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Dome of the Rock mosque, Jerusalem The Islamic holiday of Ramadan moves slowly backward through Earth’s seasons, because the Islamic calendar is slightly shorter than the solar year. A few [...]

Pieter Brueghel, Carnival on the left and Lent on the right So, you know how every year we harvest all this food in the fall, and every year we go, [...]

What's the history of Valentine's Day? Find out here! Valentine's Day History Phaedra falls in love with the hunter Hippolytus (Pompeii, ca. 79 AD) Want to know why Valentine hearts [...]

Martin Luther King, Jr. Quatr.us is proud to join the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and everywhere. First, check out our article about the Civil Rights Movement [...]

American Christmas Tree (about 1812 or 1819) Sorry I fell a little behind there: I was finishing the revisions for my book on the world history of swimming, which should [...]

It may seem like everything's on hold while we wait at home, but time passes whether we go places or not, and it's almost Thanksgiving! Here's a few articles on the complicated [...]

Lights of a Diwali celebration Reposting our Diwali article, with best wishes for the holiday to everyone! Diwali What is Diwali? A woman creates a pattern with colored sand [...]

  Carrying a puppet of Guy Fawkes to burn him Remember, remember the fifth of November... reposting last year's post about Guy Fawkes' Day This post considers which side we [...]

I've got a new blog post up over at The Rambling - check it out! It's about how Europeans thought about swimming in the 1700s - a complicated set of contradictory ideas. [...]

Pumpkins growing It's the last week of October, so it must be time to look at the history of Halloween! We take a look in this article at many different [...]