Intellect Plus
Society
1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 19.
- Women voted on Pitcairn Island decades before most of the world's capitalsFrom 1838, the female descendants of the Bounty mutineers on tiny Pitcairn Island could vote, and they kept that right when the community resettled on Norfolk Island in 1856. Such…
- The Latin word behind suffrage once meant a ballot, then a bribeSuffrage comes from the Latin suffragium, first a voting tablet or the right to vote. By the second century it had drifted toward patronage and influence, by the fourth it meant a…
- How a phone in your pocket can be located, tracked and even overheardA mobile phone reveals its position even when idle. By comparing how long its signal takes to reach several nearby towers, a technique called multilateration pins down the handset…
- Walking off with the wrong scarf is not theft until you decide to keep itPicture a diner who grabs someone else's scarf from a restaurant coat rack by mistake. She has physically taken it, yet no crime has occurred, because she believed it was hers. If…
- Modern tort law grew from Anglo-Saxon fines paid to settle feudsLong before anyone separated crimes from private wrongs, Anglo-Saxon England handled most harms with payments to the victim or their clan. Weregild, charged for killing, aimed to …
- Europe had largely stopped using judicial torture before it formally banned itFor most of recorded history, courts treated coercive interrogation as a legitimate way to reach the truth. By the time European states formally abolished it in the 18th and early…
- Treaties follow an unwritten template, from gerund-filled preambles to formal datesNo rule dictates what a treaty must look like, yet since the late 19th century most share a strikingly consistent shape. They open by naming the High Contracting Parties, often in…
- Two legal traditions disagree about whether truth emerges from contest or inquiryCommon law courts bet that truth surfaces when prosecution and defence fight openly before a neutral referee. Civil law systems bet instead on a magistrate who investigates exhaus…
- Friars sworn to poverty helped inspire the legal trust behind modern pension fundsFranciscan friars were forbidden to own anything, so benefactors found a workaround. They handed land to a local man who held legal title while promising to let the friars live on…
- Nobody has agreed on a universal definition of crime, despite millennia of punishing itModern criminal law has no simple, universally accepted definition of crime. The most popular answer is circular: something is a crime because the law says so. Almost every societ…
- Returned Boxer Rebellion reparations paid for the founding of Tsinghua UniversityAfter foreign armies crushed the Boxer uprising, China owed the United States a US$30 million indemnity, which Secretary of State John Hay considered excessive. In 1909 Congress c…
- Universitas originally meant any guild or corporation, not specifically a place of learningIn Latin, universitas simply meant a group of people joined into one body: a society, company, guild or corporation. As medieval towns grew, associations of students and teachers …
- At medieval Bologna, students hired, fined and policed their own professorsThe world's oldest continuously operating university was run by its students. Foreign students in Bologna formed mutual aid guilds, hired teachers, set their pay and fined them fo…
- A Danish queen's trip to Rome won Copenhagen its university in 1479Denmark's oldest university exists partly thanks to Queen Dorothea of Brandenburg, whose visit to Rome secured a papal bull from Sixtus IV in June 1475. Her husband Christian I fo…
- Göttingen was the world's mathematics capital until the Nazi purge emptied itBy 1900 David Hilbert and Felix Klein had drawn mathematicians from around the world to Göttingen. Then came the purge of 1933. When the Nazi education minister reportedly asked H…
- The 1923 earthquake wrecked Tokyo's university and rebuilt it as a seismology leaderOn 1 September 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed nearly every main building of the University of Tokyo, including its library and irreplaceable scientific and historical c…
- Toronto's university was conceived as a bulwark against American republican ideasJohn Graves Simcoe, an Oxford-educated officer who had fought against the American revolutionaries, wanted a college in Upper Canada to stop republicanism seeping north. His wish …
- Vienna's university waited nineteen years for the pope to allow theologyDuke Rudolf IV founded the University of Vienna on 12 March 1365, but Pope Urban V refused to approve its theology faculty, probably under pressure from Emperor Charles IV, who di…
- Yale was named for a merchant whose gift was nine bales of goodsIn 1718 Cotton Mather asked Elihu Yale, a Boston-born merchant who had grown rich in Madras running the East India Company's Fort St. George, to fund a building for a struggling C…
- Pedagogy literally means leading a child, and its theorists have argued about how ever sinceThe word pedagogy comes from Greek roots meaning child and to lead, originally the job of attending boys. Scholars still disagree whether teaching is a science that can be codifie…
