The Freemasons, a fraternal organization developed from the stonemasons, include more than 6 million members worldwide.

Despite nearing 300 years of activity, the Freemasons remain mysterious, with many of their records destroyed naturally by time. But a few member lists survived — and they name some of the most influential people throughout history.

Click here to meet the Masons »

Anyone can petition to become a member, but prospects must put their faith in a Supreme Being. The members believe in "truth, tolerance, respect, and freedom." Once limited to white men, now any nationality or race can join. However,African-American freemaons have split into their own sect called the Prince Hall Freemasons. And women technically still can't join, but many modern lodges allow them.

Although somewhat secret, most scholars agree the hierarchy of Freemasonry includes 33 degrees. Freemasons begin as Entered Apprentices and can work their way all the way to Sovereign Grand Inspector General.

We listed 17 members, living and dead, who took the solemn vow.

Eric Goldschein contributed research to this article.

Benjamin Franklin — Saint John's Lodge, Philadelphia; 1730

Benjamin Franklin became a member of Saint John's Lodge in Philadelphia in 1730, a few years after starting his own society, the Leather Apron Club.

He remained active in the group for more than 50 years, serving as Grand Master of Pennsylvania in 1734. He also printed the first Masonic publication, "The Constitutions of the Free-Masons," in the colonies. The book remains one of the rarest in the world, with only 20 verified copies currently. 

While in Paris during the American Revolution, Franklin served as Venerable Master from 1779 to 1781. His membership in the order didn't interfere with his role as a Founding Father and American inventor.

George Washington — Fredericksburg Lodge, Virginia; 1752

Initiated in 1752 at the Fredericksburg Lodge in Virginia, the first President of the United States had a strong relationship with the Masons.Washington performed Masonic rites at the laying of the U.S. Capitol's cornerstone on September 18, 1793.

He remained a member until death and recieved a masonic funeral at the request of his widow. Over the years, many Masons, as well as members of the Knights Templar, have taken pilgrimages to Mount Vernon, the location of Washington's tomb.

A statue of Washington commissioned by the state of Virginia greets visitors at the Scottish Rite Museum and Library in Lexington, Mass.

Paul Revere — St. Andrew's Lodge, Massachusetts, 1760

After his initiation in 1760, Paul Revere served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts from 1795 to 1797.

He contributed to the creation of many lodges within his home state and instituted new positions and traditions. His son also became a Freemason.

To this day, no one really knows who started the Boston Tea Party, but many historians speculate early members of the colonial Freemasons may have contributed.

On this date in 1602, the Dutch East India Company, known around the world as the VOC (for Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, United East-India Company referring to the country's union after driving out the Spanish) was formed. It was the first public company to issue negotiable shares, and by some measures is considered the most successful company of all time. 

The company lived for nearly 200 years, before being quasi-nationalized by Napoleon Bonaparte's client state in what became known as the Batavian Republic.  

Wikipedia user Red4Tribe has uploaded a map showing the extent of the VOC's holdings, in light green, over its lifetime. This is as if Apple or GE owned entire countries. We've previously documented how the British East India Company, born two years earlier, likewise ended up holding large amounts of land in India, not to mention paying their own armies. The map also shows the holdings of the Dutch West India Company, created 19 years later, in dark green. In yellow are territories held later, during the 19th century. 

SEE ALSO: The American Colonies Began As Private Plantations

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Abraham Lincoln gets a lot of credit for being a great leader. And he deserves it, but frankly, most of us don’t really know why he deserves it.

What made him such an extraordinary leader? And does modern research back up his methods?

Here’s what Honest Abe did, why it works and how it can make you a better leader.

1) Get out of the office and circulate among the troops.

In 1861 Lincoln spent more time outside the White House than in it.

And it’s believed he met every single Union soldier who enlisted early in the Civil War.

How’s that for being an accessible leader?

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

As remarkable as it may seem, in 1861 Lincoln spent more time out of the White House than he did in it. And the chances are good that if a Union soldier had enlisted early in the Civil War, he saw the president in person. Lincoln made it a point to personally inspect every state regiment of volunteers that passed through Washington D.C., on their way to the front; and early in the war they all passed through Washington, D.C.

Lincoln knew people were his best source of information. And accessibility built trust. He spent 75% of the day meeting with people.

Lincoln had an open-door policy. Yeah, the President of the United States had an open-door policy.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

Lincoln was probably the most accessible chief executive the United States has ever known… John Nicolay and John Hay, his personal secretaries, reported that Lincoln spent 75 percent of his time meeting with people. No matter how busy the president was, he always seemed to find time for those who called on him.

Guess what? Modern business theory backs him up.

These days the management gurus call it “Managing by Wandering Around.” Seriously.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

…Lincoln revealed the cornerstone of his own personal leadership philosophy, an approach that would become part of a revolution in modern leadership thinking 100 years later when it was dubbed MBWA (Managing by Wandering Around) by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in their 1982 book In Search Of Excellence.

Lincoln was always trying to get the best information so he could make good decisions.

He was constantly emailing and texting on his iPhone… Umm, well, the 19th century equivalent of it, at least.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

He virtually lived at the War Department’s telegraph office so he could gain access to key information for quick, timely decisions.

