A $1 trillion-dollar coin seems like a high denomination to ask the government to print.

Some say its weight could sink the Titanic! (This is benightedly ludicrous).

But one time, the U.S. government actually got 1/10000000th of the way there — by printing a $100,000 bill.

And it really helped the economy.

The year was 1933. We were in the midst of a worldwide depression characterized by massive deflation.

President Roosevelt ordered Americans to surrender any gold they held to the government.

The reason: no one was buying anything with cash.

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By now you've probably heard the Treasury say they will not be minting a $1 trillion coin to help the U.S. avoid the debt ceiling.

But the federal government exploiting obscure loopholes under moments of extreme duress is not without precedent.

At the beginning of 1895, the country was facing default after its gold reserves evaporated.

But through some legal archaeology JP Morgan located an obscure, Civil War-era statute that would allow he and some fellow international financiers to replenish the Treasury's gold stocks.

The country was saved.

With the help of Bancroft Prize-winner Jean Strouse's biography "Morgan," we retell the story.

(Thanks to John Steele Gordon for helping us track down the anecdote).

The story begins with a yawning U.S. trade deficit at the beginning of the 1890s.

Fearing rising U.S. demand for cheap money, foreign investors continue to sell American securities and take the proceeds home. Between 1890 and 1894 anxious creditors unload $300 million worth of American securities and transferred gold abroad. 'Few people have any idea of the amount of property in this country that is held by foreigners." National City Bank (the forerunner of Citi) chair James Stillman writes at the time. 

Source: Strouse

By the end of 1893 the Treasury's gold reserve has fallen below $60 million.

 "Since there was no income tax and the government had no power to issue money, the Treasury had to buy or borrow gold in order to maintain its reserve — and its ability to borrow depended on foreign confidence in the dollar," Strouse writes.

Source: Strouse

The main problem is that President Cleveland is unable to convince Congress to issue new bonds that could be sold in exchange for gold.

Sentiment against "goldbugs"— including from Cleveland's own Treasury secretary, John Carlisle — is running high. Western and Southern states instead favor silver. Cleveland, a New Yorker, had at one point been declared the "great financial Gorgon." By February 1894, Treasury was losing over $2 million a day. The government would default in three weeks time.

Source: Strouse

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Since the rise of recordings and radio in the early twentieth century, music has been a constant and often integral part of American culture.

Any comprehensive account of the history of the last one hundred years requires at least some understanding of how music fits into the picture.

While it is certainly important to include the music of classical composers such as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, John Cage, and Milton Babbitt in such considerations, it is also crucial to include the contributions of Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Hank Williams, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.

In fact, even for those who hate pop music, it is nonetheless impossible to gain a balanced understanding of most classical composers born after 1945 without some familiarity with the pop so many of these baby-boomer composers grew up on.

William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty, and Christopher Rouse, to name only a few, have openly celebrated their love of pop in their concert works, as composers like Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Bernstein had done years before.  Clearly, pop matters.

In the last fifteen years or so, music scholars have become increasingly interested in pop, but music journalists have been publishing on pop since the late 1960s. Their books far outnumber (and far outsell) those of music scholars. Scholars in other disciplines (like English and history) have also been quicker to turn their attention to pop than music scholars have been.

It’s not so much that journalists and non-music scholars somehow wrestled authority on pop music away from music scholars; it’s more that they became the authorities because of musicologists’ lack of interest. But musicologists, music theorists, and ethnomusicologists are no longer ignoring pop.

The newest evidence of that is our creation at the University of Rochester of the Institute for Popular Music, to encourage as much scholarly work on pop music as possible.

We want to foster the attitude that the music of Cole Porter, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, and Madonna needs to be studied with same seriousness of purpose and methodological rigor that has traditionally been applied to the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Schoenberg.

When studying popular music, scholars address a number of issues that deepen our understanding of the music and the variety of contexts in which it figures. Thinking about the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, for instance, a scholar may explore the musical structure of the songs: the use of harmony, melody, rhythm, tone color, lyrics, and recording technique to create a piece that either reuses elements that are already familiar or pushes the music into new territory.

Based on such music-technical analysis, we can begin to determine how the music grows out of previous musical practice (and which musical practices), how it is paralleled by the work of other musicians (The Beatles, for instance), and how it serves as a model for musicians that follow (psychedelia and beyond).

