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of high-tech gerrymandering, a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s forced states to redraw egregiously outdated voting maps and served as an equalizing force in American ...read more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

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