After much searching, researchers have finally located the last U.S. slave ship, the Clotilda, at the bottom of the Mobile River in Alabama. The announcement comes one year after the publication of Zora Neale Hurston’s lost interview with a survivor of that ship, and just a month ...read more

The 2020 census won’t ask you about how many people in your family are “idiots” or “insane,” but in 1840 that was a question census workers had to answer for every household. The Census Bureau added the question at a time when reformers were interested in creating institutions to ...read more

When Joseph Merrick died at age 27, his body didn’t go into the ground in one piece. Instead, the bones of the so-called “Elephant Man” were bleached and put on display at Queen Mary University of London’s medical school, and some of his flesh was saved for medical study. Yet for ...read more

The Kentucky Derby’s winning horse has only lost its title once before in history—and it wasn’t a case of officials immediately disqualifying a horse that finished first, as with Maximum Security in the 2019 race. In this case, a horse named Dancer’s Image held the proverbial ...read more

Diplomats who wanted to get to the King Louis XV in the mid-18th century had to go through Madame de Pompadour, who would meet with them while applying her makeup in public. Though Pompadour’s official title was as the French king’s mistress, she only slept with him for the first ...read more

Back in the 1950s, if you saw an unidentified flying object, you could fill out one of the U.S. Air Force’s handy UFO questionnaires for Project Blue Book. That government program dissolved in 1969, but the military has remained interested in UFO sightings ever since. In April ...read more

Things were not looking good for the music festival. A month out, the organizers had lost their permit and were scrambling to find another location. In the scramble, the organizers couldn’t get everything ready in time. When the festival-goers poured in, there weren’t enough ...read more

In 1999, an 87-year-old British woman held a press conference in front of her home to announce that for nearly four decades, she’d worked as a spy for the Soviet Union. In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy. From World War II through the Cold ...read more

The busiest day at Ellis Island was April 17, 1907, when 11,747 immigrants passed through the processing center to enter the United States. Nearly 1.3 million immigrants came to the U.S. that year—a record for highest volume of immigrants that held until 1990. Like immigrants ...read more

The most famous scene in the The Hunchback of Notre Dame is when Quasimodo saves Esmeralda from execution, rushes her to the cathedral and cries, “Sanctuary!” Though the act is pretty dramatic (he swings in and out on a rope), it’s based on a real religious custom. In medieval ...read more

The Neolithic Revolution marked a major turning point in history. During it, many communities transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, providing them with a more stable food source and allowing their populations to grow. Now, researchers suggest the ...read more

Stonehenge may be the most famous stone circle in the world, but its northern neighbor, Avebury, is the largest. Avebury is so big that there are actually two Stonehenge-size circles tucked inside—one of which, archaeologists believe, was built to commemorate the place where a ...read more

Casimir Pulaski is an American Revolutionary War hero and the namesake for a holiday in Chicago. But for over 200 years, no one knew where the so-called “father of the American cavalry” was buried. Researchers thought they’d located his grave in the 1990s until they examined the ...read more

Like many African people forced into American slavery, Redoshi was only a child when slave traders chained her to their boat. Kidnapped at age 12 in what is now Benin, she became a prisoner on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to smuggle people into the United States. And, ...read more

The biggest question facing the leaders of the United States in the early 19th century was what to do about slavery. Should it continue or should the U.S. abolish it? Could the country really be home to free black people and enslaved black people at the same time? And if the U.S. ...read more

April Fools' Day, once a time to pull a prank on both friends and enemies, has turned into a day for corporations to try and fool customers with predictable internet hoaxes. Come April 1, we can all count on an announcement about a fake new show, feature or a tinkered ...read more

The first successful airplane pilot, Wilbur Wright, flew his 1903 craft by lying on his stomach, pushing and pulling levers as the wind swept over his head. Since then, piloting a plane has become a lot less physical thanks to automation and autopilot functions that do a lot of ...read more

People in Ireland stored their butter in bogs for at least 3,500 years, leaving behind well-preserved waxy globs with a very pungent odor. In a recent study, researchers dated 32 globs of bog butter at National Museum of Ireland from about 1700 B.C. to the 17th century. They ...read more

Just before 5:30 on a December evening in 1985, mob boss Paul Castellano stepped out of a limo in front of Sparks Steakhouse in midtown Manhattan and was shot to death. The four assassins who gunned him down were conspicuously dressed in trench coats and Russian fur hats. John ...read more

Most Americans know that George Washington owned enslaved people at his Mount Vernon home. But fewer probably know that it was his wife, Martha, who dramatically increased the enslaved population there. When they wed in 1759, George may have owned around 18 people. Martha, one of ...read more

There are certain behind-the-scenes figures in American politics who, like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, seem to turn up everywhere. One of the most notorious is Roy Cohn, a man whose influence spans several decades of hot button issues, Republican politicians and LGBT history. Cohn ...read more

FBI agents searching an Indiana house in 2014 were shocked to discover a hoard of 2,000 human bones likely stolen from Native American graves. The bureau, which announced the grotesque discovery in February 2019, estimates that the bones represent 500 people. Far from an ...read more

President Richard Nixon had a PR problem. He had just deepened U.S. involvement in the extremely unpopular Vietnam War by invading Cambodia. In May, Ohio National Guard troops had killed four student protesters at Kent State. So, to drum up support for the war—and his ...read more

When an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex stood about 12 feet tall. But there were smaller tyrannosaurs that roamed the Earth before it. A newly discovered specimen has revised the timeline of when short tyrannosaurs became the ...read more

