History of Love Songs

In ancient times, all poetry was sung. The poet is pictured playing a lyre or other instrument. There was no separation of lyrics and melody as we now think of them. Unfortunately none of the melodies for these early love lyrics has survived but it's easy to imagine a softly strummed harp and a husky voice singing the words that have come down to us.

Though they are thousands of years old, the earliest love songs sound so contemporary, so honest, so urgent, they might have been written yesterday. They are proof that human emotions have not changed. When we fall in love today, we feel what men and women felt in centuries past: desire, joy, disappointment, yearning, fulfillment.

So just how far back can we trace love songs? When Pharoah Rameses wanted to tell a beautiful, bronze-skinned Egyptian lady that he found her desirable, did he have a court musician sing something that sounded like "Love Me Tender"? In a way, he did. We have recovered 3500-year-old Egyptian love poems from pieces of papyrus and pottery fragments. They are filled with the language and sentiments we hear in today's pop songs.

History of Colors

Isaac Newton made a study of color starting at the age of 23 in 1666 and developed the useful Newton color circle which gives insight about complementary colors and additive color mixing. He realized that some colors (magenta, purple) could not be produced as spectral colors. One of his contributions was the idea that white light is light containing all wavelengths of the visible spectrum. He demonstrated this fact with experiments on the dispersion of light in glass prisms.
Thomas Young suggested the threefold character of color perception in 1802 and speculated that there were three different types of color sensitive receptors in the eye.
In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell explored the use of three primary colors and realized that no additive combination of three primary colors can cover the entire gamut of perceivable hues. He showed that the set of primaries was not unique, but that spectral primaries more widely separated in wavelength could be used to produce a wider range of perceived hues. He also realized that with some subtraction, the entire gamut of perceived colors could be covered. Maxwell recognized that the chromaticism (hue and saturation) of a colored surface is relatively insensitive to the brightness. Maxwell's work could be considered to be the basis for modern calorimetry.

History of Water

History is, one might say, somewhat waterlogged. Since water is absolutely essential to human life, it should not be surprising that it is an important component of human history. Yet it is surprising how little attention water receives in historical accounts.
Water facilitated relatively rapid transportation prior to about 1850 C.E. In the era of exploration and discovery from the late 15th through the 18th centuries, Europeans explored all the major oceans and seas. Water was also thought to be an essential aspect of imperialism from the 16th century on (this is known the "salt water fallacy," the idea that an empire must be separated from the mother country by an ocean; this is why neither the Russian nor the American continental empires were seen as comparable to the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch empires). The history of exploration and trade remains a major area of historical scholarship dealing with water.
Water was also an important source of power in the period before the Industrial Revolution. Even though steam power made water power less necessary, water remained an essential component in all kinds of manufacturing processes. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, however, water increasingly becomes a hidden factor in human history. For many, it quite literally went underground, hidden from sight until one turned on a faucet or flushed a toilet. Increasing, there was a tendency to view it as something to master and control. This is, of course, in accord with a more general approach to nature as a whole: mastery and control.

History of Cartoons

What may be seen as possibly the earliest political cartoon is an anonymous woodcut entitled Le Revers du Jeu des Suysses (The Other Side of the Swiss Game), produced in 1499. In this, the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the kings of France and England can be seen playing cards while, under the table, a Swiss soldier stacks the decks in a satirical commentary on French ambitions in Italy (the support of elite Swiss soldiers was essential to France). At about the same time, Pope Alexander VI was depicted as a devil and in another drawing a Jesuit priest is given a wolf’s head. Perhaps the most memorable caricature of this period—and one exactly datable and attributable to a known artist—was an anti-Protestant woodcut by Erhard Schoen of 1521, showing the Devil playing a pair of bagpipes, the bellows of which are depicted as the head of Martin Luther.

A number of other artists of this period also produced heavily allegorical and often fantastical drawings which have resonances in the modern cartoon. However, it was in Italy at the hands of the Carracci family and others such as Pier Leone Ghezzi—the first artist to earn a living solely by this kind of work—that the modern cartoon can be said to have been moulded. It was also in Italy that these early caricaturas flourished, and almost uniquely so until collections of such drawings (especially those of Ghezzi) found their way across Europe, and Hogarth began his sequence of “modern moral subjects” in England in the 1730s.

HIstory of Cigarette

Of all the nicotine lovers, how many have ever wondered about the history and origin of their irresistible smoky delight? Probably none! Nevertheless, can’t really blame them. The high a cigarette provides, takes away all the reasoning power to think about such details. However, if at present you are out of that jubilation, read on to know some interesting information on the background of cigarette. The history of cigarette dates back to 6000 BC.The art of smoking gradually spread across the nations of South and North America. In the early 17th century in Spain, the corn husk was replaced by paper, spreading the custom of smoking the cigarette to a number of nations. During 1830s, cigarettes reached France, where its name was born. The present popular word ‘cigarette’ is actually the French adaptation of the Spanish word ‘sigarito’. In 1850, Turkish leaves were introduced, which became very popular in Russia. The cigarette was brought to the English world after Crimean War.

History of Painting

The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia, etc.

In Western cultures oil painting and watercolor painting are the best known media, with rich and complex traditions in style and subject matter. In the East, ink and color ink historical predominated the choice of media with equally rich and complex traditions.

History of Money

Money is anything that is commonly accepted by a group of people for the exchange of goods, services, or resources. Every country has its own system of coins and paper money. In the beginning, people bartered. Barter is the exchange of a good or service for another good or service, a bag of rice for a bag of beans. However, what if you couldn't agree what something was worth in exchange or you didn't want what the other person had. To solve that problem humans developed what is called commodity money.Metals objects were introduced as money around 5000 B.C. By 700 BC, the Lydians became the first in the Western world to make coins. Countries were soon minting their own series of coins with specific values. Metal was used because it was readily available, easy to work with and could be recycled. Since coins were given a certain value, it became easier to compare the cost of items people wanted.

Some of the earliest known paper money dates back to China, where the issue of paper money became common from about AD 960 onwards.