Inventions History

Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, is one of the most famous events of Western history. It inaugurated the Protestant Reformation and has for centuries been a powerful and enduring symbol of religious freedom of conscience and of righteous protest against the abuse of power. But did it actually really happen? In this engagingly written, wide-ranging, and insightful work of cultural history, leading Reformation historian Peter Marshall reviews the available evidence and concludes that very probably, it did not.

The International Spy Museum's Historian takes us on a wild tour of missions and schemes that almost happened, but were ultimately deemed too dangerous, expensive, ahead of their time, or even certifiably insane. "Compulsively readable laugh out loud history." —Mary Roach, New York...

Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.

Before the charismatic John Duval Gluck, Jr., came along, letters from New York City children to Santa Claus were destroyed, unopened, by the US Post Office. Gluck saw an opportunity and created the Santa Claus Association. The effort delighted the public, and for 15 years money and gifts flowed to the only group authorized to answer Santa's mail. Gluck became a Jazz Age celebrity, rubbing shoulders with the era's movie stars and politicians.

In this remarkable book, historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers - how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the evolution of their ideas and the crystallizing of their purpose.

Bubonic plague is widely regarded as being responsible for two of the most infamous plagues in recorded history - the Black Death in the mid-14th century and the great plague of London in 1665. The causative organism of modern-day plague was discovered independently in 1894 by two bacteriologists: the Swiss born Dr. Alexandre Yersin and Dr. Shibasaburo Kitasato from Japan.

Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe explores the role of earthquakes in shaping the deep timeframes and multi-hemispheric geographies of American literary history. Spanning the ancient world to the futuristic continents of speculative fiction, the earthquake stories assembled here together reveal the emergence of a broadly Western cultural syndrome that became an acute national fantasy: elsewhere catastrophe, an unspoken but widely prevalent sense that catastrophe is somehow "un-American."

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.

The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban history. Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation.

This history of medieval inventions, focusing on the 11th to the 14th centuries, vividly portrays a thriving era of human ingenuity, and the results are still being felt to this day. From the mechanical clock to the first eyeglasses, both of which revolutionized society, many of the commonplace devices we now take for granted had their origin in the Middle Ages. Divided into 10 thematic chapters, the accessible audiobook allows the listener to sample areas of interest or listen to the book from beginning to end for a complete historical overview.

On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto - a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the 16th century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the history of the ghetto in Europe, as well as later efforts to understand the problems of the American city.

Vous connaissez tous cet objet iconique, l'avez très certainement déjà manipulé. Le Rubik's Cube a suscité l'engouement de plus d'un milliard de personnes depuis 1974. Mais d'où vient-il ? Et comment expliquer un tel succès ? Son créateur, adepte des puzzles et des casse-têtes en tous genres, retrace la folle aventure de son invention. Il livre une véritable réflexion sur les mécanismes du jeu, les avantages de la symétrie, les vertus de la concentration, et nous montre que le Rubik's Cube est bien plus qu'un simple passe-temps.

In virtually all fields of human endeavor, Athens was so much at the forefront of dynamism and innovation that the products of its most brilliant minds remain not only influential, but entirely relevant to this day. In the field of medicine, the great physician Hippocrates not only advanced the practical knowledge of human anatomy and care-giving, but changed the entire face of the medical profession.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a man of many talents - a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, and scholar - but he is best known for Lives of the Artists, which singlehandedly established the canon of Italian Renaissance art. Before Vasari's extraordinary book, art was considered a technical skill, and artists were mere decorators and craftsmen. It was through Vasari's visionary writings that Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came to be regarded as great masters of life as well as art, their creative genius celebrated as a divine gift.

From the invention of the wheel to the marvel of electricity, from the groundbreaking medical discoveries to the wonders of the digital age, Top 101 Inventions Of All Time! celebrates the brilliance of human creativity and ingenuity. Whether you're a history enthusiast or simply curious about the marvels that surround us, this book promises an enlightening and exhilarating journey through the realm of invention.

The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own. It’s a time of ice ages, global migrations, and mass extinctions - of woolly rhinos, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and not least early species of Homo. It’s the world that created ours. But outside that environmental story there exists a parallel narrative that describes how our ideas about the Pleistocene have emerged.

The author of the acclaimed medieval mystery A Burnable Book once again brings fourteenth-century London alive in all its color and detail in this riveting thriller featuring medieval poet and fixer John Gower—a twisty tale rife with intrigue, danger mystery, and murder. Though he is one of...

You don't have to be a mechanical genius to be an inventor. Anyone can invent - a parent wrestling with a baby sling...a coach frustrated with slick-soled running shoes...an office worker determined to keep the computer cords untangled. Inventing is simply finding clever solutions to everyday challenges. Author and inventor Patricia Nolan-Brown has turned common annoyances into ingenious and money-making products.

The typical military history presents a chronicle of battles and wars and the commanders and troops who fought them. This book takes a different approach. It presents battles and wars and people aplenty, but they are not its ultimate subjects. This book is about the turning points that not only make military history dynamic but crucial to the story of humanity and civilization.

The crucial importance of education in China, a prized virtue instilled in the population among all classes by beloved teacher and philosopher Confucius in the 6th century BCE, generated an unprecedented and long-lived golden age of literature and art. It also gave rise to a cornucopia of transformative innovations and groundbreaking technology, particularly following the dawn of the Common Era.