A safety test, which took place on April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, was deemed so routine that the plant’s director didn’t even bother showing up. It quickly spiraled out of control, however, as an unexpected power surge and steam buildup led to a series of ...read more

At the end of World War II, the United States was broadly popular in Vietnam for having repelled the Japanese occupiers. Even Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist and communist revolutionary, started off pro-American. But, through the terms of five U.S. presidents, that relationship ...read more

With the wings of his plane on fire and smoke pouring into the cockpit, future President George H.W. Bush parachuted into the Pacific Ocean, where he floated for hours on a life raft, vomiting uncontrollably and bleeding profusely from his forehead. Still, Bush could count ...read more

Disenchantment with Prohibition had been building almost from the moment it first took effect in 1920. Politicians continued drinking as everyday people were slapped with charges. Bootleggers were becoming rich on the profits of illegal alcohol sales and violence was on the rise. ...read more

For his first 107 years, Richard Overton lived in relative anonymity. A World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific, he could usually be found post-retirement on the porch of his Austin, Texas, home, smoking cigars and chatting up his extensive circle of family and friends. ...read more

George Herbert Walker Bush, a former oil man who was elected to the White House in 1988 after serving two terms as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, died Friday, November 30, at the age of 94. The longest-lived president in U.S. history, Bush passed away just seven and a half ...read more

By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, much of the South lay in ruins, physically, economically and socially. Fears of Yankee reprisals and racial conflict percolated through society. Black slaves had been freed; Confederate President Jefferson Davis was imprisoned. For William ...read more

Few things are as closely linked as the Bonapartes and France. But the famed emperor’s family also had strong connections across the Atlantic. No fewer than five of Napoleon’s seven siblings—and very nearly the “Little Corporal” himself—either lived in the United States or had ...read more

Many monarchs throughout history have killed family members. England’s Henry VIII, for example, beheaded two wives and several cousins. Cleopatra engineered the murder of two siblings (one of whom was also her husband). And Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, ordered the execution ...read more

On February 23, 1945, Hershel “Woody” Williams crawled toward a string of Japanese guard posts with a 70-pound flamethrower strapped to his back. His Marine Corps unit had suffered heavy casualties since arriving on the island of Iwo Jima a few days earlier and had now become ...read more

The treaty enlarged the United States by 586,000 square miles, an area more than twice the size of Texas, all for the bargain price of around two cents an acre. Yet because some politicians and journalists considered Alaska a barren wasteland— and inherently opposed anything ...read more

1. Myth 1: Her name was Pocahontas. Born around 1596, Pocahontas was reputedly the favorite daughter of Wahunsenaca (known to the English as Powhatan), paramount chief of a coalition of some 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes in Virginia’s Tidewater region. As is possible even today ...read more

1. Only eight teams competed in the first NCAA tournament. Oregon, nicknamed the “Tall Firs” due to the height of its starting frontcourt, beat out seven other teams to win the first NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1939. The field began growing soon after, reaching 16 teams ...read more

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is generally considered one of history’s worst tyrants, responsible for millions of civilian deaths. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his only daughter, Svetlana, found it extraordinarily difficult growing up in the Kremlin under his care. Though Stalin ...read more

1. Maya Arguably the New World’s most advanced pre-Columbian civilization, the Maya carved large stone cities into the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America, complete with elaborate plazas, palaces, pyramid-temples and ball courts. Known for their hieroglyphic writing, ...read more

As they painstakingly hammered out a U.S. Constitution in the spring and summer of 1787, constitutional delegates toyed with the idea of a presidential advisory body, which would come to be known as the Cabinet. One proposal called for a “privy council” composed of, among others, ...read more

1. She struggled to find her calling. After graduating with a degree in biology from the newly opened University of Montana, located in her hometown of Missoula, Rankin got a job as a schoolteacher. But she quickly grew bored and restless, quitting only to find herself equally ...read more

1. Herodotus Nicknamed the “father of history,” Herodotus is credited with essentially inventing the genre, the origins of which lie in epics and travelogues. In his masterpiece, “The Histories,” he declared at the outset his intention to “prevent the traces of human events from ...read more

1. George Eyser Despite losing his left leg in a childhood train accident, German-born American George Eyser joined a prestigious gymnastics club that competed at the 1904 Olympics in his hometown of St. Louis. (At that time, Olympians represented their clubs, not their ...read more

1. The rebels expected to take control quickly. A cadre of rebel army officers began plotting to overthrow the government as soon as a leftist coalition won Spanish elections in February 1936. Gaining the support of General Franco at the final hour, they called for a July 18 ...read more

Though it had long been believed that planets existed outside our solar system, astronomers did not confirm their presence until 1992, when at least two were found to be circling a pulsating radio star, or pulsar. Since then, more than 3,000 additional exoplanets have been ...read more

The fifth planet from the sun, Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than Earth and over twice as massive as every other planet in the solar system combined. NASA first sent a probe there in 1973, when Pioneer 10 obtained close-up images and took measurements of its massive ...read more

Despite being sworn ideological enemies, Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union put aside their vast differences to sign a nonaggression pact in August 1939. Thus assured that the USSR wouldn’t intervene, Adolf Hitler kicked off World War II just days later by invading ...read more

1. Isaac Hopper Quakers played a huge role in the formation of the Underground Railroad, with George Washington complaining as early as 1786 that a “society of Quakers, formed for such purposes, have attempted to liberate” a neighbor’s slave. Anti-slavery sentiment was ...read more