We may want to consider how Brian Wilson’s innovative production builds on the work of Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector, or how such experimentation transformed surf music into something much more ambitious.

All of this might lay the groundwork for determining whether the recent recording of Smile! is faithful to what the band might have done had they not abandoned the project in 1967. Scholars have the luxury of digging deeper than most journalists’ readers would have the patience for; they possess the specialized training to pursue this work with great precision and skill along with a comprehensive understanding of music’s history through the centuries and its stylistic breadth around the world.

At the beginning of my History of Rock course, for example, students are confronted with a tremendous amount of music, extending at least from 1955 to 1992. Imagine all of this music was individual pieces of sheet music strewn across a giant floor and the scholar’s job is to organize it in ways that make sense. How do you do this? 

Maybe you start by organizing it chronologically, and maybe breaking the chronology up into eras. What’s the rationale for such groupings? Is it only about dates or are styles important? Influences? Geography? Culture? Music business practices? The development of technology? How do we make such decisions and what do we need to consider as we do so?

Whatever details students may remember after the course, it’s far more important that they experience how we studied the music—to confront not only the music but also the problems that come with thinking about it carefully and objectively.

The critical thinking skills required for this kind of course translate broadly and can pay off even in areas where no electric guitars, turntables, or samplers can be found. That’s the ultimate value of studying pop in an academic environment.

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A recent NGO report says the global recession increased the incidence of child labor around the world.

Perhaps that's not surprising. But it got us wondering, why doesn't the U.S. have child labor anymore?

The answer may seem obvious — we're too wealthy for that kind of thing.

That's mostly true.

But a landmark survey of child labor studies by Dartmouth economics professor Eric V. Edmonds paints a much more nuanced portrait of the situation.

We picked through Edmonds' research to explain the absence and presence of child labor in a given country, and how the U.S. finally came to outgrow the phenomenon.

We've illustrated the story using snapshots taken by Lewis Hine, an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), who sought to portray working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924.

In addition to being a fascinating bit of US economic history, it's also incredibly important for countries today that are dealing with the same issue.

There have been a lot of misconceptions about child labor in the U.S.

Vance, a Trapper Boy, 15 years old. "Has trapped for several years in a West Va. Coal mine. $.75 a day for 10 hours work. All he does is to open and shut this door: most of the time he sits here idle, waiting for the cars to come. On account of the intense darkness in the mine, the hieroglyphics on the door were not visible until plate was developed." 1908, West Virginia. 

Source: Library of Congress/flickr

The first is that it did not go away after child labor laws were passed.

Glass workers at midnight, 1908, Indiana.

Source: Library of Congress

Attempts to pass federal child labor laws were actually struck down by the Supreme Court.

"Part of a group of itinerant cotton pickers leaving a farm at which they had finished picking a bale and a half a day. They live in these wagons. Note how many children - all pick except the baby in arms. The four year old picks fifteen pounds a day regularly. Seven year old boy picks fifty pounds a day." 1913, Texas.

Source: Library of Congress

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Evolution has revolutionized our modern scientific understanding of natural history and how our bodies came to be.

Yet evolutionary insights regarding health and disease are not typically emphasized with patients.

Medical education focuses on proximate causes of disease — infection, trauma, cellular regulation, etc. — as opposed to evolutionary understandings of how our traits and responses came to be in the first place.

What evolutionary insights are there for clinical medicine?

Medical conditions can occur when there is a mismatch between our evolved bodies and our particular society and environment. This idea challenges some of our notions of disease.

Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see patients with lactose intolerance, allergies, obesity, anxiety, near-sightedness, ADHD, and flu symptoms. The lactase gene spread rapidly in historical populations with dairy husbandry. But 70% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant, all of whom are “normal” in the context of their environments that were, until recently, lactose-free.

Allergies and autoimmune conditions are more common in developed societies where infections occur less frequently. This suggests a mismatch between our evolved immune system and our current environment. Recent evidence suggests that the incidence of autoimmune Crohn’s disease has risen in places where the incidence of gastrointestinal worm infection has fallen.

Obesity likely represents a mismatch between our food preferences which evolved in environments of relative food scarcity, and modern environments with increased food availability and decreased activity levels.

