One of the gabelle’s most irritating inventions was the sel du devoir, the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of...
One of history's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than p...
Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb either.
In 1928, Celulosa Cubana, S.A., founded by sugar tycoon Manuel Rionda, began making bagasse paper in Tuinucu, Cuba.
Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—d...
Nonviolent force is a moral argument. The lesson is that if the nonviolent side can be led to violence, they have lost the argument and they are destroyed.
What stronger denunciation of an agrarian society than the charge of bestiality? Even in modern times, when Basque peasants engage in the duel by insults known as xikito, the accusation of bestiality...
Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs...
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the g...
The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to...
The nature of the precious liquid from which purple came would not be entirely understood for another two millennia. In 1826, a twenty-three-year-old student at the Ecole de Pharmacie, Antoine Jérôme...
The adversary must first be made into a demon before people will accept the war. This was why during the Cold War, the U.S. government became infuriated at any
Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called tomato ketchup in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranea...
It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name—corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.
It had all been predicted in Herzl’s 1902 novel, Old New Land, in which he imagines visiting the new Jewish state in 1923 and finding the Jews not only exploiting the Dead Sea’s mineral wealth but mak...
In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone’s favorite luxury—butter.
I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule.
Hillel
Chanukah.
At the time when Pope Pius VII had to leave Rome, which had been conquered by revolutionary French, the committee of the Chamber of Commerce in London was considering the herring fishery. One member o...