Harvard’s 1869 Entrance Exam: Could You Answer Tough Questions About Latin, Greek, Ancient History, Plane Geometry & More

in Education, Harvard, History | June 10th, 2026

In 2025, Harvard once again began asking applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. This was a reversal of the no-test-necessary policy that it and quite a few other American colleges and universities adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. To some observers of higher education, the disappearance of the standardized-test requirement came as a shock, though in a sense, it wasn’t without precedent. Until the mid-nineteen-tens, Harvard had applicants take its own entrance exam, since no standardized test existed. One example from 1869, which you can see here, evaluated students on their proficiency in Latin, Greek, history and geography, arithmetic, algebra, and plane geometry.

The idea wasn’t so much to evaluate the test-taker’s reasoning abilities as to make sure he’d already undergone the expected education for his class. Even so, as the New York Times’ Alison Leigh Cowan notes, “colleges occasionally allowed prospects to correct deficiencies as a condition of admission.”

This reflects the very different role higher education played in American life a century and a half ago than it does today: back then, Harvard admitted 185 out of 210 applicants; last year, it admitted 1,968 out of 57,435. As the country industrialized, colleges and universities changed accordingly: existing ones grew, many new ones appeared, and a greater and greater percentage of students submitted to a process surrounding tertiary education that eventually came to seem machine-like itself.

To college-applying students today, the 1869 entrance exam may not look entirely unfamiliar, at least to the extent that it asks questions about mathematics. Chances are, however, that no current Harvard hopeful, no matter how intelligent, could actually pass the test, given the weight it places on classical languages. Throughout the nineteenth century and up until World War I, all young gentlemen got an education in Latin and ancient Greek. But when both started to vanish from college-admissions exams, especially after the SAT grew dominant in the nineteen-forties, so did the immediate incentive to learn them. Reflect though that does the exigencies of a rapidly changing technological society, it also makes one wonder how much someone with no grasp of Latin or Greek really understands English: a question to which the college students of recent decades provide dispiriting answers.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Strange History of Lorem Ipsum: How Cicero’s Words Became the World’s Favorite Placeholder Text

in History, Technology | June 9th, 2026

Though seldom heard these days, the term “desktop publishing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the personal computer. It meant that one could create a publication without owning a press or contracting with an outfit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writing, design, and printing could take place on one’s desk, provided one had furnished it with the right computer and accessories. From the mid-eighties through the early nineties, that meant an Apple Macintosh equipped with a LaserWriter printer and a copy of Aldus PageMaker. For the first time, ordinary computer users could create newsletters, brochures, and other documents assured that “what you see” onscreen is “what you get,” a feature abbreviated as WYSIWYG.

That’s not the only strange-looking piece of text encountered by early desktop publishers. Since PageMaker enabled users to create a layout before even having the words to fill it, it needed dummy text to occupy the empty spaces in order to provide a reasonable approximation of how the printed result would look. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua,” that dummy text begins, and it continues as long as its defined field allows, repeating itself as necessary. It may resemble Latin, but anyone with a decent understanding of that language won’t have to read much before noticing how oddly mangled it is. So where did this mysterious text, still familiar to all layout editors and graphic designers, actually come from?

Pursuing an answer to that question in her new video above, Rabbit Hole creator Emily Zhang talks to individuals with relevant experience including Laura Perry, the former creative director at Aldus (a company named, incidentally, for the fifteenth-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius). It was she who first made Lorem ipsum digital, having previously used it as a wholly analog graphic designer in the form of rub-off Letraset sheets. She manually entered it straight into PageMaker off one such sheet, making occasional typos along the way. That was just another phase of transformation Lorem ipsum had been undergoing since Cicero’s words were first borrowed — and chopped up, and mixed with fragments of other languages — to create what became the industry-standard dummy text.