What do CEO’s of the modern era still spend much of their time doing?

The exact same thing Lincoln did: trying to get the information they need to make good decisions.

Via John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do:

The GMs do not limit their focus to planning, business strategy, staffing, and other “top management concerns.” They discuss virtually anything and everything even remotely associated with their businesses and organizations…. In these conversations, GMs typically ask a lot of questions. In a half-hour conversation, some will ask literally hundreds.

(More on what all great leaders have in common here.)

2) Persuade rather than coerce.

Despite having the power of the presidency, Lincoln didn’t strongarm people; he persuaded them. How did he do it?

He made them his friends. He made them like him. Here’s Lincoln talking about his methods:

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find by little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.

And it shows in the way he handled subordinates.

He didn’t give orders — he made requests. Look at his letters:

• To McClellan (10-13-63): “…This letter is in no sense an order.”
• To Halleck (9-19-63): “I hope you will consider it…”
• To Burnside (9-27-63): “It was suggested to you, not ordered…”

Does the modern research agree? Oh yeah.

What’s the #1 thing Harvard Business School teaches it’s MBA students about negotiation?

“They need to like you.” 

About 3:30 into the video below:

Here’s the equation for getting what you want. Cutting to the chase: You want to get more. You want more money, a better offer, a better deal; here are the components of what you need to do. First, they need to like you. That’s the first component. The things you do that make them like you less make it less likely that you are going to get what you want…

Liking is one of fundamental principles that leading persuasion expert Robert Cialdini’s detailed in his classic book, Influence.

From my interview with Bob:

No surprise that people prefer to say yes to a request to the degree that they know and like the requester. A simple way to make things happen in your direction is to uncover genuine similarities or parallels that exist between you and the person you want to influence, and then raise them to the surface. That increases rapport.

Lincoln has a famous quote on the subject:

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

(Learn the methods hostage negotiators use to bond with hostage takers here.)

3) Lead by being led.

Lincoln always gave credit where credit was due and took responsibility when things went wrong. 

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

Not only did this satisfy Lincoln’s need for honesty, integrity and human dignity; it also gave his subordinates the correct perception that they were, in many ways, doing the leading, not Lincoln. If nothing else, it made them feel good about their jobs. It also encouraged innovation and risk taking because they knew that if they failed, Lincoln would not blame them.

By doing this he dodged what Harvard professor Gautam Mukunda says is the most common leadership mistake: hubris.

Lincoln had no problem saying he screwed up, like in this letter to General Ulysses S. Grant:

I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you reached the vicinity of Vicksburg… I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I that the expedition could succeed… I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.

He trusted the judgment of the people who were on the front lines. This is one of the hallmarks of good military leadership.

Looking at the research, what type of leadership works in the toughest situations?

Lincoln’s method: being democratic and listening.

Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:

During the early 1960s, the Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit (now the Naval Health Research Center) conducted a series of studies concerning leadership at small Antarctic stations. In that research program, Nelson (1962) found that esteemed leaders tended to possess a relatively democratic leadership orientation and a leadership style characterized by greater participation in activities than traditional for a military organization. Further, the esteemed leaders developed individual relationships with each of their crew members and reportedly sought the opinions of individual crew members about issues directly concerning them.

Leaders take note: research shows that not worrying about who gets the credit for an idea is key to influencing people.

And the greatest minds of history agree. As Lao Tzu said:

Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will all say “We did this ourselves.”

(Learn what type of leader you are here.)

4) Encourage innovation.

Lots of lip service is paid to encouraging innovation these days. What did Lincoln know about innovating?

Well, he’s the only U.S. President to ever patent something.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

Years before assuming the presidency, Lincoln had shown his interest in innovation when, on March 10, 1849 (at age forty), he received a patent for a new method of making grounded boats more buoyant.

What does it take to increase creativity and innovation in an organization? As I’ve said before, it’s pretty straightforward:

Reward people for trying new things and don’t punish them for failure.

Lincoln knew this.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

And even during his most difficult times, Lincoln continued to call on his subordinates to screen new advances, implement ideas, and win while learning. He realized that, as an executive leader, it was his chief responsibility to create the climate of risk-free entrepreneurship necessary to foster effective innovation.

(More on the single most proven way to innovate here.)

5) Influence people through storytelling.

By all accounts, Lincoln was a great storyteller and he actively leveraged this skill to win people over.

Lincoln himself said it plainly:

They say I tell a great many stories. I reckon I do; but I have learned from long experience that plain people, take them as they run, are more easily influenced through the medium of a broad and humorous illustration than in any other way…

And research from Stanford backs him up.

Facts and statistics are great but when people hear presentations what do they remember? The stories.

Via Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die:

When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.

If you’re a leader as Lincoln was, you need to know what studies show inspires team morale. And the answer is great stories:

“Institutions that can communicate a compelling historical narrative often inspire a special kind of commitment among employees. It is this dedication that directly affects a company’s success and is critical to creating a strong corporate legacy,” said author Adam Galinsky, Morris and Alice Kaplan professor of ethics and decision in management.

As I’ve posted many times, storytelling can improve almost every area of your life. Why is storytelling so powerful?

Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker has done research showing stories are key to our sense of meaning:

Some new studies suggest if we spend time thinking about stories in our lives, that might be a more effective way of figuring out what is meaningful versus not.

