Chapter One
John Green’s highly entertaining YouTube Channel, Crash Course World History, does a great video on “2,000 Years of Chinese History,” which had a great segment on Confucius and Tian. A comparison of Confucius’s many confusing lives came from the sources as well as a nice summary from Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Chapter Two
You can throw a stick and hit about fifty books on George Washington in any given library. They’re everywhere. So I stuck with reading all of Ron Chernow’s Washington, and corroborated his findings with a variety of others.
Chapter Three
Pythagoras was pretty wily in evading detection, but I managed to track down good books on his baloney butt by Alberto A. Martinez and Carl Huffman. Original sources from ancient philosophers shed light as well as Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Chapter Four
Original sources such as speeches and Benjamin Franklin’s letters helped on the Iroquois’s contribution to the budding United States. The Iroquois Museum and basic biographies helped tell me the legend of Hiawatha. Grinnell College’s website clarified the various roles of the wampum beads.
Chapter Five
M. L. West’s East Face of Helicon has a lot of great research on the transmission of oral and written poetry from East to West, and much of the information about Gilgamesh comes from there as well as the various essays in Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World. The Arkansas State Religious Studies website provided a blow-by-blow of the many tablets of the epic. The version you got is a mixture of Standard Version and Old Babylonian version. The definitive scholarship on the Sumerian King List is from 1939—yes that long ago—and was written by Thorkild Jacobsen.
Chapter Six
Ben Macintyre wrote the book on Operation Mincemeat. Literally.
Chapter Seven
Shakespeare was tricky. There are so many passionate people arguing many ways about Shakespeare’s existence. I tried to keep my bias to a minimum and referenced both sides of the argument. Stephan Greenblatt wrote his book without acknowledging the controversy, and the Declaration of Reasonable doubt is a great site for all those doubters out there. Information about collaboration in Elizabethan and Jacobean times came from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Alan C. Dessen and Oxford’s Brian Vickers.
Chapter Eight
Pope Joan is highly controversial still. There’s over five hundred mentions of her in various libraries around the world, but I tried to look at both sides of the coin—both Catholic and Protestant sources. Anything too fanciful or wishful I avoided like a pope down Vicus Papissa. Thanks again to John Green’s Crash Course Renaissance video for explaining what humanists focus on!
Chapter Nine
Again, I relied on those scholars who have devoted their lives to figuring out which came first: Homer or The Iliad. There are many views on how exactly a performer preformed, and, of course, these things changed over the centuries. I used Dr. Nagy’s views, Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World was especially great, and Yale’s Open Courses Introduction to Greek History by Donald Kagan helped me remember my own days at the University of Missouri in the Classics department. Go Tigers!
Chapter Ten
Don’t discount dissertations! Michael E. Brooks did all the grunt work on Prester John in his paper, Prester John: A Reexamination and Compendium of the Mythical Figure Who Helped Spark European Expansion.
Chapter Eleven
The legends of the Sage Emperors come from many places including Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology, Keith G. Steven’s Chinese Mythological Gods, and Cultural China’s website. Again, John Green’s Crash Course World History, does a great video on “2,000 Years of Chinese History” to keep all those dynasties and their Tian-shaming ways straight. More scholars like Michael Puett and Mark Edward Lewis had great insights on the Warring States Period’s elite, and the evolution of Huangdi from oral tradition to modern-day god.
Chapter Twelve
Tom Standage’s The Turk covers the history of both owners, as well as Deep Blue’s showdown in 1989, 1996, and 1997.