Name-dropping:
Dutch East India Company (pronun-ciation: like it sounds) or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (pronunciation: um, like it sounds—in Dutch).
Massive commercial enterprise of the 17th century.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Every cocktail party features someone who enjoys talking about their business, even though their business is unfathomably boring. Before you find yourself nodding off to a discussion about the profit margin of coffee filters, interrupt them with a story from the Dutch East India Company, which did business in a day when doing business meant war, bravery, torture, immense wealth, and—most of all—nutmeg.

The Basics
Spices were to 16th-century Europe what Air Jordans were to 1990s Harlem: Even though people had lived quite happily for centuries without them, they were suddenly worth killing for.

Established in 1602, the Dutch East India Company (also known by its Dutch abbreviation, VOC) obtained a monopoly over Dutch colonial activities in Asia. And thanks to its dominance on spices like nutmeg and pepper, the VOC soon became the largest company in the world. At its height in the late 17th century, the VOC had a private army of 10,000 soldiers, 150 merchant ships, and 50,000 employees. It was also the first company to issue shares of itself in stock, the first to issue bonds, and the only company in all of history to have controlled dozens of colonies throughout the world. (Take that, Wal-Mart!)

The key to the Dutch East India Company’s success? Why, exploitation and murder, of course. The most successful head of the VOC made the CEOs of Enron and WorldCom look like patsies. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who ruled the VOC from 1617 to his death in 1629, massacred most every grown man in the Pacific Bandalese archipelago to cement his control over the islands. In fact, within 15 years of the VOC’s arrival, the islands’ populations had been reduced from 15,000 to 600. Later leaders of the VOC were hardly more compassionate—by the end of the 17th century, the punishment for stealing or unauthorized growing of nutmeg or clove was execution.

All that tyranny took a toll on the bottom line, however. Manning a sizable army, complete with 100 warships, isn’t cheap, and despite its best efforts, the Dutch East India Company couldn’t keep a monopoly on spices. French and British entrepreneurs stole seedlings and planted them on their own colonial lands, and the competition drove down the price of spices. By the mid-18th century, the VOC was kept afloat primarily by its network of textile mills. Then, in 1799, the first great company went bankrupt. The VOC, which once billed itself as the “Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe,” ceased to exist. By cornering the market on spices, it proved that a luxury product could lead to huge profits. By issuing stock, it ushered in modern publicly traded corporations. And the Dutch East India Company did it the old-fashioned way: It pulled itself up by its bootstraps, secured the support of a powerful government, and relentlessly killed and tyrannized all those who got in its way.

The British East India Company and the VOC were hated rivals, and they frequently battled for control of the spice trade. In 1619, the Brits and Dutch signed a treaty allowing the British one-third of the spice industry and the Dutch two-thirds. A good deal for the Dutch, but not good enough. In 1623, the Dutch attacked a British East India factory in the Pacific. The Brits who died immediately were the lucky ones: The survivors were tortured by having their arms and legs systematically blown off by small gunpowder bombs. Then they were killed.

The Name Game
The end of colonialism was an unmitigated disaster for cartographers. Dozens of places changed names; borders changed; new countries formed and old ones were swallowed up. (The Democratic Republic of the Congo holds the record, with five name changes in the past century.) Most every place ruled by the Dutch East India Company has since rechrist-ened itself, as you can see:

Persia → Iran
Bengal → Bangladesh (and parts of western India)
Siam → Thailand
Ceylon → Sri Lanka
Formosa → Taiwan → Republic of China
China → Okay, still China. But you get the point.

Conversation Starters
◆ Even though the sophisticated and worldly palates of today realize that nutmeg tastes like a mix between cayenne pepper and grandma’s basement, Renaissance Europe was nuts for the stuff. The Dutch East India Company wanted nutmeg so much, in fact, that they acquired the nutmeg-laden island of Pulo Run, one of the Banda Islands, from the British in exchange for the colony of New Amsterdam, which the British renamed New York.

◆ Much has been made of the dangers of sailing to the Far East, but working for the VOC wasn’t as risky as you might think: In the 16th and 17th century, only 4 percent of the ships that traveled to the Far East were lost. (By comparison, being an American president is significantly more dangerous than being a Dutch East India Company ship: About 9 percent of American presidents have been assassinated.)

◆ In one of the first examples of outsourcing, the VOC closed its shipyard in 1649, realizing it would be more profitable to hire others’ ships than to build its own. In 1669, the dividend payment on VOC shares was 40 percent of the stock price. (In 2003, Microsoft’s dividend was .03 percent.)

Name-dropping:
W. E. B. Du Bois (pronunciation: due-BOYZ—don’t feel bad if you couldn’t pronounce his name; it was so common a problem that Du Bois sent a letter to a newspaper explaining how to pronounce it correctly) (1868–1963):
Cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and author of the classic The Souls of Black Folk.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whether you’re chatting with an exchange student from Ghana about her homeland, a board member from the NAACP about the organization’s history, or a ditzy sociology major you’re about to make out with on account of your breadth of knowledge and wisdom, Du Bois can carry you through. He’s versatile like that.

The Basics
In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to get a PhD from Harvard. His degree was in history, but his passion was sociology, and he was soon famous in academic circles for his brilliant sociological studies, particularly the book The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

Du Bois might have stayed a scholar—he had a plum gig teaching at Atlanta University and was widely respected—but his life in the South led him to believe that writing sociological treatises for a narrow audience wasn’t going to end Jim Crow. In 1903, he published The Souls of Black Folk. Perhaps no book since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin so ignited passion and conflict about the place of African Americans in society. Unlike his contemporary Booker T. Washington, Du Bois believed that voting and other rights were more important to African Americans than working within the segregation system. The Souls of Black Folk is the rare book that’s considered a classic by English professors, sociologists, and political scientists alike.

