Massachusetts, like Queen Elizabeth, encouraged salt making through the granting of monopolies to those who showed the skill to produce salt cheaply. The colony granted Samuel Winslow a ten-year monop...
Literary teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiate gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in despera...
It is an old remark, that all arts and sciences have a mutual dependence upon each other... Thus men, very different in genius and pursuits, become mutually subservient to each other; and a very usefu...
In the first century A.D., Pliny estimated that the average Roman citizen consumed only 25 grams of salt a day. The modern American consumes even less if the salt content of packaged food is not inclu...
In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story i...
If all poor people refused to fight, he argued, the rich would have no army and there would be no war.
Herodotus,
Europe needed printing because it was bursting with creativity. New ideas in the arts and sciences, as well as in social justice and religion, desperately needed to be expressed and disseminated. The...
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 All our invention and...
The first of the great Roman roads, the Via Salaria, Salt Road, was built to bring this salt not only to Rome but across the interior of the peninsula. This worked well in the Roman part of the Italia...
Te Whiti
Quakers
ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of...
Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese.
Jesus was seen as dangerous because he rejected not only warfare and killing but any kind of force. Those in authority saw this as a challenge. How could there be authority without force?
It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller.
It turned out that salt was a microcosm for one of the oldest concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth-century-B.C. Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of th...
It takes two years for the salt to reach the center of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root.
In times of war prices of the necessaries of life are generally very much increased, but the prices of labor of the poor do not usually rise.