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262 illustrations
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean is a man crushed by his past. After nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread,...
In 1905, Albert Einstein solved a puzzle that had baffled physicists for years. Scientists knew that shining light on certain metals could knock electrons free...
In 1905, Albert Einstein solved a puzzle that had baffled physicists for years. Scientists had been shining light on metal surfaces, expecting that brighter light...
In 1941, Henri Matisse was seventy-one years old and recovering from surgery that left him largely confined to a wheelchair or bed. The man who...
On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash walked into Folsom State Prison carrying nothing but a guitar and a voice roughened by years of addiction and...
In 1871, a small group of students from Fisk University in Nashville set out on a desperate singing tour. Their school was nearly bankrupt, and...
Michelangelo once described his approach to sculpture not as adding something to marble, but as removing everything that wasn't the figure. He looked at a...
In 1967, psychologist Martin Seligman conducted an experiment that revealed something heartbreaking about the nature of captivity. Dogs were placed in a chamber where they...
Inside a chrysalis, something astonishing happens that most biology textbooks gloss over. The caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings. Its body releases digestive enzymes that dissolve...
In the summer of 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer stood before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention and told the world what it cost...
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean has just been released from nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. He is a...
In 1967, psychologist Martin Seligman conducted a groundbreaking experiment at the University of Pennsylvania that revealed something heartbreaking about captivity. Dogs were placed in a...
Every autumn in the forests of northern Canada, the wood frog does something that should be impossible. As temperatures plunge, its body freezes solid. No...
In 1967, psychologist Martin Seligman conducted a study at the University of Pennsylvania that revealed something heartbreaking about captivity. Dogs that had experienced repeated, inescapable...
When enslaved people in the American South sang *Wade in the Water*, overseers heard nothing but a hymn. But those who knew the code understood...
In John Bunyan's *The Pilgrim's Progress*, one of the most striking moments comes early in Christian's journey. He has been walking with an enormous burden...
On Easter Sunday, 1939, contralto Marian Anderson stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and sang. Weeks earlier, the Daughters of the American Revolution...
In the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, just down the hallway from the famous *David*, stand four unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo known as the *Prisoners*. They...
In the 1990s, neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA made a remarkable discovery. Working with patients trapped in the grip of obsessive-compulsive disorder — people who...
In the worship gatherings of the antebellum South, enslaved men and women sang spirituals that carried double meanings their enslavers never suspected. *Wade in the...
In 1669, the Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam became the first scientist to carefully dissect a caterpillar chrysalis and document what he found inside. What he...
In John Bunyan's *The Pilgrim's Progress*, there is a moment that has moved readers for over three centuries. Christian has been carrying a terrible burden...
In orthopedic medicine, there is a condition called ankylosis — the fusing of a joint caused by injury, infection, or prolonged immobility. The bones that...
In his autobiography, *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass*, Douglass recounts the moment that changed everything. His slaveholder's wife, Sophia Auld, had begun teaching...