In the weeks following D-Day, German troops began retreating en masse, as Allied forces advanced across France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. By September 1944, however, the overstretched Allies were approaching formidable German defenses along the Siegfried Line, ...read more

In early 1908, after the death of his mother, 18-year-old Adolf Hitler left his provincial hometown of Linz and moved to Vienna, the glamorous capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Leaving behind his late father’s ambitions for him to become a civil servant, Hitler saw Vienna ...read more

In the frigid waters off King William’s Island, in northern Canada, the wreck of a ship belonging to British explorer Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to find the Northwest Passage, has been preserved nearly intact for more than 170 years. The HMS Terror, one of two ...read more

Today many Americans see Labor Day as time off from work, an opportunity to enjoy a barbecue with friends and family and a final moment of summertime relaxation before the busy fall season begins. But the history behind the Labor Day holiday is far more complex and dramatic than ...read more

Ever since a British forest guide first stumbled on Roopkund Lake in northern India in 1942, experts have struggled to understand how hundreds of human skeletons ended up in this small, shallow glacial lake, which sits in a valley more than 16,000 feet above sea level. Over the ...read more

Shortly after midnight on September 18, 1961, a chartered DC-6 airplane carrying United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold on a peacekeeping mission to the newly independent African nation of the Congo crashed in a forest near Ndola, in the British protectorate of ...read more

Archaeologists in the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern coast of Scotland, have uncovered the ruins of what they think is a Viking drinking hall used by elite warriors, possibly including a powerful 12th-century chieftain named Sigurd. Orkney’s link to the Vikings can clearly ...read more

On the morning of November 11, 1620, when the Mayflower dropped its anchor off the coast of Cape Cod, the group of English Separatists later known as the Pilgrims fell to their knees and blessed God for bringing them safely across the “vast and furious ocean” to a new life in the ...read more

Humans weren’t the first to make or use stone tools. That honor appears to belong to the ancient species that lived on the shores of Lake Turkana, in Kenya, some 3.3 million years ago. First discovered in 2011, these more primitive tools were created some 700,000 years before the ...read more

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, Americans woke up to a new kind of breakfast. Poured from a box into a bowl and doused with milk, cold cereals like Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, Grape-Nuts and Shredded Wheat were not only lighter and easier to digest than more ...read more

Though the two main sects within Islam, Sunni and Shia, agree on most of the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islam, a bitter split between the two goes back some 14 centuries. The divide originated with a dispute over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the ...read more

Few monuments in the world are more recognizable than the Parthenon. Sitting atop a limestone hill rising some 500 feet above the Ilissos Valley in Athens, this soaring marble temple built in tribute to the goddess Athena brings the glory of ancient Greece into the modern world. ...read more

Archaeologists digging near the Swedish village of Gamla Uppsala have unearthed two rare boat burials from the Viking Age. Inside one of them, which was found intact, were the remains of a man, a horse and a dog, as well as several weapons and a comb. Though boat burials date ...read more

It’s hard to imagine Independence Day without fireworks. But how did this tradition get started? As it turns out, setting off mini-explosions of all shapes and colors (but particularly red, white and blue) on July 4 goes back almost as far as American independence itself. ...read more

In the first days of July 1863, two great armies converged at the small town of Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania. Begun as a skirmish between Union cavalry and Confederate infantry scouting for supplies, the battle escalated into one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. ...read more

More than a thousand years after the Viking Age drew to a close, there’s still a lot we don’t know about these seafaring Norse warriors, who explored territory from the furthest reaches of Russia to the earliest settlement in North America and left a lasting mark on the lands and ...read more

On a hot summer night in 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar located in New York City’s Greenwich Village that served as a haven for the city’s gay, lesbian and transgender community. At the time, homosexual acts remained illegal in every state except Illinois, and bars ...read more

On a Friday night in February 1926, a crowd of some 1,500 packed the Renaissance Casino in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood for the 58th masquerade and civil ball of Hamilton Lodge. Nearly half of those attending the event, reported the New York Age, appeared to be “men of ...read more

From the first-ever Hollywood stuntwoman to the first lady of drag racing, these seven intrepid women stunned audiences with their death-defying feats. With their gutsy performances in traditionally male-dominated fields, they’re known for breaking barriers, setting records—and ...read more

For thousands of years, starting with the earliest hunter-gatherer tribes, butchers have served as highly valued members of human societies. With the domestication of livestock and the improvement of tool-making techniques, butchery developed into a skilled and respected trade ...read more

Nearly 70 years before Topeka’s Linda Brown and others challenged restrictive school laws on behalf of African Americans, sparking the legal battle that resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, 8-year-old Mamie Tape of San Francisco, and her ...read more

Ancient Egypt may be long gone, but archaeologists keep finding its treasures. For more than 3,000 years, one of history’s greatest civilizations flourished along the winding Nile River in northeast Africa. But after Egypt fell under first Greek, then Roman, and finally Muslim ...read more

1. Japan is the oldest continuous monarchy in the world. Though it’s a liberal democracy, Japan is also the oldest continuous monarchy in the world. According to widely accepted (though somewhat legendary) genealogy, Akihito’s family has ruled for some 2,700 years. Though we know ...read more

Beneath the rocky floor of Callao Cave on Luzon island in the Philippines, researchers have uncovered a number of fossils from what they believe is a previously unknown ancient human species. Dubbed Homo luzonensis, the newly identified species inhabited Luzon more than 50,000 ...read more