In the process of filling the gaps in this story, Zhang also talks to Richard McClintock, a professor of Latin long acknowledged as the premier expert on Lorem ipsum. Ultimately, she unearths a few truths that are new even to him, including an important one about the 1966 meeting at Letraset in which the idea was first floated of a single piece of dummy text that could substitute for most Western languages. It was James Mosley, the highly knowledgeable head librarian at the St. Bride Printing Library, who delivered Letraset the Cicero quotation originally known as Forum ipsum, “which had become garbled by more than one typesetter sitting at his bench since the mid-fifteen-hundreds.” Likely to remain in use as long as humanity puts words on pages — paper, digital, or whatever comes next — Lorem ipsum surely has a few more forms to take.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

in History, Maps | June 9th, 2026

Coverage of the refugee crisis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the University of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest topics, not only for politicians, but for participants in the public debate,” including far-right xenophobes given megaphones. Whatever their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explosion of refugee stories had the effect of framing “these newly arrived people as others, people from ‘over there,’ who had little to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a characterization ignores the crucial context of Europe’s presence in nearly every part of the world over the past several centuries. And it frames mass migration as extraordinary, not the norm. The crisis aspect is real, the result of dangerously accelerated movement of capital and climate change. But mass movements of people seeking better conditions, safety, opportunity, etc. may be the oldest and most common feature of human history, as the Science Insider video shows above.

The yellow arrows that fly across the globe in the dramatic animation make it seem like early humans moved by bullet train. But when consequential shifts in climate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what people carried on their backs—mass migrations happened over the span of thousands of years. Yet they happened continuously throughout the last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human history, give or take. We may never know what drove so many of our distant ancestors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amazing work of anthropologists and paleontologists like those working on National Geographic’s Genographic Project,” Science Insider explains, “we can begin to piece together the story of our ancestors.” The Genographic Project was launched by National Geographic in 2005, “in collaboration with scientists and universities around the world.” Since then, it has collected the genetic data of over 1 million people, “with a goal of revealing patterns of human migration.”

The project assures us it is “anonymous, nonmedical, and nonprofit.” Participants submitted their own DNA with National Geographic’s “Geno” ancestry kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ancestry” report and customized migration map; and they can learn how closely they are related to “historical geniuses,” a category that, for some reason, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recreating the “race science” of previous centuries? Are they valid ways of reconstructing the “human story” of ancestry, as National Geographic puts it? Critics like science journalist Angela Saini are skeptical. “DNA testing cannot tell you that,” she says in an interview on NPR, but it can “make us believe that identity is biological, when identity is cultural.” National Geographic seems to disavow associations between genetics and race, writing, “science defines you by your DNA, society defines you by the color of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of people bonding over their similar features.

Despite the significance modern humans have ascribed to variations in phenotype, race is a culturally defined category and not a scientific one, argues Joseph L. Graves, professor of biological sciences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. “Everything we know about our genetics has proven that we are far more alike than we are different. If more people understood that, it would be easier to debunk the myth that people of a certain race are ‘naturally’ one way or another,” or that refugees and asylum seekers are dangerous others instead of just like every other human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

in History, Language, Literature | June 4th, 2026

You can, of course, learn the Greek language as it’s spoken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spoken in antiquity — and as it was, until fairly recently in historical time, taught to students in the modern West. But it’s a fairly different endeavor again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the matter is that no human being ever really spoke like Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Penelope, or any of the other characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer’s many literary achievements through these works include the creation and command of a kind of synthesized poetic Greek, combining qualities of regional Ionic and Aeolic dialects with various forms and expressions that were outdated even in the eighth century BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.

Needless to say, when most of us attempt to read Homer aloud in the original, we get it all or mostly wrong, even if we’re familiar with modern Greek. We’d have to spend a long time indeed in the world of classicists before hearing a more accurate recording than the one above, delivered by a YouTuber called Thomas Whichello.

On his channel, Whichello specializes in performing venerable literary texts with a pronunciation and cadence as close to period-accurate as possible, often in the original language, sometimes with his own musical accompaniment. He’s done readings of the Bible, Shakespeare, Keats, and Wilde, but none so far has been so popular as his rendition of the first book of the Iliad, accompanied by subtitles of Homer’s text and an English translation.

