David Tollen, Author at Pints of History

Dracula’s Dungeon Found?

by David Tollen | Oct 30, 2014 | The Early Modern Age

Cool: CNN video.

We Evolved to Eat Vegetables and Meat, Not Grains and Dairy

by David Tollen | Oct 29, 2014 | Human Origins & the Paleolithic

MyPlate is a graphic from the USDA that advises Americans how to eat. But I think it’s based on bad history (and bad biology too). It tells us to get almost half of our calories from grains and dairy. Yet through almost all of our history (or prehistory), we fed...

Did Hobbits Live among Us Recently?

by David Tollen | Oct 27, 2014 | Human Origins & the Paleolithic, The Recent Modern Age, Linguistics & Philology

The Indonesian island of Flores and its neighbors host two unusual languages, called Ke’o and Ngadha. They have extremely simple grammar — surprising for Austronesian languages, which generally have complex grammar. Languages often simplify when they share...

Britain Does Something Noble

by David Tollen | Oct 25, 2014 | The Recent Modern Age

In 1807, the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade. Then the government did something truly unusual—possibly with no precedent. It spent military resources solely for the sake of other people. The Royal Navy assigned a squadron to patrol the coast of West...

Why the U.S. Has No Name

by David Tollen | Oct 23, 2014 | The Recent Modern Age

Today, the United States is a country, a nation, and we tend to think it has been since its birth. But in 1776, and for ninety years after that, Americans could debate whether the U.S. was a country or a complex alliance of many countries, like today’s European...

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