Anxiety may have been an evolutionarily useful response — think of the advantage of being jumpy when you hear rustling in the tall grass in an African savannah — but now may be an inappropriate expression for our current environment.

According to a recent study, children who are genetically susceptible to near-sightedness are less likely to become nearsighted if they spend more time outdoors.  This suggests near-sightedness may in part result from a mismatch between the outdoor environment in which we evolved and modern indoor activities such as reading and playing video games.

With an evolutionary perspective, conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may be conveyed not as a disease, but rather a mismatch between a patient’s evolved nature and our particular society’s educational expectations. In all these conditions, an evolutionary approach helps clinicians and patients see medical conditions as contextual, rather than as an inherent defect. Evolution — natural history — becomes relevant.

Fever, cough, vomiting, diarrhea, etc. are evolutionary host defenses to expel infections, not, as patients often believe, infections themselves. Nonetheless the suffering can be marked. If treatment is provided to alleviate these symptoms, will our body’s defense against infections be weakened? This area is ripe for additional scientific research.

Like the early days of pharmacology and microbiology, it is too soon to predict the extent of clinical relevance that an explicit evolutionary understanding can yield. Evolutionary thinking has already directly impacted clinical medicine in areas such as genetics and vaccine design.

Evolutionary principles also inform public health measures, such as the campaign to avoid inappropriate antibiotic use in humans and livestock to help prevent the evolution of resistant pathogen strains.

Just because a trait evolved does not make it good or bad. Evolution itself is impersonal and morally neutral.  It is up to us to provide deliberate values into the blind shuffle of evolutionary selection. An evolutionary scientific understanding provides greater wisdom into health and illness.

Even in this world of technological marvels, the “history and physical” (H&P) is often emphasized as a physician’s most valued diagnostic strategy. In essence, evolution is history. With an evolutionary perspective, the “H” in “H&P” can be understood and appreciated at a deeper level.

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The step-grandchildren of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels are billionaires, although their wealth comes mostly from their biological relatives, Bloomberg's David de Jong reports.

Here's how the relationship works:

• In 1931, Goebbels married Magda Quandt, who'd previously been married to industrialist Guenther Quandt (as well as another man before).
• Harald Quandt (actually the son of Magda's first husband) wound up living with Goebbels after the marriage.
• When Guenther — himself implicated as a Nazi follower though not involved in the regime’s crimes — died, Harald and his half-brother Herbert Quandt inherited his fortune.

That included ownership of two large manufacturing firms as well as stakes in Daimler-Benz and potash miner Wintershall AG.

Today, Herbert's widow Johanna Quandt, 86, and their children Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt remain BMW’s dominant shareholders, de Jong says. Meanwhile, he writes, "the billionaire daughters of Harald Quandt -- Katarina Geller-Herr, 61, Gabriele Quandt, 60, Anette-Angelika May-Thies, 58, and 50-year-old Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo -- have kept a lower profile."

Goebbels poisoned himself and his biological children as the war was ending.

Click here to read the full story from de Jong >

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Despite its huge rally from its March 2009 low, the stock market has effectively gone sideways for the last decade.

Many have characterized the current market as a secular bear market.

But in a new research report, Fidelity portfolio manager Jurrien Timmer writes that from a technical perspective, this secular bear may be turning into a secular bull.

Timmer examined how the S&P 500 has been performing since 1871 and discovered that on average, prolonged periods of below-average returns, or secular bear markets, last about 14.5 years on average.

By that measure, the secular bear market that we're currently in is "getting a bit long in the tooth" now that it's in its 13th year, and going by historical patterns, is likely to end.

But it's no sure thing that we are entering a bullish super-cycle.  Many investors, especially pension funds that have lowered their risk profiles dramatically, aren't really expecting the market to go into a secular bull market.

Nevertheless, Timmer thinks that the end of this bear market isn't too far off.

"This study of market history seems to suggest that maybe the worst is over," he writes. "If so, it will be important for investors to take a close look at their portfolios to make sure they are not too defensively positioned and that their investment mix is in line with their long-term goals."

Timmer took a close look at each of the previous secular bull and bear markets.

BEAR: 1902-1921

"The first secular bear market lasted from 1902 to 1921, spanning a little more than 19 years. During that time, the nominal total return was 3.7% and the real return was –0.4%. The P/E fell from 14.8 to 14.0."

