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After The Black Death, Europe's Economy Surged
The Black Death, the wave of bubonic plague that devastated Europe after 1348, marked the final end of a long period of economic growth. The several prior centuries had been a time of explosive expansion of both the population and economy of Europe, a development the historian Robert Lopez termed th...
In Unloving Memory Of HawkVision, A Low Point In Sports Owner Shamelessness
The story of professional sports is, among other things, the story of cheap bastard owners doing cheap bastard things. Charlie Comiskey charged his White Sox players to launder their uniforms. Jeffrey Loria coldly auctioned off two World Series champions, sold the Marlins for more than a billion dol...
How The Roman Empire's Cities Crumbled
When we think of the Roman Empire as a physical space, cities are what come to mind. We see the huge bulk of the Coliseum. The ruined husks of aqueducts, bathhouses, and grand temples reach for the sky, reminders of the engineering prowess and resources the Romans had at their disposal. Those kinds ...
What Were The Knights Templar Really Like?
Over the last seven centuries, the Knights Templar have left the realm of history and entered the realm of pop culture. They’re a major plot point in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the villains of the Assassin’s Creed series of games, and feature in an astonishing array of pseudo-history and cons...
Professional Mercenaries And Cannon Made Medieval War Obsolete
As the medieval world gave way to the early modern around 1500, European warfare was utterly transformed. Mounted knights and castles gave way to cannon, firearms, and enormously complex fortifications. The scale of war grew as well. Armies that had contained thousands of soldiers in the 15th centur...
How Terry Funk Ended Up In A Match Even Weirder Than Mayweather/McGregor
Terry Funk, along with being a legendary professional wrestler, deserves recognition as a sort of godfather of the Boxer vs. Other fight, a matchup of differing combat disciplines of the type that will captivate the world for however long Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Conor McGregor lasts....
Why Didn’t The Eastern Roman Empire Fall?<em></em>
When the Roman Empire disintegrated over the course of the fifth century, only half of it actually fell, the western half. The eastern half of the Roman Empire would survive in one form or another for a thousand years....
The Sad Failure Of Donald Trump's Desperate Attempt At A Baseball League<em></em>
Jeffrey Gildenhorn, a beloved D.C. restaurateur, recreational politician, and full-time man about town for several decades, died earlier this summer after choking on his meal at the Palm, a local power lunch institution. He’d lived a full enough life that none of his many obituaries mentioned his su...
Chris Froome's Next Race Will Be Against History
There hasn’t been genuine last-week intrigue about who would win any Tour de France since 2011, when Cadel Evans took the yellow jersey from Andy Schleck on the penultimate day of the race. Schleck gouged Evans and the rest of the field for minutes on Stage 18's summit finish atop the Col du Galibie...
War Is The Health Of The State
Have you ever stopped to wonder why practically every government on earth follows the same basic form?...
Women In Wrestling Have Taken A Hard Road To Get To Where They Are Now
Recently, Netflix released the first season of GLOW, a dramedy based on the production of Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, the comedic late ’80s women’s wrestling promotion that was, ever so briefly, a smash hit in syndication. Many reviews have focused on how a gifted, majority-female cast and creativ...
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...