Du Bois was also the first writer to apprehend the “double-consciousness” of African Americans—the idea that being black and American led to “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” The book established him as a rival to Booker T. Washington for the title of Most Important Black Leader in America.

In 1909, Du Bois cofounded the NAACP, and he edited its flagship magazine, The Crisis, for 25 years. But he eventually fell out with NAACP leadership. In his later years, Du Bois came to embrace the radical egalitarianism of Communism. He visited Communist China, called Stalin “a great man,” and generally irked the FBI, which eventually indicted him on a trumped-up charge that he’d become a “foreign agent.” The case never came to trial, and Du Bois eventually solved his legal troubles and his personal “double-consciousness” problem at the age of 92—by ceasing to be an American. Invited to live in Ghana by its president, Du Bois—who’d always favored pan-African unity—left the U.S. and renounced his citizenship. Although he died a Ghanaian, no American in the first half of the 20th century did more to influence the civil rights movement of the second half.

Communism: It Wasn’t Just for Idiots and Meanies
The attraction of Communism, which offered revolutionary change and equality for the working class, was profound indeed. Many African American intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century expressed Communist sympathies, including Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes. And though you don’t read about it in schoolbooks, another American icon who stood for the rights of the disenfranchised, Helen Keller, was a member of the Socialist Party in the U.S. Not technically Communist, but close.

A NOVEL APPROACH
Du Bois is remembered almost exclusively for his nonfiction writing, but he was a novelist as well—albeit not a very good one. If you think Moby Dick features a lot of information about whales and whaling, check out how Du Bois nitpicks cotton to death in The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

Conversation Starters
◆ W. E. B. Du Bois was a frat boy. But what a frat! During his days at Fisk University, Du Bois was one of the most prominent early members of the historically black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. Among his brothers: Jesse Owens, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

◆ Like a lot of great men, Du Bois had a weakness when it came to infidelity. He lived with his wife, Nina, for 53 years, but Du Bois himself acknowledged, “It was not an absolutely ideal union.” For one thing, it was nonideal in the sense that Du Bois had periodic affairs, including some that scholars refer to as “parallel marriages.”

◆ Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People clearly stated its mission right in its title, Du Bois was—get this—the only African American on the NAACP’s first board of directors.

◆ Du Bois died in Ghana just one day before the epochal March on Washington began. Martin Luther King Jr. eulogized Du Bois the following morning at the start of the march, a sort of preparation for his brilliant “I Have a Dream” speech.

Name-dropping:
Dead Sea Scrolls (pronunciation: obvious) (found beginning in 1947).
Ancient scrolls containing most of the Hebrew Bible, a treasure map, and some excellent recipes for plum wine.

Essenes (pronunciation: EH-seens):
A religious community of Jews living around the time of Jesus who probably penned a majority of the scrolls.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
When you’re discussing Ulysses (see p. 164), for starters, since the scrolls contain even less punctuation than Ulysses’ final chapter. But your knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls should also sufficiently impress armchair scholars of religious history.

The Basics
Often referred to as the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times (although we’re still waiting for a bunch of Salinger novels to show up when the guy finally dies), the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in 11 separate caves. (If you’re driving from Jerusalem, head east until you get to Jericho and then hang a left.) Dating from sometime between the third century BCE and first century CE, the “scrolls” consist of 850 documents (not all of which were recovered in scroll form) written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

Oddly enough, the scrolls weren’t discovered by hardworking archaeologists but by a shepherd. In 1947, a boy named Muhammad edh-Dhib threw a stone into a cave in hopes of chasing out a goat he thought might have ambled into it. The stone shattered pottery, and when Muhammad entered the cave to investigate, he found the first scrolls. By 1956, all the extant scrolls had been recovered.

Most scholars believe the scrolls were written by a Jewish group known as the Essenes, who were driven out of Jerusalem because their apocalyptic worldview clashed with that of the Jewish leadership. The Essenes believed in a sort of Star Wars world: There was good, and there was evil, and there was not a lot of gray. The good (the “children of light”) would soon conquer the evil (the “children of darkness.” George Lucas came up with better names, at least). The group who wrote the scrolls seems to have been fixated on a messiah fi gure possibly living among them who’s constantly referred to as the “Teacher of Righteousness.”

Because the scrolls were written right around the time of Jesus, they have importance to scholars of both Christianity and Judaism. Jewish scholars have used them to learn more about the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism in the last centuries BCE, while Christian scholars have learned more about the apocalyptic religious movements in and around Palestine during Jesus’ life. If nothing else, the scrolls reveal the diversity within Judaism at the time they were written, and help us to understand the Judaic world in the years before the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE.

Alas, Poor Shapira
In 1883, an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem named M. W. Shapira decided to sell an ancient manuscript of the Book of Deuteronomy that he believed to be extremely valuable. But when he sent the manuscript to biblical scholars, they all agreed it was a forgery. Humiliated, Shapira committed suicide in 1884. The following year, the manuscript sold at auction (for much less than Shapira hoped to get for it), and promptly disappeared. But comparisons of the Dead Sea Scrolls to descriptions in stories of Shapira’s manuscript have led scholars to believe that Shapira’s Deuteronomy was quite probably authentic—and thus worth untold millions. Which just goes to show you: Never, ever kill yourself.

