The famous Nazca Lines are intricate designs in the ground that cover an estimated 170 square miles in southern Peru. The large-scale etchings depicting people, animals and objects date to 2,000 years ago, when a pre-Inca civilization laid them in the Nazca Desert. Many modern ...read more

At the turn of the 20th century, the world was gripped by a plague pandemic that had spread from China to port cities around the globe. So when a 41-year-old San Franciscan named Wong Chut King died of a particularly violent disease in March 1900, there were worries that the ...read more

How have medical professionals measured pain throughout history? Not very well, it turns out. In one famous test in the late 1940s, two American male researchers performed pain experiments on pregnant women in labor. Whenever a woman had a contraction, they burned her hand with ...read more

You can tell a lot about a particular era of American history by looking at its Halloween costumes—not just what people are afraid of, but also what’s popular in entertainment and who’s running for president. Halloween has evolved into the main costume holiday in the United ...read more

How do you make a horror tale scarier? Just say it’s “based on a true story.” That’s a technique book publishers and movie producers have been using for decades, whether or not the supposedly “true story” adds up. Some movies are inspired by what might be called “real ...read more

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago is most-remembered for what happened on the streets outside of it. Before the convention began on August 26, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley refused protest permits to most anti-war demonstrators and deployed 12,000 police ...read more

The U.S. Navy has confirmed that three F-18 gun-camera videos first released by The New York Times and a UFO research organization show “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs—a more formal term for UFOs that doesn’t have all the little-green-men baggage. The Times originally ...read more

Someone is out there with a golden toilet that doesn’t belong to them. The 18-karat-gold toilet disappeared from Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, on September 14, 2019—only two days after the palace installed it as part of an art exhibition by Italian artist ...read more

Category 5 is as powerful as a hurricane can get under the Saffir-Simpson scale. These monster storms pack wind speeds of 157 miles per hour or more. Since 1924, there have been 35 documented hurricanes in the North Atlantic that reached this level—and of those, five have hit ...read more

At midnight on July 1, 1997, Hong Kong returned to Chinese control after a century and a half of British colonial rule. The handover was meant to establish a “one country, two systems” relationship between China and Hong Kong that would last until 2047, with Hong Kong existing as ...read more

Every March 31, the U.S. Virgin Islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix observe “Transfer Day” to commemorate the sale of the islands from Denmark to the United States. Of the U.S.’s five permanently inhabited territories, the U.S. Virgin Islands is the only one the ...read more

Want to visit the original Seven Wonders of the World? Unfortunately you can’t, because only one of them exists anymore. The original list—sometimes called The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—comes from a 225 B.C.E. work by Philo of Byzantium called On The Seven Wonders. The ...read more

Legend has it that Romulus and Remus—twin brothers who were also demi-gods—founded Rome on the River Tiber in 753 B.C. Over the next eight and a half centuries, it grew from a small town of pig farmers into a vast empire that stretched from England to Egypt and completely ...read more

Can you tell who a criminal is just by looking at them? No you can’t, but that didn’t stop the idea from gaining traction in the late 19th century. Early criminologists in the U.S. and Europe seriously debated whether criminals have certain identifying facial features separating ...read more

If you go on Twitter during the first of the month, you may notice “rabbit rabbit” trending. That’s because of a superstition that if your first words that day are “rabbit rabbit,” you’ll have luck for the rest of the month. Alleged followers of this tradition have included ...read more

A female warrior long assumed to be a Viking may actually be a Slavic warrior woman who migrated to Denmark from present-day Poland over 1,000 years ago, says a researcher in Germany. The discovery comes amid debate about the role and prevalence of female warriors in the Viking ...read more

The Senate had just adjourned on May 22, 1856, when Representative Preston Brooks entered its chamber carrying a cane. The pro-slavery southerner walked over to Senator Charles Sumner, whacked him in the head with the cane and then proceeded to beat the anti-slavery northerner ...read more

The Great Depression was a brutal era in America: brutal for the 15 million people who couldn’t find work, brutal for the farmers out west whose crops failed in the Dust Bowl, and for the up to 1.8 million people of Mexican descent who were rounded up and illegally deported in ...read more

How do you prepare to send someone to a place no one has ever gone before? For NASA in the 1960s, the answer was to create simulations that mimicked aspects of what astronauts could expect to encounter. Take gravity, for example. Gravity on the moon is about one-sixth of what it ...read more

In the 1930s, the Los Angeles Welfare Department decided to start deporting hospital patients of Mexican descent. One of the patients was a woman with leprosy who was driven just over the border and left in Mexicali, Mexico. Others had tuberculosis, paralysis, mental illness or ...read more

You’ve probably heard of conspiracy theories that the moon landing was a hoax (those are false, and easily debunked). But have you heard the one about how the moon race was itself a hoax, because the Soviet Union was never trying to get to the moon in the first place? Or at ...read more

In the early 20th century, it wasn’t a crime to enter the U.S. without authorization. Though authorities could still deport immigrants who hadn’t gone through an official entry point, they couldn’t be detained and prosecuted for a federal crime. But that all changed in 1929 when ...read more

In 1629, the General Court of Colonial Virginia met to decide if a certain settler was male or female. The settler in question had been born in England as Thomasine Hall, migrated to Virginia as an indentured servant named Thomas and continued to live in the colonies as both a ...read more

Every U.S. president has been a member of a church, except for one: Abraham Lincoln. Famously opaque on the subject of religion, Lincoln’s personal faith was something even his closest friends said they couldn’t figure out. Lincoln rented pews for his family at First ...read more

Gloria Laura Vanderbilt was only 10 when she became an unwilling tabloid sensation. It was 1934, and she was the subject of a nasty custody battle between her widowed mother and her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Depression-era Americans eagerly read about the acrimonious ...read more

In the United States, where you live can affect the power of your vote. And before the era of high-tech gerrymandering, a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s forced states to redraw egregiously outdated voting maps and served as an equalizing force in American ...read more

The great Cola Wars of the 1980s were a battle between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo for dominance. The disastrous introduction of “New Coke” in 1985 appeared to set Coca-Cola back. Yet by the end of the year, it was clear the “mistake” had actually helped Coca-Cola’s sales, allowing ...read more

The Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969 was one of the most astonishing achievements in human history. That day, an estimated 530 million TV viewers watched U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take their first steps on the moon. Afterward, the two men and third ...read more

Legends of large, ape-like beasts can be found all over the world. Since the 1950s, the United States’ version of this has been “Bigfoot.” And since 1976, the FBI has had a file on him. That year, Director Peter Byrne of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in The ...read more

Ancient cultures have long considered opal a special gemstone because of its ability to capture so many different colors. Turns out, that’s not all it can capture: researchers in Australia have identified at least four members of a new dinosaur species whose bones were preserved ...read more

Before The Bachelorette pitted 30 men against each other to win one woman’s heart, Americans watched a different show about random strangers competing for a mate: The Dating Game. Starting in 1965, the reality show featured a woman asking three men questions without seeing their ...read more

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