Showing results by narrator "Mark Schectman" in All Categories

America has long been the land of innovation. More than 13,000 years ago, the Clovis people created what many call the “first American invention” — a stone tool used primarily to hunt large game.

As white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe pointed out in the non-fictional key to her work, however, the world of slavery in her book was actually less horrible than the real world. “Slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art,” she wrote. “A work which should represent it strictly as it is would be a work which cannot be read.”

Get ready for a lot more space science.

In 1787, four years after the American Revolutionary War, the United States was a country brimming with possibility, and no city felt the excitement more than Philadelphia.

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.

By the mid-1800s, tuberculosis had reached epidemic levels in Europe and the United States. The disease, now known to be highly infectious, attacks the lungs and damages other organs. Before the advent of antibiotics, its victims slowly wasted away, becoming pale and thin before finally dying of what was then known as consumption. The Victorians romanticized the disease and the effects it caused in the gradual build to death.

It was the greatest migration in US history. And when millions of African-Americans fled the South in search of a better life, they remade the nation in ways that are still being felt.

On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic.

Humans release more than 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, thanks largely to the burning of fossil fuels. This number has been rising steadily for more than 100 years. As the climate situation becomes increasingly dire, scientists, environmentalists, businesspeople and politicians have been seeking solutions. Many of these solutions involve lowering carbon emissions - using greener fuels, driving less.

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.

We live in a golden age of wine, thanks in part to thirsty millennials and Americans seemingly intent on out-drinking the French. 

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.

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.

From Black Lives Matter to quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s bended knee, the Black Panthers’ political legacy remains alive in America’s ongoing dialogue about race, justice and privilege. The backbone of their philosophy—a mix of demands and aspirations—is the Party’s Ten-Point Program, written in October 1966 at the North Oakland Neighborhood Service Center.

The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history.

Winston Churchill, English prime minister and one of history’s most influential statesmen, was undoubtedly a man with weighty questions on his mind.

In an electoral surprise, a man from New York recently became president. No, not that man, and not from that slice of New York—Mohamed Abdullahi “Farmajo” Mohamed, a long-time resident of a Buffalo suburb and the former prime minister of Somalia, was selected as the next president of the African nation of Somalia earlier this week.

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.

When I reach Hunter Hoffman, director of the Virtual Reality Research Center at the University of Washington, he’s in Galveston, Texas, visiting Shriners Hospital for Children. Shriners is one of the most highly regarded pediatric burn centers in America. They treat children from around the country suffering from some of the most horrific burns possible - burns on 70 percent of their bodies, burns covering their faces.

Shortly after dawn one January day in 1944, a German military truck departed the center of Vilnius, in what is today Lithuania, and rattled southwest toward the fog-laced towns that ringed the city.