- What happened at the Battle of Solferino that led Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross?
World War II
The 1939-1945 global conflict and its consequences.
- Why was Mommsen prosecuted over a speech criticizing Bismarck?
- Why did Blériot's flight change how the British press thought about England's safety as an island?
- What connects the ICRC's 1917 prize to its second Peace Prize in 1944, also awarded during a world war?
- Why did the 1918 flu pandemic become known as the 'Spanish' influenza despite likely originating elsewhere?
- How did Stark's later career as a National Socialist official and denouncer of Einstein's physics complicate his scientific legacy?
- Why did astronomers from Allied nations found the International Astronomical Union in Brussels in July 1919?
- Why were Germany and its wartime allies initially excluded from the newly founded IAU?
- What had happened to the Wilhelmine world that Buddenbrooks depicted by the time Mann won the prize?
- What did Carl von Ossietzky publish in 1931 that led to his imprisonment?
- Why couldn't Ossietzky travel to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize?
- What rule did the Nazi government impose on Germans after Ossietzky's award?
- Why did Szilard patent the chain reaction concept and then assign it to the British Admiralty?
- What allowed Fermi to leave Fascist Italy permanently under the guise of attending his own Nobel ceremony?
- Why did the Nazi government prevent Richard Kuhn from accepting his Nobel Prize in 1938?
- What made the timing of Sillanpää's 1939 prize especially ironic given events in Finland that year?
- How did the outbreak of World War II disrupt the international networks that had built modern physics and chemistry?
- Which fields of science and technology were most accelerated by wartime pressure, and why?
- What happened to Jewish scientists working in Europe once the war began?
- What contrasting outcomes did the war produce for medicine and for nuclear physics by its end?
- Why was Palomar Mountain darkened at night during the war years?
- How much did the war delay the completion of the two-hundred-inch telescope?
- Why did it take decades for Bletchley Park's codebreaking work to become publicly known?
- Why was the discovery of plutonium kept classified for years after it was made?
- Why did Otto Stern leave Germany in 1933, and how did that affect where he received his Nobel Prize a decade later?
- Why did preserving fodder through the winter matter so much for wartime Finland specifically?
- How long did Hull serve as Secretary of State, and why is that tenure notable?
- What relief principle did the Quakers apply when deciding who received food and medical aid during wartime?
- What made Yukawa's 1949 Nobel significant beyond the physics itself?
- How did Jouhaux's imprisonment at Buchenwald during the war affect his later work?
- How much money did the Marshall Plan direct to European reconstruction, and how many nations received it?
- Why did Fermi leave Italy in 1938, and how did the timing of his departure connect to his Nobel Prize?
- What was Georges Pire's activity during the German occupation of Belgium, and how did it lead to his postwar humanitarian work?
- What did NASA inherit from NACA when it formally opened for business on 1 October 1958?
- Why was Alexis Léger declared a traitor by his own government and forced to flee France in 1940?
- What happened at the Battle of Solferino that led Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross movement?
- Why was UNICEF originally founded in 1946, and why did it not dissolve once its emergency mission ended?
- What aspects of postwar West German society did Heinrich Böll's fiction criticize most sharply?
- How did Montale's poetry resist the demands of fascist-era Italian literary culture?
- What kind of Polish-Jewish world did Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish fiction depict, and why had it largely vanished by 1978?
- What wartime experiences shaped the events that surface in Simon's novels?
- How did SPAM spread through military and Pacific cuisines during and after World War II?
- Why would the U.S. military need hard data on bowel movement frequency during the Gulf War?
- How has dysentery historically affected military campaigns more than combat itself?
- Why were anti-personnel landmines designed to maim rather than kill?
- What kind of 'amnesia' was West Germany practicing when The Tin Drum was published in 1959?
- Why did the Royal Navy instruct sailors to shout 'Bang!' instead of firing live ammunition?
- What year did this cost-cutting training practice come to light?
- What recurring subject unites the roughly thirty novels Patrick Modiano wrote over five decades?
- How did Modiano's father's experience during the German occupation shape his fiction?
- Who founded Nihon Hidankyo in 1956, and what was the organization's original purpose?
- What methods did the hibakusha use over seven decades to keep the effects of nuclear weapons from becoming abstract to the public?
- Why did the U.S. military fund multiple rounds of development for a pigeon-guided missile before abandoning it?