Night: Did you mean...?

Heraclitus of Ephesos (l. c. 500 BCE) was an early Pre-Socratic philospher who claimed that the First Cause of existence was fire and that life itself was characterized by strife and change. Heraclitus did not see this condition as a bad...

How the Rabbit Lost His Tail is a Sioux legend, part origin myth and part didactic tale, explaining why the rabbit looks as it does, why the owl is a night bird, and how one should treat a member of one’s family and also one’s community...

Halloween is the most popular holiday in the world, after Christmas (based on level-of-celebration and consumer spending) and, increasingly, the most lucrative. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans are expected to spend...

The Autobiography of Saint Ignatius is the story of the life of Ignatius of Loyola (l. 1491-1556) dictated by him to the Jesuit priest Father Louis Gonzalez between 1553-1555, shortly before Loyola's death in 1556. It is an account of his...

A Teton Ghost Story is a tale from the Native American Teton (Tetonwan) of the Oceti Sakowin (People of the Seven Council Fires), better known as the Sioux, on one of the possibilities of the state of the soul after death and how the living...

The Unseen Helpers is a Cherokee tale on the importance of kindness. Generosity is a central cultural value of the Cherokee nation, as it is with Native American nations generally, and is regarded as especially praiseworthy when the giver...

The Ghost Wife is a Pawnee story dealing with loss, grief, the inability to let go of the past, and the danger of dealing with ghosts. It reflects the Pawnee understanding of the unpredictable nature of life, the certainty of death, and the...

The Brave Who Went on the Warpath Alone and Won the Name of the Lone Warrior is a Sioux tale in the tradition of the hero's journey in which a young person overcomes seemingly impossible challenges and is recognized as a great champion and...

Ehyophsta is a Cheyenne legend of the heroine, Ehyophsta, the Yellow Haired Woman, who first brought the buffalo to the people. When she accidentally breaks a taboo, the buffalo vanish until they are brought back later by the two other great...

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543 CE) was a Polish astronomer who famously proposed that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun in a heliocentric system and not, as then widely thought, in a geocentric system where the Earth is...