THE SCROLL YOU WISHED YOU FOUND
Our personal favorite scroll is the so-called Copper Scroll, which is actually written on copper and contains a veritable treasure map of secret tombs containing silver, gold, and spices. Um, Goonies 2, anyone? We’re picturing an aging Corey Feldman teaming with, say, Dakota Fanning, to seek out gold in them thar Holy Hills.

Conversation Starters
◆ Initially, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls didn’t look like scrolls, but like a jigsaw puzzle. Scholars pieced together over 100,000 fragments of papyrus—a particularly impressive accomplishment when considering that most of the pieces were missing.

◆ Among the texts in the scrolls are some Thanksgiving psalms, a couple rocking hymns, and a divinely dictated battle plan. They also contain psalms attributed to King David and a host of sacred writings not found in the Hebrew Bible.

◆ Other than paragraph indentations the scrolls have no punctuation absolutely none which as you can imagine makes for difficult reading

Name-dropping:
Miles Davis (pronunciation: You can handle this one) (1926–1991).
Trumpeter whose hugely influential playing and composing puts him near the top of the list of important 20th-century musicians.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whatever sub-genre of jazz your cocktail party hosts happen to use for a party, there’s a reasonably good chance that Miles Davis invented it, refined it, or redefined it—so Davis is sure to be a hit topic. Also, if your hosts happen to be heroin addicts, Davis serves as an excellent cautionary tale.

The Basics
Miles Davis was the rare serious musician whose work succeeded both critically and commercially. He stood at the forefront of most major jazz movements over the last 60 years of jazz, and he got rich doing it. (Miles liked to say, “I got five Ferraris to support!”)

The son of a dentist, Davis started seriously playing the trumpet when he was 13. By the time he graduated from high school, he’d played with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. In fact, he even got a full ride to Juilliard, but upon arriving in New York City, he decided to ditch school in favor of playing with Parker’s quintet. Those recordings from the mid-1940s proved to be seminal achievements in bebop, the fast-tempo and heavily improvisational music for which Parker is best remembered.

Then Miles decided to follow in a storied tradition of jazz musicians and get himself addicted to heroin. For five years, it seemed that Miles’s talent might go to waste, but he eventually returned to his hometown of East St. Louis and kicked heroin with the help of his dad the dentist (who, we’re imagining, just threatened to drill his teeth sans Novocain if Miles kept shooting up).

In 1959, Miles released his masterpiece album, Kind of Blue. It made him both famous and rich. Davis called together his new band on almost no notice, gave them brief instructions, and sat down to play. The album was recorded in two days. All the songs but one were recorded in one take. Often called the definitive jazz album, Kind of Blue was revolutionary: It used modes rather than chord progressions, ushered in the era of “cool jazz,” and—perhaps best of all—its emphasis on melody made it approachable for jazz neophytes.

By the early 1970s, Miles progressed to fusion jazz—using electric instruments and funk beats in the studio—producing the indisputable classic Bitches Brew, which marks the only time in this entire book that we get to use a curse word.

By the mid-1970s, his addictions to cocaine and alcohol (and heroin again) led to a physical and emotional breakdown. He dropped out of the jazz scene, got halfway sober, and returned to the public eye in 1981, but he was never quite the same.

Best-Seller
Kind of Blue is the best-selling jazz record of all time. It has sold more than three million copies, and 40 years after its 1959 release, it was still selling 5,000 copies a week. (Incidentally, one would have to sell 5,000 albums a week for more than 47 years to match the sales of the Backstreet Boys’s 1997 self-titled effort.) Miles Davis always resented the white establishment, particularly after a 1959 beating at the hands of New York police officers. So this oft-told story rings true: In 1987, Miles attended a reception to honor Ray Charles and was seated next to a scion of Washington society. When she asked him what he’d done to get invited to the reception, he responded, “I’ve changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than being white?”

THE ORIGINAL PIMP
Miles often dressed flamboyantly, particularly in the 1970s, when America seemed to believe that only polyester could save us from the threat of Communism. Between the flamboyant dress, the fast cars, and his many affairs, Miles has often been cited as an early example of living the pimping lifestyle without actually having to, you know, pimp. Except, he did, you know, pimp. According to the New York Times, Miles briefly worked as a pimp during his early heroin-addicted days in New York.

Conversation Starters
◆ In between winning 26 Grammys, writing music (including the theme for Sanford and Son), founding Vibe magazine, and befriending everyone from Michael Jackson to Bono, Quincy Jones apparently finds an hour each day to share with Miles. He once commented, “[Kind of Blue] will always be my music, man. I play Kind of Blue every day—it’s my orange juice.”

◆ Miles once said, “I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later,” and that’s more or less the approach he took to recording. He’d often call in band members on no notice, give them no time to rehearse, talk briefly about what he wanted to happen, and then start playing. Although this annoyed some of his band members (notably John Coltrane, whose playing Miles found long-winded), others found it exhilarating.

◆ In the Jazz Cat Imitating Spider-Man category: Davis’s former road manager Chris Murphy claimed in a tell-all book that Davis once decided to scale the face of his apartment building because he had no key and was convinced that his girlfriend was in the apartment engaging in shenanigans with “a dozen white guys.”

Name-dropping:
Charlemagne (pronunciation: SHAR- luh-main) (c. 742–814 CE).
For 43 years, he was King of the Franks (the Franks being the forefathers of both the French and the Germans). You might think that having the same forefathers might keep France and Germany from getting into a gigantic war every few decades. But, hey. Cain and Abel. Union blue and rebel gray.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
During drunken poker games, whenever elephants come up, and—most significantly—when you get stuck talking to someone who is absolutely, positively fascinated by genealogy.

