War is about as civilized as a car wreck, perhaps less so, yet through much of history it was fought within a limited set of rules that at least applied to the aristocrats under arms. When possible, nobles were supposed to be captured and offered for ransom. Battles were pre-announced, and troops situated in open fields so leaders could approach and engage their armies claiming some sense of honor (before the hacking melee began). All of this changed on this day in 1455, when the two sides of what would be known as the Wars of the Roses met at St. Albans, just north of London.

The opposing armies had arrayed themselves on two sides of a ditch, and begun lengthy negotiations to avoid a conflict. Richard, Duke of York and a white rose relation of the royal House of Plantagenet vying for the throne of England, tired of the wait and sent his ally the Earl of Warwick and some troops through back lanes and gardens to sneak up on the red rose Lancastrians, who were resting behind their front lines, many of them not even wearing their armor. A rout ensued. Lancastrian nobles were killed and the king captured. Then, the successors of the dead aristocrats set about evening the score, and the two sides murdered one another over the next 30 years. The conflict ended at Battle of Townton in 1461, at which it was announced that “no quarter would be given” prior to the fight. At least 28,000 people died in a single day (the largest loss of life on English soil). The Yorkists won, killing many of the Lancastrian nobles as they fled, and executing those who were captured.

It was only a hint of what was to follow.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of the ubermensch, or superman, in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nobody really understood what he was talking about, or how it correlated with his other writings, but he wrapped the concept in quotable ideas — the talked about “the death of God” as a cause for developing new moral values, for instance — and explored how a new generation of humans would destroy concepts of equalitarianism and replace it with rules devised by the smartest, most blessed among us. I remember reading it late high school, fantasizing that I was one of those super beings (being 17 ‘n all), and dropping my imperfect recollection of relevant paragraphs to impress other kids at parties.

Two fellow Chicago teens named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had been similarly impressed by the book, only they lived in the earlier part of the century, and decided to put their misguided reading of the text into practice by pulling of “the perfect crime.” Both of them were rich and preciously intelligent, and spent seven months mapping out the killing of a 14 year-old neighbor on this day in 1924. Turns out the practice of being a superman isn’t as perfect as contemplating it, though. Leopold left his custom-made glasses at the crime scene, and their alibi of going for a drive was compromised by the fact that Leopold’s car was in the shop the night of the murder. They both confessed to crime (blaming one another for striking the fatal blow), and famed attorney Clarence Darrow got them to plead guilty, which negated the need for a jury and let Darrow address the judge alone for sentencing. His speech included the following claim:

“This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor… Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?… It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”

Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life in prison, but avoided the death penalty. Millions of people would be unable to avoid such a fate when the Nazis would similarly misread Nietzsche.

When President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law on this day in 1862, a variety of interests had already decided who would win or lose as a result. The Southern states had opposed such land giveaways because they worried states filled with small landowner farmers wouldn’t be filled with slaves. Northern states, filled with factories that similarly relied on people power (though paid at slave-like wages, not truly enslaving them, per se), were concerned that their employees would move away. By 1862, the South had seceded, losing its voice, while Lincoln’s Republican Party controlled Congress and had adopted the yeoman farmer ideas of the Free Soil Party. The Act gave any free person up to 160 acres of land for $1.25/acre, and all they had to do was live on it for six months, build a small house, and grow crops.

In many ways, it was a scam. For every parcel of land given to an individual, four parcels were allocated to the railroads, which built a transcontinental line that went operational in 1869. Other corporate interests got particularly choice (and large) parcels, like the timber companies in the Pacific Northwest. Since much of the Homestead land was interior and hardscrabble, and not lush along the coasts, 160 acre-sized farms had low chances of survival (and repeat awards of such marginal lands helped directly contribute to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s). And there was the not so insignificant matter of the Indians, who’d been recently evicted from much of the land that the government was doling out to white settlers. Interestingly, though, the availability of new lands onto which America could relocate its burgeoning population is credited as one of the primary reasons why our country was able to avoid some of the conflagrations of politics and economics that the closed proximity of European geography prompted.

Were our conversations more civil because we had the space that allowed for civility?

When Anne Boleyn had her head chopped off on this day in 1536, it was because she’d failed to produce a male heir for her husband, England’s King Henry VII. Only the story is a bit more complicated than that. Henry was still relatively new royalty. His dad’s family line had come to power in the immediate aftermath of the Wars of the Roses (the 30 years’ worth of fighting between the Lancaster and York sides of the Plantagenet family); Henry Tudor was a minor Lancaster relation who’d defeated Yorkist King Richard III and married Elizabeth of York, thereby hoping to put the conflict to rest. Son Henry proved to be a ruthless ruler within days of his coronation, ordering his dad’s advisors arrested and executed.