(More on how to tell great stories from a UCLA film school professor here.)

 Sum up

Leadership lessons you can learn from Lincoln:

1. Get Out Of The Office And Circulate Among The Troops
2. Persuade Rather Than Coerce
3. Lead By Being Led
4. Encourage Innovation
5. Influence People Through Storytelling

There’s a lot to learn from Lincoln.

And people didn’t just love Honest Abe because he was a wise leader; he also had a good sense of humor:

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

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Related posts:

• 10 Things The Greatest Leaders All Have In Common
• Lessons From The Samurai: The Secret To Always Being At Your Best
• 8 Things The World’s Most Successful People All Have In Common

The post Lessons From Lincoln: 5 Leadership Tips History And Science Agree On appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

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SEE ALSO: How An 11-Year-Old Convinced Abraham Lincoln To Grow A Beard

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We use it to describe how we're feeling, if we agree, or even just to start a sentence — the word "OK."

But what do these two letters really mean, and why do we use them so often?

One theory claims OK abbreviates "oll korrect," a bastardized spelling much like N.C. for "nuff ced" and K.Y. for "know yuse" in the 1830s. Think "ZOMG" or "LOLZ" today. And that's how OK first appeared in 1839 in The Boston Morning Post: as a joke, according to Alan Metcalf in his book, "The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word." The term celebrated its 175 anniversary on Sunday, March 23.

While he didn't coin the term "OK," eighth President Martin Van Buren popularized it. His supporters began referring to themselves as the "OK Club," OK being short for Old Kinderhook, Van Buren's nickname based on his birthplace: Kinderhook, N.Y. Some claim Van Buren started writing "OK" as his signature on official documents. 

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson, claiming the word came from Choctaw language, spelled it as "okeh," later ousted by the modern spelling "okay."Pete Seeger, the recently deceased political folk singer whose songs often told tales of language, also claimed "okay" originated with Choctaw.

Cyrus Byington's "Dictionary of the Choctaw Language" in 1915 gives the earliest evidence of that. As a Christian missionary working with the Choctaw in Mississippi, Byington cataloged the people's language extensively. According to him and even dictionaries published later, "okeh" meant "it is so and in no other way." 

So the choice comes down to a Native American etymology or an American one. And the word's origins could play into the spelling controversy.

Some style guides, such as the Associated Press, insist on the spelling "OK," but most accept "okay" as informal use.

SEE ALSO: Here's What All 50 State Names Actually Mean

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If you hate driving in your city, the following charts may help explain why.

Vizual Statstix's Seth Kadish has cooked up some really cool charts showing the grid orientation — or lack thereof — of major cities in the U.S. and western Europe.

Here's how he did it:

I first calculated the azimuth of every road in ten counties (plus one parish and D.C.). I tried to choose consolidated city-counties to keep the focus on urban centers, but for larger counties, I opted not to clip the shapefile to the city boundary. All calculations were made in a sinusoidal map projection using the central longitude of the area of interest. I then graphed the angles on rose diagrams (wind roses) using bins of 5° to show relative distributions for each area. The plots were scaled such that the maximum bar height was the same on each rose. To ensure rotational symmetry in the plots, each azimuth was counted twice: once using the original value and once using the opposite direction (e.g., 35° and 215°). As such, all streets, regardless of one-way or two-way traffic, were considered to be pointing in both directions. 

The results show basically what you'd think: Relatively newer cities for the most part tend to have been more planned out and are thus more grid-oriented. The streets of Boston, born in 1630, are notoriously haphazard. Washington, D.C., and Chicago — both planned communities born out of marshes — are elegantly uniform.

But there are some exceptions to the old-new rule. In its orientation around three different rivers, Pittsburgh spirals out in all directions. Los Angeles, meanwhile, is shockingly aligned.

It's  true — here's L.A. up close:

And here's Western Europe, where the cities are ancient. 

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Last week one of Business Insider's contributors, Bankers Anonymous, posted a neat picture of a Youngstown, Ohio, steelworker's tax return from the 1940s.

You guys loved it, and we loved it, and apparently Twitter also loved it because @topaperpour kindly tweeted us an even older tax form — one from the Midwest in 1911.

Check out the nostalgia below.

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Jeremiah Denton, a former Navy rear admiral and U.S. senator from Alabama who survived nearly eight years of captivity in Vietnamese prisons, has died aged 89.

In 1965, Denton was captured by North Vietnamese forces after his fighter jet crashed. He was then forced to appear in a propaganda video about his treatment and America's role in the conflict. 

But Denton got the best of his captors, blinking the word "torture" in Morse code as a signal to U.S. military intelligence that his comments were being made under duress.

When his captors learned what he'd done, he was brutally tortured. But for his courage and cunning, President Johnson awarded Denton the Navy Cross.

A YouTube user has uploaded the clip. 

Here's what he blinked:

T: –

O: – – –

R: · – ·

T: —

U: · · –

R: · – ·

E: · 

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A few months ago I published a history of how private English entrepreneurs were America's first settlers. But their businesses basically failed, and it took wealthy religious separatists to get English America off the ground. 

There was more to the story of America's entrepreneurial roots.

