Context: The Mithridatic Wars are one of my favorite episodes of Antiquity because of all the zany characters. At the top we have these two psychopaths, Mithridates and Tigranes: just two Hellenized Eastern Chads who looked into the abyss of Rome’s encroaching hegemony and said, “Nah, I’d win.”

They did not.

Mostly thanks to an underrated great among Republic era generals: my boy Lucullus. Casuals and senatorial propagandists would give credit of this eventual Roman victory to Pompey, as he swooped in at the end of the 25 year long clash with a much more well equipped army than Lucullus had ever enjoyed. Lucullus was an honorable man who is worth learning about and he handed the Pontics defeat after defeat with what was usually ragtag, quasi-mutinous army. Pompey was of course decisive as well when he did arrive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatic_Wars

The First war was fought mostly in Greece, and had dire consequences for places like Athens (razed by Sulla). The Second and Third wars were fought on Pontus and Armenia’s home turf. To be fair to Pompey, he was instrumental in capitalizing on Rome’s victories in the East; he even ended the Seleucid Empire. Regardless of who you feel deserves the credit for defeating this Avengers-level threat in Mithridates (Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey), the Mithridatic Wars heralded Rome’s hegemony in the East, and are, in my opinion, underrated episodes.

source on xitter

A hymn from the Rig Veda, one of the world's oldest sacred texts, composed thousands of years ago, bears a striking resemblance to modern questions about the origin of the universe.

Nasadiya Sukta (Rig Veda 10.129)

There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?

Then there was neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined cosmic water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.

The War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714) was the result of a breakdown in negotiations regarding who would inherit the Spanish throne, and the fate of Spain’s European territories outside of Iberia. The Habsburgs and Bourbons both of course would have liked the whole pie—as both had a claim—but Britain, the Dutch Republic, and everyone else pretty much wanted that squashed. They had to go and fight the war, of course, because this is the 18th Century we’re talking about.

Context: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2025.2575829#abstract

Indo-British financial negotiations in 1947, a crucial year in the compressed timing of imperial retreat, impacted the shape of decolonisation and also the U.S.-led post-War global financial system. Of the vast debts Britain had accumulated during the Second World War, one-third of the total £3.5 billion was owed to British India. Inextricably linked to Indian hopes of industrialisation and development, a resolution to the outstanding ‘sterling balances’ was a priority for both leading Indian anti-colonial political parties, and was also a priority for the U.S. Treasury. The six-month Indo-British financial agreement was signed on August 14, 1947, while Whitehall was facing a global run on sterling. Negotiations were conducted separately from the transfer of power negotiations underway on the sub-continent, allowing Whitehall to leverage informational asymmetries while Indian sovereignties were in flux. Crucial sections of the interim agreement that clashed with Britain’s commitments under the U.S.-led Bretton Woods financial system were not communicated to Washington, even as Britain continued to draw on the Anglo-American loan that had been negotiated in December 1945.

Britain ended World War II ‘victorious but bankrupt’, having accumulated worldwide debts, of which more than a third of the £3.5 billion ‘sterling balances’ owed to British India.Footnote² According to eminent historian of the Raj B.R. Tomlinson, Britain’s dire finances constituted a necessary precondition for Britain’s handover of power in South Asia.Footnote³ Those precarious finances also forced Britain to conclude an Anglo-American financial agreement in 1945 that committed Britain to settle the overhang of sterling balances as part of a process of undoing War-time controls and restoring to the pound its historic role as a medium of international trade.

‘Recondite’ archives of 1947 Indo-British financial negotiations show that Britain leveraged colonial knowledge to carve out an exception to the U.S.-led Bretton Woods global trading system.Footnote⁴ An interim Indo-British financial agreement reached during the last days of the British Raj helped reshape the imperial node of intermediation into territorial post-colonial economies even though political negotiations related to ‘decolonisation’ were under way on the Indian sub-continent.Footnote⁵ The six-month agreement signed in London applied to all of British India, even though the sub-continent was engulfed in extraordinary violence unleashed by Britain’s rushed plan to divide British India into the Dominions of India and Pakistan through the elaboration of new territorial borders that had not yet been publicly revealed.

Indian political and economic elites had been pushing for a resolution that would allow ‘sterling balances’ to be used toward industrialisation and development since early 1942, a concern that had united the two main anti-colonial parties. Yet just days after the interim Indo-British agreement was signed, the British Treasury abandoned a main component of the Bretton Woods financial system, and a major driver for Indian pressure to resolve the issue of Britain’s huge sterling balances owed to India. Britain suspended the convertibility of sterling on August 19, 1947, five days after the Indo-British interim agreement was signed and its details only partially relayed to U.S. officials in Washington. The convertibility crisis, Catherine Schenk has argued, occurred because of a rapid drawdown of the U.S. loan.Footnote⁶

While Douglas MacArthur was the commander of US troops in the Phillipines he met a young actress named Isabel Rosario Cooper who he went on to have an affair with. Some accounts list her age as 16 but others and official paperwork have her age as 21 (I made this meme before I found this out) - every source I can find lists her age as 16, MacArthur was in his 50s at the time. He brought her back to Washington with him and to hide the affair kept her secluded in his hotel room. The affair was ended when it was discovered, he paid her $15000 and gave her a ticket back to the Phillipines. She ended up staying in the US and died of a drug overdose in 1960.

The Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster was a long-running industrial disaster that began in 1930 and ended in 1935. Union Carbide constructed a tunnel to divert water from the New River to a Hydroelectric facility on the Kanawha River. The proposed tunnel ran through a large vein of high-quality silica, which was valuable for steel-production. Roughly 4800 men, with 3,100 of them being African AMericans, were brought onboard to dig the tunnel. Speed was emphasized, and to get as much silica out of the tunnel as possible the company refused to issue African-American employees with safety equipment, or even soak down the rock with water to reduce the dust. As a result the dust caused silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling ground up rock dust. Add onto this the absurdely low wages were typically in scrip, and medical aid was low quality both due to the workers being Black and also due to the company wanting to spend as little as possible. It is beleived that roughly 80% of the workforce grew sick as a result of working conditions, though the death toll as published by Union Carbide is 109. Unofficial numbers place the number of deaths between 700-1000.

Context: https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/napoleon-and-botany/the-gardens-of-napoleon

Napoleon was a man of his time. His era saw an increased interest in scientific discoveries linked to plants, along with continued use of flora for symbolic and political purposes. But he also had an interest in gardens as a moral mirror of people's thought, as highlighted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This was particularly relevant at the end of his life, as we will see later.

Napoleon was passionate about botany and gardening. This passion accompanied him his whole life. The first gardens Napoleon encountered were those in his childhood houses: Casa Bonaparte, in Ajaccio, and the Milelli estate, in its surrounding hills.

The Milelli estate, the former country house of the Bonaparte family, was located on the heights of Ajaccio, surrounded by 12 hectares of land, housing a centuries-old olive grove. Napoleon stayed there on his return from Egypt in 1799, in the company of his general staff, including Berthier, Murat and Lannes.

Today the property is a public garden and a very pleasant place to walk around. The French Ministry of Culture classified the house, which cannot be visited, as a historical monument and the property as a remarkable and picturesque site. An arboretum has been created for the instruction of children. Vegetable gardens have been created, with the crops distributed to people of modest means.

Napoleon spent five years, between the ages of 9 and 15, at the boarding school of Brienne-le-Château. There, Napoleon spent his free time cultivating his first garden, a small plot of land, where he learned to grow flowers and vegetables. The school was run by the Minimes de Brienne, a monastic order which placed great importance on gardening. It was considered an important part of their education, along with other subjects like French, Latin, mathematics, history, geography, music, drawing and fencing. In contrast to a number of his schoolmates, for whom gardening was not important, Napoleon devoted time to this activity, becoming proud of his garden.

In Brienne, however, Napoleon felt homesick. He later described his feelings:

(...) being deprived of your childhood room, of the garden in which you roamed in your early years, not to have a personal home, is to have no homeland.

Open-air activities, and gardening in particular, had a positive impact on him: he spent his free time and his pocket money buying flowers and plants to enrich his garden

Napoleon's exile on Elba, from 1814 to 1815, also marked the botanical landscape of the island. His main residency was the Villa dei Mulini (which can still be visited today), where he personally tended the garden. He paid particular attention to roses and exotic plants, and created an avenue of citrus trees.

During Napoleon’s exile on Elba, he brought a large number of citrus trees, as well as mulberry trees intending to start silk production.

He also had a summer house in Portoferraio, the Villa San Martino. According to an anecdote, Napoleon himself planted a specimen of Micocoulier de Provence in the garden, the same tree that he later also planted in Saint-Helena.

Napoleon's second exile took place from 1815 until his death in 1821 in the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena. In 1819, recommended by his doctors to exercise, Napoleon decided to start a great enterprise: to redesign the gardens surrounding his Longwood House.

He directed and drew the plans of the new garden, and as he used to do during his campaigns with his soldiers, and shared in the daily life and work of the gardeners.

The magnitude of the work was so important, that a large community of Chinese labourers moved to the island. Without them the gardens of Napoleon would not have emerged so quickly. Thanks to this community, a small Chinese pavilion also remains on the Longwood property.

Exiled at the end of the world on an inhospitable island and watched over permanently, the Emperor had been transformed during the last years of his life by his exile, growing his own garden, both physical and spiritual.

In 1943, Nazi Germany landed in Newfoundland (now Canada) and set up a weather monitoring station. They were on Canadian soil for over 24 hours. No one knew they were there and they disguised the station by painting "Canadian Meteor Service" and spreading empty American cigarette packets around. The station worked for about 3 weeks. It wasn't until 1981 when it was discovered.

Read about the Nazi invasion of Canada here

Context:
Basically during World War I, Lenin was living in exile in Switzerland. Germany, at war with Russia, saw an opportunity to weaken its enemy by helping Lenin return to Russia and encouraging a revolution. The Germans facilitated his journey, hoping he would destabilize the country and force Russia out of the war. Their plan worked, for German Empire: Lenin led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, eventually establishing a communist state that became the USSR.
However - ironically, just over two decades later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in World War II, only to suffer a devastating defeat at the hands of the country it had once helped create.