The Curious Engineer

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Looking Through the Past

worldhistory.substack.com

Illuminating forgotten corners of history and using them to think about the present. Click to read Looking Through the Past, by George Dillard, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

History

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Posts
293 from 23 Feb 2021 to 4 Nov 2026
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weekly (98 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 86

  1. The Comet That Wasn’t a Comet
  2. Mexico City, 1910: A Sign From the Heavens
  3. New Men and New Minds
  4. Yokohama: Glimpses of a New Japan
  5. Exhibit A: The “Deaf Looter”
  6. Galveston, 1900
  7. “The Most Moral Weapon Ever Devised”
  8. Russia, 1913
  9. Exhibit A: 1873 Map of Sinai
  10. Sudan, 1898
  11. The War Before the War
  12. Sinai: By This Way Only
  13. Drawings from the Bottom of the World
  14. The Long Way Around
  15. Where Did the “College Experience” Come From?
  16. Singapore: Straits and Shadows
  17. Portraits of Singapore
  18. Men Cannot Estimate the Worth of Malacca
  19. How Do You Know That Document Is Real?
  20. The Dardanelles: The Price of Passage
  21. Picturing the Straits
  22. The Bosporus: Where Two Seas Meet
  23. How Iran and the US Learned to Distrust Each Other
  24. Gibraltar: Non Plus Ultra
  25. The Man Who Cataloged How Italians Talk With Their Hands
  26. The Struggle over Hormuz
  27. The Long War on Urban Dogs
  28. A Narrow Gate
  29. Why Is Mongolian Script on Renaissance Paintings?
  30. The Huns, Through Others' Eyes
  31. How the West Almost Turned the Cold War Hot
  32. Greek Kings on the Nile
  33. Elephant for Christmas Dinner
  34. No, Not Those Goths
  35. A Game for the Many
  36. The Etruscans: Still Hard to Read
  37. What If Museums Were Full of Copies?
  38. The Scythians Are Still Elusive
  39. The Weirdest World Cup
  40. Carthage: Memory and Myth
  41. Carthage After Carthage
  42. Glimpses of Carthage
  43. The Politics of the Playground
  44. Who Were the Parthians?
  45. What Happened to Streetcar Suburbs?
  46. The Right Way to Consume Your Stimulants
  47. AI Won’t End Work, But It Will Hurt a Lot of Workers
  48. Coca: a Stimulant That Made the Modern World
  49. The Middle of Nowhere, the Center of Empire
  50. Chocolate: a Stimulant That Made the Modern World
  51. Mocha: Not Just a Flavor
  52. Coffee: a Stimulant That Made the Modern World
  53. Ancient Robots, Modern Fears
  54. Tobacco: a Stimulant That Made the Modern World
  55. Do Boycotts Ever Work?
  56. Sugar: a Stimulant That Made the Modern World
  57. A Long History of Feeling Small
  58. Tea: a Stimulant That Made the Modern World
  59. Fragments and Figments from the French Revolution
  60. How a Machine Became a Metaphor
  61. What Types of Leaders Make Sporting Events All About Themselves?
  62. How France Tried to Replace God
  63. From Balloon Bombs to Predators
  64. What Is the First Estate?
  65. Is Iran Really Different?
  66. How Napoleon Became Short
  67. The Moral Limits of Gambling
  68. Iran Delenda Est
  69. How Marie Antoinette Lost Control of Her Image
  70. Who Invented Photography?
  71. The Fashion Counter-Revolution
  72. An Empire Built on Excrement
  73. The Fashion Revolution
  74. The Great War Against Free Speech
  75. The Life (and Death) of Marat
  76. Frederick Douglass and the Power of the Photograph
  77. 250 Years of George Washington Merchandise
  78. What New Technologies Do to Fragile Minds
  79. The Route of History
  80. How Charles Morgan Met His Moment
  81. Kingdoms of Water
  82. Fireworks and Fault Lines
  83. An Artery of Empire
  84. How Machines Shape the Way We Write
  85. From Eden to El Dorado
  86. The End of Egypt