The Basics
Charlemagne means “Charles the Great” in French, and—indeed. He became king of a recently unified France in 771, when he was in his 20s, whereupon he immediately decided to invade and conquer Italy. Then he annexed Bavaria (for the beer, presumably), took over Hungary, and conquered parts of Spain. Before he was 40 years old, Charlemagne had unified most of European Christendom. And that was only the beginning.

Charlemagne’s real gift was for infrastructure. He divided his kingdom into 350 well-run counties, rebuilt schools in France, and encouraged the growth of church music. He even experimented with a kind of pre-Republic in an annual, open-air meeting with landowners during which he’d outline his plan for the coming year and then listen to their suggestions. (He didn’t always take these suggestions, and he sometimes killed the landowners he disagreed with, but—baby steps!) However, Charlemagne wasn’t in the pocket of the landlords, and he fought, with mixed results, against the growth of the serf system.

Charlemagne’s chief passion, aside from war, was education. Like most nobles of his day, he received minimal academic instruction in his childhood, but he made his palace a kind of early university. The school’s hardest-working student was Charlemagne himself, but unfortunately Charles the Great was a poor student. For instance, he never really learned how to, um, write. But he tried hard, studying rhetoric, astronomy, and Latin.

In the coming Dark Ages, Europe would cease to be a center of the cultural world, but Europe flowered under Charlemagne as never before. And although he was an absolutely ruthless tyrant who would today doubtlessly be called a war criminal, he is the rare “Great” who earned the name.

Question: Who’s Your Great 38 Granddaddy?
Answer: Charlemagne, if you’re of European ancestry. We made a solemn vow not to do any difficult math during the writing of this book, so just take our word when we say that you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and about a trillion great38 grandparents (there’s a lot of doubling, due to extremely distant incest). Ergo, everyone of European ancestry living today can count Charlemagne (and, inciden- tally, also the prophet Muhammad) as an ancestor. In fact, research indicates that every human being alive is probably a descendant of Queen Nefertiti and Confucius. One study claims that the chance Charlemagne isn’t a European’s great38 granddad is about 1 in 1015,000. (By comparison, there are about 1080 atoms in the entire universe, so we’re talking a very, very slim chance.)

Cowboy of Hearts
Beginning in the mid-1400s, French playing card designers associated each king in a deck of cards with an actual, real-life king. In fact, even today the cards are associated with the royal links the French gave them.

• King of Spades—King David
• King of Clubs—Alexander the Great
• King of Hearts—Charlemagne
• King of Diamonds—Julius Caesar

POUND FOR POUND
Charlemagne introduced much of the world to the livre, known in English as the pound—both the monetary unit and the weight. In a world where princes often printed their own special currencies, Charlemagne applied his standards throughout his kingdom, and the English adopted them to ease trade. In time, Britain passed them to America. We Americans still measure in pounds; but all of Charlemagne’s empire, and indeed nearly every other nation in the world, uses kilograms.

Conversation Starters
◆ Many contemporary accounts of Charlemagne record that he was, well, a bit of a girly man. Apparently, he spoke in an unusually high voice.

◆ Although Charlemagne is often remembered for his Christian piety due to his passion for sacred music and converting the masses, there was one commandment he just couldn’t seem to follow: the one about killing. In just one day, for instance, he oversaw the beheading of 4,000 Saxons.

◆ According to legend, Charlemagne used to impress guests by throwing his tablecloth into the fire and then pulling it out unburnt. (These were simpler times, when people were impressed by Amazing Unburnable Tablecloths.) Those who believe the story is true provide a simple enough explanation: Charlemagne’s tablecloth was likely made of asbestos.

◆ Somewhere around the beginning of the ninth century, Islamic caliph Harun al-Rashid gave Charlemagne an elephant. The elephant (whose name is lost to history) was sort of the Columbus of his species. He is believed to have been the first ever to venture into Northern Europe.

Name-dropping:
Catherine the Great (pronunciation: Just sound it out) (1729–1796).
Russian Empress of German descent who did not—we repeat, did not—die during a botched attempt to have sex with a horse.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
First and foremost, whenever anyone tells that horrifying story about the horse. (More on that and the true circumstances of her death in a moment.) Why is it, anyway, that kings get to have wild, bacchanalian parties on a daily basis and no one ever raises a peep, but a woman has a little fun here and there, and all of a sudden she’s in a romantic relationship with a horse? So, yeah. Whenever gender relationships come up.

The Basics
Catherine the Great started out pretty unlucky—well, as unlucky as German princesses can get. When she was 14, she was shipped off to Europe’s hinterland to marry the heir to the throne of Russia, Karl Ulrich. That seems like a pretty good deal, maybe, until you consider that Karl was crazy, impotent, an alcoholic, and had a fanatical fascination with the emperor of Prussia, Russia’s sworn enemy. After Karl assumed the throne in 1762, it quickly became obvious that he would be, like, the Worst Emperor Ever, and so a group amassed a small army and marched upon his castle. Terrified, Karl fled, and so just six months after Karl’s coronation, Catherine—well-read, intelligent, and friendly with Enlightenment stalwarts like Voltaire and Diderot—was installed in his place. Her husband was assassinated by Catherine’s supporters eight days later.

Although Catherine agreed intellectually with Enlightenment principles—most notably that the serfs ought to be freed from their functional slavery at the hands of landowners—she found it impractical to make such reforms, mostly because she relied on the support of landowners. But over the next 34 years, she did bring Russia further into the fold of Europe by modernizing her court, streamlining government bureaucracy, and building more than 100 new towns and cities. Although she was of German ancestry, Catherine embraced Russian culture wholeheartedly and served as a kind of PR representative for a nation that had always been considered backward by the rest of Europe.