In fact, Henry VIII’s rule was all about consolidating power. He married his older brother’s widow Catherine, in hopes of maintaining the clarity of succession along with an uneasy peace with her Spanish relations. He loved another, though; Anne, with whom he exchanged torrid love notes, and brought to live at Court while still married to Cathy. When the Pope proved unwilling to annul his marriage, Anne blamed Henry’s Cardinal Woolsey for the failure, and saw to his downfall. Henry then issued a statue in 1533 forbidding any of his subjects to ask the Pope for anything, and a year later declared himself head of his own church (Archbishop Thomas Cranmer then gave him his annulment, though later Catherine’s daughter Mary got back at the prelate by having him burnt at the stake). He and Anne married in secret, which pissed off many religious leaders (they called her a “google-eyed whore,” among other things). The aristocrats saw her French-leaning sympathies as an impediment for an alliance between England and the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V. And the common folk hated her because she was a Protestant heretic, and she and her husband taxed and spent too much on their lavish lifestyles. So when she failed to give Henry a male heir in time to secure his succession plans, his advisors were happy to push a more fecund Jane Seymour on him, whom he married 11 days after Anne’s execution. Jane gave him a son a year later, and died shortly after. His son would reign as Edward VI.

Does the truth depend on who tells it?

The lilitu in ancient Babylon were blood-drinking demons, and some scholars believe that they are the origin of Lilith and her daughters in Hebrew demonology. Though not a character in the Bible, Lilith was Adam’s first wife. She was created at the same time as he was, not like the subservient rib-product second wife, Eve. Lilith left Adam to hookup with archangel Sammael, with whom she preyed on the blood of newborns as he worked as the angel of death. Since then, every civilization has had its own version of spirits, shrouds, revenants and ghouls who drink blood for sustenance. The vampires in Enlightenment Europe were usually human corpses, risen from the grave to roam the world as the eternally dead in an evil mirror-image of the Christian faithfuls’ rise to eternal life after dying.

The label vampire didn’t appear until 1745, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, with an incomplete etymology that could be based on the word for “witch” in various Slavic languages, or an Old Russian name, upyri, used in the 11th century to describe objects of pagan worship. The first vampire story in English was published in 1816 by Dr. Polidori, a drinking buddy of Lord Byron. In The Vampyre, Lord Ruthven is anything but a rotting corpse, but rather a darkly elegant and seductive aristocrat. Variations on this theme followed, culminating in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published on this day in 1897 and all but solidified the fashion and feel of the gothic genre. The horror of vampire fiction to this day relies on the combination of desire and loathing that vampires feel for life on earth, and that we of the living feel for them.

It’s interesting how the theme has morphed to suit the tastes of communities throughout history.

But for our conviction that we live on the cusp of a future yet to be invented, there’s considerable evidence that we may forget things as quickly as we discover them. The Antikythera Mechanism is one such hint, discovered on this day in 1902 submerged in a shipwreck between the Greek islands of Kythera and Crete. The device is a finely crafted bronze mechanism consisting of 37 interlocking gears. It resembles a 19th century Swiss clock, only there’s a slight problem: The Antikythera Mechanism was built almost two millennia earlier, sometime before 100 BCE. Researchers are still trying to figure out what it actually did, though there’s some consensus that it was used to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and visible planets (Roman orator Cicero mentioned that such devices had been built by Archimedes, who was also believed to have built giant mirrors that used sunlight to set distant ships’ sails on fire).

Similarly ancient cylindrical clay pots with sheet copper linings and lead-tin alloy soldering that look (and function) like chemical batteries were discovered near Baghdad in 1936 (and there are carvings on the walls of pharaonic tombs that look a lot like spotlights). Precolumbian golden objects resembling airplanes were discovered along the coastal areas of South America. There’s an iron pillar in Delhi that is 1,600 years old and has never corroded, and a map drawn in 1513 by Turkish admiral Piri Reis that accurately depicts known coastlines with satellite-like accuracy, identifies Antarctica 300 years before it was discovered, and traces its coastline even though it’s covered in ice (it was last visible in 4000 BCE).

I wonder how much of innovation could be simply the act of remembering?

It’s hard to imagine a time when people thought that smoking tobacco was good for you, or that it wasn’t addictive. Christopher Columbus was given a bundle as a welcoming gift on one of his adventures and thought them worthless. But by the mid-1500s, recreational smoking was all the rage (England’s Sir Walter Raleigh was a confirmed smoker), and demand for tobacco would drive the colonization of America. It was also considered to have medicinal uses, like cleansing wounds and soothing skin diseases. A French nobleman suggested it as a cure for the migraine headaches suffered by Queen Catherine of Medici’s son and, when it worked, he shared it with other aristocrats with similarly satisfactory results. His name was Jean Nicot, and his remedy was named nicotiane in his honor.

Thanks to the magic qualities of nicotine, tobacco was considered a salve for nerves, or an energizer for the tired, well into the 20th century. Yet those perceived benefits didn’t come without an equally apparent cost, did they? When the U.S. Surgeon General published on this day in 1988 his conclusion that nicotine was an addictive substance with a power over people similar to that of heroin or cocaine, his office had already been publishing its findings linking tobacco  to respiratory and pulmonary disease for almost 25 years (and research making aspects of the same case dated back to the early 1900s). This data, combined with the readily available experiential proof that smokers coughed a lot and suffered shortness of breath, should have made his announcement no surprise that nicotine addicted cigarette smokers to a habit that caused more than 300,000 premature deaths annually. And it wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why the annual percentage of smokers 18 years or older in America has declined only 4% over the past decade or so.

