Curated playlist
Memory of the World Register
- SmallpoxOn the 26th of October 1977, a hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin fell ill in Merca, Somalia. His was the last naturally occurring case of indigenous smallpox in the world. Two years later, on the 9th of December 1979, a commission of…
- A Doll's HouseA Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen's three-act play, opened at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen on the 21st of December 1879, and before the year was out it had already set off what contemporaries called a "storm of outraged controversy"…
- De revolutionibus orbium coelestiumDe revolutionibus orbium coelestium arrived in print in 1543, in Nuremberg, just before its author died. Nicolaus Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, had built an alternative to the model of the universe handed down from Ptolemy. That…
- Bibliotheca CorvinianaBibliotheca Corviniana was a library so vast that contemporaries ranked it second only to the Vatican. It stood inside Buda Castle, assembled by Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, across the three decades of his reign from 1458 to 1490.…
- RigvedaThe first word of the Rigveda is Agni. Not a greeting, not a declaration of purpose, but the name of a god: the sacrificial fire. That opening word has now stood for somewhere between three thousand and four thousand years, recited aloud…
- Baltic WayThe Baltic Way began at exactly 19:00 local time on the 23rd of August 1989, when approximately two million people across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania lifted their arms and joined hands. For 15 minutes, a living line stretched 675…
- Tabula PeutingerianaThe Tabula Peutingeriana is a single scroll, 6.75 metres long and just 0.35 metres high, that holds inside it the entire road network of the Roman Empire. Painted onto parchment sometime around 1200, it is a copy of something much older.…
- Derveni papyrus"Close the doors, you uninitiated," begins a poem attributed to Orpheus, quoted inside a scroll called the Derveni papyrus. Plato himself quoted that same line. The papyrus was pulled from a nobleman's tomb near Thessaloniki, carbonized by…
- International Committee on Intellectual CooperationThe International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation held its first session on the 1st of August 1922, with the philosopher Henri Bergson in the chair. Twelve people gathered under the auspices of the League of Nations with a task that…
- Astrid LindgrenAstrid Lindgren was born on the 14th of November 1907 in Näs, near Vimmerby, in the Swedish province of Småland. By the time she died, on the 28th of January 2002, she had sold roughly 167 million books worldwide and had been translated…