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A History Joke 0
- Education
- March 21, 2016
Question: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in
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5 ‘Lincoln’ Quotes Old Abe Never Said 1
- History
- March 21, 2016
If you’ve visited Ford’s Theatre, you’ve likely seen the 34-foot tower of books on Abraham Lincoln. The tower, designed to symbolize that the final word on America’s 16th president will never be written, was constructed with some 6,800 books – just a fraction of the 15,000 titles written on Lincoln. (An admitted Lincolnphile, my personal
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How Johann Sebastian Bach Taught His Students 0
- Culture
- March 21, 2016
March 21st marks the birthday of one of the greatest composers of all time: Johann Sebastian Bach. Beyond being a great composer, Bach was also a great teacher who raised many pupils to be masters of their craft. According to Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach’s success as a teacher resulted in part from
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Should We Clone a T-Rex?0
- Science
- March 21, 2016
The unearthing of a pregnant, 68 million year-old Tyrannosaurus rex in Montana reportedly has the potential to yield the holy grail of paleontological discoveries: T-Rex DNA. The specimen, says North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno, contains medullary bone, a tissue that develops only in pregnant females near the creature’s egg-laying phase. The presence of
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Is Humility a Specifically Religious Virtue?0
- March 21, 2016
In many secular contexts today, it’s considered a virtue for people to “be humble.” But should that be the case? Apart from a religious context, does it really make sense for people to cultivate humility? The background for this question is the idea that—if we care about being rational human beings—moral attitudes need to be
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The Meaning of Holocaust: Do you know it?0
- History
- March 21, 2016
Words are powerful. In the case of the word holocaust, we tend to think of it solely in reference to the Nazis’ attempt to eliminate all Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s through mass shootings, concentration camps, and eventually gas extermination followed by mass graves and crematorium. But the word was actually in
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