Alexander Hamilton – Americans Live in His World
George Washington, James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, all these giants of history have entered the pantheon of immortality as founders of the United States of America. These were the men, the statesmen, who created new political institutions and a modern system of representative democracy from scratch. They…
Josef Ganz – The Man Who Had His May Bug Stolen
Who has heard of Josef Ganz? No one, or almost no one. His name is forgotten, just as his work is forgotten. Yet without him, several generations would have driven differently. He was the creator of the most popular car of the 1950s, the father, so to speak, of the…
Sigmund Freud – Cocaine for Breakfast and Dinner
Cocaine is the second most popular illicit drug in the world after cannabis. The white powder that millions of people sniff, smoke and inject is extracted from the leaves of a plant called Erythroxylum coca, which grows in South America. As far back as three thousand years BC, the local…
Frederick Douglass – The Slave Who Changed America
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (Frederick Douglass). This was the name given by Harriet Bailey, a black woman on a plantation in the middle of Maryland around 1818, to her son, who would go down in the history of the struggle to abolish slavery as Frederick Douglass. An escaped slave and…
Frankenstein – The Monster Became a Monster Because of Humans
"Oh, if only I could write a story that would make readers as horrified as I was that night! I would just have to introduce them to the apparition that haunted my dreams." So exclaimed the young ladies of the 19th century when they were seized by the writing craze.…
Frank Lloyd Wright – The Storms of Free Life
"I was accused of saying I was the world's greatest architect. If I had really said that, I don't think it would have been arrogant," Frank Lloyd Wright said without hesitation in 1957, at the age of 89. The Guggenheim Museum, now one of New York's greatest landmarks, has still…
The History of Racing – From Muddy Fields to Racetracks
Sir Henry Segrave, 1920s speed racer and world speed record holder, wrote in his later years: "The desire for speed is an instinct possessed by every human being, as well as by the great majority of animals, and has been one of the most important drives in the process of…
Christmas Is Forbidden!
The winter was harsh, the ground frozen, nature raw. Soldiers have spent almost six months in the muddy, sodden and now icy trenches of France and Belgium. Comrades were disappearing, fighting was escalating. On 7 December 1914, Pope Benedict XV proposed an official temporary cessation of hostilities so that the…
Tommie Smith and John Carlos Allies of Revolution, Love and Tranquility
The right hand of Tommie Smith, clad in a black armband, raised in the air at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico symbolised the strength of black Americans, while the black-armed left hand of John Carlos, standing beside him, represented their unity. The two American Olympic medal winners used them to…
The Amistad Rebellion – A Long Way Home
In August 1839, a rickety double-masted ship was wandering in the sea off New York. Sailors who got close enough to it claimed that strange scenes were taking place on board. Newspapers began running sensationalist stories about a pirate ship full of black people, and it wasn't long before the…