We know that Neanderthals were carnivores, with a diet that consisted primarily—if not exclusively—of meat. But a new study by researchers in France suggests that around 120,000 years ago, when a period of sudden climate change wiped out many of the animals who made up their ...read more

Back in the 1990s, it took nearly a decade for paleontologists in Canada to extricate the massive Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as “Scotty” from its solid sandstone casing. Now, for the first time, researchers from the University of Alberta have taken Scotty’s detailed and ...read more

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device at a remote site in Kazakhstan, signaling a new and terrifying phase in the Cold War. By the early 1950s, schools across the United States were training students to dive under their desks and cover their ...read more

Archaeologists have found what they believe is a buried Viking-era ship in a region of Norway that is already famous for its wealth of Viking treasures. Using ground-penetrating radar (also known as GPR, or geo-radar), a team of experts spotted the vessel-shaped irregularity in ...read more

In 1604, England’s King James I authorized a new translation of the Bible aimed at settling some thorny religious differences in his kingdom—and solidifying his own power. But in seeking to prove his own supremacy, King James ended up democratizing the Bible instead. Thanks to ...read more

Archaeologists in Poland have discovered a giant 60,000-year-old flint workshop that they believe was used by Neanderthals to make thousands of stone tools. So far, the researchers have recovered some 17,000 stone products from the site, believed to be the first large ...read more

Around 450 B.C., the Greek writer Herodotus traveled to Egypt. His later account of the trip, included in his famous work The Histories, focused on a distinctive river barge known as a “baris,” which he said the Egyptians used to ferry goods up and down the Nile River. Herodotus ...read more

Tel Megiddo Current Location: Israel Megiddo is better known to some by its Greek name of Armageddon, which some Christians believe will be the site of the end-times battle prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Archaeologists have uncovered an astounding 26 layers of human ...read more

From the moment he plants a kiss on Jesus of Nazareth in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas Iscariot sealed his own fate: to be remembered as history’s most famous traitor. But by identifying Jesus to the Jewish authorities, Judas set into motion the series of events that became ...read more

Dorothy Day was described by her fellow suffragists as a “frail girl.” Yet on the night of November 14, 1917, prison guards at the Occoquan Workhouse, did not hold back after she and 32 other women had been arrested several days earlier for picketing outside the White House. ...read more

She was Mary of Magdala, one of the earliest followers of Jesus of Nazareth. According to the Bible, she traveled with him, witnessed his Crucifixion and was one of the first people to learn of his Resurrection. Over the centuries, everyone from early church leaders and scholars ...read more

For some 800 years, the man known as “The Crusader” had rested peacefully at St. Michan’s church in Dublin, Ireland, his body naturally mummified by the crypt’s limestone bricks and methane-rich soil. Now, vandals have broken into the historic church, decapitated the ...read more

On the afternoon of May 8, 1854, a ragged bunch of armed men approached the border between Mexico and the United States, just south of San Diego. Just ahead, a detachment of U.S. soldiers waited on the other side of the border to arrest them, while a band of eager spectators ...read more

Over the centuries, the head of John the Baptist has ranked high on the list of the most sought-after relics in Christianity. The Jewish preacher and prophet, celebrated as one of the earliest Christian saints, is believed to have paved the way for his distant cousin, Jesus, whom ...read more

After 5,000 years, scholars are beginning to unlock one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Stonehenge. Geologists long ago traced dozens of the Neolithic monument’s smaller “bluestones” to the Preseli Hills in western Wales, some 180 miles away from Stonehenge itself. Now, a ...read more

For centuries, the most common image of Jesus Christ, at least in Western cultures, has been that of a bearded, fair-skinned man with long, wavy, light brown or blond hair and (often) blue eyes. But the Bible doesn’t describe Jesus physically, and all the evidence we do have ...read more

A 240 million-year-old fossilized leg bone has yielded evidence of what might be one of the earliest known cases of cancer ever found. Scientists in Germany detected a highly malignant tumor in the fossilized leg bone of a stem turtle, which lived during the Triassic Period ...read more

In late June 1776, as a massive British fleet prepared to invade New York, a complex drama played itself out at the headquarters of General George Washington’s Continental Army in New York City: a former bodyguard of the general was set to be hanged for conspiracy against the ...read more

As the 15th century drew to a close, some 60 million people lived across the Americas, sustaining themselves with the bounty of the vast lands they inhabited. But with the arrival of the first European settlers, waves of new diseases, along with warfare, slavery and other ...read more

After almost a decade of painstaking work, conservators in Egypt have revealed the newly revamped tomb of Tutankhamen, better known as King Tut. In addition to cleaning and restoring the paintings that adorn the walls of the tomb, the combined efforts of the Getty Conservation ...read more

In the Oscar-winning period piece The Favourite, two clever, ambitious ladies-in-waiting in early 18th-century England compete for the favor—and romantic affections—of a mercurial and unstable Queen Anne. The outlandish, profanity-laden and darkly comic film doesn’t stick to the ...read more

When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 B.C., his body didn’t begin to show signs of decomposition for a full six days, according to historical accounts. To the ancient Greeks, this confirmed what they all thought about the young Macedonian king, and what Alexander ...read more

Every summer, groups of hunters head to the remote, uninhabited New Siberian islands in search of the elusive “white gold”—a perfectly formed tusk of a woolly mammoth—hidden in the thawing Arctic permafrost. They are not only exploring the furthest reaches of the Arctic Ocean, ...read more

These days, the State of the Union—the yearly speech by the U.S. president in front of the two houses of Congress, giving his view on the state of the nation and his legislative goals for the year—is as familiar a late January tradition as failing New Year’s resolutions and ...read more