- Peking University outlived the failed reform movement that created it in 1898The Guangxu Emperor authorised an imperial university in June 1898 as part of the Hundred Days' Reform. By late September the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi had seized power an…
- Victorian English teachers were paid according to their pupils' test resultsFrom 1870, when England made state schooling compulsory, elementary teachers' pay depended on whether children hit exact targets: reading a short newspaper paragraph, writing from…
- For four months in 1783, Princeton's Nassau Hall served as America's capitalPrinceton's oldest building has had a dramatic life. British soldiers briefly held Nassau Hall during the 1777 Battle of Princeton before surrendering to George Washington's army.…
- A papal wine tax helped fund Rome's Sapienza, now Europe's largest universityIn 1431 Pope Eugene IV reorganised Rome's university and levied a new tax on wine to pay for it. The proceeds bought a palace that later held the church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza.…
- The word school comes from a Greek term that originally meant leisureSchool traces back to the Greek schole, which first meant free time and the activity you filled it with, before shifting to mean a group gathered for lectures. Only people with le…
- Nineteenth-century secondary schooling rationed years of study according to social classUntil the mid-1800s, European secondary schools were designed around class: labourers' sons got about four years, merchants' sons five, and the elite seven. The idea that every te…
- The famous Sorbonne began as a royal chaplain's lodging house for poor scholarsRobert de Sorbon, chaplain to King Louis IX, noticed how hard it was for poor students to reach the rank of doctor. In February 1257 he founded a house where clergy could live tog…
- High school got its name when secondary schooling counted as higher educationWhen most children never went beyond basic schooling, higher education meant what we now call secondary school. That older usage survives in the term high school. Today higher edu…
- Songbirds, single-celled giants and even pea plants show signs of learningPut a stuffed owl in a songbird's cage and the birds panic, then gradually calm down. Swap in a different owl and the alarm returns. That narrow, stimulus-specific fading is habit…
- From Sumerian clay tablets to Finnish borrowing records, libraries span 4,600 yearsThe earliest libraries held no books at all, only archives of cuneiform clay tablets from Sumer, some dating to around 2600 BC. The word itself traces to the Latin liber, meaning …
- After British troops burned Congress's library, Jefferson sold it his own booksIn August 1814 British forces burned the Capitol and more than 3,000 volumes of the young Library of Congress. Within a month Thomas Jefferson offered his personal collection as a…
- Munich's great university began in Ingolstadt and moved twice to dodge historyLMU Munich was founded in 1472 in the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt, not in Munich at all. French threats during the Napoleonic Wars pushed it to Landshut in 1800, and King Ludwig I…
- MIT narrowly escaped being swallowed by Harvard, then an anonymous donor saved itCash-strapped and cramped in Boston's Back Bay, MIT's governing corporation once agreed to merge with Harvard. Only a 1905 court ruling that it could not sell its land killed the …
- A 1903 newspaper called Oxford and Cambridge master's degrees bogus academic fraudsAt Oxford and Cambridge, a Master of Arts has long come without further study, awarded to bachelor's graduates after some years simply to make them full members of the university.…
- Moscow State University's Stalinist tower was Europe's tallest building until 1990The main building of Moscow State University rises 240 metres and 36 storeys on Sparrow Hills. Built on Stalin's orders as one of seven tiered towers, partly with Gulag labour, it…
- Student strikes won Mexico's national university its autonomy and shaped its turbulent historyUNAM, with more than 324,000 students, is among the world's largest universities, and its students have repeatedly shut it down. Strikes over exam rules in the 1920s helped win it…
- Britain's civil service exams were partly inspired by imperial ChinaChina pioneered standardised written exams for choosing officials, beginning in 605 under the Sui dynasty. Centuries later, European thinkers from Voltaire to East India Company o…
- Harvard's changing seals trace its drift from Puritan college to VeritasHarvard's founders feared leaving New England's churches with an illiterate ministry. The colonial legislature voted the college into being in 1636, and a dying clergyman's gift o…
- A papal split let a small Rhineland capital found Germany's oldest universityWhen two rival popes emerged in 1378, German scholars in Paris backed Rome, lost their stipends and had to leave. Rupert I, ruler of the Palatinate, saw an opening and secured pap…
- California once effectively banned homework for children under fifteenIn 1901 California's legislature passed an act that all but abolished homework for anyone younger than 15. It capped a parental revolt against evening assignments. American attitu…