Source: Fidelity Viewpoints

BULL: 1922-1927

"Then we got the relatively short-but-sweet secular bull market of the Roaring '20s. This period lasted only eight years, yet the S&P 500 gained 27.5% in nominal return and 27.8% in real return. The P/E ratio climbed from 14.0 to 20.2."

Source: Fidelity Viewpoints

BEAR: 1929–1942

"The stock market bubble of the late 1920s (along with many other factors, of course)  ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s. That secular bear market lasted until 1942. During that time, the nominal return for the S&P 500 was –5.2% and the real return was –4.6%. The P/E ratio fell from 20.2 to 7.7. The hallmark of this period was, of course, a lack of demand and the resulting deflation. This is why the real return was not lower than the nominal return."

Source: Fidelity Viewpoints

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To celebrate its 100th birthday, Grand Central Terminal restaurants and shops are having a crazy discount tomorrow.

Participating retailers will be rolling their 2013 prices all the way back to 1913 costs on February 1st, which means if you stop by the station, you could get a 10¢ shoe shine or a loaf of rye bread for 6¢. (Unfortunately, the trains will still cost the same.)

That won't be the only way the transportation hub will be celebrating. There will also be a Rededication Ceremony that day with Cynthia Nixon, Caroline Kennedy, and the Vanderbilt family, as well as music performances in the station by the Grammy Award-winning big band Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks.

The terminal will also have a slew of other celebratory specials and parties throughout its centennial year, which will be posted on the Grand Central's website.

The station opened officially to the public at midnight on February 2 in 1913, with more than 150,000 people in attendance to see the city's newest landmark. The New York Times even wrote of the day that, "Railroad men viewed the scene with amazement, saying that never before had the public been known to take such a keen interest in the opening of a railroad terminal."

Here's the full list of the 1913 pricing rollbacks and participating stores (via the Gothamist).

• 19¢ ea. shrimp, 13¢ ea. mussels, 13¢ ea. clams at Pescatore
• 10¢ for a side of french fries at Tri Tip Grill *From 11am-3pm
• 5¢ small drip hot coffee at Financier Patisserie *Starting at 12 pm. Limit one per customer
• 10¢ shoe shine at Leather Spa
• 10¢ nylon watch straps from Central Watch *Limited to first 500 customers. Limit one per customer
• 25¢ piece of Legendary Fudge at Li-Lac Chocolates *Limit one per customer
• 19¢ slice of cheesecake at the Oyster Bar & Restaurant *Dine-in only
• 10¢ for bambini scoop of gelato or sorbet at Ciao Bella
• $2 for 100% silk scarves (unisex) at TOTO
• 6¢ loaf of rye bread at Zaro’s Bakery * Shuttle Passage and Grand Central Market locations only. Limit one per customer
• 75¢ Adirondack cocktail at Michael Jordan’s The Steak House N.Y.C.
• 5¢ 1lb box of pasta with purchase of a Ceriello Sauce at Ceriello Fine Foods *until 4pm

DON'T MISS: Amazing Pictures Of Grand Central Terminal From The Early 1900s

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Every once in a while I read a finance article that sticks in my head and never goes away.  An article about the historical intersection of debt and the United States from the New Yorker from four years ago by Jill Lepore is just one of these.[1]

The USA of IOU

Jill Lepore’s article explains that in many ways the United States was founded of the debtors, by the debtors, for the debtors.

We know from English literature that the United States represented a fresh start for insolvents from the lower and upper classes, which makes sense when we learn that both Dickens’ father went to debtor’s prison and Trollope’s father fled England to avoid it.

What I didn’t know is that as many as two-thirds of Europeans arriving in the Colonies were debtors, paying their way as indentured servants.  The colonial governments of Virginia and North Carolina for their part, eager for laborers, passed incentives by promising 5 years’ worth of debt protection.  The founder of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, specifically started the colony as a debtor’s refuge in 1732, as an alternative to English debtors’ prison.