Over the next 34 years, Catherine the Great would add 200,000 square miles to the Russian Empire. And she added over 200,000 lovers to her personal list of conquests. (We kid!) Although Catherine had many lovers, she was less promiscuous than the vast majority of male monarchs. And although her marriage was miserable, she found happiness in her relationship with Grigory Potempkin, an adviser who oversaw the annexation of the Crimea and advised her on countless construction projects.

In the end, Catherine paid more lip service than actual attention to Enlightenment ideals. And while the improvements she brought to Russia may not have been felt by the serfs (who constituted 95 percent of the population), the sheer force of her charisma and her determined intelligence improved Russia’s image throughout the world.

THE GREATS, IN APPROXIMATE ORDER OF GREATNESS
Peter the Great (1672–1725):
Probably Russia’s greatest statesman. Also he was six-foot-seven! Sure, he wasn’t great
for the serfs—but then again, no one was. ★★★★★

Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE):
Conquered half the known world and did it all before dying at 33. If he pulled those stunts now, he would be called a war criminal. Still, pretty great for his time. ★★★★

Catherine the Great (1729–1796):
She could have been greater if she’d had the courage to stand up to the landowners, but if she’d done that, she’d probably have died violently and young. ★★★

Frederick the Great (1712–1786):
Sure, he tried to be a genuinely enlightened monarch, but he also had a pathological fear of bathing. ★★

Pompey the Great (106–48 BCE): Friend to, and then enemy of, Julius Caesar. But if he was so great, how come he never became Caesar himself? ★

When “My Kingdom for a Horse” Starts Sounding Dirty
Somehow, the rumor survives. Soon after Catherine’s death, someone—probably her enemies in the Russian aristocracy— started floating the story that Catherine died of being crushed after attempting to have sex with a horse. Russian aristocrats may have started it, and high school boys have been spreading it ever since. But it’s just not true. Although Catherine did take many lovers and had a secret room built in her palace that she filled with raunchy paintings and sculptures, Catherine the Great did not die anywhere near a horse. But the true story is nearly as embarrassing: Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, had a stroke while on the toilet, and died a few days later.

Conversation Starters
◆ The world-famous State Hermitage (which in Russian is pronounced err-mee-TAJJ) Museum began as Catherine’s personal collection of art. She was generally a friend of the arts, although like a lot of Russian leaders, she couldn’t help but send a dissident writer to Siberia now and again. Most famously, she exiled Alexander Radishchev to Siberia after he published a book highlighting the miserable lives of the serfs.

◆ Also like a lot of Russian leaders, Catherine just couldn’t stomach the existence of Poland. Her forces invaded Poland in 1792, and eliminated it from the map (temporarily) by 1795, dividing it among her kingdom, Austria, and Prussia.

◆ Catherine was said to strongly dislike her son, who later became Emperor Paul I, but it’s possible that this story—like the one about the horse—was created by her enemies in the aristocracy. Still, Paul seems to have believed Catherine hated him. As a young man, the perennially paranoid Paul accused his mom of mixing shards of glass into his food in an attempt to kill him.

Name-dropping:
The Buddha (pronunciation: BOO- duh) (c. 563–483 BCE).
Also known as Siddhartha Gautama and Gautama Buddha—the nirvana-achievin’ founder of Buddhism who, contrary to what you might have heard, was neither Chinese nor obese.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Buddhism is immensely helpful for late-night, really deep conversations. Like, have you ever thought about how everything—like, everything—is going to fall apart? You and me and the couch we’re sitting on and the planet and everything? Well, the Buddha already thought of that, fortunately. And he did it without any intoxicants.

The Basics
Most of what we know about the Buddha isn’t based on reliable histories but on legends, many of which weren’t written down until centuries after the Buddha’s life. But the story goes like this:

The Buddha was born a prince in an area that today straddles the border between India and Nepal. At the time, being a prince involved a life of carefree luxury (and, potentially, a Wilt Chamberlain–like promiscuity). But because a soothsayer told Siddhartha’s mother that the baby would either grow up to be a great king or a great holy man, Siddhartha’s father tried in vain to make him the former. In fact, he went so far as to shield the boy from any sort of religious education and exposure to human suffering.

When he was 29, however, Siddhartha started traveling outside the palace and encountered “the four sights”: a crippled man, a diseased man, a rotting corpse, and finally a wandering ascetic, who roamed the hills of India much like the hippies once roamed the Haight. Siddhartha quickly became every parent’s nightmare: He ditched his money, his parents, his wife, and his palace to spend his life searching for a way to overcome the inevitability of human suffering.

After a couple years of nearly starving himself to death as an ascetic, the Buddha sat down beneath a tree (called the Bodhi tree) and asserted that he wouldn’t move a muscle until he found enlightenment. He found it, and from then on, Gautama came to be known as a “Buddha,” or “Awakened One.”

Initially preaching to just five people, the Buddha’s disciples soon multiplied. Further, his teachings of impermanence and karma, along with the “Four Noble Truths” and the “Eightfold Four Noble Truths Path,” became the foundation point for a philosophy and religious tradition that would, by the first century CE, be a driving force in the lives of people from India to China.

Four Noble Truths
The philosophy of the Buddha is often summed up in the following “Noble Truths”:

1. “There is suffering.” This one is fairly simple, and fairly obvious, too, and if you disagree we will come to your house and punch you in the face to prove you wrong.
2. The cause of suffering is desire. “Desire” here is not so much a reference to romantic desire as to one’s general attachment to
people, places, and things.
3. The way out of suffering is to eliminate desire.
4. The Eightfold Path is the way out of suffering. If you’re wondering what the Eightfold Path is, well—then we’ve got a sidebar just for you.