A Greek here in 2026 with no particular knowledge of the classical language may understand a quarter of the individual words Whichello uses, and maybe half of them in certain passages. Actually being able to follow the story, however, is another matter. Still, you can get a surprising amount out of the video even if you understand nothing at all, since Whichello is aiming not just for linguistic accuracy, but also emotional resonance in his delivery. Ignore his glasses, button-down shirt, microphone, and window frame, and you could almost be sitting around a campfire with him nearly 30 centuries ago. Note, also, that the commenters include genuine classicists who call his the best reading they’ve ever heard — as well as viewers, credentialed or otherwise, eager to hear him name all those mighty Achaean ships in Book 2.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

An Introduction to the Islamic World: 1,000 Years of History in 19 Minutes

in History, Religion | June 2nd, 2026

References to Islam in major media can make it sound monolithic and eternal. But it’s actually a much younger and less unified phenomenon than many of us imagine, especially if we happen to live outside the Middle East. As a religion, it dates back “only” to the seventh century, when it was founded by the Prophet Muhammad. As an engine of large-scale civilization, Islam took a bit longer to come into its own, and it hasn’t stopped undergoing divisions, transformations, declines, and rebirths since. Here on Open Culture, we recently featured a video from YouTube channel How So covering 1,000 years of medieval European history in 20 minutes. The one above does the same thing for the Islamic world’s first millennium, ending with the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

After he united the formerly polytheistic Arab tribes under his new faith, Muhammad lived for a decade longer. His death in the year 632 marked the last time that every believer in Islam would have been on the same page. It was at that point that the title caliph, or successor, was defined, and the first four caliphs after Muhammad held power for thirty years, the period in which the first Muslim state emerged.

The caliphate, as their territory was called, expanded widely across and out of the Arabian Peninsula, into the territories of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. Supporters of the early caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib argued that he was the true heir to Islam, and detractors that he wasn’t. Eventually, the former group became known as the Shias, and the latter as the Sunnis, the two sides of a schism of which practically everyone today has heard.

Lesser known to the general public are the Umayyads, Abbasids, Buyids, and Fatimids, all of them major players in the continuing expansion of Islam well into the Middle Ages. But the still-familiar place names of Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Constantinople (or, as we know it, Istanbul) are just as important in these chapters of the story of Islam, and without understanding that religion, it’s impossible to understand the diverse forms that civilization has taken in those places and others in the wider region of the world around them. The crisis of authority that began setting in after Muhammad’s death has, in some sense, persisted for nearly fourteen centuries now, more than long enough to have become a defining characteristic of the Islamic world. What shape its societies will take over the next millennium, it would surely take a prophet to know.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Tour of Athens’ Acropolis, Explained with 3D Reconstructions

in Architecture, History | May 28th, 2026

Since it was first built as a Mycenaean fortress in the thirteenth century BC, what we now know as the Acropolis has been used to worship not just Greek gods, but also, in later periods, the Virgin Mary and Allah. Now, of course, with its days of military and religious functions long behind it, it stands as a set of ruins. Still, they’re very popular ruins, as evidenced by the crowds captured in the video above from Manuel Bravo. Though most tourists at the Acropolis come with the idea that its buildings would have looked more glorious in the distant past, few can have much of a sense of how to imagine that with any accuracy. Using 3D models, Bravo integrates views of how the Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike, and other structures look now with how they would have looked in Athens’ golden age.

To fully appreciate the Acropolis requires not just an idea of how it was originally intended to look, as Bravo emphasizes, but also the intentions of ancient Greek architecture. The approach up the hill was meant to feel like an ascent from the mundane world into the sacred one.

Entering the central space on top, the visitor was led to viewing points that showed the surrounding collection of buildings at their most dramatic, a design the architects might have described as cinematic, had cinema existed at the time. Even in its ruined state, the Acropolis still transmits a sense of how, where, and to what degree that visitor was meant to be filled with awe, as well as where he was meant to look. And nothing up there — at least in the absence of Phidias’ thirty-foot statue Athena Promachos — draws attention as deliberately as the Parthenon.

As we previously noted here on Open Culture, if you make the trip to the Acropolis yourself, you can now see the Parthenon without scaffolding (or, depending on when you go, a minimum of scaffolding) for the first time in 200 years. That lack of obstruction makes it easier to envision the glories of that celebrated building back when it was both the temple of Athena and the treasury of Athens. But as Bravo says, if you really want to gaze upon the Parthenon as the ancients knew it, marbles and all, you’ll have to make the trek out to Nashville, Tennessee, where a full-scale replica was built in 1897 for the city’s Centennial Exposition. It may feel a bit odd to turn up in a place known for country music and bachelorette parties in search of the architectural, and perhaps spiritual foundation of Europe. But then, civilization has never taken a predictable course.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

in History, Travel | May 27th, 2026

Officially, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Demolition would take more than four years, and a few sections remain for memorial purposes, but it was on that date that passage between East and West Berlin — and thus East and West Germany — opened to all citizens of both countries. To say that it came as a surprise would be a serious understatement. Earlier that year, even the best informed observers were predicting that the wall would stand for at least a few more decades. Earlier that day, for that matter, the officials involved in the opening didn’t foresee that Socialist Unity Party of Germany Secretary of Information Günter Schabowski would, that evening, mistakenly declare on national television that the liberalization of border travel was effective “immediately, without delay.”

