For many people today, waking up in the middle of the night is incredibly frustrating, stressful, and is often labeled as insomnia. But apparently, for people in the past, it was part of their normal routine. As Business Insider reports (using excerpts from Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep), Virginia Tech historian Roger Ekrich
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If you’re a military-history buff, you’ve probably heard the name Hiram Maxim. If you haven’t, he is credited with inventing the Maxim machine gun in 1884, which substantially changed warfare with its ability to fire 600 rounds per minute. Now, the ingenuity of the Maxim machine gun reveals that odd contradiction of progress. On one
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Today’s students are on a much more delayed educational schedule than in times past. Before the 20th century, students used to enroll in college around the age of 15. The Harding family of Alabama is witnessing to the previously more expedited educations in a remarkable way: their first seven children all enrolled in college by
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We’ve come to a place in our political discourse when government action often is perceived as more important than respecting the traditions and institutions upon which that very government derives its authority. Many Americans are impatient with the process required by our system of checks and balances. The recent announcement by President Obama regarding his
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In 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World—a dystopian novel imagining a future in which people live in a highly organized society that they are conditioned to accept. In 1958, in Brave New World Revisited, he looked back on his novel and reflected on how accurate its predictions of the future had been (you can read the
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“It is typical of our time,” Chesterton wrote, “that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it
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