Lists and Stories

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  What Makes HBCUs Unique? Say HBCU and many people think of the Bayou Classic, the often nationally televised football matchup between the Southern University Jaguars and the Grambling State University Tigers. Some fans would say that what is more important than the play of the football teams is the performance of the...
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  What Purposes Do Mosquitoes Serve in Ecosystems? All of us have experienced this: It’s nighttime, and we’re drifting off to sleep when we think we hear something close by. The sound gets louder, and we know what it is now—the high-pitched hum of a tiny invader’s rapid machinelike wingbeats cutting through the darkness and spiraling toward us. It...
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  What State Is Washington, D.C. In? Washington, D.C. is a territory and not a state, nor is it part of any U.S. state. It is surrounded by the state of Maryland on the northwest, northeast, and southeast and bordered by the state of Virginia, across the Potomac River, on the west and southwest. Companion, washington dc, geography,...
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  What the Stanford Prison Experiment Taught Us In August of 1971, Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford University in California conducted what is widely considered one of the most influential experiments in social psychology to date. Made into a New York Times best seller in 2007 (The Lucifer Effect) and a major motion picture in 2015 (The...
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  What was Alfred like as a governor of his kingdom? As king of Wessex, Alfred administered his kingdom very efficiently, organizing his finances and precisely measuring services and payments due from tenants of his burghs. The burghs that he had erected and fortified as a defense against Danish attacks were divided into hides, a form of land...
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  What Was Dr. Dre’s Role in Creating the Subgenre of G-Funk? If gangsta rap was the prevailing subgenre of hip-hop from the late 1980s into the 1990s, “G-funk” (“G” as in “Gangsta”) was its even more uniquely West Coast offspring. The G-funk production style has been considered a sub-subgenre of hip-hop. Characterized most distinctly by the sampling of 1970s...
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  What Was Frederick Douglass’s Position on Women’s Rights? In the aftermath of the American Civil War and at the beginnings of the Reconstruction period, communities of abolitionists readily took up the cause of universal suffrage and called for enfranchisement irrespective of race or gender. Frederick Douglass was one such prominent abolitionist and...
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  What was Hadrian’s architectural legacy? Although the emperor Hadrian spent little time in Rome itself, he left his mark on the imperial capital in the form of art and architecture. Arguably his most famous achievement was the Pantheon, which he likely completed by 125 CE. It is made of brick and concrete and once displayed a marble...
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  What was Hadrian’s relationship with his Jewish subjects? Rome’s relationship with the Jewish population of the Roman Empire had been strained since the destruction of Jerusalem in the 1st century CE, and Hadrian’s focus on Romanizing the province of Judaea greatly exacerbated tensions. He aimed to transform Jerusalem into a Roman metropolis, and in 132...
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  What Was Life Like Before We Knew About Germs? “It was the summer of 1880. It was August. It stank to high heaven. The sewers had been uncorked, and all the filth came out in a flood. All manner of waste was on display.” So reads an article in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro. Purporting to be written by novelist and critic Émile Zola...
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  What Was Life Like in Japanese American Internment Camps? After the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese aircraft on December 7, 1941, the U.S. War Department suspected that Japanese Americans might act as saboteurs or espionage agents, despite a lack of hard evidence to support that view. Out of this fear, on February 19, 1942, U.S. President Franklin D....
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  What Was the First Book Ever Written? The earliest surviving written literature is from ancient Mesopotamia. The Epic of Gilgamesh is often cited as the first great composition, although some shorter compositions have survived that are even earlier (notably the “Kesh Temple Hymn” and “The Instructions of Shuruppak”). Apart from its...
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  What was the importance of literacy and learning to Alfred’s rule? Alfred’s avid dedication to learning defined the years of his reign as king of Wessex following his victory at Edington in 878, after which he sought to improve his own knowledge and promote educational reform in his kingdom. Although he had displayed a desire for learning in his youth, he was...
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  What Was the Little Ice Age? When most people think of ice ages, or “glacial ages,” they often envision cavemen, woolly mammoths, and vast plains of ice—such as those that occurred during the Pleistocene (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) or the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods (about 300 million years ago)....
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  What Was the Science Behind Medical Bloodletting? “The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile,” begins a text attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. Regarded as the father of modern medicine, he is often the subject of legend rather than fact; of the near-60 medical writings that bear his name, it is...
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  What Was the Super Bowl’s First Blockbuster Commercial? It’s 1984. More than 77 million Americans—nearly one-third of the country—are tuned in to their televisions to watch Super Bowl XVIII. The Los Angeles Raiders are down 9 to 28 in the third quarter against the Washington Redskins when the teams pause for a commercial break. Suddenly, a brass...
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  What was Ulysses S. Grant’s policy regarding Reconstruction? U.S. Pres. Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant’s predecessor, was a hard-line Southern Democrat who handled Reconstruction in the South with leniency. As a result, Southern state and local governments quickly passed a series of black codes that ensured the sociopolitical hegemony of white planters...
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  What was Ulysses S. Grant’s relationship with the Lakota Indians? Ulysses S. Grant became president of the United States less than a year after the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie created, in 1868, what would be an undisturbed reservation for the Lakota Indians in western modern-day South Dakota. Many Lakota moved, but some chiefs chose to live on unceded land. The...
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  What were Alfred’s military achievements? Much of Alfred’s reign as king of Wessex was consumed with defending his kingdom against Danish invaders. By the time he was king, Danish armies had overrun the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia, and most of Mercia, gaining political power in those regions and establishing...
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  What Were Contraband Camps? For upward of 500,000 enslaved people, the path to freedom during the American Civil War (1861–65) involved a contraband camp. These enclaves were established by people who fled from enslavement to Union-controlled territory. Although some Union officials initially sent them back to the...