features a wide cast of characters, including Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, and Louis Pasteur. What surprising things did you uncover about some of these figures? a fundamental distinction (and who ultimately turned out to be right!). Two of my favorites were a grouchy, reclusive physicist named Jean-Baptiste Biot and a down-trodden, oft-ignored chemist named Auguste Laurent. One day, I noticed that both of them mentioned working with a certain perfumer, Edouard Laugier. I decided to try pulling on that thread to see who he was, and it revealed a whole world where aroma and essential oils were a ..read more

Certainly, there are several misunderstandings that continue to prevail. Many Jews would argue that most Jews lived in ghettos prior to emancipation, despite the fact urban ghettos were generally limited to the Italian peninsula and a few Central European cities (e.g. Frankfurt, Prague) and were not, on balance, to be found in Poland, where most early modern Jews lived. Despite decades of revisionist scholarship that has challenged the notion that the original European ghettos were largely isolated, it is not clear that this has made a significant dent in popular perceptions. The fact that Jew ..read more

I think there are a couple of things we can learn from these forgotten healers and their world. One is that the task of healing is complex. Renaissance medicine took a holistic view of health that wove together physical, mental, and spiritual or emotional elements. By contrast, modern biomedicine tends to divide the body into many constituent parts and to divorce human health from the broad ecosystems in which it is embedded. Renaissance notions of health and healing remind us that we’re deeply interconnected, both as individuals and as a species. I would also say that, while Renaissance medic ..read more

During World War II, the casket containing the poet’s remains was removed from the marble tomb and hidden underground to protect his bones from bombing and looting. But the last time the bones were actually taken out of the casket and examined was soon after the commemorations in 1921. It was reported last summer that plans are underway to reexamine Dante’s bones with modern scientific methods before the 700th anniversary of his death in September 2021. As you might imagine, I can’t wait to see what new light is shed on this subject that, for me, is more than just academic. is the most persona ..read more

Today, a year into a global pandemic, we celebrate Passover, at a time of personal and communal struggles for freedom and justice. Some may find hope in the utopian Yiddish writers who believed that a fairer world was at hand. Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s gave way to new forms of Yiddish poetry as the Jewish world mourned the horrific murder of the majority of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust. Many of the poets who had once focused on the struggles of others now turned, in their writing, to face this indescribable loss ..read more

In the cascading series of events initiated by the rebels in St. Mary’s, we see how African militancy derived from the entanglements of empire, trade, and war across the Atlantic. Tacky’s Revolt was smaller and less significant than Long and subsequent historians have supposed only because the slave war it advanced was larger and more consequential. “A more dangerous or troublesome Affair I was never engaged in, in all my life,” wrote Zachary Bayly about the St. Mary’s insurrection. And still the Coromantee War was closer to its beginning than its end. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic ..read more