Hear how the Black Death reshaped Europe's economy

The bubonic plague spread in three waves over 600 years

The Black Death refers to the first wave of the plague, which swept through Europe in the 14th century and killed 25 to 50 million people. Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis carried by fleas (often on rats), the human toll was roughly one-third of Europe's population at the time.

Volcanic activity may have triggered the Black Death by spewing gases that led to crop failures in Europe, thus forcing the import of grain ships with plague-infested fleas.

Volcanic activity may have triggered the Black Death by spewing gases that led to crop failures in Europe, thus forcing the import of grain ships with plague-infested fleas.

Money—not land—became Europe’s key economic driver in the Middle Age

During the medieval commercial revolution, money gradually replaced land as the primary economic commodity. Expanding trade, markets, and finance transformed Europe’s economy—laying foundations, historians argue, that were essential for the later Industrial Revolution.

Medieval Europe explained

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe fragmented into agrarian Christian kingdoms that fostered the development of universities, guilds, and expanding commerce. Far from a “Dark Age,” the medieval era shaped Europe as a distinct cultural and political unit.

COVID-19's shock to employment rates sparked some economists to fear deflation

COVID-19 simultaneously disrupted the supply chain and the labor market. Since the unemployment rate had hit record highs, some economists were worried that the supply chain would recover before the labor market. If that had happened, businesses would have been producing goods, but no one would have been able to buy them because they wouldn't have the disposable income to do so.

Early farming created population booms—and also major busts

Europe’s ancient embrace of farming took the continent on a demographic roller-coaster ride. Regional booms and busts in human numbers occurred between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, a new study finds.

Medieval European winters were colder than ours, but peasants stayed warm

Medieval winters were colder than ours today while the continent was mired in the so-called Little Ice Age. Without modern technologies, peasants survived with simple, sometimes genius, solutions, including central, chimney-less fireplaces (vented by small, draftless vents) and decorative handwarmers.

How royal panic led to Europe's deadliest witch hunts

This article delves into the witch "panics" and hunts that roiled across Scotland between 1590 and 1662. The witch hunts in Scotland were unusually deadly, with the country having five times the average European execution rate per capita. Their...

Play 17th-century death roulette

Before modern science and medicine, death was much harder to escape. Using real mortality records from London's Dreadful Visitation–a collection of all the Bills of Mortality from 1665–this interactive game gives you an idea of what may have possibly killed you during the Great Plague. Grow your appreciation for life today as you stumble upon causes of death like “livergrown” and “drowned at St. Katharine’s by the Tower”.

How failures at Versailles Conference led to more racial inequality

Suffering a pandemic and the aftermath of a war that killed 50 million, the world in 1920 faced a turning point as it negotiated a new political order. As today, the key issue was racial inequality.

European diseases killed a massive share of the Native American population

After Western contact, epidemic diseases devastated Indigenous communities. By 1920, the Native American population of the US had fallen to roughly 270,000, compared with an estimated 1.2 to 18 million at the time of European arrival.

The Great Depression was an international depression felt far beyond the US

Many countries suffered through a depression in the 1930s that the First World War, the US stock market crash, and an economic downturn in Germany turned into an international crisis.

In 1914, the Financial Times asked readers to redraw Europe for cash prizes

Two months in World War I, the newspaper invited readers to sketch postwar borders and submit peace terms for cash prizes. The contest captured public attempts to predict a new world order and foreshadowed modern crowdsourced forecasting. It's a wild look at how uncertain Europe's future was at the time.

The human cost of creating medieval monsters

The concept and creation of monsters have been used since time immemorial to communicate social norms and the consequences of breaking them. Some so-called monsters were judged as such solely due to having features that would be considered birth defects in modern times. This in-depth article explores the human cost of creating medieval monsters, many of whom were defined by a physical appearance that deviates from the expected.

The printing press spread novels widely

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440 changed how writing was reproduced. It allowed multiple manuscripts to be copied via movable type rather than by hand, making more literature more widely available. Over time, that change caused literacy rates to rise, creating a market for even more literature.

Listen to what it was like living as a medieval leper

This podcast uses paleopathological and anthropological findings to reconstruct what it was like for people diagnosed with leprosy in medieval times on the Eurasian continent. If a town lacked a leprosarium—an isolated leper asylum or colony—or the suspected leper was a foreigner or a Jew, which would make them ineligible for leprosarium admission, they'd be expelled.

Europeans, on average, have double the amount of vacation time Americans have

Europeans average nearly double the amount of time off as their American counterparts. Why is that? It's due to a long history of European labor’s push for time off, including both left- and right-wing political groups that argued vacation could benefit their causes.

Southern Black Codes sought to preserve prewar racial labor structures

With little federal oversight, Southern states enacted laws effectively reestablishing slavery's economic and social order. These laws, known as the "Black Codes," restricted freed people's movement, labor, and property rights.

Death taxes have helped fund wars since the 1860s

Death taxes date back to 700 BCE and were used in Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt. In the US, they've been used to finance wars since the Civil War, and have been levied on both the estate and beneficiary. The estate tax created during WWI to help finance war efforts is still in effect today.

The Chinese market for donkey hides has created a new source of diseases

Since 1992, China’s donkey population has dropped more than 80 percent. This report examines how China’s booming demand for a traditional medicine known as e-jiao, made from collagen from donkey hides, is leading to the slaughter of 6 million African donkeys annually, and providing a new source for zoonotic diseases.

Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant power held by workers, not elites

Lenin argued that capitalism concentrated power in a small ruling class, and only transferring authority to industrial workers could eliminate exploitation and class hierarchy. This five-minute explainer outlines how he envisioned that revolutionary shift.

Overwork contributes to thousands of worker deaths

Can work really kill you? The World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization have estimated that long work hours contribute to thousands of death from strokes and heart attacks each year. This BBC article argues that the culture of overwork and burnout is leading to a public health crisis in desperate need of solutions.

Investment banking giant Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008 when it had $619B in debt, making it the largest bankruptcy ever in the US

Nearly all of its 26,000 employees immediately lost their jobs. But in London, a few hundred remained tucked away, working for another decade to wind down the bank’s European business.

The ancient Games at Olympia ended after 1,500 years due to economic issues

The ancient Olympics came to an end in 393 CE, and some historians point to Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I's ban on celebrating pagan festivals. This article explores an alternative theory: a bad economy. The writers cite the Theodosian Code, which makes no mention of the Olympics, and multiple records that mention the Olympics after Theodosius' death.

Cultural norms about how to handle the bodies of loved ones have hampered Ebola responses in West Africa

Awareness of local burial and grieving traditions eventually helped healthcare workers fight the spread of the virus. As healthcare workers and burial teams altered their procedures during the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak, and as community leaders pressed people to adapt traditional ceremonies, the spread of Ebola began to slow.

Cultural norms about how to handle the bodies of loved ones in communities in West Africa have hampered Ebola responses.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the largest ground war in Europe since World War II in terms of casualties, forces mobilized, and displacement of civilians.

Hookworm infection, though risky, may help fight certain autoimmune conditions by tamping down the immune system's inflammatory response.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

View the ten deadliest tornadoes in US history.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

Roughly 43 million US borrowers owe roughly $1.7T in student debt, the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

Bone marrow (soft tissue found inside certain bones) generates roughly 500 billion new blood cells each day

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

While El Niño moves warm Pacific Ocean waters east along the equator, La Niña moves them west, shifting where rainfall will become more common for months.

Some coin denominations have ridges etched on their sides, partly to prevent counterfeiting, in a practice called 'reeding.'