Skeptophilia

It's always thin ice to make too many assumptions about why our distant ancestors did what they did. Most of the time, all we have is th...

I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England...

It's a point I've made before, but it's worth saying again: we queer folks are not  "pushing our lifestyle in other people...

The phenomenally silly song "St. Brendan's Fair Isle," by the Arkansas folk singer and songwriter Jimmy Driftwood , tells the ...

A year and a half or so ago I wrote a piece about some of the biblical apocrypha -- books and epistles and letters and whatnot that didn...

Last year I did a post about the remarkable Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus , whose passion for history (coupled with an u...

Given my dual fascination with history and botany, it's a bit surprising that yesterday I ran into a story I'd never heard before th...

Some time around 1150 C.E. in the Faroe Islands, a comb-maker named Unås and his wife Gunnhild had a baby boy, whom they named Sverre.  Unås...

Spartacus was a Thracian slave and gladiator, born in around 103 B.C.E. in what is now Bulgaria, about whose early years (despite several m...