Chapter 23 of Moby-Dick is entitled “The Lee Shore.” It offers some philosophical commentary on the need for travel and direct experience. Melville reflects on the restless, roaming nature of a sailor named Bulkington:
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Let us tell the story of the greatest speech ever delivered by an American president.
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In a letter written to Giovanni Colonna in 1337 or 1341—scholars are uncertain of the precise date—Petrarch says as follows:
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Fortress of the Mind Publications is pleased to announce that the audiobook of the new translation of Frontinus’s Stratagems is now available. The link to Amazon Audible can be found here. The book is read by narrator Saethon Williams, whose expert audio renditions have featured in Quintus Curtius’s other translations. Besides Amazon Audible, the audiobook can be found at a number of retailers, library platforms, and streaming services:
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In book nine of the Aeneid, the Rutulian warrior Numanus Remulus makes a famous declamation, in which he speaks the following lines:
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In an 1842 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle chastised Emerson, saying, “A man has no right to say to his generation, turning away from it, ‘Be Damned!’ It is the whole past and the whole future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you.” What did he mean by this? And what importance does Carlyle’s admonition have for us today? It turns out that it has a great deal of importance. We discuss.
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No one should doubt the extraordinarily destructive power of lightning. A dramatic illustration of this power occurred in 1830, when the packet ship Boston was hit by a bolt of lightning in the Atlantic and burned to the waterline, with the loss of one unfortunate passenger.
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The French naval officer and explorer Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux was born at Aix-en-Provence in 1739. He enlisted in the French Navy in 1754; but he must have shown promise to his superiors, for they granted him an officer’s commission two years later.
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The following story is found within the pages of an 1840 volume entitled The Book of Shipwrecks and Narratives of Maritime Discoveries and the Most Popular Voyages. The narrator of the tale, as seems to have been the custom in those days when relating first-hand accounts, has omitted some specific details, such as the ship’s name, the dates, and the identities of major protagonists.
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In this podcast I describe unforgettable images that have emerged from the aftermaths of certain battles. We discuss Livy’s description of the battlefield after Cannae, a scene in Dante, and an anecdote from the American Civil War.
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Quintus Curtius 
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