A couple of hundred miles south of New England, the Dutch West India Company — the sister firm of the world's first publicly traded private firm, the Dutch East India Company — had founded the colony of New Netherland.

The best, most recent history of the period, "The Island at the Center of the World" by Russell Shorto, was published in 2004. Here are 11 amazing things I learned.

************

Captain Henry Hudson was a Dutch agent whose crew hated him.

Hudson had been fired from the English Muscovy Company for failing to find a Northwest Passage to Asia. It was a chance meeting with a representative of what would become the Dutch West India Company that changed his life. He was recruited to continue his search; this time he navigated his way down what he called (and what is still called by some) the North River. 

Hudson would ultimately come to meet a grisly fate, as he refused to give up on his quest for a Northwest Passage. His freezing crew marooned him and his son in modern Hudson Bay.

Most of the earliest settlers of New Amsterdam were Belgian.

If you look at contemporary maps, you'll see the area was labeled New Belgium. That's, in part, because the earliest Dutch settlers, including the Dutch West India Company's third governor, Peter Minuit, were largely of Walloon extraction. 

Yes, Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24.

Minuit was the Dutch West India Company's third New Netherland governor. He purchased Manhattan from a local Lenape Indian tribe for the modern-day equivalent of about $700. Shorto says the Indians were not swindled but rather expected the Dutch to enter into a military and economic alliance with them. For several years, at least, that was largely true.

New York's first city hall was in a tavern. 

It was at the corner of Pearl Street and Coenties Slip downtown. It was long ago torn down, but there's a historical marker there. Here's what it looked like:

There used to be a wall on Wall Street.

It was built by slaves in 1653 to keep out the English. Here's a pic:

The main export from New Amsterdam: beavers.

Eighty-thousand beaver pelts per year passed through Manhattan. "Traders in New Amsterdam, with their ties to the world's greatest trading power, were among the most sophisticated on earth," Shorto says.  

Peter Stuyvesant was basically Captain Ahab.

New York's longest-serving governor had lost a leg to cannon shot fighting the Spanish near South America. He'd previously been in charge of Curacao when The Company promoted him to run New Netherland. He ultimately comes off as a sympathetic figure, though his citizens started a quasi-uprising against him. But he loved New Amsterdam and had to be haggled by his own citizens into surrendering to the English. Here's a famous painting of the act:

New Yorkers and local tribes got along great, until a stupid governor massacred surrounding Indians.

New Amsterdam was dealt a severe setback when governor William Kieft decided to take revenge for the murder of one of his citizens by massacring an entire Indian settlement in New Jersey. That basically put all the surrounding tribes on a permanent war footing with New Amsterdam's leaders.  

The hero of New Amsterdam ended up imprisoned by Dutch authorities and was massacred in his home by Indians.

Adriaen van der Donck was a lawyer by training and was called "The Jonkheer" by his fellow citizens as a sign of respect, and this is where we get the town Yonkers. Van der Donck sailed to Amsterdam to try to fight for New Amsterdam's freedom from the Dutch West India Company, and for his efforts was temporarily imprisoned by Dutch authorities. He was released but banned from serving office for life. Soon after moving back, he was massacred at his home on the site of the modern Van Cortlandt Park.

By the end, New Yorkers didn't care whether they were ruled by the Dutch or the English.

Shorto makes the case that New Amsterdamers were the first to have a true sense of their American identity and that this fueled Van der Donck's mission.

And the Dutch were already on the wane anyway.

The British navy was in its ascendancy, and the Dutch had provoked its ire by massacring English colonists in far-off (modern) New Guinea. This helped lead to two wars. And England's ambassador to the Netherlands, George Downing, was probably the most important diplomat of all time, having negotiated the Dutch out of several key American colonies as well as launching the slave trade. The Dutch West India Company went belly up. 

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Skeletons dug up by Crossrail, a massive railway project in London, are giving scientists a more detailed look at the bubonic plague, or Black Death, that swept through Europe in the 1300s.

Studies of the bones suggest that the bubonic plague was pneumonic, spreading through sneezes and coughs rather than by bites from rat fleas. The bones also suggest that the people of this time were extremely malnourished, which may have made fighting infection more difficult. The graveyard where the skeletons were found was used to bury plague victims for at least 100 years, scientists say. The team reported these and other findings March 30.

SEE ALSO: How Much Should People Worry About The 'Unprecedented' Ebola Outbreak In Guinea?

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The first non-insect animal to evolve powered flight wasn't the bird, but a fuzzy reptile called the pterosaur. These animals ruled Mesozoic skies for 150 million years, soaring above the dinosaurs. Now, they're coming to New York.

The American Museum of Natural History is launching its Pterosaurs: Flight In The Age Of Dinosaurs exhibit on April 5. We got a preview of the exhibit before it opens and here's what we learned about these strange animals.

Pterosaurs are a group of flying reptiles made up of at least 150 species. They varied immensely in size and appearance, as shown in the GIF below. Pterosaurs were anywhere from the size of a bird to the size of a small plane. Some were even as pink as a flamingo.

They went mysteriously extinct with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, but their closest living relative, the crocodile, still remains.