Eightfold Path
1. The Right Perspective
2. The Right Thinking
3. The Right Speech (i.e., no lying)
4. The Right Action (i.e., no stealing, no killing, no intoxicants, and no sex if you’re a monk)
5. The Right Livelihood (i.e., not being an investment banker. We kid. Sort of.)
6. The Right Effort
7. The Right Mindfulness
8. The Right Concentration

THE LOW-FAT PATH
The Buddha is often portrayed as being a bit—how to put this politely—fat. But was he? Probably not. The Buddha competed throughout his life in wrestling and archery, and he spent much of his time hiking great distances. Depictions of a fat Buddha are often not of Gautama at all, but of another Buddha named Hotei. An eccentric, pudgy, and happy monk, Hotei is known as the Laughing Buddha and is a common subject of Buddhist artwork.

Conversation Starters
◆ Before kabbalah, Buddhism was all the rage among Western celebrities. Fads pass, but a few have stayed loyal to the faith, including Richard Gere, Tina Turner (who has credited Buddhism for helping her to ditch Ike), and the Beastie Boys’s MCA.

◆ Most Buddhists do not consider Siddhartha Gautama to have been either the first or the last Buddha. Since enlightenment is available to everyone (even if you are, say, a grasshopper), there have been many Buddhas throughout history. Those who achieve enlightenment but forgo nirvana, choosing to remain in the cycle of death and rebirth, are known as bodhisattvas—and these, too, are numerous and widely revered by Buddhists.

◆ In 2004, a Japanese candy manufacturer sought to register a trademark for a popular candy it produced called “Snot from the Nose of the Great Buddha.” A group of priests stopped the company from getting the trademark for its gooey, sugary snack, but it remains on sale—complete with a wrapper depicting the Buddha beatifically picking his Buddha nose.

◆ From the Interreligious Dialogue Files: The Buddha, who lived well before Jesus, was once a Catholic saint. St. Josaphat, as he was known, was the son of an Indian king whose father tried to keep him from going religious. When it became clear to scholars, however, that Josaphat was, you know, the Buddha dressed in a saint suit, he was quietly taken off the list of saints.

Name-dropping:
Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818– 1848), and Anne Brontë (1820–1849) (pronunciation: BRON-tay, but more on that later).
A trio of sisters from Yorkshire, England, whose brilliantly imagined novels shook up Victorian literature and have been a staple of 19th-century literature classes ever since.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whenever you find yourself drinking with a student of 19th-century literature, you’ll need all the Brontës you can muster. But knowledge of the Brontës will also come in handy if you get stuck listening to a boring, nostalgic tale of the halcyon days of yore. Just cut them off and say, “I’m sure the holiday parties/red wine/sporting events were better in the old days. But in the old days, no one got to enjoy any of it, because everyone was constantly dying of tuberculosis.”

The Basics
The Brontë sisters were close growing up. They attended boarding school together, and watched their sisters Maria and Elizabeth die of tuberculosis in their childhood. Eventually, they would all share the same fate.

Charlotte
The oldest of the three, Charlotte wrote four novels, but it was her first, Jane Eyre, that’s become a classic. The story of a young governess in love with a man who has a secret (and very crazy) wife chained in his attic, Jane Eyre wasn’t well received by critics, but it sold well from the beginning, and—as is so often the case—the critics ended up looking foolish. Charlotte married at 37; she was pregnant a year later when she died suddenly, apparently of tuberculosis.

Emily
The middle sister, Emily was the quietest of the sisters, but today she’s generally considered the most talented. Her early poems show a talent for verse, and her lone novel, Wuthering Heights, is stylistically dazzling. It contains stories within stories, a reading experience that has been compared to opening a matryoshka doll. But Emily did not live to write another book. Shortly after the publication of Wuthering Heights, she caught tuberculosis. A few months later, she died at the age of 30.

The Unfortunate Mr Branwell Brontë
When the Brontë siblings were children, the girls were thought bright—but not near so talented as young Branwell Brontë, the lone boy. His one literary contribution—an unpublished translation of Horace—was supposedly admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Branwell had something else in common with Coleridge: They were both fond of opium.) The clear black sheep of the family, Branwell got fired from the only two jobs he ever had (once for sleeping with the boss’s wife), and eventually returned home. While his sisters wrote, he spent his days drinking and smoking opium. In the end, he became so strung out that it’s not known for sure whether he ever learned of his sisters’ success. Regardless, soon after the Brontë girls became literary celebrities, Branwell died of— that’s right—tuberculosis.

Anne
Let’s not sugarcoat it. Compared to her sisters, Anne was something of a hack. Pious, quiet, and perhaps too traditional for her own good, Anne’s most famous novel, Agnes Grey, is a mediocre example of the “governess novel” (the 19th- century equivalent of The Nanny Diaries). Still, Anne was only 28 when her second novel was published, and she might have gone on to match her sisters’ brilliance. But she caught—you guessed it—tuberculosis. She died at the age of 29.

Extra Credit:
TB
Something about 19th-century writers—their depressive dispositions, perhaps—seemed to attract death by tuberculosis. Besides the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, D. H. Lawrence, and Anton Chekov all died of TB. Perhaps the most tragic death was that of John Keats, the outlandishly promising British poet who died in 1821 at the tender age of 25. Keats remained a brilliant poet to his bitter end. His last will and testament, one perfect line of iambic pentameter, was also his last poem: “My chest of books divide amongst my friends.”