How did pizza, a saucy dish originating in a southwestern region of Italy, become so dominant in the United States? Legend has long recognized Gennaro Lombardi as the founder of the country’s first pizzeria. He supposedly received his business license for it in 1905. Over a ...read more

The 10th-century Viking’s grave contains high quality weapons, an imported uniform, two horses and even a gaming set. Clearly, the grave contained a warrior of great importance; and for over a century, archaeologists assumed the person was male. But when researchers announced in ...read more

The president was acting strangely. In the wake of a scandal about his illegal dealings with foreign powers, White House aides felt he was so “inattentive and inept” that a memo sent to the chief of staff raised the prospect of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from ...read more

In the early 14th century, a nun named Joan of Leeds faked her own death with a “dummy” and a bogus burial. Scholars in the United Kingdom recently reexamined and translated a salty letter the Archbishop of York wrote about the escapade. Several centuries later, it remains the ...read more

There are a lot of exaggerations in the 2018 film The Favourite, but one part that’s true to life is that Sarah Churchill really did threaten to blackmail Queen Anne with letters suggesting the two were more than just friends. It’s a rare example of an 18th-century woman ...read more

Long before AOL Instant Messenger, Winston Churchill received a World War I letter that said “OMG” (LOL). And decades before Baby Boomers began wringing their hands over “sexting,” their parents were sending each other racy acronyms in their World War II letters. Some of these ...read more

God save the queen—from nuclear war? That’s right. After the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of annihilation, officials in the United Kingdom came up with a plan to save Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, if the Soviet Union ...read more

The human family tree is becoming messier than The Jerry Springer Show. We already know Homo sapiens and Neanderthals slept together. We also know both slept with the mysterious “Denisovan,” a human relative first identified in Siberia’s Denisova Cave in 2010. Now, researchers ...read more

In December 2018, the U.S. Senate passed a federal anti-lynching bill for the first time. The significant milestone is preceded by at least 240 failed attempts since 1901 to pass any bill or resolution mentioning lynching in Congress. These attempts to outlaw lynching peaked ...read more

Captain Matthew Flinders is famous for circumnavigating Australia and putting the continent on European maps for the first time. He’s also the subject of urban legends because of the fact that, for over 200 years, nobody has known exactly where his body is buried. But in January ...read more

Our understanding of Neanderthals has shifted radically in the past decade. Once thought to be distinct from and far less intelligent than modern humans, Neanderthals have gotten their revenge with studies showing a.) they’re much more capable than we gave them credit for, and ...read more

“Ladies and gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union,” began President Ronald Reagan in a televised speech from the Oval Office. “But the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and ...read more

Nobody likes paying taxes. Even so, most people have probably never considered telling the Internal Revenue Service they can’t pay because their social security number is heretical. Here, we collect the most creative excuses Americans have made for evading their taxes. 1. I ...read more

Fanny Hill is one of the first erotic novels in the English language, and it’s been causing scandal for over 250 years. The novel was banned in both the U.K. and the U.S. until after World War II, and banned in Singapore until 2015.  Framed as two letters written by Frances ...read more

“And now ladies and gentlemen, here’s one of the great legends of Hollywood. She’s back with us tonight—Miss Snow White!” It was 1989 and the Oscars were just getting started. Instead of being greeted by a host, an unknown actress dressed as Snow White kicked off an 11-minute ...read more

Gerald Ford’s presidential pardon of Richard Nixon ensured that the disgraced president never faced legal consequences for his involvement in the Watergate cover-up. But a lot of people in Nixon’s orbit did go to prison—including Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, who ...read more

If you only read F. Scott Fitzgerald, you might get the impression that everyone during the 1920s flouted Prohibition and got away with it. But while it’s true that a small portion of white, middle- and upper-class urbanites lived that way, the Roaring Twenties was also the ...read more

At a fourth century Roman grave site in England, archaeologists have discovered that a third of the skeletons are decapitated—an unusually high percentage, even for the Roman Empire. “Low proportions of decapitated burials are a common component of Roman cemeteries,” said Andy ...read more

Most government shutdowns happen over hot button issues where the Democratic and Republican parties strongly disagree—abortion in the 1970s, Medicaid and Medicare in the ‘90s; and Obamacare, DACA and a “border wall” in the 21s century. Similarly, the record eight shutdowns that ...read more

Say you’re out walking in the desert and see a flash of light in the sky that you can’t identify. If this happened between 1952 and 1969, you could report that light to Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force’s project to investigate unidentified flying objects—aka, UFOs. Project ...read more

There are a lot of mysteries surrounding Viking graves, and a recent discovery has raised a new one: Why did Icelandic Vikings kill male horses in their prime and bury them with middle-aged men? And why, it seems, were these Vikings more inclined to eat female horses? ...read more

Islam has existed in North America for hundreds of years, ever since enslaved people captured in Africa brought their religion over. In the 1700s, an English translation of the Quran (or Koran) actually became a bestseller among Protestants in England and its American colonies. ...read more

The Schiedam was a pirate ship for a period of time in between its life in the Dutch East India Company and its time in the English fleet. It wrecked in 1684 off the coast of Cornwall in England while transporting English munitions; and recently, two hand grenades still filled ...read more

In 1619, the Jamestown colony—North America’s first permanent English settlement—consisted mostly of single men looking to get rich. For the Virginia Company, this presented a problem: how to keep it growing when few single English women wanted to venture to the struggling ...read more