1. The reactor’s emergency safety systems had been turned off. The Chernobyl nuclear power station in present-day Ukraine consisted of four 1,000-megawatt reactors, plus two additional reactors that were under construction. On the night of April 25-26, 1986, Soviet technicians ...read more

With the country’s highest per-capita murder rate and more saloons than grocery stores, San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century was no place for the faint of heart. Yet people flocked there anyway, drawn by the Mediterranean climate, ample employment opportunities and ...read more

1. Dust Bowl Around World War I, homesteaders flocked in mass to the southern Great Plains, where they replaced the native grasses that held the topsoil in place with wheat and other crops. Eschewing sustainable agricultural practices, such as crop rotation, they managed to reap ...read more

Living in largely independent city-states that they laid out in a grid pattern, the Etruscans excelled at metalworking, seafaring, agriculture and pottery. According to the Roman historian Livy, “no people was ever more devoted to religious observances.” At the same time, they ...read more

The son of Setnakht, founder of the 20th dynasty, Ramses III ruled ancient Egypt from about 1187 B.C. to 1156 B.C. During his reign, Egypt came under renewed threat from a mysterious confederacy of seafarers known as the Sea Peoples, who had been wreaking havoc in the eastern ...read more

Very little is known about King Erik IX of Sweden, who is also referred to as Erik Jedvardsson, Erik the Saint and Erik the Lawgiver. No surviving documents from his lifetime even mention him, and his earliest appearance in the extant literature merely reports that his remains ...read more

On March 19, 1941, the U.S. War Department established the 99th Pursuit Squadron, which, along with a few other squadrons formed later, became better known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Consisting of America’s first black military pilots, these units confronted racism at home in ...read more

1. Napoleon Bonaparte Immediately upon returning from his famed Egyptian military campaign in October 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte began scheming to overthrow the five-member Directory that ruled France. With the support of several high-level co-conspirators, including two of the ...read more

1. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Married in 1939, New York City residents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were devoted communists who allegedly headed a spy ring that passed military secrets to the Soviets. The scheme got underway sometime after 1940, when Julius became a civilian ...read more

1. He saw numerous sunrises and sunsets each day. Cruising along at over 17,000 miles per hour, the International Space Station circumnavigates Earth once every 90 minutes. Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko therefore had the opportunity to witness an astounding ...read more

Born and raised in Alabama, Rosa Parks’ activism began in earnest at age 30, when she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and was elected secretary at her first meeting. Twelve years later, on December 1, 1955, on her way home from a long day of work as a department store ...read more

1. “The Jungle” is a work of fiction.  Sinclair is arguably the best known of the so-called muckrakers, the forerunners of today’s investigative journalists who in the early 1900s exposed widespread corporate and political malfeasance. Unlike most other muckrakers, such as Ida ...read more

1. She is the best-selling novelist in history. Popular worldwide, Christie’s books have been translated into dozens of languages and have sold an estimated 2 billion copies (and counting). This puts her third on the all-time bestseller list behind only William Shakespeare and ...read more

On December 21, 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, blasted off from present-day Cape Canaveral in Florida. The plan called for the three astronauts onboard to come within about 70 miles of the moon, circle it several times and return safely home, all while ...read more

The area around Pylos, on the southwest coast of Greece, has long been a hotspot for Bronze Age artifacts. This week, a husband-and-wife team from the University of Cincinnati announced the latest major find from there: an intact 3,500-year-old warrior tomb filled with weapons ...read more

1. George Washington was the father of the Navy. Despite having virtually no experience at sea, Washington was a huge early proponent of the Navy, believing among other things that it would disrupt British supply lines. “It follows then as certain as that night succeeds the day, ...read more

1. He was largely raised by his aunt and uncle. Born in a small city in Indiana, Dean soon moved with his parents to Santa Monica, California, when his father, a dental technician, was transferred to a hospital there. But at age 9 his mother died of cancer, and he was sent back ...read more

The first inkling of what researchers call a “lost world” of Arctic dinosaurs came in 1961, when a geologist for Shell Oil Company stumbled upon a cache of bones while mapping along the Colville River in northern Alaska. Assuming they belonged to large Ice Age mammals, he made no ...read more

Many revelers at this year’s festivities may not even know that they’re in essence commemorating a wedding. Back in October 1810, Bavaria’s crown prince (the future King Ludwig I) married Princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen. Bavaria, in present-day southern Germany, had ...read more

1. All previous attempts to settle Florida had ended disastrously. From 1513 to 1559, the Spanish sent several major expeditions to Florida, but each one ended in complete failure. Juan Ponce de León’s colonization attempt, for example, was cut short by a Native American arrow ...read more

1. Few monarchs have ruled for longer. Born in 1638, Louis XIV became king at age 4 following the death of his father, Louis XIII, and remained on the throne for the next 72 years. This marks him as both the longest-reigning French monarch in history and the longest-reigning ...read more

1. The census is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution calls for an “enumeration” to be made of the populace “within every subsequent term of 10 years.” In some ways, this idea was nothing new. The ancient Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians ...read more

Tropical Africa (133,000 B.C. to 88,000 B.C.) By extracting sediment cores from Lake Malawi, one of the largest and deepest lakes on Earth, scientists determined in 2007 that sub-Saharan Africa experienced a series of mega-droughts from 135,000 to 90,000 years ago. Rainfall was ...read more

Smallpox is believed to have first infected humans around the time of the earliest agricultural settlements some 12,000 years ago. No surviving evidence of it, however, predates the so-called New Kingdom of Egypt, which lasted from about 1570 B.C. to 1085 B.C. A few mummies from ...read more