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Movies often pit dark-robed, masked ninjas against elite samurai warriors. HowStuffWorks looks at how accurate that take is on these two fighters.

Tortured by their relentless work ethic, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary define an amusement as an idle, time-wasting diversion or entertainment. When the term was applied to the practice of trick photography in the late nineteenth century, the trend’s supporters were quick to point out that “photographic amusements” were not just entertaining but also educational. Making a photograph of a ghost or creating a self-portrait inside a glass bottle taught novices about accidental double exposures. Photographers learned the medium by pushing it to its limits. Despite its educat...

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 Sketch of conductor, attributed to Alfred Edward Chalon, 1840. Art Institute of Chicago, Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection. In 1557 the legal printer Richard Tottel published an auspicious volume of English poetry: Songes and Sonettes written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, or as Thomas Warton, who wrote the first modern literary history in the late eighteenth century, called it, “the first printed miscellany of English poetry.” According to Warton, Tottel salvaged “many admirable specimens of antient genius” ...

In 1524 Pope Clement VII ordered a test of an antidote oil created by surgeon Gregorio Caravita. A test subject took a dose of poison in front of a small crowd of invited personages. In both of the antidote’s two trials, apothecaries provided the poison—a good quantity of a deadly aconite called napellus in the first test, arsenic in the second. Although a pharmacist was present, the papal physician, Paolo Giovio, oversaw the trial. Pope Clement commanded that the antidote be tried on “condemned bodies, faithfully and diligently, for the benefit of the public.” The use of condemned cr...

Woman Reading a Letter, by Johannes Vermeer, c. 1663. Rijksmuseum. Italians lived in some of the most medically sophisticated cities and states in early modern Europe, and were remarkably health literate. Abortion was a feature of the medical landscape. Healers at all levels of the medical establishment provided women and men with materials and services to terminate pregnancies and with health care afterward. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was becoming more contentious. Some theologians and moralists labeled practitioners who participated in abortions sinners and murdere...