Encyclopedia

Early Americas

For Lost Settlement

• Cassava

  Cassava, or manioc, is a root crop first grown in the southwestern Amazon; bitter kinds are made safe by removing their poison, while sweet kinds need only cooking.

• Maize

  Maize, or corn, is a grain first grown in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago; by 1500 it fed peoples from southern Canada to Chile.

• Tenochtitlan

  Tenochtitlan was the Mexica (Aztec) capital, an island city in a lake in central Mexico, traditionally founded in 1325 and taken by the Spaniards in 1521.

• The Columbian Exchange

  The Columbian Exchange is the movement of plants, animals and diseases between the Americas and the rest of the world that began with Columbus's voyages.

• The Taíno

  The Taíno were the farming peoples of the larger Caribbean islands and the Bahamas, the first people Columbus met in 1492.

• Tisquantum (Squanto)

  Tisquantum, a Wampanoag man of Patuxet, was kidnapped to Spain in 1614, came home in 1619, and served the Plymouth colonists as interpreter until his death in 1622.

Great War Propaganda

• Posters in the First World War

  In the First World War, governments used printed picture posters on a huge scale to recruit soldiers, sell war loans, and keep up support at home.

• War loans and war bonds

  In the First World War, governments paid for much of the fighting by borrowing from their own citizens, who bought war loans or bonds in return for interest.

Keeping Time

• Feast days and the farming year

  In medieval and early modern England, church feasts and saints' days named the dates for rents, fairs, hiring and the work of the farm.

• The Gregorian reform and Old Style dates

  In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII dropped ten days to correct the Julian calendar, but England kept the old reckoning, the Old Style, until 1752.

• The Julian calendar

  The Julian calendar, which Julius Caesar set up from 45 BCE, gave the year 365 days and added a leap day every fourth year.

Checking In

For Space Hotel Ltd

• Department stores

  Large stores selling many kinds of goods at fixed, marked prices grew up in the mid-1800s, above all in Paris, and changed how city people shopped.

• Inns before hotels

  Before the hotel, travelers slept in roadside inns, in friends' houses, in monastery guest rooms, or in stations kept for the ruler's messengers.

• The first grand hotels

  Large hotels built with money from wealthy backers appeared in American cities from the 1790s, and Boston's Tremont House of 1829 became the model many later hotels followed.

Once in a Lifetime

• Corrupted air (miasma)

  For more than two thousand years, many doctors believed that epidemics spread through air made foul by rot, an idea often called miasma.

• Quarantine

  Quarantine is the holding apart of people, ships, or goods that may carry a disease, a practice that began in Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in 1377, during the plague.

• Smallpox, from inoculation to eradication

  Smallpox killed about one in four of those who caught its common severe form, until inoculation, vaccination, and finally a worldwide campaign ended it in 1977.

• The Black Death

  The Black Death was the great plague epidemic that crossed western Asia, North Africa, and Europe between about 1346 and 1353.

Reaching Space

For Space Hotel Ltd

• Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

  A deaf Russian schoolteacher (1857–1935) who worked out much of the early theory of spaceflight and wrote stories about people living in orbit.

• Life support in spacecraft

  How the first crewed American spacecraft, from Mercury to Skylab, supplied air, water, food, and cooling and dealt with waste.

• Skylab, America's first space station

  The American space station of 1973–1974, built inside an empty rocket stage, where three crews lived for 28, 59, and 84 days.

• Space stations

  How writers and engineers pictured homes circling the earth, from a brick moon in 1869 to the first real stations, Salyut 1 and Skylab.

• Space suits

  How the sealed suit that lets a person survive outside a spacecraft went from early fiction and diving gear to the suits of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab.

• The NACA and NASA

  How a small American committee for aircraft research, founded in 1915, became the core of NASA, the civilian space agency, in 1958.

The Story of English

• Alfred the Great

  Alfred was king of Wessex from 871 until his death in 899; he held off the Danish armies and promoted learning and writing in English.

• Middle English

  Middle English, spoken from about 1150 to about 1500, lost most of the old word endings and took in many words from French.

• Old English

  Old English, once also called Anglo-Saxon, was the language of the English from their settlement in Britain until about 1150.

Kitchen, Farm and Fable

• Confucius

  A teacher from the state of Lu in ancient China, traditionally dated 551–479 BCE, whose sayings his followers gathered in the Analects.

• Garum, Roman fish sauce

  Garum was a salty sauce made by letting fish break down in salt, and Romans of every class used it to season food.

• Slavery in ancient Greece and Rome

  Greeks and Romans held people as property, bought, sold, and inherited, and enslaved people did much of the work in homes, workshops, farms, and mines.

Living Scripts

• The Cyrillic alphabet

  The alphabet of Russian, built mostly from Greek capital letters in the ninth or tenth century and reformed in Russia in 1708–1710 and 1917–1918.