When the first pterosaurs appeared 220 million years ago, they were seagull-sized. In the GIF below, you can see they had long tails, small heads, and short limbs. As time went on, larger species started appearing. The later pterosaurs had longer heads and necks, shorter tails, and longer limbs from standing on the ground. You can see these in the GIF below.

Some pterosaurs even developed elaborate head crests, like Thalassodromeus sethi, seen below. This pterosaur had the largest head crest of any known vertebrate and a 14 foot wingspan. Sethi lived in modern day Brazil.The skull of Nyctosaurus, seen below, had two giant prongs jutting from its head. These prongs were nearly as long as its entire body and were three times as long as its head.

Scientists debate whether the two bones were connected by a soft tissue or remained bare like antlers.One Pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, is the largest known flying animal. This species, shown in the GIF below, lived in current day western Texas. Northropi had an over 30-foot wingspan and was named after the Mexican god of air, Quetzalcoatl.

The Pterosaur exhibit displays a lifesize version of northropi hanging in the "Flight Lab" section of the exhibit.

In order to coax their big bodies into flight, these creatures evolved adaptations like hollow bones and an elongated fourth finger to support a wing. Some developed rudder-like tail fins. Flying likely allowed the creature to increase its range for food and mate selection.

The museum also features a "Fly Like A Pterosaur Exhibit" which uses motion sensors to let visitors control a pterosaur avatar.When pterosaurs weren't airborn, they walked on the ground on all fours, like the little guy below. Fossilized tracks, on exhibit in the museum, helped paleontologists reconstruct how these creatures walked. Check out the American Museum of Natural History's Pterosaur: Flight In The Age Of Dinosaurs exhibit opening April 5

*All visuals and information courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

SEE ALSO: Weird 'Chicken From Hell' Dinosaur Lived Alongside The T. Rex

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In 1995, Disney introduced children everywhere to a Native American princess married 400 years ago today — Pocahontas. 

The plot goes that Pocahontas, the beautiful daughter of Chief Powhatan, saves English adventurer John Smith from execution when British relations with the "savages" in the New World turned sour. Pocahontas even starts a romance with Smith — who treats the natives far more kindly than does his superior, John Rolfe — and she and Smith sail away to Britain together at the end of the film.

History, however, tells a different and darker tale.

To start, Pocahontas was just a nickname, meaning "the naughty one" or "spoiled child." Matoaka, as the Powhatan Nation's website calls her, was taken prisoner at age 17 while on a social visit to the Jamestown colonists. They held her hostage there for more than a year. 

Matoaka had met Smith before her captivity, but sparks didn't fly between them. Actually, Rolfe — the most vile character in Disney's version — showed special interest in Matoaka. As a condition of her release, she agreed to marry him. On April 5, 1614, Matoaka became Rebecca Rolfe, and she soon had a son named Thomas. In 1616, the family, nicknamed the "Red Rolfes," returned to England, where she was something of a celebrity.

When Matoaka and Rolfe tried to return to Virginia in 1617, she, for whatever reason, left the ship at Gravesend in England. That same year, she died there at age 21. 

"It is unfortunate that this sad story, which Euro-Americans should find embarrassing, Disney makes 'entertainment' and perpetuates a dishonest and self-serving myth at the expense of the Powhatan Nation," Chief Roy Crazy Horse writes.

On top of that, controversy also arises about whether or not Matoaka saved John Smith. 

When Smith first wrote about his experiences with the Powhatan people (in two letters in 1607 and 1612), he characterized his time there as rather nice and never mentioned Matoaka saving his life.

But in his book, "General Historie of Virginia," published in 1624, Smith mentioned that Powhatan had tried to stone him to death, but Matoaka threw herself in the way to save him:

[T]wo great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne vpon his to saue him from death.

Skeptics find it odd that Smith wouldn't write about the occurrence until 17 years later and after Matoaka's death, when Europe started to take notice of her story. Indeed, the prevailing viewpoint is that Matoaka's self-sacrifice never happened.

Research from J.A. Leo Lemay, an English professor at the University of Delaware, however, makes the opposite case. As one of the first to fully analyze all the historical evidence, he found we have little reason to consider Smith's later writing as untruthful. Some scholars might have even had political motivations for poking holes in his claims. On top of that, similar occurrences in other Native American tribes suggest that the attempted execution was a ritual to allow outside members into tribes.

But other accounts show the Matoaka and Smith didn't have the special relationship Smith claimed. According to the Powhatan Nation, Matoaka disliked Smith, and when she saw him in London, she refused to speak to him and called him a liar.

The debate continues about whether "Pocahontas" truly saved John Smith, but we do know she never married him, as the film implies. She instead spent her short life, which ended in tragedy, with John Rolfe — the man Disney made the villain. 

SEE ALSO: 14 Historical "Facts" That Are Completely False

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When 21-year-old Erik Fritz Unneland opened an old box in his parents’ living room, he had no idea what was inside.

"It was in a glass table in our living room in Norway, I just never bothered to open the box," Unneland told Business Insider. "I did not know it was a shaving kit."The wooden box contained his Norwegian grandfather’s old shaving kit from the 1940s, complete with backup blades, antique Gillette razors, a shaving brush, compact mirror, and more.

But the coolest part of the discovery was a mechanism that sharpened razor blades so you didn’t have to buy new ones. Unneland and his father opened it up to see how it worked:

Pulling the string makes the gears move.