2025 81

  1. An Unexpectedly Modern “Fairy Wedding”
  2. How to Tame a River
  3. Looking Back, Looking Ahead
  4. Cheese Mites and Sludge Worms: The Origins of Grossout Cinema
  5. The Lost Valley
  6. From Pearl River to Gold Mountain
  7. Inventing Breakfast
  8. Wonderland, Incorporated
  9. Only to the White Man Was Nature a Wilderness
  10. The Best General View of Yosemite
  11. From Railway Madness to Digital Anxiety
  12. The Making of the Gilded West (and an announcement)
  13. The King of Games
  14. Gregor MacGregor’s Paper Kingdom
  15. How Ancient People Saw Themselves
  16. The Planets, Personified
  17. A Preventable Plague
  18. How to Enter a City Like a King
  19. Prester John and the Letter from Nowhere
  20. When Female Athletes Outdrew the Men
  21. Borderless Ambition
  22. The Dark Glow of Radium
  23. Who Was the First to Fly?
  24. The Road That Made Japan
  25. The Age of the Great Picture
  26. Living by Numbers
  27. Plastic Before Plastic
  28. The King’s Quarry
  29. Pear Pressure
  30. What Corruption Looks Like
  31. The Birth of the Modern Moral Panic
  32. The Ottoman Mirror
  33. After the Bomb
  34. Albert Robida's Electric Life
  35. How the Corridor Changed the Way We Live Together
  36. In the Company Style
  37. The Medieval World Revealed
  38. What Were the Earliest Laws Really Like?
  39. The Case of the Ghostly Photographs
  40. Spirits of the Republic
  41. Homes for Everybody?
  42. False Dawns and Long Shadows in Iranian History
  43. Bacchanalia Reborn
  44. Excelling Above All Fruits
  45. “I Am the First Man to Read That!”
  46. The Anatomy of a Great Painting
  47. The Other Two
  48. The Futurist Trap
  49. Phrenology's Bumpy Path
  50. Who Invented the “Founding Fathers?”
  51. There Are People Who Can See and Others Who Cannot Even Look
  52. The Brutal Origins of the Beautiful Game
  53. An Infinite Number of Leaflike Skins
  54. Cosmic Propaganda
  55. Snake Oil, Then and Now
  56. From Walden Pond to the Ganges
  57. What Lord Elgin Did
  58. How a Forgotten Battle Created a More Peaceful World
  59. 2 Good 2 Be 4 Gotten, Early Modern-Style
  60. How Strange Men's Weird Collections Inspired the Modern Museum
  61. The Hogs of New York
  62. Visions of Greenland
  63. Is There a Ghost in the Machine?
  64. Battling the Blaze
  65. Imagining the Dinosaurs
  66. Who Owns Beauty?
  67. Denial and Tragedy in the Age of Cholera
  68. Time for a Change
  69. The Ancient Art of Color
  70. Know Nothings and the Politics of Paranoia
  71. Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
  72. The Picture of Free, Untrammeled Womanhood
  73. "The Bicycle Girls and the Costumes They Will Wear"
  74. How Guantanamo Became a Black Hole
  75. Riches from the Mouth of Hell
  76. I Was Here
  77. Nights of Misery
  78. An Early Modern Richard Scarry
  79. Sudan, 1898
  80. The Power of (and the Problem With) Names
  81. Brush Your Teeth, Drink Milk, and Watch Out for Syphilis

2024 55

  1. Projecting Ourselves Onto the Past
  2. A Newer Seward?
  3. War, Bureaucracy, and Divine Commerce
  4. Echoes of Rage
  5. Liar's Archaeology
  6. The Myth of Bananaland
  7. Does This Taste Poisoned to You?
  8. Horns of Plenty
  9. Where Is Ancient Babylon?
  10. Pistols At Dawn
  11. A Narrow Gate
  12. Ballots, Brawls, and Bribes: Election Day in Early America
  13. A Multiplicity of George Washingtons
  14. An Excellent Means of Electioneering
  15. The World Travels of a Blood-Soaked Mother Goddess
  16. An Ocean of Pain and Death
  17. The First Anti-War Art
  18. A Stalinist Childhood
  19. Barnum's Animals
  20. Can Lost Rivers Be Found Again?
  21. Celebrating Empire, or Marketing It?
  22. The Life and Times of the Empress Dowager
  23. It Came From the Deep
  24. How to Seem to Cut One's Nose Half Off
  25. Migrant Mothers
  26. It's in the Cards
  27. July, 1914
  28. The Most American Animal
  29. The Grand Tour and the Beginnings of Modern Tourism
  30. Splish, Splash, Scrape, and Steam
  31. The Jail Goes by the Name of Dejima
  32. Mostly Incorruptible
  33. The Best of Herbs
  34. Why Are Eagles a Symbol of So Many Countries?
  35. Life in the Trenches
  36. Patently Ridiculous
  37. To Cut and Hack My Days
  38. Nobody Asked the Horses, Part 2
  39. Nobody Asked the Horses
  40. The Garden of Our Dreams
  41. Plumage and Plunder
  42. San Francisco, 1906
  43. The Terror, Beauty, and Community of Eclipses
  44. Who Were the "Barbarians?"
  45. Isthmus Be the Place
  46. To Resist a Fall: the Strange History of the Parachute
  47. The Fighter Still Remains
  48. Shocking, Just Shocking
  49. Paris, 1889
  50. WWII Propaganda: From Tempting Vixens to Adorable Bears
  51. An Ancient Crossroads of Culture
  52. Fancy Hats for Fancy People
  53. Will the Real Nero Please Stand Up?
  54. Terror on Two Wheels
  55. Tell Me the Future