WHATEVER RINGS YOUR BELL
All three Brontë sisters wrote for most of their lives under gender-ambiguous pseudonyms. Charlotte was Currer Bell; Emily, Ellis Bell; and Anne, Acton Bell. Many 19th-century women (most famously George Eliot) used pseudonyms, because critics and reviewers expected women to write prim-and-proper books. In retrospect, most of the great 19th-century British novelists were women—and none of them wrote merely proper novels.

Conversation Starters
◆ If Brontë seems like an odd name for a middle-class British family, well—it is. The Brontës’ father was an Anglican minister named Patrick Brunty. But the good Rev. Brunty thought his name sounded painfully unsophisticated, so he changed it—several times. First, it was Branty, then Bronte, and then Bronté, before he finally settled on the Brontë.

◆ Incidentally, the accent mark in Brontë is known as a diaeresis, which is a word that frankly contains too many vowels to ever become popular. A diaeresis indicates that a vowel should be pronounced. Although extremely rare today, it is still used by The Economist and The New Yorker magazines, both of which spell cooperate “coöperate.”

◆ The next time you worry that your kid is spending too much time with her imaginary friends, consider the Brontës. Well into their young adulthoods, the Brontës talked and wrote about two kingdoms they’d invented as children, Angria and Gondal. The Gothic, soap-operaesque storylines they invented in Angria and Gondal ended up informing both their poems and novels.

◆ Before they became famous, the Brontë sisters wrote poetry together. Using their gender-ambiguous pseudonyms, the Brontës published a book of poems in 1846. It sold exactly two copies.

Name-dropping:
Simón Bolívar (pronunciation: see- MOAN bo-LEE-varr—and remember to roll those r’s)
(1783–1830).
South American revolutionary who brought independence to much of the continent but gets absolutely no props, while Che (freaking) Guevera, who never liberated anybody, gets his face plastered all over hipsters’ T-shirts.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Well, whenever you see a Che shirt, for starters. But you can also use your knowledge of Bolívar to impress students of colonialism, revolutionaries, American Civil War buffs, and fans of South American author Gabriel García Márquez.

The Basics
Known as “The Liberator,” Simón Bolívar came from a wealthy Venezuelan family. He studied in Europe, married the daughter of a prominent Spaniard (sadly, Bolívar’s wife died soon after of yellow fever), and received an excellent education from private tutors. But by his 21st birthday, Bolívar began to imagine a South America free from colonialism and, in typically dramatic fashion, stood atop a mountain in Rome and made a solemn vow to liberate his homeland.

Plenty of kids in their early 20s have big ideas, but Bolívar made it happen. With Spain weak due to Napoléon’s invasions, Bolívar began leading Latin American independence movements. And despite his initially failing to win independence for Venezuela, his forces eventually prevailed, entering Caracas in 1813. It was then that Bolívar began a long and storied tradition in Latin American politics by immediately declaring himself president of Venezuela, by which he meant “dictator.”

It was Bolívar’s dream that all Latin America would be a single giant nation (and he also dreamed, no doubt, of running it himself). In the next few years, it seemed he might accomplish it. One by one, territories were brought into the fold of “Gran Colombia.” Besides Venezuela, Bolívar helped to liberate Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia (naturally), and Panama. But Bolívar’s dream was never terribly realistic. Internal factionalism caused him constant problems and left him frequently out of power, and his unrepentant lust for power (he wrote a constitution for Gran Colombia that made him president for life and gave him the ability to choose a successor) made him unpopular in spite of all he’d done to bring sovereignty to South America.

He resigned his presidency of Gran Colombia once and for all in 1830, after spending the latter part of his career trying to quell uprisings throughout South America. Suffering from tuberculosis, he spent the last six months of his life adrift, still vaguely dreaming of a powerful, united South America. Simón died of tuberculosis on December 17, 1830. A great general who lusted too much for power, his faults have largely been forgotten today, and although he is not as famous as he ought to be in the U.S., Bolívar is revered throughout much of South America.

Name Game
Simón Bolívar is the only person in the world to have not one, but two, sovereign nations named after him: Bolivia and Venezuela. Before you try to find the “Venezuela” in Bolívar’s full name, allow us to explain. It turns out that the full name of Venezuela is “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” (Additionally, he’s also got a square in Egypt named after him, as well as the official currency of Venezuela, the bolivar.)

Bolívar’s Labyrinth
The tragic last months of Simón Bolívar’s life are recounted to brilliant effect in Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s 1981 novel The General in His Labyrinth. In the book, “The General” vacillates between an acceptance that he is near death and a fierce determination to begin a revolution anew. García Márquez’s version of Bolívar’s last words is particularly moving. In the midst of a hellish fever, The General wakes up and says, “Damn it. How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” it seems that Bolívar did indeed ask that question, but it wasn’t his final utterance. His real last words were likely the more pedestrian “José, bring the baggage.”

Conversation Starters
◆ Simón Bolívar had one of the most impressive full names in all of human history: Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios.

◆ We’ve often pondered why it is, exactly, that Goofy, a dog, gets to be Mickey Mouse’s zany, talkative pal, while Pluto, also a dog, is merely Mickey’s pet. And it’s hard not to feel sorry for poor, mute Pluto. But it turns out that Pluto has a comrade. Donald Duck’s pet dog, Bolivar (who was indeed named for Simón), first appeared in Disney cartoons in 1938. Like Pluto, he can’t talk and always walks on four legs. How typical of The Man to name a hapless, mute mutt after a brilliant South American general.