Here's how it looks from the back.

When a razor blade is placed on the device, the metal rubs against the interior, sharpening the blade.

It could then be popped back into the razor.

It should make us all feel fortunate that cheap packs of fresh razors are at every supermarket instead of having to reuse the same blade over and over again.

Check out more pictures of the shaving kit at Unneland’s Imgur page.

VIDEO: Our Editor Threw Caution To The Winds And Got A Straight-Razor Shave...

SEE ALSO: The 16 Best Barbershops In America

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Graphic designer Paul Sahner has been taking pictures of New York's streets since he moved to the city nine years ago. He loves the feeling of capturing an ever-shifting urban landscape for posterity on his blog NYC Grid.

Inspired by the changing shops and street corners he saw while walking around, Sahner started a before-and after-series on NYC Grid. The photographer would match his own photos of New York City with old pictures from the Library of Congress or Flickr to showcase the transformation of the city's landmarks and streets.

"I don't share the hopeless sense of loss that many other NY bloggers and writers express,"Sahner writes. "I don't dislike modern architecture, I don't fear gentrification, I enjoy change and relish new ideas. But I do feel there's something special about the time we're experiencing here. Once this time, this moment, has passed it will never return."

Over at NYC Grid, readers can use a toggle function to compare the old and new photos interactively. We've presented them here back-to-back in slideshow format so you can get the full effect of each image.

1900: Mott Street has been the center of New York's Chinatown for more than 100 years.

2013: Even today, the buildings remain largely unchanged, with the exception of modern conveniences and signs.

1907: Bowling Green is the oldest public park in NYC, built in 1733.

It's the kind of story you'd think could only be found in books; a message in a bottle returns home after a century of floating out at sea.

But last month, a fisherman pulled the beer bottle out of the Baltic sea near the city of Kiel. Inside, a postcard, dated 1913 by a man named Richard Platz, complete with two German stamps and one simple request. He asked the finder to send it on to his address in Berlin when found. 

He returned it to the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, who was able to track down 62-year-old Angela Erdmann, Platz's granddaughter.

Erdmann visited the museum on April 7 and was able to hold the brown bottle once held by her believed maternal grandfather.

“It was almost unbelievable,” Erdmann told the German news agency DPA.

Experts will try deciphering the rest of the message, which was hard to read due to time and water damage.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, this drift bottle will bypass the original record holder that was found in the United Kingdom after spending nearly 98 years at sea.

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Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I've seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon's final defeat in Belgium on June 18, 1815, the faraway Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the site of the most devastating volcanic eruption on Earth in thousands of years.

The death toll claimed around 100,000 people, from the thick pyroclastic flows of lava, from the tsunami that struck nearby coasts, and from the thick ash that blanketed South-East Asia's farmlands, destroyed crops and plunged it into darkness for a week. Both events — Napoleon's defeat and the eruption — had monumental impacts on human history. But while a library of scholarship has been devoted to Napoleon's undoing at Waterloo, the scattered writings on Tambora would scarcely fill your in-tray.

This extraordinary geological event took place 199 years ago this week, and on the cusp of its bicentenary Tambora is finally getting its due. With the help of modern scientific instruments and old-fashioned archival detective work, the Tambora 1815 eruption can be conclusively placed among the greatest environmental disasters ever to befall mankind. The floods, droughts, starvation, and disease in the three years following the eruption stem from the volcano's effects on weather systems, so Tambora stands today as a harrowing case study of what the human costs and global reach might be from runaway climate change.

Tambora's greatest claim to infamy lies not in the impact it had on what was then the Dutch East Indies (which were terrible enough), but its indirect effects on the disease ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The enormous cloud of sulfate gases Tambora ejected into the atmosphere slowed the development of the Indian monsoon, the world's largest weather system, for the following two years.

Drought brought on by the eruption devastated crop yields across the Indian sub-continent, but more disastrously gave rise to a new and deadly strain of cholera. Cholera had always been endemic to Bengal, but the bizarre weather of 1816-17 triggered by Tambora's eruption — first drought, then late, unseasonal flooding — altered the microbial ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The cholera bacterium, which has an unusually adaptive genetic structure highly sensitive to changes in its aquatic environment, mutated into a new strain. This met with no resistance among the local population, and it spread across Asia and eventually the globe. By century's end, the death toll from Bengal cholera stood in the tens of millions.

Just as the biological disaster known as the Black Death defined the 14th century in Europe and the Near East, so cholera shaped the nineteenth century like no other calamity. Much of our medical science, and our modern public health institutions, originate in the Victorian-era battle against cholera. But only now, thanks to renewed scientific interest in the relation between cholera and climate change, can we make the connection between the worldwide cholera epidemic originating in 1817 and Tambora's eruption thousands of miles away.

Tambora's ripple effects were felt across the globe. In southwest China, the outlying mountainous province of Yunnan suffered terribly from the cold volcanic weather, losing crop after crop of rice to bitter winds and flooding rains. The situation was so extreme that desperate Yunnanese resorted to eating white clay, while parents sold their children in the town markets, or killed them out of mercy.

