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Ships

Ninety per cent of world trade, almost entirely unwatched.

3
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Venetian Arsenal

Dante put the Venetian Arsenal in Hell as a picture of ceaseless, specialised labour, and three centuries later the yard could still turn out nearly a ship a day using techniques that would not look out of place on a modern production line.

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Adolf Hitler

Hitler's earliest written statement calling for the removal of Jews predates his rise to power by fourteen years, and historians now largely agree it grew out of a specific wartime myth rather than any lifelong conviction.
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Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti

A jurist exiled for fourteen years after a foreign invasion still produced work specialists treat as the best surviving source on his field, proof of how portable book-based scholarship could be.
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Akbar

A widely repeated legend has two Rajput warriors' statues honouring their loyalty to Akbar, but a modern historian traced the story back only as far as a Dutch chronicle written decades after the event it claims to describe.