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The Homeless

   2022    History
The Chicago Tribune in late June of '42 reports the mass killing of Jews. Like many other newspapers, the Tribune puts it on page 6 or 7 in a tiny, little article. You either missed it, or if you saw it, you would say the editors don't think this is true. If they thought this was true, this would be on the front pages. Only a few of papers did put the story on the front page, including the Pittsburgh Courier.
The dominant idea in the American government is any act of rescue will be a diversion from the war effort. Both could've been done at the same time. In spite of that, a group of government officials supports and finances rescue operations. Allied soldiers begin to liberate concentration camps and find mass graves. The public sees the sheer scale of the Holocaust.
Series: The U.S. and the Holocaust

Words on a Page

   2020    History
Writing itself is 5,000 years old, and for most of that time words were written by hand using a variety of tools. The Romans were able to run an empire thanks to documents written on papyrus. Scroll books could be made quite cheaply and, as a result, ancient Rome had a thriving written culture. With the fall of the Roman Empire, papyrus became more difficult to obtain. Europeans were forced to turn to a much more expensive surface on which to write: Parchment. Medieval handwritten books could cost as much as a house, they also represent a limitation on literacy and scholarship.
No such limitations were felt in China, where paper had been invented in the second century. Paper was the foundation of Chinese culture and power, and for centuries how to make it was kept secret. When the secret was out, paper mills soon sprang up across central Asia. The result was an intellectual flourishing known as the Islamic Golden Age. Muslim scholars made discoveries in biology, geology, astronomy and mathematics. By contrast, Europe was an intellectual backwater.
That changed with Gutenberg’s development of movable type printing. The letters of the Latin alphabet have very simple block-like shapes, which made it relatively simple to turn them into type pieces. When printers tried to use movable type to print Arabic texts, they found themselves hampered by the cursive nature of Arabic writing. The success of movable type printing in Europe led to a thousand-fold increase in the availability of information, which produced an explosion of ideas that led directly to the European Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed.
Series: The Secret History of Writing
Dangerous knowledge

Dangerous knowledge

2007  Science
The Jinx

The Jinx

  History
The Hunt

The Hunt

2015  Nature
Ancient Aliens

Ancient Aliens

2014  Culture
Get Gotti

Get Gotti

2023  History
Unknown

Unknown

2023  Science