Captain John Smith already had lived an exciting life by the time he joined the Virginia-bound colonists at the age of 26. He had left England at 16 to become a soldier of fortune on the continent of Europe. He fought with the Austrians against the Turks, and once in single combat he cut off the heads of three Turkish champions. A Transylvanian prince rewarded him with a coat of arms for his deeds. Later he was captured and given as a present to the wife of a Turkish pasha, but he escaped and made his way back to England.

Life in the United States has changed beyond recognition from life in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In thousands of ways people live differently. They work, they play, they eat, and they even sleep differently. Then, there was no station wagon in the garage to take the family to the beach or mountains over weekends and no telephone at hand to call a friend to ask how to do tomorrow’s algebra problem. Life was slower-paced than it is today, and was not complicated by the machines that have become masters as well as slaves of our society.

It is to be remarked that some of the most disturbed and disastrous epochs in our annals are those to which we have to go for records of the greatest exploits in gastronomy and lavish expenditure of public money on comparatively unprofitable objects. During the period from the accession of Rufus to the death of Henry III., and again under the rule of Richard II., the taste for magnificent parade and sumptuous entertainments almost reached its climax. The notion of improving the condition of the poor had not yet dawned on the mind of the governing class; to make the artizan and the operative self-supporting and self-respectful was a movement not merely unformulated, but a conception beyond the parturient faculty of a member of the Jacquerie.

After the Turks took Constantinople, when the learned Greeks were scattered all over Southern Europe, when many genuine classical manuscripts were recovered by the zeal of scholars, it was natural that literary forgery should thrive. As yet scholars were eager rather than critical; they were collecting and unearthing, rather than minutely examining the remains of classic literature. They had found so much, and every year were finding so much more, that no discovery seemed impossible.  The lost books of Livy and Cicero, the songs of Sappho, the perished plays of Sophocles and Æschylus might any day be brought to light. This was the very moment for the literary forger.

In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London.

As the French Revolution evolved, there emerged in print a recurring figure, the collective power of the people expressed as a single gigantic body — a king-eating Colossus. Explore the lineage of this nouveau Hercules, from Erasmus Darwin’s Bastille-breaking giant to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Explore how the witch craze of early modern Europe, along with the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut, helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone — complete with cauldron and cats.

It's now 200 years since "The Year Without a Summer", when a volcanic sun-obscuring ash cloud caused temperatures to plummet. Explore how it offers an alternative lens through which to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a book begun in its midst.

A curious case of supposed dream telepathy at the end of the US Civil War, in which old ideas about the prophetic nature of dreaming collided with loss, longing, and new possibilities of communication at a distance.

Said to be spawn of the devil and possessed with prophetic insight, Mother Shipton was Yorkshire's answer to Nostradamus. She wielded power for centuries — from the Tudor courts, through civil war, to the spectre of Victorian apocalypse.