One of the benefits of being a U.S. president is you get to work from home. Ever since John Adams moved into the White House in 1800, every subsequent president has gotten the chance to live in his official workplace in Washington, D.C. Like many other Americans who work from ...read more

“Spanish flu” has been used to describe the flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 and the name suggests the outbreak started in Spain. But the term is actually a misnomer and points to a key fact: nations involved in World War I didn’t accurately report their flu outbreaks.  Spain ...read more

The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was the most deadly flu outbreak in history, killing up to 50 million people worldwide. In the United States, where it ultimately killed around 675,000 people, local governments rolled out initiatives to try to stop its spread. These varied ...read more

On June 19, 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin went with friends to a strip club in Detroit to celebrate his upcoming wedding. That night, two white men who apparently thought Chin was Japanese beat him to death. At the killers’ trial, the men each received a $3,000 ...read more

War has always brought chaos, and with it an opportunity for pillage and plunder. This was especially true during World War II, when countless pieces of priceless art, artifacts and other treasure were destroyed and spirited away from both Europe and the Asia Pacific. Nazis, in ...read more

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot linen cloth bearing an image of a crucified man that has become a popular Catholic icon. For some, it is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ. For others, it is a religious icon reflecting the story of the Christ, not necessarily the ...read more

The last known survivor of the last U.S. slave ship died in 1940—75 years after the abolition of slavery. Her name was Matilda McCrear. When she first arrived in Alabama in 1860, she was only two years old. By the time she died, Matilda had lived through the Civil War, ...read more

The United States has never delayed a presidential election. But there was one instance in which some wondered if the country should: when the nation was embroiled in the Civil War. The 1864 election was the second U.S. presidential election to take place during wartime (the ...read more

In 1665 and 1666, one city experienced two enormous tragedies: the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. The plague killed roughly 15 to 20 percent of the city’s population, while the fire burned about a quarter of London’s metropolis, making around 100,000 people ...read more

On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said ...read more

The Great Depression was a difficult, life-altering period in the United States when millions of people struggled to find work and get by. Despite the tough times, the average life spans of Americans actually increased. In fact, historical research shows that during the 20th ...read more

One of the best ways to prevent the spread of the flu and other viruses is to wash your hands. Today, this may seem like common sense to many people (even if they don’t all do it properly). Yet it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that some doctors in the United States and Europe ...read more

The first humans emerged in Africa around two million years ago, long before the modern humans known as Homo sapiens appeared on the same continent. There’s a lot anthropologists still don’t know about how different groups of humans interacted and mated with each other over this ...read more

The history of invasive species is usually one of unforeseen consequences. When an animal, fish, insect or plant is taken out of its original ecosystem and introduced to a new one—whether by accident or on purpose—it's less likely to have any natural predators.  Which can lead to ...read more

Despite what the song says, a kiss isn’t always just a kiss. A kiss can be political, whether because it’s the first of its kind or because it’s between two heads of state. A kiss can also become iconic when it’s captured on film, even if the kiss itself was invasive and ...read more

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor in the United States. Originally, Harry S. Truman established the “Medal of Freedom” to honor people who’d demonstrated notable service during World War II. In 1963, John F. Kennedy reintroduced it as the ...read more

The worst influenza pandemic in history was the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. It infected an estimated 500 million people (about one-third of the world’s population) and killed an estimated 50 million—more than the death toll for World War I. Even today, the seasonal ...read more

In November 2002, doctors in the Guangdong province of southeastern China began to see the first cases of what would become known as SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. Over the next several months, 8,096 people in 26 countries contracted the new viral illness, leading to ...read more

H.H. Holmes is notoriously known as one of America's first serial killers who lured victims into his hotel dubbed the “Murder Castle” during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. According to some claims, he killed up to 200 people inside his macabre hotel that was outfitted with ...read more

George Washington first saw armed conflict in 1754, when he was 22 years old and still had all his teeth. Although he’s most famous for his success as the commanding general of the American Revolution, it was during the French and Indian War that he cut those teeth as a military ...read more

During World War II, countries on both sides of the fight destroyed a number of important cultural sites in Europe and Asia. In 1942, the Nazi Lufwaffe leveled the Royal Opera House in Valletta, Malta. And in 1945, the United States hollowed out the Prefectural Industrial ...read more

Popular culture often shows cavemen as aggressive, club-wielding hunters. But what if most early humans were actually scavengers? The notion, first proposed by scholars in the second half of the 20th century, has since challenged the dated presumption that prehistoric men hunted ...read more

In January 1953, the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency had a thorny situation on its hands. Reports of UFO sightings were mushrooming around the country. Press accounts were fanning public fascination—and concern. So the CIA convened a group of scientists to investigate ...read more

The United Kingdom is made up of four constituent states: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. But there have long been tensions between England and the other three U.K. states, in part because England has always been the dominant political power among them. England ...read more

Midway through the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, three pipe bombs went off in the Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring 111. The man behind the bombing was 29-year-old Eric Rudolph, a terrorist who went on to carry out three more bombings over the ...read more

The historical people known as Vikings, who hailed from Scandinavia in Northern Europe, are well-known today for their exploits in the west. But the merchant-warriors also made their way into Eastern Europe, where they helped found a medieval federation in territory now known as ...read more

Before European settlers arrived in North America, there were millions of wild turkeys spread across what are now 39 U.S. states. But by the 1930s, wild turkeys had disappeared from at least 20 states and their total population had dropped to 30,000.  Over the next few decades, a ...read more

When the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in the early 17th century, they didn’t smell terrific, according to Native American accounts. Unlike the Wampanoag, these Europeans didn’t bathe regularly. A surviving member of the Patuxet nation named Tisquantum (or “Squanto”) ...read more

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