Peter Kriger

In January 1920 the United States did something no large industrial nation had attempted. It took a commodity that half the country drank and roughly a third of the federal budget depended on, and it withdrew the law from it.We have been telling the story ever since as a costume drama. The...

Jeder kennt das Ende des Mittelalters. Das Schießpulver hielt Einzug, der gepanzerte Reiter wurde zum Museumsstück, Burgen fielen, der Feudalismus brach zusammen, und die moderne Welt brach durch die entstandene Lücke ein. Es ist eine wunderbare Geschichte. Doch fast nichts davon hat den...

Todos lo admitieron al mismo tiempo. Internet entero levantó la vista de su teléfono y confesó que sí , que piensa constantemente en el Imperio Romano. Lo convertimos en una broma, porque así solemos hacer con las cosas que nos asustan un poco.

When Hernan Cortes brought down an empire of millions with a few hundred men, he let a secret out of the bag that we have been trying to forget ever since. A civilization is astonishingly easy to knock over. And almost nobody has to die for it to happen.

In the summer of 1789, a bankrupt kingdom attempted the most ambitious upgrade in the history of government. Within four years the upgrade had eaten its own engineers, and a machine designed to guarantee the rights of man was signing death warrants at a rate that required printed forms with...

Un roi barbare a mis Rome à sac en 410, et quinze siècles plus tard, on en accuse encore des adolescents. Ils l'ignorent. D'ailleurs, les bâtisseurs de cathédrales, les auteurs de romans d'horreur et les ingénieurs qui programment aujourd'hui des machines dans des salles obscures...

La revolución industrial sí ocurrió en la antigüedad. Simplemente no sucedió como usted piensa.

For eight hundred years, everything needed to print a book already existed. China was printing whole libraries from carved blocks in the ninth century. Korea was casting metal type before Gutenberg was born.

The Elector of Saxony owned five thousand holy bones, and he had them printed in a catalogue with illustrations, because a collection nobody can browse is a wasted asset. Eight years later his own university professor published a list of complaints about precisely this line of business.

Everyone knows the story. A Christian empire sold narcotics to a civilization that did not want them, and when that civilization objected, the empire sent warships. It is the most morally convenient episode in the Western canon, which is exactly why it deserves to be handled with suspicion.

In 1830, respectable physicians warned that the human body would come apart at thirty miles an hour. In 1889, a Boston paper explained that the telephone would end visiting, conversation, and eventually friendship. In 1954, the United States Senate spent three days investigating comic books.

Every age is certain its witches are real. The old world had servants of the Devil; later centuries had wreckers, subversives, and enemies of the people; we have our own quiet vocabulary for the ones we agree to destroy.

Tout le monde l'a admis en même temps. Internet tout entier a levé les yeux de son téléphone et a avoué que oui , en effet, il pensait constamment à l'Empire romain. On en a fait une blague, comme on le fait souvent avec ce qui nous fait un peu peur.

The First World War is usually explained by asking what people wanted. Historians have spent a century sorting the guilty from the merely reckless, and the argument has produced magnificent scholarship without producing agreement. This book asks a different question.

In 2007 a man published a book about the future. He held no chair in futurology, ran no consultancy, and had no institutional reason to be believed.

Five thousand years ago, somebody poured a season's worth of grain into a shared building and immediately ran into a problem that has never once gone away: who gave what, and who gets it back? The answer was to write it down.

Christopher Columbus set out to end the world. He said so in writing, at length, with scriptural citations. He believed his voyages had been foretold by the prophets. He believed the gold of the Indies would finance the recovery of Jerusalem, without which the last act of history could not begin.

Nobody ever needed it. For the whole of human existence before the sixteenth century, our species got along on honey, fruit, and the occasional raided hive, and no one recorded the deprivation.

We talk about privacy the way we talk about clean air: as something we once had in abundance and are now carelessly using up. The historical record tells a stranger story.

Alle gaben es gleichzeitig zu. Das ganze Internet blickte von seinen Handys auf und gestand: Ja , tatsächlich denkt es ständig an das Römische Reich. Wir machten einen Witz daraus, denn so gehen wir mit Dingen um, die uns ein wenig Angst machen.