- Baghdad's House of Wisdom was real, but its university image may be modernPopular history pictures the House of Wisdom as a medieval university with departments and formal debates. Some historians now argue that image took shape in the 19th and early 20…
- Wilhelm von Humboldt quit before his Berlin university even opened its doorsWilhelm von Humboldt designed a university that fused teaching with research, an idea later copied across Europe and by Johns Hopkins. Yet opposition to his plans was so fierce th…
- India's first IIT was built on the grounds of a colonial detention campIn May 1950 newly independent India opened its first Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, on the site of the Hijli Detention Camp. Jawaharlal Nehru called the transformation a sy…
- Johns Hopkins chose to build scholars before buildings, and invented the American research universityWhen Daniel Coit Gilman became the first president of Johns Hopkins in 1876, he spent the endowment on recruiting brilliant faculty rather than raising grand halls, a policy parap…
- War reparations from China paid for Japan's second university in KyotoIn the 1890s Japan had just one university, in Tokyo, and the government balked at funding another. Then Saionji Kinmochi, an aristocrat from an old Kyoto court family, proposed u…
- The 'laurel berry' behind baccalaureate is a medieval pun, not the real rootIn the 12th century a bachelor was a knight too young or too poor to lead vassals under his own banner. Universities borrowed the word for junior members, and scholars later punne…
- Robots in Yorkshire fetch books for the British Library's 200 million itemsThe British Library adds some three million items a year, needing nearly 10 kilometres of new shelving. Most of what it owns, about 70%, sits not in London but in Yorkshire, where…
- 'College' first meant a legal club of colleagues, not a place to studyIn ancient Rome a collegium could be a guild of priests, a board of magistrates or a trade association: people chosen to act together. That is why surgeons, heralds, cardinals and…
- Columbia began as King's College, then renamed itself to cheer the new republicFounded in 1754 by royal charter of George II, King's College shut for eight years during the Revolution while soldiers used its only building as a barracks and hospital. When it …
- Every school teaches a hidden curriculum nobody wrote downBeyond the subjects on the timetable, pupils absorb lessons from how school is organised: who gets praised, how time is carved up, which friendships form. Philip W. Jackson named …
- The PhD began as a German stand-in for the humble Master of ArtsMedieval doctorates required no original research at all, only long residence and exams. The research PhD was a 19th-century Prussian innovation: Berlin's philosophy faculty start…
- Only about four in ten young children worldwide attend any early educationEconomists and the OECD rank high-quality preschool among the smartest investments a society can make, with benefits that dwarf the costs. Yet as of 2023 only around 40% of three …
- Switzerland's 'Poly' could not award doctorates until 1909, yet trained EinsteinETH Zurich opened in 1855 as a federal polytechnic school, and locals still call it the Poly. It only gained the right to grant doctorates after reforms between 1905 and 1908. Tod…
- A bachelor's degree is named after a knight's apprentice squireMedieval Latin used baccalaureus for a squire serving a knight, and universities borrowed it for students halfway to mastery. 'Graduate' comes from gradus, a step, because each de…
- Cairo's Al-Azhar was founded as a Shia mosque and became a Sunni powerhouseIn 970 a Fatimid general began a mosque in the new city of Cairo, named in honour of Fatimah 'the luminous', daughter of the Prophet. It promoted Ismaili Shia teaching for two cen…
- Is owning something a single right or a whole bundle of them?Lawyers disagree about what ownership really is. One camp, following William Blackstone, says its core is the right to keep others out. Another, popular with twentieth-century leg…
- The Catholic Church runs the oldest legal system still working in the WestCatholic canon law has courts, judges, advocates, written codes and penalties, and it has operated without a break since long before European common law or civil law existed. By t…
- Your freedom to walk ends exactly where a neighbour's claim beginsPhilosophers split rights into two basic kinds. A liberty means nothing forbids you from acting; a claim means someone else owes you a duty. You may stroll down a pavement freely,…
- Timing decides whether a theft becomes a robbery in English lawUnder English law, snatching something and then shoving the owner away afterwards may not count as robbery at all. The force or threat must come immediately before or during the s…
- A Scottish minister flipped the king is law into law is kingIn 1644 the Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford titled his attack on the divine right of kings Lex, Rex, meaning the law is king. It reversed the old formula that the king is la…