Best 1845
Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, first performed in 1845, is a significant German Romantic opera. It tells the story of a knight's struggle between divine devotion and earthly desire, specifically through his encounter with the goddess Venus. The work’s complex narrative and innovative musical structure...
Heinrich Berghaus's German atlas, published in Gotha from 1838 to 1848, was a pioneering thematic work mapping physical, meteorological, and natural-historical data.
The Unconstitutionality of Slavery is an 1845 abolitionist treatise by American writer and legal theorist Lysander Spooner. It argues that slavery violated natural law and that the United States Constitution did not authorize or legally sanction it. Spooner supported this position through textual an...
Why this score?
Spooner's ingenious antislavery constitutional argument remains historically influential; legal reasoning is admired but widely contested.
Scoring methodology
