Alfred Nobel (1833) It was on this date, October 21, 1833, that Swedish chemist Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in Stockholm. It is one of the ironies of his life that a man who made his fortune in the invention and manufacture of weapons of war – dynamite and other nitroglycerine derivatives – bequeathed among […]

The Angel Moroni Appears to Joseph Smith (1827) It was on this date, September 22, 1827, that the resurrected being described as the angel Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith and eventually revealed the location of golden tablets containing the Book of Mormon beneath a hill in Palmyra, New York. Moroni is supposed to have been […]

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection," wrote Zola, "until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."