When the border guards finally gave up their attempts to hold the line around 11:00 that night, the surrounding scene in both Berlins had turned into what attendees now remember, 36 years later, as the biggest street festival of their lives. To those of us unable to join in the celebration at the time, it may seem unlikely that such an event could really have occurred with no intimations whatsoever.

Yet the footage shot by a traveler in Berlin during the summer of 1989, right there in the vicinity of the wall, depicts a city where events seem to be frozen. Though the built environment isn’t without touches of faded grandeur here and there (and as many West Berliners were soon to discover, the real urban stateliness was over East), the overall impression given by what was then the red hot center of Cold War geopolitics is that of a dullsville.

The most outwardly interesting feature in these parts of Berlin at the very end of the nineteen-eighties is, of course, the wall itself: the brutishness of its form, the humdrum menace of its guards, the accumulation of graffiti both political and apolitical. At one point, the tourist’s camcorder captures the memorials for fallen wall jumpers, the most recent of which, a certain Chris Gueffroy, had made his fateful escape attempt from the East that past February. History would soon immortalize him as the last person to be shot trying to get over the wall, though not the last to die doing so. That title belongs to Winfried Freudenberg, who in March of 1989 fell from a balloon he’d rigged up to fly across the border. At this point, when the rapid urban evolution of the reunified German capital has long since made it one of the most popular cities in Europe, neither she nor Gueffroy would recognize the former East Berlin they were desperate to escape — nor, for that matter, the West Berlin of which they dreamed.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Who Would Be King of the United States If George Washington Had Become a Monarch?

in History | May 25th, 2026

The young George Washington may never have hacked up his father’s cherry tree and refused to lie about it, but his life nevertheless offers plenty of deeds both virtuous and adequately documented. It was no small thing, for instance, to refuse to seek a third term as the first President of the United States of America — much less to exchange that title for “King of the United States of America.” As every enthusiast of American history knows, this set the precedent, only once violated and thereafter written into law, of a two-term limit. But as every enthusiast of alternate American history has wondered, what would have happened had Washington become king? And if the U.S. monarchy had remained intact for the past 227 years, who would rule it today?

In the UsefulCharts video above, Matt Baker explains a series of different succession scenarios. While none is highly plausible in itself, they together give an idea of the lines along which American monarchical history could have played out, at least assuming that every other event played out exactly the same way as it has in our reality.

One of the first complicating factors is that Washington himself had no biological descendants. Given that, we can trace down a theoretical royal lineage starting with his adopted son, born from his wife Martha’s first marriage; with the nephew he selected as the primary heir of his estate; or with the senior-most heir of his father (owner of the notional cherry tree). Not that any of those major paths through the chart of Washington’s indirect descendants is necessarily straightforward either.

The whole matter seems at least as complicated as figuring out who would be the Roman emperor if Rome had never fallen, an exercise Baker works through in another UsefulCharts video previously featured here on Open Culture. The possibilities for the American monarch in 2026 come down to King Robert III, or Robert E. Lee V (and great-great grandson of Robert E. Lee); Queen Brynda, or Brynda Hansen; King Richard, or Richard Washington; and King Larry II, or Lawrence Shaffner, the descendant of George Washington’s nephew Bushrod. Baker finds that Shaffner is the most convincing candidate for the job, which is hard to deny. Even apart from the relevant familial, political, and legal factors, consider that name again. King Larry: apart from the title, how much more American could it possibly sound?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Harvard’s 1869 Entrance Exam: Could You Answer Tough Questions About Latin, Greek, Ancient History, Plane Geometry & More

The Strange History of Lorem Ipsum: How Cicero’s Words Became the World’s Favorite Placeholder Text

How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

An Introduction to the Islamic World: 1,000 Years of History in 19 Minutes

A Tour of Athens’ Acropolis, Explained with 3D Reconstructions

Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

Who Would Be King of the United States If George Washington Had Become a Monarch?

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