Showing results by narrator "Mark Schectman"

At 4 in the morning on March 30, 1867, Secretary of State William Seward signed a treated buying Russian America — that is, Alaska — for the cost of two cents per acre a total of 7.2 million in gold bricks.

During the early 19th century, the Supreme Court’s term was so short that the justices would leave their families behind when they came to Washington. Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall arranged for the Supremes to live together, in hopes that shacking up in boarding houses or inns would instill a sense of fraternity among them. It did.

Are you frustrated or disenchanted by the results of your Agile approach? Does Agile sound like a good idea, but you're not sure how to explain it beyond roles, practices, and meetings? Is your team going through the motions, but it's still business as usual? The missing piece is the Agile mindset - the thinking that makes Agile processes work.

In 1946, George Orwell traveled to the house of an acquaintance in Scotland to write his final book. He had been suffering from tuberculosis for a long time, although it’s hard to know how long exactly.

Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling ‘Wonder Woman,’” read the astonishing headline. In the summer of 1942, a press release from the New York offices of All-American Comics turned up at newspapers, magazines and radio stations all over the United States.

In deepest Cuba, some places remain almost virgin. People live in bohíos - thatched-roof huts made of palm boards. Cuban guajiros (farmers) still make coffee in a cloth sieve and go to bed with their chickens. Reality here contrasts sharply with the unrestrained cacophony presented by the island's tourist advertising, which conveys the false idea that we are a people immersed in endless revelry, laughter, and carnivals.

Volcanologists have a flair for understatement. Here is the term for the roiling, spattering 2,000-degree Fahrenheit liquid rock visible in the caldera of Kilauea volcano this afternoon: lava lake.

The Cyber Risk Handbook is the practitioner's guide to implementing, measuring, and improving the counter-cyber capabilities of the modern enterprise. The first resource of its kind, this book provides authoritative guidance for real-world situations, and cross-functional solutions for enterprise-wide improvement.

Slow as molasses isn’t just a saying — the byproduct of sugar production is usually sticky and viscous, even at room temperature. So historians and scientists have long been stumped by Boston's 1919 Great Molasses Flood.

Last year, Eighth Day Farm in Holland, Michigan, planted some squash seeds they were given, not knowing what they would produce. When the plants eventually grew in as bright orange, two-foot-long squashes, farmer Sarah Hofman-Graham invited Michigan Radio reporter Rebecca Williams over for some soup. The squash "tasted sweet and mild," Williams reports for Michigan Radio.

Ebenezer Scrooge wasn’t the first fictional character to see ghosts around Christmas time. The tradition of holiday ghost stories goes much, much farther back—farther, perhaps, than Christmas itself.

For years, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the existence of menopause, a life stage that humans do not share with our primate relatives. Why would it be beneficial for females to stop being able to have children with decades still left to live?

Who polices America's prosecutors? And when they set their sights on an innocent CEO, can he survive a five-year, $25 million legal labyrinth to save the company he built, and himself from prison?

The American military has been perfecting the art of disguise for more than a hundred years, employing a variety of materials and mimicking natural patterns to make soldiers invisible to enemy eyes. But don’t be too impressed: insects, it turns out, have been doing the same thing for a hundred million years. Ancient bugs cleverly covered themselves with dirt, wood, leaves and even the remains of their victims to become invisible to prey and predators alike.

Today is Buffalo Soldiers Day–proclaimed by President George Bush in 1992 to celebrate the all-black Army regiments’ “outstanding legacy of service.” The Buffalo Soldiers, as Bush acknowledged, are a historically important group best remembered for fighting on American’s western frontier.

The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is - a representation of geographic information - and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography. Only a few examples exist: Around the 11th century, a now-anonymous scribe created a chart of how the planets moved through the sky. By the 18th century, scientists were warming to the idea of arranging knowledge visually.

For centuries, Aboriginal Australians have said they belonged to the oldest sustained civilization on the face of the Earth, citing their culture and history of oral storytelling that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Now, one of the most extensive analyses of Indigenous Australian DNA to date suggests that they've been right all along.

Move over, Rio - Italy just had its own Olympics-style games complete with heartbreak, joy and plenty of athletic glory. But the games weren’t your average sporting event. As the Agence France-Presse reports, they were the first world athletic competition just for people with Down Syndrome, drawing athletes from 36 countries around the world.

In his 1907 autobiography, cowboy Nat Love recounts stories from his life on the frontier so cliché, they read like scenes from a John Wayne film.

Frank DiCara is 90 years old, but he still remembers what it felt like to wake up an enemy in his hometown. It was 1941, and he was a 14-year-old kid in Highlandtown, an Italian-American neighborhood in Baltimore, when news broke that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into war with the Axis Powers of Japan, Germany and Italy.