1. If Ye Vote for Me, I’ll Give Ye Hard Cider George Washington knew the value of a good house party. According to legend, he entertained potential supporters of his 1757 bid for the Virginia House of Burgesses with a banquet that featured plenty of wine, hard cider and gourmet ...read more

1. Anti-Masonic Party Conspiracy theorists fueled the founding of this party in 1828, which was established to expose and dismantle the Freemason society across America. The party’s founders suspected the Masons of murdering William Morgan, a bricklayer who intended to publish a ...read more

1. Failed bandit Elmer McCurdy’s corpse had a more interesting life than the man did. In 1911, Elmer McCurdy mistakenly robbed a passenger train he thought contained thousands of dollars. The disappointed outlaw made off with just $46 and was shot by lawmen shortly thereafter. ...read more

1. The St. Valentine who inspired the holiday may have been two different men. Officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, St. Valentine is known to be a real person who died around A.D. 270. However, his true identity was questioned as early as A.D. 496 by Pope Gelasius ...read more

1. The earliest predictor: Shubencadie Sam By virtue of living east of every other celebrity groundhog in North America, Nova Scotia native Sam, a resident of Shubencadie Provincial Wildlife Park in Canada, takes the prize as the earliest to issue a Groundhog Day prediction ...read more

At 63,000 feet of altitude, a human being’s blood will boil. At 90,000 feet, the atmospheric temperature plummets to minus-90 degrees Fahrenheit. These facts did not deter Joe Kittinger from accepting a challenge: to ride a balloon to 100,000 feet and then parachute back down to ...read more

1. First artificial earth satellite: Sputnik The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first manmade object to orbit the earth, on October 4, 1957, to little fanfare. In fact, the official Soviet news agency, Tass, didn’t announce the launch until the next day. Global reaction to ...read more

1. Voyager 1 has an identical twin. In the early 1970s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) developed a mission called Voyager to make a “grand tour” of Jupiter and Saturn—and possibly Uranus and Neptune if all went well. The agency planned to launch a pair ...read more

1. Giovanni Schiaparelli sees “channels” on the surface of Mars in 1877, and speculation runs rampant that intelligent beings created them. What a difference a word makes. When Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope in 1877 to view the surface of ...read more

1. 200-Meter Swimming Obstacle Race Every four years, the world watches in awe as Olympians like Michael Phelps cut gracefully through the water to set world records and hold aloft gold medals in freestyle swimming. Imagine how much more entertaining the performance could be, ...read more

1. Skylab was made to go up but not to come back down. The space station known as Skylab was designed as an orbiting workshop for research on scientific matters, such as the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body. Because the project represented the next step ...read more

1. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson served punch to the public on Independence Day. Americans have been celebrating Independence Day on July 4 since 1777, but an official event at the White House wasn’t held until 1801, when President Thomas Jefferson threw wide the mansion’s ...read more

Theory #1: Earhart ran out of fuel, crashed and perished in the Pacific Ocean. This is one of the most generally accepted versions of the famous aviator’s disappearance. Many experts believe Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan got slightly off course en route to a refueling ...read more

Fred Noonan has been consigned to a historical footnote as Amelia Earhart‘s navigator. That’s partly because little is known about him. When he and Earhart vanished on July 2, 1937, headlines blared about the disappearance of “Lady Lindy” and the frantic search for her Lockheed ...read more

When Abraham Lincoln signed an executive order proclaiming the emancipation of slaves held in states “in rebellion against the United States” in January 1863, he created one of American history’s most iconic documents. Several autographed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation ...read more

It’s just an 18-by-12-inch piece of paper, but the Frank and Jesse James wanted poster going under the gavel on June 23 in Denver should fetch far more than the $5,000-per-man bounty it offers. In fact, it’s expected to bring in between $15,000 and $25,000. “Authentic wanted ...read more

1. Three minutes to midnight: As the arms race gets underway, the clock hand inches forward in November 1949. When the Doomsday Clock debuted in 1947 as a cover design for the new magazine version of the newsletter-style Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the clock hand stood at ...read more

Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most American servicemen had never seen a plane like the “Zero,” so named not because of the prominent Rising Sun emblem painted on the side but for the manufacturer’s type designation: Mitsubishi 6M2 Type 0 Model 21. Those servicemen ...read more