history

I adore a good historical mystery. There’s something intriguing about pondering alternative possibilities of long ago events. For like minded bibliophilic sleuths, here are five of Christian Pelusi’s favorites.

Please do share your favorite unsolved puzzle novels if you got ‘em; I’m always looking.

Writer Nigel Tomm releases the tenth volume of his novel "The Blah Story" which encloses the longest word in the English language (or even in the world). The word 'babyoubiqui...oiletub' contains 2,087,214 letters (728 pages) and means something like 'a girl' or 'a bi*ch'.

Let us now praise, admire, commend, extol, honour, eulogize, congratulate and applaud Peter Mark Roget…But let us first tackle the 150-year-old debate over whether Roget's Thesaurus…is the most useful book ever written or, conversely, a blight on the language that has enabled countless lazy writers to bulk up their prose with words they barely understand and immediately forget.

Recorded by Loreena McKennitt, "The Dark Night of the Soul" is a poem written by St. John of the Cross' experience with torture and coming to find hope.

Interested in knowing how copyright evolved? This website provides a digital resource relating to the history of copyright in five jurisdictions (France, Germany, Italy, the UK and US) for the period up to 1900. It will include the 50 most important documents from France, Germany and the UK, and the 20 most important from Venice and the United States.

It’s hardly your typical history textbook, but it’s getting the attention its story deserves. Children in Germany are studying the Holocaust by way of a comic book—Die Suche—an approach designed to make the story more real to them and to counter the myths, prejudices and misunderstandings about the Third Reich.

In his new book, The Science of Leonardo, Fritjof Capra writes about Leonardo's investigations of the natural world and advances a new interpretation of the Renaissance man’s work. Capra claims that Leonardo applied the empirical method a century before Galileo, and thus better deserves the distinction of ‘father of science.” This is a very short but informative audio interview.

Washington insider, Robin Gerber, writes a historical 'what if' in which the Democratic Party nominates former first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to run against Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 election.

Geraldine Brooks' novel is based on the real-life adventures of a 14th century Hebrew codex, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The rich history of this medieval manuscript is woven with fictional possibilities into what the reviewer terms a “haunting and satisfying” read and “embodies both the story of the survival of the Jews…and the story of all thinking people's relationship to the past.”

That's the first question on a site that is determined to educate those of us who found History boring. Serves us right now we try to understand a mental genuis like Herman Melville without a shred of background into his culture and therefore we read blind trusting on plot and missing out on depth.