In the aftermath of this three-year famine, Yunnan farmers turned to a more reliable cash crop — opium — to ensure their families' survival against future disasters. Within a few decades, opium was being grown all across Yunnan, while opium processing technology and expertise drifted south into the remote mountains of modern-day Burma and Laos. The "golden triangle" of international opium production was born.

If the Tambora disaster persists in cultural memory at all, it is as the "Year Without a Summer," 1816, the most notorious and best chronicled extreme weather event of that century. Snowstorms swept the east coast in June, ensuring the shortest growing season on record. Crowds of desperate and hungry rural folk from Maine and Vermont fled snowfalls of up to 18 inches to the western frontier, which had been spared the worst of Tambora's weather.

Here grain harvests were fetching sky-high prices on the famine-struck Atlantic market, but after the boom came a shattering bust — the so-called Panic of 1819— which triggered the first sustained economic depression in US history. East coast speculators had invested hugely in western agriculture post-1816, only to lose their shirts when the similarly-affected European grain markets returned to normal in 1819, and commodity prices plummeted. "Never were such hard times," wrote Thomas Jefferson of ordinary Americans who, across the country, found themselves "in a condition of unparalleled distress," persisting well into the 1820s.

As it turns out, however, the indirect ripple effects of Tambora — what climate scientists call "teleconnections"— were even more historically significant. Cholera, opium, and the Panic of 1819 are three examples; another is Arctic exploration.

One of the paradoxical effects of a major tropical eruption is that while the planet in general is cooled by the blanket of volcanic dust that drifts from the equator to the poles, the Arctic itself is drastically warmed owing to changes in wind circulation and north Atlantic ocean currents. This anomaly was only discovered after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the tropical Philippines, the first observed with the benefit of modern climatological instruments.

In 1817 and 1818, the British Admiralty began to receive exciting reports from whaling captains of a remarkable loss of sea ice in around Greenland. Huge icebergs from a broken icepack were spotted floating as far south as Ireland and New York. The prospect of a northwest passage for shipping to the East — a holy grail England had sought since Elizabethan times — beckoned once more. With a generation's naval captains still hungry for glory but now languishing onshore after the defeat of Napoleon, the Admiralty launched an expensive and ultimately disastrous 50-year-long campaign to chart the elusive northwest passage.

The British could not have known then, of course, that Tambora had caused the Arctic to melt, and that the climatic impacts of a tropical eruption persist for no longer than three years. The Arctic refroze just in time for the arrival of Britain's first polar expedition under Captain John Ross in 1818. Years of fruitless, icebound sallies into the polar seas culminated in the tragic Franklin expedition of the 1840s, when all hands were lost, and the heroic age of British Arctic exploration came to an end.

It is time to recognise Tambora as the Napoleon of eruptions. The implications — for historians — of a revised, volcanic nineteenth century are immense. As with the global cholera epidemic, and the growth of a Chinese opium empire, Victorian-era polar exploration might not have happened at all, or would have evolved in an entirely different direction, had it not been for Tambora's climate-wrecking detonation in 1815.

For two long centuries, the connections between this major volcanic disaster and human history have been obscured by two factors: the limitations of scientific knowledge, and by our narrow, anthropocentric vision that seeks out only human causes for human events, neglecting the influence of environmental change. Now, in the 21st century, as we begin to appreciate more profoundly the interdependence of human and natural systems, the lesson of a 200-year-old climate emergency may finally be learned: a changing climate changes everything.

Gillen D'Arcy Wood, a professor of English, is the author of "Tambora: the Eruption that Changed the World" (Princeton University Press).

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

SEE ALSO: The Moon Is Going To Turn Red Next Week

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Hyperinflationary episodes have appeared several times over the past century — 55, to be exact— as the world's nations have experimented with fiat currencies backed by the full faith and credit of the governments that issue them.

At times, that full faith and credit has been misplaced — and holders of unstable currencies have been caught empty-handed in countries all over the world.

Often, this is can be a recurring theme among developing nations like those in Latin America during the debt crisis that struck the region in the 1980s.

Even some of the largest economies in the world today, though — like China, Germany, and France — have suffered devastating hyperinflationary episodes.

A major historical precursor of hyperinflation is war that destroys the capital stock of an economy and dramatically reduces output — but the misplaced monetary and fiscal policies that ensue are almost always part of the story.

Economists Steve Hanke and Nicholas Krus compiled data on all 56 recorded hyperinflations in a 2012 study. We summarize 9 of the worst episodes here.

Hungary: August 1945 - July 1946

Daily inflation rate: 207 percent

Prices doubled every: 15 hours

Story: Hungary was economically devastated by WWII. Owing to its unfortunate status as a warzone, estimates indicate 40 percent of Hungary's capital stock was destroyed in the conflict. Before this, it had engaged in a wild, debt-fueled ramp up in production to support the German war effort, but Germany never paid for the goods.

When Hungary signed a peace treaty with the Allies in 1945, it was ordered to pay the Soviets massive reparations, which accounted for 25-50 percent of Hungary's budget during its hyperinflationary episode. Meanwhile, the country's monetary policy was essentially co-opted by the Allied Control Commission.

Hungarian central bankers warned that printing money to pay the bills would not end well, but "the Soviets, who dominated the Commission, turned a deaf ear to these warnings, which led some to conclude that the hyperinflation was designed to achieve a political objective–the destruction of the middle class" (Bomberger and Makinen 1983).

