The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “history”

How Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage Invented the World’s First Computer: An Illustrated Adventure in Footnotes and Friendship
How Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage Invented the World’s First Computer: An Illustrated Adventure in Footnotes and Friendship

The story of how an improbable pair forever changed our horizons of the possible.

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Love, Forgiveness, the Pride of the Protest, and What Makes a Compelling Heroine: Dostoyevsky’s Beautiful Eulogy for George Sand
Love, Forgiveness, the Pride of the Protest, and What Makes a Compelling Heroine: Dostoyevsky’s Beautiful Eulogy for George Sand

A warm celebration of the art of crafting “characters of the most sincere forgiveness and love.”

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The Boy Who Loved Math: The Illustrated Story of Eccentric Genius and Lovable Oddball Paul Erdős
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Illustrated Story of Eccentric Genius and Lovable Oddball Paul Erdős

How a prodigy of primes became the Magician from Budapest before he learned how to butter his own bread.

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How to Change Minds: Blaise Pascal on the Art of Persuasion
How to Change Minds: Blaise Pascal on the Art of Persuasion

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”

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A Lovely Illustrated Children’s Book Celebrating Trailblazing Jazz Pianist and Composer Mary Lou Williams
A Lovely Illustrated Children’s Book Celebrating Trailblazing Jazz Pianist and Composer Mary Lou Williams

How an extraordinary woman transformed bullying into beautiful music and came to lift the spirits of millions.

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Saul Bellow’s Spectacular Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on How Art and Literature Ennoble the Human Spirit
Saul Bellow’s Spectacular Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on How Art and Literature Ennoble the Human Spirit

“Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

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I, Pencil: A Brilliant Vintage Allegory of How Everything Is Connected
I, Pencil: A Brilliant Vintage Allegory of How Everything Is Connected

“If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.”

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Gorgeous 19th-Century Illustrations of Owls and Ospreys
Gorgeous 19th-Century Illustrations of Owls and Ospreys

The science of the familiar “owl-face” and the art of its varied permutations.

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Charlotte Brontë on Faith and Atheism
Charlotte Brontë on Faith and Atheism

A specimen from the fossil record of Truth and Reason.

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Einstein, Gödel, and Our Strange Experience of Time: Rebecca Goldstein on How Relativity Rattled the Flow of Existence
Einstein, Gödel, and Our Strange Experience of Time: Rebecca Goldstein on How Relativity Rattled the Flow of Existence

“Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?”

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