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The Star of India is an iron-hulled merchant sailing ship built in England in 1863. On display at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, she is billed as “the world’s oldest active sailing ship”. In 1863, the Gibson, McDonald & Arnold shipbuilding company, on the Isle of Man, began work on a three-masted sailing barque … Continue reading Sailing Ship “Star of India” →
Today, we remember the First World War as a long drawn-out stalemate that resulted in four years of blood but no gains by anybody—and a peace treaty that did nothing but cause another World War twenty years later. But less often remembered is the fact that the war was one of the most unpopular in … Continue reading World War One Trench Songs →
The first backpacker to thru-hike the entire 2100-mile Appalachian Trail in one trip was a troubled WW2 veteran who did it as a kind of therapy. For most of human history, people got around from one place to another by walking. Although Rome pioneered an extensive network of paved roads, and these were used through … Continue reading The First Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker →
Project Mercury was America’s entry into the Space Race and was intended to put a human into space before the Soviet Union did. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 caused a near-panic in the United States and led to desperate calls to “catch up”. President Eisenhower responded by establishing the National … Continue reading Project Mercury →
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One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar.
In 2020, David Gallagher, who runs SF Memory, opened a cabinet found abandoned in San Francisco’s Mission District, somewhere around Tiffany and Duncan streets. Inside were 920 Kodachrome slides by a then unknown photographer capturing life in the city throughout the 1960s. They show us the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) … Continue reading "The Mystery Remains: Found Kodachrome Photos From 1960s San Francisco" The post The Mystery Remains: Found Kodachrome Photos From 1960s San Francisco appeared first on Flashbak.
Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video […]
The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations (quotes below), by Donald Chew, persuaded me that for-profit-firm capitalism has varied quite a lot over space and time, and that the U.S.
For centuries, the people of Judaea had seen many foreign dynasts claim hegemony over them; the Greeks were but the latest. Antiochus IV’s interactions with the Judaeans were, to put it mildly, troubled. Does Antiochus IV deserve the mantle of villainy that ancient sources such as the Bible place on him? He is portrayed […]
