Idlewild, Michigan was once known as “The Black Eden”—a resort where black writers, business people, physicians and entertainers spent their summers in a racially segregated country. In its earliest days, you could run into W.E.B. Du Bois; in its later years, you ...read more

The small, 340-ton São José-Paquete de Africa set out from Mozambique in December 1794. Even though the ship was no more than no more than 130 feet long (and probably closer to 100), the crew had packed 543 captive people aboard. The crew shackled them in place to prevent them ...read more

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered dozens of mummified cats along with 100 wooden gilded statues of felines and a bronze statue of a cat goddess named Bastet. These artifacts were found inside the King Userkaf pyramid complex in the Saqqara necropolis, a famous burial ground ...read more

Ancient people of North America’s Clovis culture migrated to South America roughly 11,000 years ago, then mysteriously vanished, researchers have discovered.In a new study, researchers analyzed DNA from 49 people living over a span of 10,000 years in Belize, Brazil, the Central ...read more

Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate in the spring of 1987 when the Miami Herald reported that rumors of his “womanizing” were true. The ensuing scandal over his extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice ended his candidacy. Yet according to Gail ...read more

Could a large, cigar-shaped object floating through space be part of an alien spacecraft? Astronomers at Harvard University don’t rule it out in a recent paper.Scientists spotted the object in October 2017, at first thinking it was a comet or an asteroid, and later wondering if ...read more

Do U.S. citizenship and voting rights go hand and hand? For most of the country’s history, the answer has been no—just look at the example of Native voting rights, which weren’t secured in all states until the 1960s.Native Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens when the country ...read more

Imagine a world in which political norms have broken down. Senators use bad faith arguments to block the government from getting anything done. An autocrat rigs elections and gives himself complete control over the government. Even stranger, many voters subscribe to the ...read more

Researchers in Egypt have discovered a 4,500-year-old ramp system used to haul alabaster stones out of a quarry, and news reports have suggested that it could provide clues as to how Egyptians built the pyramids. Yet while the ramp system is a significant technological discovery, ...read more

Duck-billed dinosaurs may have “tooted” different notes from their trumpet-like nasal passages depending on what species they were, new research suggests.Paleontologists made this discovery while studying an unnamed species of the duck-billed Parasaurolophus. This type of ...read more

The Great Depression was a time of great economic and social change that affected many parts of American life—including Halloween. Parents, concerned about their sons running amok on All Hallows' Eve, organized “haunted houses” or “trails” to keep them off the streets.Halloween ...read more

The Underground Railroad ran south as well as north. For slaves in Texas, refuge in Canada must have seemed impossibly far away. Fortunately, slavery was also illegal in Mexico.Researchers estimate 5,000 to 10,000 people escaped from bondage into Mexico, says Maria Hammack, who ...read more

In the 1800s, taking a photo of a dead body wasn’t creepy—it was comforting. In an era when photos were expensive and many people didn’t have any pictures of themselves when they were alive, post-mortem photography was a way for families to remember their deceased ...read more

For early American settlers, buying a lottery ticket wasn’t just a vice or a guilty pleasure—it was a colonist’s civic duty. That’s because lotteries were one of the biggest ways that the 13 colonies supported themselves financially. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the colonies ...read more

Before Texas was a U.S. state, it was its own independent nation where both Mexicans and white immigrants were citizens. But during the nine years that the Republic of Texas existed, Mexicans became outsiders as white settlers made it more difficult for them to vote and hold onto ...read more

One September morning in 1976, a bomb blew up a car as it was driving up Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. When police arrived at the scene, they found a human foot in the road, and a man lying on the pavement who was missing half his legs. Minutes later, he was dead.That man was ...read more

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, there were tens of thousands of Mexican Americans living in California, Texas and the New Mexico territory; all former parts of Mexico that the U.S. had claimed in the 1840s. With the wounds of the Mexican-American War fresh, these Mexican ...read more

Sure, the story of King Arthur drawing Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake is pretty cool. But have you heard about the eight-year-old girl who pulled a sword that’s at least 1,000 years old out of a Swedish lake?The Swedish news site The Local reports that Saga Vanecek was ...read more

Every fall, grocery stores line their shelves with pumpkin spice-flavored products that range from traditional pumpkin pies to the more questionable pumpkin spice candy corn. The flavor is a mixture of nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves—all spices that humans have enjoyed in ...read more

The year the Civil War ended, the U.S. amended the Constitution to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude. But it purposefully left in one big loophole for people convicted of crimes.The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, ...read more

The largest-ever survey of a region from the Maya civilization has located over 60,000 previously unknown structures in northern Guatemala. The survey, conducted with the help of lasers, challenges long-held assumptions that this area was poorly connected and sparsely ...read more

Whether you like it, hate it or just use it to decorate, you probably think of candy corn as a Halloween treat. But in the beginning, it was associated more with chickens than the spooky holiday.Candy corn’s origins are a little iffy, but it seems to have come out around the ...read more

A housewife and salesman have an affair, then hatch a plot to kill her husband and claim insurance money on his death. If this sounds like a film noir plot, that’s because it is; it’s the plot of James Cain’s 1943 hardboiled crime novella Double Indemnity and the 1944 film ...read more

The oldest known animal in history has been discovered thanks to some well-preserved animal fat that’s been sitting in northwest Russia for the past 558 million years. The find expands the confirmed existence of animals by three million years.The ancient animal is a Dickinsonia, ...read more

