The musicians of the Titanic famously continued playing as the ship went down, a testimony to practicing one's craft until their dying breath. But did it really happen like this?
Varying accounts exist as to whether the band played until the end and...
Today
The 1873 Global Financial Meltdown that Cause 20 Years of Deflation and Destroyed 2 Empires
On May 9, 1873, as the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed and thousands of speculators were wiped out in a single afternoon, young Salbert von Rothschild and two colleagues from the Schey and Goldschmidt banking families were nearly lynched on the floor of the exchange by infuriated ... Show More
44m 22s
Jul 16
Johnny Appleseed's Trees Were for Booze, Not Pies, and He Dressed Like a Hobo for Marketing Purposes
The Disney version of Johnny Appleseed has a cheerful barefoot man in a tin pot hat scattering apple seeds for grateful pioneers to bake into pies. The real John Chapman collected his seeds for free from cidery waste, planted them into strategically fenced nurseries on land he bo ... Show More
53m 24s
Jul 14
All the World’s Empires Became Nations in Less Than 100 Years, and What That Means for the Next 100
For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single legal canopy. The nation-state as we know it is barely a century old for most of the world's ... Show More
49m 33s
Jun 2009
Titanic Lives: The Crew of RMS Titanic
Much has been written about RMS Titanic, but this has tended to concentrate on the ship and its passengers. Using sources such as crew lists, local newspapers, Titanic Fund minute books and the newly released 1911 census, this talk traces the lives of a crewmen and his family and ... Show More
47m 5s