Sources: Hanke and Crus (2012), Bomberger and Makinen (1983)

Zimbabwe: March 2007 - November 2008

Daily inflation rate: 98 percent

Prices doubled every: 25 hours

Story: Zimbabwe's hyperinflation was preceded by a long, grinding decline in economic output that followed Robert Mugabe's land reforms of 2000-2001, through which land was expropriated largely from white farmers and redistributed to the majority black populace. This led to a 50 percent collapse in output over the next nine years.

Socialist reforms and a costly involvement in Congo's civil war led to outsized government budget deficits. At the same time, the Zimbabwean population was declining as people fled the country. These two opposing factors of increased government spending and a decreasing tax base caused the government to resort to monetization of its fiscal deficit.

Sources: Hanke and Crus (2012), Koech (2011)

Yugoslavia/Republika Srpska: April 1992 - January 1994

Daily inflation rate: 65 percent

Prices doubled every: 34 hours

Story: The fall of the Soviet Union led to a decreased international role for Yugoslavia –formerly a key geopolitical player connecting East and West – and its ruling Communist party eventually came under the same pressure as the Soviets did. This led to a breakup of Yugoslavia into several countries along ethnic lines and subsequent wars over the following years as the newly-formed political entities sorted out their independence.

In the process, trade among regions of the former Yugoslavia collapsed, and industrial output followed. At the same time, an international embargo was placed on Yugoslavian exports, which further crushed output. 

Petrovic, Bogetic, and Vujosevic (1998) explain that the newly-formed Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in contrast with other states that broke away like Serbia and Croatia, retained much of the bloated bureaucracy that existed before the split, contributing to the federal deficit. In an attempt to monetize this and other deficits, the central bank lost control of money creation and caused hyperinflation.

Sources: Hanke and Crus (2012), Petrovic, Bogetic, and Vujosevic (1998)

Most people know that the costs of healthcare in the United States are high. But an infographic from The Advisory Board Company illustrates that it hasn't always been this way.

Take a look at how sharply costs have risen since 1960 (this is in 2012 dollars).

The first graph shows how much the government spends per person (topping out at $8,402 per person in 2010).

The second shows the total spending — $2.593 billion (or 17.9 % of the GDP) in 2010:

Per-capita spending on healthcare was 57 times higher in 2010 than in 1960, when — it bears noting — Medicare did not even exist.

It's too soon to say what the longterm cost effects of the Affordable Care Act will be, and these charts reflect pre-ACA realities. But the unsustainable increase in healthcare spending was one of the primary motivations behind reform.

SEE ALSO: American Families Are Being Crushed By Medical Debt

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Is the constant smoking and drinking in Mad Men exaggerated? Maybe not.

In those halcyon days before we knew cigarettes could really kill us, a staggering percentage of Americans smoked openly and often. They also drank a lot.

The infographic above, from The Advisory Board Company, clearly shows how the number of smokers has dropped precipitously— from 42% of Americans in 1965 to just 21% of Americans in 2005 — while our drinking habits have largely held steady.

With the exception of one especially hard-drinking decade (1975-1985), Americans have consumed about 8.4 liters of pure alcohol per year per person (that's actually ticked up somewhat recently, to 8.8 liters in 2008). That would be equivalent to about nine shots of vodka a week. "Excessive drinking" is generally defined as 15+ drinks a week for men or 8+ drinks a week for women.

Smoking is still the number one underlying cause of death in the United States, and alcohol is number four.

MORE ON OUR DRINKING HABITS: Doctors Are Ignoring America's Drinking Problem And It's Costing Us Billions

SEE ALSO: Three Charts Show How Healthcare Costs Have Exploded Since 1960

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The Conversable Economist, aka Timothy Taylor, has a new post discussing how long it takes for the gains from new technologies to be fully realized. He asks:

Has the U.S. economy already seen most of the economic growth that will result from the innovations in information and communication technology, including the web, the cloud, robotics, and so on? Or is the U.S. economy perhaps only a fraction of the way — perhaps even less than halfway — through its adaptation to the potential for productivity gains from these technologies, and thus has stronger prospects for future growth?

Taylor says a new article from two University of Wisconsin economists concludes that it can take at least 30 years for a new technology to go from 10% to 90% of the potential market. As an example, he shows how long it took tractors to overtake horses and mules on U.S. farms between 1910 and 1960. Here's why it took so long:

During much of this time, the quality of tractors was continually improving, and also during the earlier part of this time period (like the Great Depression) wages for farm workers were not rising by much. Thus, it made some sense for a number of farmers to avoid buying the early generations of tractors. Let someone else work out the kinks! But as the quality of tractors improved and wages of farmworkers rose, investing in a tractor began to look like a better and better deal.

It took a similarly long time for electrification to kick in, despite its obvious benefits, he writes:

For US households, it took time — really up into the 1920s — until they had both a source of electricity and also a supply of new household appliances like the vacuum cleaner, radio, washing machines, dishwasher, and all the changes of lifestyle that came with reliable indoor electric light.

The lesson: "We may be only a moderate portion of the way through the social gains from the information and communications technology revolution," Taylor concludes.

Read the full post here »

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