Freddie Oversteegen was only 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance during World War II, and only a couple of years older when she became one of its armed assassins. Together with her sister—and later, a young woman named Hannie Schaft—the trio lured, ambushed and killed German ...read more

Germany has identified four drawings that Nazis stole from a Jewish home during the Third Reich. The art belonged to the Deutsch de la Meurthe family, who lived in Paris when Germany invaded and occupied France. Nazis seized their house—all but Georgette, the youngest daughter, ...read more

While Allied troops were fighting World War II in the Pacific, the U.S. homefront was defending Washington, D.C. from the worst flood it’d ever seen.“Spare no effort or expense to protect the Capital,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told officials during the flood of October ...read more

What cigarette do doctors says causes less throat irritation? In the 1930s and 40s, tobacco companies would happily tell you it was theirs. Doctors hadn’t yet discovered a clear link between smoking and lung cancer, and a majority of them actually smoked cigarettes. So in ...read more

A Category 4 storm that barreled into the Carolinas during the hurricane season of 1954 left a path of destruction that would eventually pave the way for the development of Myrtle Beach into a major tourist destination. As the first (and so far) only recorded Category 4 storm to ...read more

As far as U.S. presidential elections go, the 1824 one was unusually crazy. There were four major candidates, none of whom won enough electoral votes, which meant the House of Representatives had to pick someone for president. Then, less than two weeks before the House decided, a ...read more

President Richard Nixon might have gotten away with it if it weren't for John Dean. In June 1973, Dean testified before Congress that Nixon knew about the Watergate cover-up. Not only that, Dean said he suspected there was taped evidence—and he was he right.“There are few times ...read more

By September 9, 1971, inmates at New York’s Attica Correctional Facility had seized control of the prison and taken guards hostage. Their extreme actions followed months of protests over inhumane conditions, including overcrowding, minimal food, harassment, lack of medical care ...read more

In August 1518, King Charles I authorized Spain to ship enslaved people directly from Africa to the Americas. The edict marked a new phase in the transatlantic slave trade in which the numbers of enslaved people brought directly to the Americas—without going through a European ...read more

We’ve never had a paternity case like this before. Scientists have discovered the first known ancient human relative whose parents came from two different parts of the human family tree. The mother, a Neanderthal. The father, a Denisovan—a mysterious hominin we still don’t know ...read more

Women (and men) began surfing in Hawaii and other Polynesian islands at least as far back as the 17th century. And while Christian missionaries tried to suppress surfing in the 1800s, a Hawaiian princess helped bring it back long before Gidget and Moondoggie hit the beach.Prior ...read more

Hiram Rhodes Revels arrived on Capitol Hill to take his seat as the first black member of the U.S. Congress in 1870. But first, the Mississippi Republican faced Democrats determined to block him.The Constitution requires senators to hold citizenship for at least nine years, and ...read more

The most famous kitty in spy history is probably the white Persian of James Bond flicks. The image of a faceless villain stroking the cat in the early 1960s films is now a meme (see: Inspector Gadget, Austin Powers). Lesser known is the cat whom, during the same decade, the CIA ...read more

Archaeologists have identified Germany’s oldest public library, which may also be the oldest library in the Roman Empire’s northwest provinces. Niches in the walls appear to have stored up to 20,000 scrolls.The library’s remains were unearthed in the middle of Cologne. The Romans ...read more

A wildfire that scorched the coast of Ireland has revealed a World War II-era sign carved into the ground. Irish police officers spotted it while flying over Bray Head to assess the fire’s damage.The partially-eroded sign originally said “ÉIRE,” which means “Ireland” in the Irish ...read more

As record-high temperatures have sent water levels plunging in Germany this summer, World War II munitions have surfaced. So far, 22 grenades, mines or other explosives have been recovered from the Elbe River in the German states of Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. Authorities warn that ...read more

“ENGLAND OR DROWN!” proclaimed the New York Daily News on its frontpages. It was August 6, 1926, the day that an American, Gertrude Ederle, was poised to become the first woman to swim the English Channel.Only five men had ever swum the waterway before. The challenges included ...read more

Journalist Ida B. Wells was already out of town when she realized that an editorial she’d written had caused a riot. In 1892, Wells had left Memphis to attend a conference in Philadelphia, when the office of the newspaper she co-owned was destroyed and her co-editor was run out ...read more

In 1958, journalist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times highlighted a fun, if dubious, letter from a reader about loggers in northern California who’d discovered mysteriously large footprints. “Maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas,” Genzoli ...read more

Richard Milhous Nixon was a paranoid man. Between February 1971 and July 1973, he secretly recorded 3,700 hours of conversations—far more than any president before him.Initially, government investigators focused on the tapes concerning the Watergate scandal. Over the next four ...read more

Archaeologists in Jamestown, Virginia, have discovered a skeleton that may belong to the man who helped establish two major institutions—representative government and slavery—in the English colonies nearly 400 years ago.That man was Sir George Yeardley, the three-time governor of ...read more

Duck boats are a U.S. tourist attraction that have unfortunately seen several high-profile accidents (the most recent killed 17 people on Table Rock Lake in Branson, Missouri). Yet before they were a controversial tour vehicle, the Allied troops during World War II used them to ...read more

This summer, construction workers discovered an enormous, 2,000-year-old sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt. The sheer size of the black granite tomb—it’s over six feet tall and nearly nine feet long—sparked speculation that it contained someone of great importance, perhaps even ...read more

Over the past several centuries, many people have claimed to have found Jesus’ original burial cloth. One of the most famous candidates is the Shroud of Turin, so named because it has been housed in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, since 1578. However, new ...read more