Lepore makes the interesting comment that Founding Fathers Jefferson and Washington were so up to their necks in debt to London bankers that the Declaration of Independence from England not only served democratic Enlightenment ideals but also their own balance sheets.[2]

Debtor’s prison

Before reading Lapore’s article I had no idea that the English tradition of locking up debtors in prison jumped the Atlantic and came to the American colonies and the young United States.  Debtors through colonial times and the first 40 years of the Republic routinely got locked up in brutal prisons – often for very small amounts.  There the debtor would stay, half-starved and dependent upon alms from passers-by, until someone – usually a relative – paid the debt.

New York became the first state in the nation to outlaw debtors’ prisons in 1831, paving the way for other states to follow suit.

Debtors’ prisons largely predated proper bankruptcy law, which makes sense as bankruptcy would always be preferable to prison.

Bankruptcy for Traders vs. Everybody Else

You are not going to believe this[3], but in the 1800 to 1830 period, financial traders typically received preferable treatment, by law, over everybody else, when it came to insolvency.

If you were a stockbroker in 1800s Wall Street, for example, or you engaged in financing merchandise shipping and trade, or trading in agricultural commodity futures[4], you could declare bankruptcy if the business went awry.  But, if you were not a financier, you had no way of getting clear of your debts, and you might face debtors’ prison.

In essence when debts became overwhelming, Lepore explains, a bankruptcy law in 1800 allowed financiers to declare bankruptcy and receive a fresh start, freed of their debts.  Presumably lawmakers justified this disparity through a logic similar to today’s “Too Big To Fail” principal.  If the brokerage houses in turn of the 19^th Century Wall Street couldn’t work through their financial distress, well then my goodness, what would happen to the economy????[5]

Since the bankruptcy law only applied to traders, everybody else was liable to be thrown into debtors’ prison.  Indefinitely, in fact, until their debts got paid.  Not until 1841 did Congress pass a permanent bankruptcy law so that ordinary folks could declare bankruptcy in the event of insolvency.[6]

So, if you were wondering whether the bailout of Wall Street in 2008 while Main Street suffered represented the nadir of financial inequality and injustice, you’d be wrong. Early 19^th Century injustices were even worse. There, doesn’t that feel better now?

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We recently brought you stunning photos of early-'80s Macau, before that city became a worldwide gambling mecca.

Today, we want to show you a city whose transformation is perhaps even more incredible: Shenzhen, China.

Shenzhen is one of the most unique cities in the world.

In 1979, Premier Deng Xiaoping named Shenzhen a Special Economic Zone, meaning it would be immune from the strict Communist regime governing the rest of the country and would instead would be permitted to pursue private enterprise.

Shenzhen's official population was 12 million and it had a GDP of 500 billion RMB, according to the Asia Society.

"Has any urban area on Earth ever grown so rapidly and changed so dramatically in such a short time as Shenzhen?" 

That's the arguably rhetorical question posed by transportation expert and amateur photographer Leroy W. Demery Jr. in a photoset he has posted to flickr documenting his journey to the city in the 1980s.

With his kind permission, we reproduce the photos here.

Here is his own introduction:

I traveled China for three months in 1983, and managed to visit, or "pass through," every province except Tibet, Hainan (part of Guangdong Province back then), Fujian and Taiwan (which I visited in 1980)  However, I made my "first visit" to China on 1980 July 17. I joined a half-day "cross-border" tour operated by China International Travel Service (CITS), Hong Kong. Booking was easy and the price was very reasonable.  Bao'an County, which had a settlement history dating back nearly 1,700 years, was renamed Shenzhen City in January 1979.

At this time, the total population was stated at 300,000. The population of the urbanized area was stated at 20,000 - that's "twenty thousand" - and the urbanized land area was stated at 3 km2. Establishment of the Special Economic Zone was approved in August 1980 - that is, roughly one month after these photos were taken. I saw virtually no sign of the amazing changes that were soon to begin.  Travel guidebooks published during the early 1980s state that China began admitting unescorted foreigners in 1981.

However, our Hong Kong-based CITS guide said that there was a "new arrangement:" one could obtain a visa to visit Beijing and Shanghai in three days. You simply applied for the visa, she said, "and on the third day, you go." So I might have visited (at least) Beijing and Shanghai in 1980, three years before I actually did.

First, this is what the city looks like today. Shenzhen is now one of the fastest growing cities in the world.

It boasts one of China's largest ports.

It has its own stock market.

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Strip away the concierge, heated pool, and freshly made beds. Lose the velvety bathrobe that “mysteriously” ends up in your luggage. In fact, pare the hotel down to just one element: its bar.

