Robert W. Lebling

A century ago, a Czech playwright coined the word “robot,” and 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci designed a pretty good one—and he was far from the first. (Hey Siri, who was Ismail al-Jazari?)

Should the 13th constellation of the zodiac matter to you? (It’s named Ophiuchus, and Babylonians wondered about it just as much as everyone who argues the point now on social media.)

As tensions escalated and the nation moved toward the outbreak of the US Civil War in 1861, a law student in Chicago formed the first American company inspired by a North African light infantry known as Zouaves that had won distinction in both Algeria and Crimea. Soon dozens of Zouave regiments mustered up and, from 1859 to the end of the war in 1865, Zouave soldiers were wildly popular in both the North and the South—mostly for their courage and elite training, but also for their fashionably colorful Algerian-style pantaloons, waistcoats and headgear.

Renowned and often notorious, Lucian wrote in Greek under the Roman Empire. Inspiring and famously satirizing, he conjured the source tale for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” penned the first space-travel science fiction novel and coined a term that became a beloved modern superhero. 

Three kilometers offshore from Tartus, Syria, lies Arwad, the sole island along the Eastern Mediterranean coast, a tiny rocky fastness with an outsize history.