gnostek1 / 6A 13th-century fresco of Sylvester I and Constantine the Great , showing the purported Donation ( Santi Quattro Coronati , Rome)
01Lorenzo Valla used anachronistic Latin vocabulary in the text to prove the document was an 8th-century forgery.
02The Donation was cited to justify papal authority over the Papal States and crowning of Charlemagne.
03Even after Valla's proof, the Catholic Church continued using the Donation politically for decades.
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01Agnew accepted at least $147,500 in bribes while serving as Vice President, some payments made inside the White House itself.
02He resigned via a single-sentence letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, bypassing Congress entirely.
03His plea deal made him the second Vice President in U.S. history to resign — the first was John C. Calhoun, in 1832.
gnostek1 / 5Sir Geoffrey Luttrell , mounted, being assisted by his wife and daughter-in-law. Folio 202v.
01The Luttrell Psalter was created around 1320–1340 for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham, Lincolnshire, at a cost of £32.
02Marginalia include a man with a wheel for a body, a dog playing bagpipes, and a knight genuinely losing to a giant snail.
03The agricultural scenes are so detailed that historians reconstruct 14th-century plowing technique, crop rotation, and harness design from its pages.
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01Herzog cooked the shoe with garlic and duck fat before eating it in front of an audience.
02Les Blank filmed the entire meal; the resulting short, 'Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe,' runs 28 minutes.
03He made the original bet to push Errol Morris to finish 'Gates of Heaven' — and Morris did.
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01Manzanar held over 10,000 Japanese Americans in California's Owens Valley, surrounded by guard towers and searchlights.
02Interned fathers legally signed draft consent forms for sons serving in the 442nd in Italy simultaneously.
03A 1943 riot at Manzanar left two internees dead, shot by military police.
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01Titus reportedly wept at dinner if he had performed no act of generosity that day.
02He commanded the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, during which the Second Temple was destroyed.
03He reigned only 26 months before dying of fever at 41; his brother Domitian may have hastened his death.
gnostek1 / 5The Liver of Piacenza , a bronze diagram of the sheep's liver found near Piacenza with Etruscan inscriptions
01Haruspicy was inherited from the Etruscans; Rome never developed it independently.
02A bronze model liver found at Piacenza, divided into 40 named sections, was the haruspex's training manual.
03Julius Caesar ignored the haruspex Spurinna's warning on the Ides of March — then received 23 stab wounds.
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01A New York postal clerk named Charles Kaplan held 16 bombs after spotting identical suspicious packages.
02One bomb reached Senator Thomas Hardwick; his maid opened it and lost both hands.
03The bombings triggered the Palmer Raids, which deported over 500 foreign-born radicals within a year.
gnostek1 / 2"Queens" of Mysore : left, Krishnaraja Wadiyar III 's first wife, Devajammani has a discoloration around the mouth, thought to be due to the blowing of variolation dust in the nose ("nasal insufflation"). Right, his second wife shows the…
01Ottoman variolation predates Jenner by at least 70 years — recorded in Istanbul by 1670.
02Smallpox killed roughly 400,000 Europeans per year in the 18th century before inoculation spread.
03Variolated children received live smallpox; about 1 in 50 died — versus 1 in 3 from natural infection.