Party Earth is betting you’d still want to go to the following historic hotels, just like Hemingway, Picasso, and countless other famous drinkers did.

Le Bar du Hôtel Le Bristol: Paris

112 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
75008 Paris

Opened in the 1920s, Hôtel Le Bristol quickly became a hangout for fashion barons and successful artists, including Dalí, Picasso, and Coco Chanel.

Le Bar du Hôtel le Bristol, the hotel’s marble-floored drinking den, is staggeringly grandiose, studded with chandeliers and flowery sculptures, while the seasonal courtyard is where today’s see-and-be-seen laze about their summer days sipping €35 cocktails.

Travaasa Hana: Maui

5031 Hana Highway
Hana, HI 96713

Regularly voted one of Maui’s top resorts, Travaasa Hana is an all-in-one retreat, offering everything from spa treatments to net fishing to a stylish restaurant overlooking the sea.

Granted, Hemingway never slung any of the bar’s delicious mojitos (Travaasa didn’t exist yet), but he adored the stunning Hamoa Beach down the road.

Grab a pitcher to go and hit up this black lava-lined pocket of paradise.

The Empire Hotel Rooftop: New York City

44 West 63rd Street, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10023

The Empire Hotel may not be the fanciest lodging in all of NYC, but its exclusive rooftop bar is still a hotbed of sultry fashion shows and celebrity after-parties.

Big names have been coming to The Empire Hotel Rooftop since the 20s, but whether visitors grab a spa treatment by the pool or dance the night away to DJs, the views of the Upper West Side make everyone feel like a star and one of the primary reasons this is viewed as one of the top bars in NYC.

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There are obvious differences between the banks of yore and the giant institutions where our salaries get direct-deposited today.

In the 1960s, bank tellers were real bank tellers. And it was a time when the economy was doing well, interest rates were high, and the average American had more discretionary income than ever before.

The average man was spending so much money, that he had started to borrow money in order to do so. And the banks more than willing to oblige.

Here's an excerpt from "Our Flashy, Lovable, Open-Handed Banks," by Herbert Brean, published on May 9, 1960 in the now defunct LIFE magazine.

"Once banks were put-in institutions," commented a New York banker recently, 'Now they are take-out institutions.' The modern banker doesn't wait for you to ask for money. He presses it on you. Many banks today will encourage a new customer to write checks before he has deposited a nickel. 'You're not borrowing enough," a Salt Lake City banker enthusiastically upbraids his customers. "Take some more!'"

And because business was booming, older commercial banks were facing fierce competition from savings and loans associations and new upstarts banks who wanted in on the action. But deposit rate ceilings were in place back then, and this meant that such financial institutions couldn't compete on rates.

First, they gave away absurd amounts of free stuff.

"When a customer opens a savings account in a modern bank, he may reasonably expect a premium or giveaway, but he is not getting his money's worth if he accepts free flower seeds, flowering shrubs or dwarf palms. These are passé. When the Gibraltar Savings and Loan Association opened a new office in Beverly Hills last year, it commemorated the event by raffling off a new car, a blue mink stole, a color TV set and a dozen transistor radios. It fed and entertained new customers and gave them 5,000 sets of stainless steel flatware, 1,000 cigarette lighters and 3,000 desk memo pads."

In the 1960s banks gave away wall clocks, dinnerware, sterling silver candlestick compotes, coffeemakers, kitchen cutlery sets, lady's billfolds, photo albums, cameras, bird-cage planters, cleaver sets, record albums, scholarships etc. At Christmas, the Manhattan Savings bank would flood its lobby to stage an ice-skating show. Later, the bank would drain the lobby, and host a dog show featuring "midget handlers."

The "average man" wasn't enough business for these banks, so they started targeting women. They would lure them in with powder rooms and free lessons on subjects like "how to install a zipper." They also targeted children.

"Deposits may come in nickels and dimes, but BOA (Bank of America) finds it profitable to send representatives to collect them. Society National Bank of Cleveland has a similar program—with sixth graders as tellers. At this bank's main office, juvenile business is transacted in a special room with a low counter to enable 10-year-olds to look the teller in the eye and appraise his trustworthiness."

Of course, those days are long gone.

