270 the widowed queen of a Syrian desert city launched a campaign that swept most of Rome's eastern provinces, including Egypt, under her control. Within a year Zenobia's realm…
- Zhou Enlai read Journey to the West at six, taught by his adoptive motherZhou Enlai served as the People's Republic of China's first premier for over 26 years and helped arrange Richard Nixon's 1972 visit. His lifelong love of Chinese literature and op…
- William of Orange was a sovereign prince before he was bornWilliam III's father died of smallpox eight days before his birth in 1650, so the baby arrived already Prince of Orange. He grew up to spend his life resisting Louis XIV of France…
- Lord Mansfield rode a pony 54 days to school and later reshaped English lawAt 13, William Murray set off alone from Perth to London on a pony his father gave him, a journey of some 400 miles that took 54 days. As Lord Mansfield he became the most powerfu…
- Pitt the Younger went to Cambridge at 14 and led Britain at 24William Pitt became prime minister in 1783 at just 24, the youngest in British or world history. He then held the job for nearly nineteen years in total, a span beaten only by Rob…
- William the Conqueror's claim to England ran through Viking Normandy and exiled princesBefore he was the Conqueror, he was known as William the Bastard, the illegitimate son of a Norman duke and a woman from Falaise. He inherited the duchy as a child amid aristocrat…
- The father of the Dutch nation began as a favourite of Spain's royal familyWilliam the Silent led the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule and is honoured as the Father of the Fatherland. Yet he was raised Catholic under imperial supervision, and when Emper…
- Willy Brandt was an alias adopted to hide from Nazi agentsThe West German chancellor known worldwide as Willy Brandt was born Herbert Frahm in Lübeck in 1913. Fleeing to Norway in 1933, he took a false name to evade Nazi agents, later ma…
- Churchill failed the Sandhurst entrance exam twice before a long military careerWinston Churchill was a poor pupil who needed three attempts to get into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. As a young cavalry officer he wangled his way to Cuba, India and …
- Woodrow Wilson was once a citizen of the ConfederacyWoodrow Wilson's earliest memory was hearing a passer-by in Georgia complain that Abraham Lincoln had won and war was coming. The son of a Confederate-supporting minister, he is o…
- Wu Zetian is the only woman ever to rule China as emperorAcross more than two thousand years of Chinese emperors, only one woman took the supreme title huangdi in her own right. Wu Zhao began as a junior consort of one Tang emperor, bec…
- William Blackstone's lectures turned English law into a bestsellerIn 1753 an Oxford lawyer with a stalled career began giving the first university lectures ever offered on English law. They made William Blackstone famous and led to his four-volu…
- Gladstone was prime minister four times and left office at 84William Gladstone began in Parliament as a High Tory opposed to reform and ended as the embodiment of Victorian Liberalism. He led four separate governments between 1868 and 1894,…
- Vladimir the Great reportedly shopped for a religion before choosing ChristianityAccording to an early Slavic chronicle, the pagan ruler of Kiev sent envoys to inspect Islam, Judaism, Latin Christianity and Byzantine Christianity. Returning from Constantinople…
- Vytautas switched sides three times and still became Lithuania's heroVytautas watched his father die in captivity at Kreva Castle, escaped, and allied with the Teutonic Knights against his cousin Jogaila. He changed sides again and again, convertin…
- Lithuania's last pagan ruler founded a dynasty by becoming Poland's kingJogaila grew up worshipping Lithuania's old gods. In February 1386 he was baptised in Kraków's Wawel Cathedral, married the young queen Jadwiga three days later, and was crowned K…
- The Wanli Emperor spent 48 years on the throne, much of it feudingCrowned at nine, Zhu Yijun was raised by a powerful minister to be frugal and virtuous. Then he learned his tutor Zhang Juzheng had lived in luxury all along. That discovery soure…
- Wilhelm I, a second son nobody expected to rule, became Germany's first emperorBorn a younger son, Wilhelm of Prussia was not supposed to reign. He became king at 63, only because his brother had no children and suffered a disabling stroke. With Otto von Bis…
- Ulugh Beg, Timur's grandson, measured the year with a 36-metre sextantWithout any telescope, a fifteenth-century prince in Samarkand built a sextant with a radius of about 36 metres and timed the sidereal year within a minute. Ulugh Beg was a brilli…
- Umar set out to kill Muhammad and became Islam's second caliphIn Sunni tradition, Umar ibn al-Khattab once took up his sword intending to assassinate Muhammad. A clansman stopped him with news that Umar's own sister had secretly converted. R…
- Šuppiluliuma I built a Hittite empire, then a plague followed his captives homeA widowed Egyptian queen asked a Hittite king for a son to marry and make pharaoh. Šuppiluliuma I agreed, but prince Zannanza never arrived. The killing set off years of Egyptian …
- Uthman, a rich Meccan merchant, gave Muslims one standard QuranThe Quran most Muslims read today traces back to a single codex issued under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan. He was already 68 and the oldest man ever to take the office when …
- Václav Havel went from brewery worker and prisoner to presidentBarred from university for his family's wealth, Václav Havel became a playwright who mocked communist bureaucracy, then a dissident who rolled beer barrels at a brewery and spent …
- Sardar Patel let his brother take his ticket to EnglandVallabhbhai Patel scrimped for years to study law in England, but his papers arrived addressed to V. J. Patel, initials he shared with his elder brother. Vithalbhai insisted an ol…
- Vercingetorix may be a title, not a name, and Caesar wrote his storyThe man France later adopted as a symbol of resistance is known only by a Gaulish title meaning roughly supreme king of warriors. His birth name is lost, and almost everything abo…
- Before Stoker's vampire, Dracula was a Wallachian prince's family nicknameLong before Bram Stoker borrowed it, Dracula was the name a fifteenth-century prince signed on his own letters, spelled Dragulya or Drakulya. Vlad III inherited it from his father…
- Lenin's path to revolution began with his brother's execution in 1887Vladimir Ulyanov grew up the son of a school inspector who had earned hereditary noble rank, in a family of loyal monarchists. Then in May 1887 his older brother Aleksandr was han…
- The last Inca emperor was hunted down deep in the Amazon forestFor three decades after the Spanish conquest, a small Inca kingdom held out in the forests of Vilcabamba. In 1572 a new viceroy declared war, the city fell empty, and forty soldie…