◆ It wasn’t just South America that revered Bolivar. Although it may be hard to imagine a Southerner named for a Venezuelan revolutionary, there was indeed at least one such man: Simon Bolivar Buckner Sr., a mustachioed Kentuckian, was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. After the war, he served as governor of Kentucky. He wasn’t embarrassed by the name, either. In fact, he passed it on to his son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., who also became a general, but this time in the U.S. army. An unrepentant racist who refused to lead African-American troops, Junior nonetheless commanded the assault on Okinawa. He was killed by artillery fire during the battle, making him the highest-ranking American soldier to die in World War II.

Name-dropping:
Beowulf (pronunciation: BAY-oh-wuhlf) (written between 700 and 1000 CE).
The italicized Beowulf is an epic poem, apparently written in English (although you wouldn’t know that to read it). The nonitalicized Beowulf is the poem’s hero, a knight-in-shining-armor type.

Grendel (pronunciation: GREN-dul):
A horrible monster.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whenever you find yourself chatting with a pretentious one-time English major (you can spot them by the repeated references to Proust and the suit jacket with elbow patches). But Beowulf will also give you a tale to tell while you drink an actual Grendel, a lemonade-based, liqueur-stuffed, sticky-sweet cocktail.

The Basics
Beowulf is widely considered to be the first great work of literature in English—even though all the words are spelled weird, as if its author (whose identity is unknown) was hooked on phonics. The language is so inaccessible, in fact, that many translations have been published (most notably, Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney’s, in 2001). Beowulf is the epic story of a fellow named, well, Beowulf. It is told in two parts.

Part 1: A horrible monster named Grendel has, for 12 years, attacked a Danish mead hall every single night, plucking drinkers from their seats and killing them. Frankly, you’d think they could just close down that mead hall that Grendel so hates and open up another one farther down the street. But regardless, a young prince named Beowulf arrives on the scene and promises to save the mead drinkers from their evil monster. That very night, Grendel shows up, eats a sleeping man, and then runs into Beowulf. Our hero valiantly battles the evil Grendel, eventually tearing off his arm. Grendel manages to escape, but the wound proves fatal. Beowulf is widely lauded for his bravery and strength, but the troubles aren’t over.

The next evening, Grendel’s mom (even monsters have mothers) shows up and demands wergild, a form of medieval payment to make up for the killing of a relative. The mead drinkers refuse, no doubt wondering where their wergild is for Grendel’s 12-year murderous rampage. Enraged, Grendel’s mother kills a man. The next morning, Beowulf gets up, tracks Grendel’s mother to a cave, decapitates her, and returns home with her head, whereupon the mead flows in earnest.

Part 2: Many years later, Beowulf has been king for a tranquil 50 years when a fire-breathing dragon shows up. The dragon’s carnage puts Grendel to shame, and Beowulf is older and weaker now, but he still summons the will to fight. After a bitter battle, Beowulf succeeds in killing the dragon, but not before he himself is mortally wounded. The epic ends with Beowulf’s somber funeral.

Most critics see the story of Beowulf as a Christian allegory—Beowulf stands up to the forces of evil, and in the end sacrifices himself for the good of the world. Besides that, it’s a rip-roaring adventure story. Sure, “English” like “swamec gelome laðgeteonan/þreatedon þearle,” makes it a wee inaccessible—but that’s why you’ve got cheat sheets. (Translation, by the way: “Me thus often the evil monsters/thronging threatened.”)

Extra Credit:
MEAD
Whether it’s a bodice-ripping romance set in the dark ages or Beowulf itself, everybody in 10th-century Europe seems to be drinking mead. So what is the stuff? It’s a sweet wine, fermented from honey, and its history dates back to 2000 BCE—when the Babylonians used to lap it up. With a reputation for being wickedly strong, you’d think it’d be popular today, but grape wine is a far more palatable taste. Still, if you’re keen on getting your hands around a flagon of the good stuff, you can probably pick some up at a Renaissance Faire. (And no, we won’t own up to how we know that!)

Although most of Beowulf is obviously made up, some details are historically accurate. Hygelac, the Danish king in Part 1 of Beowulf, really did die around 516 CE while leading a Viking raid into the Netherlands, just as Beowulf recounts. A fire-spitting dragon, however, did not show up in Denmark a few years later.

Conversation Starters
◆ Lord of the Rings author and weird-language nut J.R.R. Tolkien was fascinated by Beowulf—he often wrote about it and even wrote an unpublished translation. Beowulf was an important inspiration for Tolkien’s own epic, and much of the made-up languages in his books bear the imprint of Old English. The Rings’ antagonist Saruman, for instance, gets his name from the Old English word for treachery.

◆ With a total of 3,182 lines, Beowulf is the longest Old English manuscript in existence. In fact, it comprises about a tenth of all Anglo-Saxon poetry known to still exist. But it’s not the oldest poem in English: That distinction goes to Caedmon’s “Hymn of Creation,” which—believe us—isn’t famous for a reason.

◆ Only a single original manuscript of Beowulf survives, and it was severely damaged in a fire in 1731 while in storage at a place called the “Ashburnham House.” Just goes to show you that one ought not store a priceless, one-of-a-kind epic poem at a joint containing both the words “ash” and “burn” in its name.

◆ The world of Beowulf also attracted a somewhat dimmer literary light. Novelist Michael Crichton, so rich he won’t mind us calling him a hack, wrote a book called Eaters of the Dead (later made into the movie The 13th Warrior) that imagined the Beowulf story through the eyes of a 10th-century Muslim. In Crichton’s account, “Grendel” is not a regular monster but, well, a tribe of Neanderthal cannibals.