Read the full article by Herbert Brean here.

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Last summer, researchers announced that they may have found the human skeleton of King Richard III beneath a parking lot in England. 

After rigorous DNA analysis, the University of Leicester confirmed Monday, Feb. 4, that the bones belong to the medieval monarch.

From the University:

DNA from the skeleton matches two of Richard III’s maternal line relatives. The genealogy investigation verified the connection between these descendants and Richard III’s family.

The skeleton was likely to have been killed by one of two fatal injuries to the skull – one possibly from a sword and one possibly from a halberd. A total of 10 wounds were discovered on the skeleton.

King Richard III of England died in a battle during the War of the Roses in 1485. The body was believed to have been brought to Leicester, England, and buried in the church of the Franciscan Friary, or Greyfriars. But over time, the location of the church was lost, along with the king's remains. The discovery closes the chapter on a 500-year-old mystery.  

The grave site was found under a city council parking lot in Leicester. Two fatal injuries to the skull are consistent with battle wounds. The skeleton also had a curved spine, which matches accounts that the king's right shoulder was higher than his left.  

Researchers said they found no evidence of a withered arm, which is how the monarch was famously portrayed by William Shakespeare in the play "Richard III." 

Here's a short video on the search for King Richard III: 

SEE ALSO: 10 Animals That Were Hunted To Extinction

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History's greatest empires covered a fifth of the world, ruled hundreds of millions of people, and lasted anywhere from 100 years to over a millennium.

Empire, which comes from the Latin "imperare" meaning "to command," is a collection of states or ethnic groups united under one ruler or oligarchy.

It is a term that has been used to describe recent US foreign policy. Wrote filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick in a recent USA Today op-ed: "Obama is about to enter his second term as heir of George W. Bush's imperial strategy unless his latest foreign policy appointments signal significant change."

Each empire seemed unstoppable for an age, but in the end they were all consigned to history.

The Portuguese Empire reached 4 million square miles at its height in 1815.

Data compiled at Wikipedia.

The Abbasid Caliphate covered 4.29 million square miles at its height in 850.

Data compiled at Wikipedia.

The French Colonial Empire covered 5 million square miles at its peak in 1938.

Data compiled at Wikipedia.

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Many commentators are freaking out about a new Barron's headline celebrating the arrival (actually return) of the Dow Jones Industrial Average passing 14,000.

We'll refrain from singling any one out.

But the belief is that the following from Barron's means the market is about to tank: "We told you so. In October, we predicted the Dow would pass its 14,165 record by early this year. Now we're just 1% short. Expect a breakthrough soon. Here's what happens after that."

More generally, there are people who get nervous any time there's an article talks about a new bull market, or how everyone's into stocks, or how we've just breached a new era.

Basically, there are a lot of people who reflexively get negative, just because people have turned bearish.

As Josh Brown has noted, this so-called "headline" or "magazine cover" risk is total nonsense. A magazine cover is just a magazine cover. A headline is just a headline. A big benchmark is just a big benchmark.

We went through the history of the Dow, from the 1960s to today, to prove why this is complete hogwash.

(Many thanks to Barry Ritholtz and, again, Josh Brown for digging up some of the "deader" of the dead trees...)

For the sake of this feature, we can trace the first headline risk debunking to the May 31, 1963 issue of Time. It talked about a rising US economy.

Ok, stocks declined for about two months after that. Then they went up for a good while.

The Dow hit 1,000 for the first time in November 1972.

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The U.S. has a long history of armed conflict and the Best Liberal Art Colleges released this infographic, breaking down the battles, the cost, and the duration of each. It's a handy and concise look at a long and complex history of armed conflict.

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After the confirmation that the body under the car park belongs to King Richard the III Monday, Feb. 4, scientists at the University of Dundee have been hard at work reconstructing what the historical king looked like.

They've released the images of the facial reconstruction today, Tuesday Feb. 5, created 528 years after his bloody death during a battle in the War of the Roses in 1485.

"It was a great privilege for us all in the Dundee team to work on this important investigation," Caroline Wilkinson, the researcher from the University of Dundee who led the reconstruction effort. "It has been enormously exciting to rebuild and visualise the face that could be Richard III, and this depiction may allow us to see the King in a different light."

