Can you sew your own clothing? That one is easy. What about making your own shoes, butchering an animal, removing its skin, tanning the leather, then rending the fat to make candles? If you can answer ‘yes’ to all those things, then you are merely average for a medieval peasant. Learn more about what a […]

HFM 126 | Useful Skills That People Had in the Middle Ages That We Don’t Today, Part 2: Making Things With Your Hands

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If you’ve seen the 1960 Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, you know about the Scopes Monkey Trial. In this real-life 1925 case, John Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The case became an enormous media sensation. It was reported on like […]

HFM 147 | The Real Story of the Scopes Monkey Trial

In the early 1800s there was no English explorer greater than James Holman. He travelled almost 20 times farther than Marco Polo. He travelled among 200 different cultures, charted undiscovered parts of Australia, and by October 1846 had visited every inhabited continent. He did all this despite being completely blind. How did he travel the […]

HFM 139 | James Holman: The Blind Traveller

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — the victor at the Battle of Gallipoli, Turkey’s first president, and a reformer so zealous that he replaced six centuries of Ottoman Islamic legal and cultural custom with Western practices in the space of 15 years — lost his father at the age of 7, was neglected by his family, […]

HFM 137 | Leaders in Times of Crisis, Part 7  – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938)

Recognized by most historians and much of the public as one of our country’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln is known for his impressive accomplishments, including preserving the union during the Civil War and signing The Emancipation Proclamation. But he is less known for his ability to overcome a significant obstacle in his life—clinical depression. He […]

HFM 136 | Leaders in Times of Crisis, Part 6  – Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

In a remote forest clearing in Burgundy, France, a 13th-century castle is slowly being constructed using only the tools, techniques, and materials that would have been available to the builders of the day. It’s archaeology in reverse. What started out as an eccentric pipe dream is now an established enterprise, drawing in tens of thousands of […]

HFM 126 | Useful Skills That People Had in the Middle Ages That We Don’t Today, Part 2: Making Things With Your Hands

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