The exalted status of Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is reflected by the fact that everybody knows it as, simply, the Principia. Very few of us, by contrast, speak of the Historia when we mean to refer to John Ray and Francis Willughby's De Historia Piscium, which came out in 1686, the year before the Principia. Both books were published by the Royal Society, and as it happens, the formidable cost of Willughby and Ray's lavish work of ichthyology nearly kept Newton's groundbreaking treatise on motion and gravitation from the printing press.

According to the Royal Society's web site, "Ray and Willughby’s Historia did not prove to be the publishing sensation that the Fellows had hoped and the book nearly bankrupted the Society. This meant that the Society was unable to meet its promise to support the publication of Isaac Newton’s masterpiece."

Fortunately, "it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society" — and now better known for his eponymous [...]

Once again, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and producer Greg Kurstin have teamed up to celebrate Hanukkah by performing songs created by musicians with Jewish roots. Above, they perform--along with Jack Black--Rush's “The Spirit Of Radio.” (Geddy Lee's parents were both Jews who survived Auschwitz and Dachau. Lee tells their story below.) Other songs featured in this year's celebration include Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat & Tears, Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" and more. Find performances from prior Hanukkah celebrations in the Relateds below.

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Christmas cards aren’t just an anachronism.

They’re almost an endangered species, the victim of the Internet, postal rate increases, and the jettisoning of any time consuming tradition whose execution has been found to bring the opposite of joy.

Above, Victoria and Albert Museum curators Alice Power and Sarah Beattie take us on a backwards trip to a time when the exchange of Christmas cards was a source of true social merriment.

Christmas cards must hold a special place in both the V&A’s collections and heart, given that the museum’s founder, Henry Cole, inadvertently invented them in 1843.

As a well respected man about town, he received a great many more holiday letters than he had time or inclination to respond to, but neither did he wish to appear rude.

So he enlisted his friend, painter J.C. Horsley, to create a festive illustration with a built-in holiday greeting, leaving just enough space to personalize with a recipient’s name and perhaps, a handwritten line or two.

He then had enough postcard-sized reproductions [...]

As Christmas approaches, we reach for our bookshelves and pull down Charles Dickens' beloved tale of hardship, revelation, and a miser's redemption in the holiday season. I speak, of course, of The Cricket on the Hearth, published in 1845 as the third of what would be Dickens' five Christmas books. (The first, of which you may have heard, was A Christmas Carol.) From the very year of its publication, The Cricket on the Hearth found great success as a stage production, and it continued to be adapted even in the age of radio. The story was a century old by the time it aired on NBC, in the broadcast that opens the five-and-a-half-hour compilation of Christmas old-time radio above.

That video is just one of three uploaded in the past few weeks by the Youtube channel An Evening of Old-Time Radio. It collects a variety of Christmas-themed specials and broadcasts from shows like Lux Radio Theatre, The Coronet Little Show, and CBS Ceiling Unlimited (an aviation-promoting wartime effort created by Orson Welles).

The second volume features more than six [...]

"Christmas time is here, by golly / Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / Fill the cup and don't say 'when.'" So sings musical satirist Tom Lehrer on his hit 1959 album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer — which was recorded in March of that year, not that it stopped him from taking an out-of-season jab at the holidays. "Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens / Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens / Even though the prospect sickens / Brother, here we go again." If it seems to you that he takes a dim view of Christmas, you should hear how he sings about everything else.

Now, more easily than ever, you can hear how Lehrer sings about everything else, by simply downloading his music from his web site. "All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain," he writes. "All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for [...]