The university press release notes:

The calm and apparently thoughtful face is in stark contrast to the many portrayals of Richard III, showing contorted facial and bodily features, that were created for political reasons following his death.

Here they are:

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The U.S. has been able to sit back and watch as Europe struggles to hold its currency union together.

Americans can safely assume there is no danger Illinois, as bad as its finances are, will drop out and issue its own currency in "Lincolns."

It wasn't always so.

For a quarter of a century, America's states and territories, and the institutions within them, began circulating their own currency, as the agrarian mistrust of centralized banking eventually climaxed in the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832.

This period is well known among collectors and numismatists.

But for others — even within the banking industry itself — this period remains mostly unknown.

We wanted to shed some light on this colorful but important moment in the country's growth.

The story begins in 1832. President Jackson, an agrarian and hard currency advocate, is reelected and vetoes the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States.

Next, Congress passes legislation that the government's funds would be held by local banks instead of a centralized reserve.

Source: Krooss/Samuelson

This worked fine initially, but soon inflation begins to climb as the banks extend their circulation.

Source: Hammond

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Quentin Tarantino is considering the prospect of a third "rewritten history" movie to follow 2009's Inglourious Basterds and this year's Django Unchained.

Speaking to reporters after winning the prize for best original screenplay at the Baftas on Sunday night, Tarantino suggested he might take a similar approach for a forthcoming film.

"This [rewritten history theme] begs a trilogy, it begs to have a third movie on this theme," said the director. "I haven't decided about what yet, but I wouldn't be surprised."

Tarantino did not divulge any further details about his proposed follow-up, but he is well-known for teasing fans with plans for sequels that never quite seem to make it to the production stage.

He once suggested a prequel to Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, featuring John Travolta and Michael Madsen as brothers Vincent and Vic Vega, and in 2011 admitted that his proposal for Kill Bill 3 was unlikely to ever hit the big screen.

The film-maker has previously discussed his interest in filming a gangster movie set in the 1920s, and has also hinted that he could return to the second world war. One of the subplots for Inglourious Basterds that did not make it into the final shooting schedule was a segue about a group of black soldiers who go awol in 1944 after the invasion of Normandy.

"My original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this [would be] a huge story that included the [smaller] story that you saw in the film, but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been fucked over by the American military and kind of go apeshit,"Tarantino told the Root in December.

"They basically – the way Lt Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and the Basterds are having an "Apache resistance"– [the] black troops go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland.

"So that was always going to be part of it. And I was going to do it as a miniseries, and that was going to be one of the big storylines. When I decided to try to turn it into a movie, that was a section I had to take out to help tame my material. I have most of that written. It's ready to go; I just have to write the second half of it … That would be the third of the trilogy. It would be [connected to] Inglourious Basterds, too, because Inglourious Basterds are in it, but it is about the soldiers. It would be called Killer Crow or something like that."

Django Unchained had a good night at the Baftas, with Christoph Waltz also taking home the best supporting actor prize. Tarantino's film is nominated for just five Oscars but the film-maker will be hoping to repeat his triumph in the best original screenplay category, where he is up against Michael Haneke (Amour), Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty), John Gatins (Flight) and Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola (Moonrise Kingdom).

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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Peruvian archaeologists have discovered a temple believed to be about 5,000 years old at the ancient El Paraiso archeological site in a valley just north of Lima, the Culture Ministry said.

If the date is confirmed, it would be among the oldest sites in the world, comparable to the ancient city of Caral, a coastal city some 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the north.

The discovery, dubbed the Temple of Fire, was found in one of the wings of El Paraiso's main pyramid. It includes a hearth that experts believe was used to burn ceremonial offerings.

"The smoke allowed the priests to connect with the gods," said Marco Guillen, who led the team of researchers who made the find.

Archaeologists found the hearth in mid-January as they were carrying out conservation work at a set of 4,000-year-old ruins known as El Paraiso, located some 40 kilometers northeast of Lima in the Chillon River Valley.

The discovery shows "that the Lima region was a focus of civilizations in the Andean territory," Deputy Culture Minister Rafael Varon told reporters.

Archaeologists believe the ancient coastal civilizations raised crops including cotton, which they traded with coastal fishermen for food.

El Paraiso, spread across 50 hectares (125 acres), has 10 buildings and is one of the largest ancient sites in central Peru.

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