Presenting history with some teeth in it. Back in the early ‘aughts, on the western end of Sicily, an archaeologist named Sebastiano Tusa was visiting a friend in the little town of Trapani. Tusa was taking a break from his underwater explorations off the island of Favignana, which lies along…

You may remember from your biology class that “Kickass Petals Can Obfuscate Folks’ Gardening Stratifications.” ** The taxonomy of the flowers in question starts out pretty simply. They are obviously Plants, so they go in that Kingdom. Their Phylum was once called Magnoliophyta, after the French botanist Magnol, but today…

With baseball season underway, you need to know about something called the Allotment Act. Back in 1887, the United States had only recently become truly united, by post-Civil War reunification, and by the completion of the trans-continental railroad that linked America’s two coasts. European-American settlers were pouring into the West,…

See you next week.