Habits are more powerful than choices.

Human beings can’t fly. The very idea of being high above the ground challenges our conscious apprehensions, as well as triggers visceral memories of fearing falls out of trees. We know we don’t belong up in the air, and the idea that we shouldn’t fly greatly impeded the growth of the commercial flight in the early decades of the 20th century. The actual experiences weren’t much help, either. Ford’s Trimotor and Boeing’s Model 80 were the workhorses of flight in the late in 1920s, but both planes were uncomfortable (The Trimotor had no ventilation), and couldn’t fly above weather, so flying was usually turbulent. When Stout Airlines hired the first flight attendants in 1926, it gave them the duty of reassuring passengers (along with tending to baggage, ticket reissues and other duties). They were marginally convincing on the reassurance front.

The game changed when Ellen Church decided she wanted to be a commercial pilot, but was turned down by Boeing Air Transport because she wasn’t a man (BAT would one day become United Airlines). Church was also a nurse, and had temerity to pitch the manager of BAT’s San Francisco office that he should hire her, along with eight other nurses,  to work the planes and reassure fliers. She started flying from Oakland to Chicago on this day in 1930. The experiment was a success, and soon all of the airlines followed the same model: Stewardesses had to be registered nurses and be of a smallish height and weight in order to move freely along the narrow aisles of early planes. They also had to be single and/or without children, though I’m not sure why. The nurse requirement was loosened during WWI, as nurses were needed for the war effort. Church only worked 18 months and went back to nursing, serving in the war and earning an Air Medal for valor while in flight.

You could say that stewardesses helped socialize the idea of flying.

I used to stare at images of Space Station V, the double-wheeled platform orbiting above the Earth in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was still under construction in the film which, combined with Hilton operating a hotel and PanAm running the shuttle service, made it seem so cool and real, like it was something I’d get to visit by the time I was an adult. The design was based on an idea proposed by Austro-Hungarian rocket engineer Herman Potocnik in a book he published the year before he died in 1929 entitled The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor, though space stations had been contemplated by astronomer Everett Hale in 1869, and riffed upon by rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. They were seen as necessary way stations for exploration, much as ships traveling Earth’s oceans had relied on supply depots along their routes. Leave it to the Nazis to come up with the idea of using a space station as a weapon of war (another pioneer, Hermann Oberth, devised plans for a huge concave mirror to fry earth-borne enemies with concentrated sunlight).

America’s Apollo program proved that Moon travel was possible without a midway stopping point, but a few generations’ worth of contemplation had convinced us that building a space station was a necessary next step if we planned to go to Mars, or beyond (NASA also wanted to keep 40,000 staffers employed after the first Moon landing in 1969). Between frequent budget cuts and a vague mandate, a station design that looked like a tin can took shape, though augmented by interiors including a wardroom and small private quarters courtesy of industrial designer Raymond Loewy. McDonnell Douglas got the contract to build the thing and, on this day in 1973, Skylab was launched into orbit. Much of it was damaged on the way up, and only three manned missions were made to it during its 171 days in space (it orbited the Earth 2,476 times). Hour after hour of “experiments” were conducted and rolls of film shot, but nobody back home had much enthusiasm for the mission. Skylab fell to Earth and disintegrated in 1979, to be followed by other space stations (The Soviet’s Mir, and today’s ISS), but nobody much cared about them either.

I guess humanity woke up from that particular dream once it was made real?

It had been tough time, even by 14th century standards. Rounds of plague had reduced the population of England by as much as a third, and most people alive were chronically malnourished, poorly educated, and felt themselves lucky if they had work slaving away in the muck for their feudal lords. It wasn’t uncommon for Christian believers to ferret themselves away as hermits from the world, to better commune with God about things, as an unnamed woman had done to a cell attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. Sometime in her late 20s, she came down with a severe, life-threatening illness but miraculously survived, recovering on this day in 1373 and bringing back with her from the brink inspired revelations about the nature of all existence. She wrote a short version of her visions soon thereafter, but a longer text — entitled Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love — was published in 1393. It’s the first book in English known to be written by a woman.

The contents of her visions were well within the context of what any faithful Christian could have imagined or seen in her day: God loves humanity, and Christ is pretty much everywhere and everything. She did imagine Jesus as a mother as well as a father figure, which has been a find for feminist theology, and she was less hung up on sin as an indelible stain which humanity had to remove, than she was more interested in forgiveness. Her writing has no poetry or dramatic structure, but speaks in the language of a fevered mind believing death was near (she hallucinates a shining cross hovering over her bed), expressing ideas that may well have been common among the common folk of her era. History doesn’t even record her name; she’s called Julian of Norwich out of convenience. Her anonymity is cited as one reason why she’s never been beatified.

So does the individual speak truth to the group, or does a community speak its beliefs through an individual?