Have a drink with: Your Local Mountebank Healthcare! Fireworks! Toads! Ask him about: What ails you We’re all getting a lot of weird healthcare advice lately, and I admit that it’s hard to stomach the idea that our country, which vanquished polio and smallpox with scientific elbow grease, is entertaining the medical expertise of a…
Have a drink with: Oliver Cromwell He’ll never be the head of a major corporation. Ask him about: Karaoke hour? In the last weeks of 1962, if you dug between the photos of miniature poodles and Christmas advertising in your local paper, you may well have read about the solution to a historical mystery: the…
Have a drink with: New Haven Puritans Judge swung his fist down, plunk plunk… Ask them about: Anything but Quakers. It’s election season, which means we are faced with ample opportunity to confront our worst tendencies and unresolved problems as a society, along with the inevitable call to harken back to a better, simpler, more moral…
Have a drink of: Nice Cold 17th Century Beer Less filling; tastes great. Ask your friends: to buy you a round. In 1662 Charles II gave his charter to the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (the “Royal Society,” for short). A hybrid of a gentleman’s club, an entrepreneurial incubator, a maker faire…
Have a drink with: Captain William Kidd Privateer, man of song and legend, unwitting pirate? Ask him about: the tabloid trial of the (18th) century! William Kidd, a merchant captain and commissioned privateer, was tried and executed in 1701 for throwing away the king’s commission to turn pirate in the Indian Ocean. Not 25 years…