2023 43

  1. What Did the Church of the East Leave Behind?
  2. The Volcanoes and the Paintings
  3. Window Into a Lost World
  4. Remember, You Will Die
  5. History’s Still Happening on the Acropolis
  6. The Buddha Without the Buddha
  7. Imagining American Animals
  8. Precious Cargo
  9. Kings vs. the King of the Jungle
  10. The Case of the Ghostly Photographs
  11. The Many Faces of Charlemagne
  12. Why Don’t We Know Much About Ancient Persia?
  13. The Persian Version
  14. Faces of Death
  15. Did the Earliest War Photography Tell the Truth?
  16. China's Last Moments of Imperial Splendor
  17. Welcome to Looking Through the Past
  18. Curses!
  19. A Whale of a Tale
  20. The God of Ecstasy Through the Ages
  21. Watching the Gladiators
  22. When the World Ran on Bird Shit
  23. The Brief But Spectacular Era of Balloon Mania
  24. Is Chichen Itza Authentic? Does It Matter?
  25. How Photography Helped to End Child Labor in America
  26. The Global Journey of a Blood-Soaked Mother Goddess
  27. The Controversial Priests Who Bridged East and West
  28. The Second Age of Smoke
  29. How Did the Romans Map Their Empire?
  30. How Alexander the Great Influenced Indian Art
  31. China’s Psychedelic Lost Caves
  32. The Sports World Chooses Money Over Integrity
  33. “From Today, Painting is Dead” — What the Invention of Photography Tells Us About AI
  34. How Exotic Animals Became Political Pawns
  35. The First Mug Shots
  36. Americans Love Our Cars. Do They Love Us Back?
  37. What is Substack’s Twitter Competitor For?
  38. History’s Still Happening on the Acropolis
  39. Making a Mockery of Meritocracy
  40. The Future of AI Isn’t What You Think
  41. How We Serve Our Creations
  42. Algorithms and the Flattening of Desire
  43. College Admissions Teaches Kids About America’s Shittiness

2022 21

  1. Books That Stuck With Me in 2022
  2. Preserved Fish: a Semi-important Historical Figure With a Fun Name
  3. Life on the Ledge is Over
  4. Once Again, America Does Just Enough
  5. Soccer Time-Wasting Techniques, Ranked
  6. This Election Should Break the Fever, But It Won’t
  7. “Tick” Bonesteel III: A Semi-important Historical Figure With a Fun Name
  8. Trump, Truman, Testimony, and the Truth
  9. Joe Biden Doesn’t Control the Economy
  10. Taxing the Rich Won’t Slow Innovation
  11. When Hypocrisy No Longer Matters
  12. The Psychological Phenomenon That’s Breaking Our Politics
  13. Rebuild, But With Humility
  14. Why are Some of the Most Important Prices Secret?
  15. “I Don’t Have To” Doesn’t Mean “You Can’t”
  16. I Loved Google Stadia, Which Is Probably Why It Failed
  17. Two Climate Change Misconceptions That Make Solutions Harder
  18. America’s Brief Experiment With Universal Healthcare Is Ending
  19. Enervation Nation
  20. Why Doesn’t America Care About Latin America?
  21. Can Republicans Govern by Stunt Alone?

2021 7

  1. Which Extreme Laws Will Red States Pass Next?
  2. We Have a Talent Problem in American Politics
  3. Are You Rich Enough to Be a Good Person?
  4. Did George Washington’s Doctors Kill Him?
  5. I Can't Kill You, It's Thursday
  6. Eleven Facts That Will Make You Rethink Your Relationship With History
  7. Illuminating forgotten corners of history and using them to think about the present