More than an artistic movement, the Renaissance was a revolution in how people understood the world and their place in it. Some of the era’s most telling insights happen to be hidden in its most famous paintings. From Italy to Northern Europe, the seven works below reveal seven fascinating facets of the Renaissance.   […]

Skepticism is the royal gateway to philosophy. If we take what we already know for granted, there would be no room for inquiry, curiosity, or intellectual wonder. Skepticism is an act of iconoclasm towards the pillars upon which our current knowledge stands, but what happens if the object of skepticism is the capacity to […]

Loneliness is a feeling we all know: heavy, quiet, hard to escape sometimes. But what if this is not a burden, but a means for creativity? History has captured great art, music, and literature inspired by loneliness. From the star-filled sky of Van Gogh to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, solitude gave wings to incredible creativity. […]

Few empires in history have grown as large or lasted as long as the Ottoman Empire. It was founded in the medieval era and only disappeared in the first decades of the 20th century (Quataert, 2005, 3). Ottoman history is, in many ways, marked by contradictions. It was a Sunni Islamic empire noted for […]

On August 16, 1924, the battered body of the Italian Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was found buried in a wood on the outskirts of Rome. He had been missing since June 10, when a group of fascists assaulted and kidnapped him. At the end of May, Giacomo Matteotti, an early opponent of Mussolini’s Fascist […]