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🇮🇹 **A Thousand and One Nights in Italy**

"_In mid-19th century Italy, two eccentric aristocrats set forth on parallel projects: constructing ostentatious castles in a Moorish Revival style._"

🔗 publicdomainreview.org/essay/a.

attribution: Vincenzo Paganori, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 📖 **Making Babies in Early Modern England**

"_Early modern English people were obsessed with making babies. In this fascinating new history, Leah Astbury traces this preoccupation through manuscript letters, diaries, recipe books and almanacs, revealing its centrality to family life._"

🔗 doi.org/10.1017/9781009602846.

⌛ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 **Timekeeping in Early Modern England**

"_In early modern England the time and date was often an informal matter, which had the potential to pose problems._"

🔗 historytoday.com/archive/histo.

🇺🇸 📖 **The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding**

"_The author’s new book focuses on two “tragic contradictions”: the Founding Fathers’ failure to adopt measures to eliminate slavery in the new nation or to grant security for America’s native tribes."

🔗 washingtonindependentreviewofb.

🇺🇸 **More than 1,800 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation.**

"_The Washington Post has compiled the first database of slaveholding members of Congress by examining thousands of pages of census records and historical documents_"

🔗 washingtonpost.com/history/int.

**Climate-driven changes in Mediterranean grain trade mitigated famine but introduced the Black Death to medieval Europe**

"_Here, we argue that a post-volcanic climate downturn and trans-Mediterranean famine from 1345–1347 CE forced the Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa and Pisa to activate their well-established supply network and import grain from the Mongols of the Golden Horde around the Sea of Azov in 1347 CE. This climate-driven change in long-distance grain trade not only prevented large parts of Italy from starvation but also introduced the plague bacterium to Mediterranean harbours and fueled its rapid dispersal across much of Europe._"

Bauch, M., Büntgen, U. Climate-driven changes in Mediterranean grain trade mitigated famine but introduced the Black Death to medieval Europe. Commun Earth Environ 6, 986 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-029.

**Strabo: The First Geographer**

"_As the father of descriptive geography, Strabo of Amasia provides a unique view of the early Roman Empire._"

🔗 historytoday.com/archive/histo.

🇩🇰 📖 🔭 **The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe**

"_The Lord of Uraniborg is a comprehensive biography of Tycho Brahe, father of modern astronomy, famed alchemist and littérateur of the sixteenth-century Danish Renaissance._"

🔗 cambridge.org/core/books/lord-.

attribution: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL:commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil.

📖 **The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World**

"_A landmark account of the origins of American slavery, revealing how ancient Roman ideas were used to defend the establishment of a slave empire in the English Atlantic world._"

🔗 hup.harvard.edu/books/97806742.

**Roman-era ink reveals surprising chemical complexity**

"_University of Évora archaeologist César Oliveira, the lead author of the new study, says the ink’s basic ingredients were as expected, but ‘the surprising element is the intentional inclusion of iron-gall ink constituents, creating a hybrid of carbon-based and metal-based ingredients’. The tannin from oak galls combined with iron salts during the ink-making process to create an intense black or dark purple ink._"

🔗 chemistryworld.com/news/roman-.

**Explaining the Tides Before Newton**

"_Astronomical explanations for tides, usually credited to Isaac Newton, can be traced to thinkers like Strabo and Pliny in the Classical era._"

🔗 daily.jstor.org/explaining-the.

attribution: Jebulon, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil.

🇩🇪 🇵🇱 **Germany will return Teutonic archives looted in WWII to Poland, media reports**

"_The archives, seized by Nazi forces as part of a broad cultural plunder, contain manuscripts and documents tied to the medieval Teutonic Order of warrior monks—materials invaluable to understanding the order’s expansion, its conflicts with Poland and Lithuania, and the formation of regional borders._"

🔗 tvpworld.com/90298141/germany-.

📚 **Leonardo's Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader**

"_The exhibition draws on Stanford’s Special Collections and the collections of the David Rumsey Map Center and the Lane Medical Library to reveal the authors and texts that shaped Leonardo’s world and influenced his ideas, reading habits, and understanding of books in the age of Gutenberg._"

🔗 exhibits.stanford.edu/leonardo.

**Project to bring voices of enslaved people to life**

"_Voices in Slavery’s Archive: Law, Place and Testimony in British Guiana will digitise, map and analyse the records which are here at Kew and allow researchers to examine how enslaved people used the courts to make complaints relating to family life, work, health, violence, and a host of other issues._"

🔗 nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/

**Travelling for your health**

"_In the mid-19th century a burgeoning literature on foreign climates and health resorts emerged, testament to the new specialism of medical climatology. The works generally included a detailed analysis of the climate in the region and general travel information about local attractions and facilities for invalids._"

🔗 wellcomecollection.org/stories.

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