Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice while living at "Steventon," her father's Hampshire vicarage where she spent the first 25 years of her life. However, the book was not published until much later—in...
The National Geographic Society is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. It was founded in 1888 by a small group of eminent explorers and scientists and,...
Still regularly performed, Der Rosenkavalier is one of the most acclaimed comic operas of Richard Strauss, the leading composer of romantic opera in the early 20th century. It is loosely based on the...
The Emmy Awards are given for outstanding achievement in US television. They are presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which was founded in 1946 and which held the first...
Where Does Coffee Come From?
In this first lesson, we will explore where coffee comes from and
where it grows.
The English term coffee evolved from the Arabic word qahwah, which
was... 8 Comments
In 1848, the same year California became a part of the US, another major event in the state's history occurred. While establishing a sawmill for John Sutter, James W. Marshall discovered gold and...
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a museum dedicated to archiving the history of rock music. It was created in 1983 but did not have a home until 1995, when it opened its Hall of Fame in Cleveland,...
The January Uprising began as a spontaneous rebellion of young Poles in Russian Poland against conscription into the Imperial Russian Army. They were soon joined by Lithuanians living in the...
Louis XVI was the king of France during the complex sociopolitical conflict that culminated in the French Revolution, but he was shy, dull, and corpulent and lacked the leadership skills necessary...
As the fourth point of his presidential inauguration address in 1949, Truman announced what became known as his Point Four Program—the US policy of technical assistance and economic aid to...
In 1983, after five years of development, Apple released the Lisa, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface. Although the Lisa was a commercial failure—due in part to its initial...
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the Jewish armed resistance that took place in the Warsaw Ghetto of Nazi-occupied Poland during WWII. By July 1942, the Nazis had forced 500,000 Jews into the Warsaw...
Popeye, the popular cartoon character who turns from sailor to strongman with a few swallows of spinach, started out as a minor character in the Thimble Theater comic strip. In its early days, the...
A founding work of modern Western literature, Cervantes's Don Quixote presents a profound picture of the divide between idealistic and realistic world views. A burlesque of chivalric romances, it was...
During WWI, Luxemburg and Liebknecht formed a revolutionary, antiwar socialist group in Germany that became the Spartacus League. After the proclamation of the German republic in 1918, they opposed...
Orsini was an Italian revolutionary in the movement for Italian unification. In 1858, he made an attempt on the life of Napoleon III, whom he held responsible for the failure of the Italian...
Ejection seats are used in aircraft to quickly propel occupants out in an emergency. Today, they are fired by an explosive charge, but the first ejection seats were powered by compressed air. One of...
The field of cryonics involves techniques in which cold is applied for a variety of therapeutic goals, including brief local anesthesia, destruction of superficial skin lesions, and preservation of...
The Anglo-Zulu War was fought between the British Empire and the Zulu nation. It began when Zulu king Cetshwayo, determined to resist European advances into his territory, rejected British demands to...
The world's first subway line opened in London in 1863. It was 3.75 mi (6 km) long and soon carried tens of thousands of passengers each day—transporting 9.5 million in its first year. Initially...
The Davy lamp was an early safety lamp used in the mining and quarrying industries. It was designed by English chemist and physicist Sir Humphrey Davy to prevent the accidental ignition of flammable...
During his first State of the Union address, President Johnson outlined a vast program of economic and social welfare legislation designed to create what he termed the "Great Society." As part of...
Jupiter has more than 60 moons. The four largest—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—were the first satellites of a planet other than Earth to be detected. They were discovered by Galileo in 1610,...
In 1832, Morse, an American painter-turned-inventor, began working on a system for transmitting messages as electrical pulses across a wire. Five years later, he was granted a patent for his...
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For 27 years after its completion in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge had the longest main span in the world, stretching 4,200 ft (1,280 m). Its four-year construction, supervised by chief engineer...
Topsy was a circus elephant at Coney Island's Luna Park. After killing three people—at least one of whom was mistreating her at the time—in as many years, she was deemed a threat and schedule to be...
The distance from Earth to Mars fluctuates between approximately 35 million mi (56 million km) and 63 million mi (101 million km). In 1999, NASA's Mars Polar Lander, on a mission to analyze soil...
During the "Red Scare" that followed World War I, US Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer attempted to deport political radicals, dissidents, and aliens in the notorious "Palmer Raids." The...
Signed by Canada, Mexico, and the US, NAFTA created the world's largest free-trade area. The agreement immediately lifted tariffs on the majority of goods produced by the signatory nations, and it...
Guinness is a celebrated Irish dry stout that originated in the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness. When Guinness acquired his brewery, he famously signed a 9,000-year lease that fixed his annual rent...
During his presidency of Iraq from 1979 to 2003, Hussein instituted a brutal dictatorship, launching wars against Iran and Kuwait and directing campaigns against Iraqi minorities, particularly the...
In 1835, a minority faction of the Cherokee tribe signed the Treaty of New Echota, which bound the entire tribe to move beyond the Mississippi River within three years. Although the Cherokee...
In 1882, French inventor Louis Lumière developed a method of making photographic plates. By 1894, he and his brother August were producing 15 million plates a year. They worked on improving Edison's...