history Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Could The Roman Empire Have Survived?
No empire, from Sargon’s Akkadian Empire to the Soviet Union, lasts forever. There’s always an expiration date....
10 Years Ago, WWE Killed Vince McMahon In Its Most Ridiculous Storyline Ever
When you watch WWE programming for a long time, certain patterns emerge, ranging from production quirks to how matches are laid out to certain tropes that consistently recur in the storytelling. One of these is the way WWE lets show its utter contempt for its audience. Hell, it showed up recently wh...
After Rome Fell, Europe's Barbarians Had To Figure Out How To Be Kings
Political structures and institutions—the bedrock of the systems that underpin our world and society—aren’t a given. They can and do evolve and strengthen, or, alternatively, crumble into nothingness. That’s one of many reasons the fall of the Roman Empire is a valuable example for us to bear in min...
Rome's Fall Left Britain A Violent, Cityless Hellscape
In the year 350 AD, to paraphrase the historian Robin Fleming, Britain was as Roman a place as anywhere in the Empire. It had a dense network of roads and ports, luxurious villas with mosaic floors and private bathhouses, a profusion of small, prosperous towns that served as markets for regional tra...
Rome's Collapse Turned Petty Kings, Strongmen, And Warlords Into The French
Decades before Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476 AD and the Western Roman Empire officially went out of business, the provinces of northern Gaul (roughly the area between Paris and the lower Rhine in what’s now the Netherlands and northwest Germany) had long since slipped from the grasp of the a...
Billy Corgan Is Buying Pro Wrestling's Oldest And Deadest Brand To Use As He Pleases
Depending on the specific argument you’re making, you might say that the National Wrestling Alliance, pro wrestling’s oldest governing body, ceased being relevant as much as 35 years ago. So it was definitely surprising last week when Billy Corgan (yes, that one) bought its remnants from Bruce Tharp...
Gift Ngoepe, First-Ever African-Born MLB Player, Got A Hit In His First Career At-Bat
Earlier this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates were losing to the Cubs and they replaced Antonio Bastardo on the mound with Dovydas Neverauskas. The Lithuanian pitched two innings and became the first Lithuanian-born player to play in a major league game. Neverasukas was optioned back to Triple-A Indiana...
Yakov Smirnoff, America's Secret Weapon In The Cold War, Is Still Laughing
The National Security Advisor gets bounced for covert dealings with a Russian ambassador, then the Pentagon announces that Russian fighter jets recently buzzed a U.S. destroyer in the Black Sea, and reports come out that the Kremlin has begun testing cruise missiles in utter disregard of a bilateral...
After The Visigoths Sacked Rome, They Established A Full-Blown Kingdom
When last we met the Goths, they had just sacked the city of Rome in 410 CE, the act for which this barbarian people is both famous and infamous. They were, after all, the first group in 800 years to pillage the Eternal City, and that kind of action is going to leave a mark in the history books. The...
Vince Russo, One Of Pro Wrestling's Biggest Bullshit Artists, Is Back Where He Started<em></em>
Hard as it may be for long-time fans to believe, this month marks 25 years since Vince Russo first emerged as a presence in pro wrestling. All these years later, the former WWE, WCW, and TNA storyline writer and television personality is best known for his role behind the scenes in the Attitude Era ...
Russell Westbrook Has A Double-Double For The Season<em></em>
Tonight, Russell Westbrook scored 12 points, grabbed 13 rebounds, and handed out 13 assists in a rout of the listless Milwaukee Bucks. The 13 rebounds that Westbrook grabbed give him 822 for the season through 77 games. Westbrook is already well over the 820 points he’d need to average double-digit ...
The Roman Empire Was Brought Down By Structural Rot
One way of telling the story of the fall of the Roman Empire is to examine the lives and personalities at the very top of the political spectrum, the emperors, generals, court officials, and kings at the center of power who made the life-and-death decisions that reverberated throughout the Roman wor...
The Roman Empire Accidentally Killed Itself
It took just 80 years for the Roman Empire to fall apart as a political unit....
As The Roman Empire Fell, Its People Stopped Talking To One Another
Rome was more than just an empire, an agglomeration of provinces ruled by the emperor and administered through a central bureaucracy and a collection of appointed governors and officials. The Roman world, beyond the political structures that sustained the empire, went much deeper than that: It was a...
Apocalypse Is The Only Path To Equality, Says The New Prophet Of Doom
Perhaps you imagine that enlightened lawmaking will bring our nation’s rampant inequality problem under control. History tells us the prognosis may be much, much more grim. We spoke to the author of one of the scariest books we have ever read. ...
What Happened To Normal People When The Roman Economy Fell Apart?
The sophistication and scale of the Roman economy was a marvel that powered all of its other achievements, from monumental buildings on three continents to its famed and feared professional army. Although it was an agrarian economy focused around agricultural production, it was surprisingly complex,...
Why Where You Live Matters<em></em>
When you woke up this morning, were you in a house, an apartment, or a condo? Look around you. What kinds of buildings do you see? Skyscrapers, mid-rise office parks, strip malls, tracts of suburban homes, fields or water? When you went to work, did you drive, bike, take a train, or walk? When you g...
The Roman Economy Was A Powerhouse
We remember the Roman Empire for a great many things. Gladiators are always popular, and the army runs a close second, but the most striking thing about Rome is the monumental landscape of buildings it left behind. The Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, ornate palaces and villas, aqueducts that reach to...
What Can The English Civil War And Roman Republic Tell Us About Today?
“A system in which the best option is inadequate to the nation’s needs is by definition in crisis,” said Guardian journalist Gary Younge last week in a thoughtful video reflecting on the end of the Obama presidency....
How Did Jorge Posada Become A First-Ballot Hall Of Fame Washout?
Amid the arguing over this year’s Hall of Fame, one of the weirder potential results involves no argument at all. Unless there’s a dramatic and unexpected late break in the voting, Jorge Posada—who as of this afternoon appeared on 10 of 239 known ballots in the ballot tracker—is going to miss the fi...