From a 13,000-year-old brewery to a long-lost ancient city supposedly built by Trojan War captives, it was an eventful year for historical discoveries. As the year comes to a close, take a look back at some of the ways history made news this year. 1. A human ...read more

Egyptian officials have cracked open a sarcophagus discovered inside an ancient tomb in Luxor to reveal a well-preserved female mummy they believe is more than 3,000 years old. The woman’s remains inhabited one of two separate coffins found inside the same tomb in the El-Asasef ...read more

According to ancient Greek texts and myths, a group of Trojan prisoners founded the city of Tenea after their devastating defeat by Greek hero Odysseus—and an enormous wooden horse—in the Trojan War. More than 3,000 years later, near a small village in southern Greece called ...read more

As families around the country prepare to gather with family, eat turkey and perhaps partake in some Black Friday shopping, they might be surprised to learn how much we don’t know about the origins of the Thanksgiving. What we do know is most of the adult colonists in attendance ...read more

More than any other author, F. Scott Fitzgerald can be said to have captured the rollicking, tumultuous decade known as the Roaring Twenties, from its wild parties, dancing and illegal drinking to its post-war prosperity and its new freedoms for women. Above all, Fitzgerald’s ...read more

In an extremely rare early painting found in an ancient Israeli church, Jesus looks completely different from the long-haired, bearded Western image of him. Archaeologists from the University of Haifa in Israel discovered the previously unknown 1,500-year-old painting of Jesus ...read more

Contrary to popular scientific opinion, it turns out life for Neanderthals probably wasn’t any more violent or dangerous than it was for our modern human ancestors. In a new study, researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany compared the head injuries suffered by ...read more

From 1914 to 1918, World War I took a greater human toll than any previous conflict, with some 8.5 million soldiers dead of battlefield injuries or disease. The Great War, as it was then known, also ravaged the landscape of Western Europe, where most of the fiercest fighting took ...read more

Scientists discovered the ancient human skeleton known as the “Spirit Cave Mummy” back in 1940, hidden in a small rocky cave in the Great Basin Desert in northwest Nevada. But it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that radiocarbon dating techniques revealed the skeleton was some 10,600 ...read more

Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they ...read more

If the image that jumps to mind when you think “Neanderthal” is a hunched-over cave dweller with a barrel-like chest, you may need to think again. An international team of scientists has upended that stereotype by creating a 3-D virtual reconstruction of the chest of a ...read more

A secret passage to the underworld may have just been discovered, at least according to the mysterious ancient civilization that built it. Archaeologists have confirmed the existence of a hidden tunnel leading to a chamber deep underneath the Pyramid of the Moon, the massive ...read more

Researchers in Texas have discovered what they believe are spear points used by human hunters some 15,500 years ago, making them the oldest weapons ever found in North America. The newly discovered spear points pre-date the earliest known weapons made by the Clovis people, whom ...read more

By the time federal authorities arrested Theodore J. Kaczynski (aka the “Unabomber”) at his primitive log cabin in Montana in April 1996, he had managed to outwit the law for more than 17 years. From 1978 to 1995, the former math professor with a genius-level IQ and a massive ...read more

Off the Bulgarian coast, just over a mile beneath the surface of the Black Sea, archaeologists have discovered what they believe is the world’s oldest intact shipwreck. Measuring some 75 feet (23 meters) long, the ship is thought to be an ancient Greek trading vessel. With its ...read more

Scientists using a new underwater camera system recently captured footage of a strange creature known as the “headless chicken monster” swimming about a mile deep in the Southern Ocean near Australia. Resembling a chicken with its head cut off, sporting tentacles and waving ...read more

When Martin Luther issued grievances about the Catholic Church in 1521, King Henry VIII took it upon himself to personally repudiate the arguments of the Protestant Reformation leader. The pope rewarded Henry with the lofty title of Fidei Defensor, or Defender of the Faith. ...read more

In early 1692, during the depths of winter in Massachusetts Bay Colony, a group of young girls in the village of Salem began acting strangely. The daughter and niece of the local minister, Samuel Parris, claimed to be afflicted by invisible forces who bit and pinched them, ...read more

During the tense period of the Cold War, the U.S. government sought to deploy a potent new weapon against the Soviet Union: mind-reading. In a highly classified project conducted first in a California research lab in the 1970s, and later at an Army base in Maryland, the CIA, Army ...read more

Before there was Amazon.com, there was the Sears catalog. Founded as a mail-order watch company in the late 19th century, Sears, Roebuck and Company made its name with its swollen, jam-packed catalogs that advertised everything from underwear to entire house ...read more

On the night of July 16, 1918, a Bolshevik assassination squad executed Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children, putting an end to the Romanov family dynasty that had ruled Russia for more than three centuries. The murder of the Romanovs stamped out the ...read more

Archaeologists have discovered an elaborate, perfectly preserved shrine in the wall of a house in Pompeii, the ancient Roman city on Italy’s western coast that was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius. As many as 30,000 people are believed ...read more

Feverish and delirious, Bob Stevens arrived at a Florida hospital in the early morning hours of October 2, 2001. The emergency room doctors thought the 62-year-old photojournalist might be suffering from meningitis. But when an infectious disease specialist looked at Stevens’ ...read more

A private buyer paid a record-high $1.1 million for a 750-milliliter bottle of single malt whisky at an auction in Edinburgh. With a standard pour of around 1.5 oz, that means each drink of the stuff would tally up to just over $63,000. Not that this particular whisky may ever ...read more

A newly discovered species of dinosaur weighed in at twice the heft of an African elephant and walked with a crouch—like a cat. The dinosaur roamed southern Africa during the early Jurassic Period, some 200 million years ago and, at 12 metric tons, was by far the largest ...read more

Many Allied bombings released the equivalent energy of 300 lightning strikes and temporarily weakened the ionosphere, say researchers. During World War II, Allied bombing raids left their devastating mark on Germany, killing more than 400,000 civilians and laying waste to ...read more

In October 1991, Americans were riveted by the spectacle of an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee questioning Anita Hill, the African-American law professor who had accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. TV viewers, both male and female, ...read more

If you ask people to name the victorious Allied Powers in World War II, Mexico isn’t usually a name that comes to mind. But after declaring war against the Axis in mid-1942, Mexico did contribute to the Allied victory in important ways. Despite long standing tensions with the ...read more

A long-lost letter written by Galileo Galilei reveals an effort by the 17th-century astronomer to soften his public stance against the Catholic Church’s doctrine that the sun orbits the Earth. The letter, uncovered at the Royal Society in London, appears to solve a ...read more

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan got the chance to appoint the third Supreme Court justice of his presidency. But while the first two justices had sailed through the confirmation process, the third appointment turn out to be much, much more difficult. The outcome would have ...read more

For many people, nothing tastes better than a glass of cold beer, whether enjoyed at the end of a long day of work or while relaxing on a summer afternoon. But brewing beer—not baking bread—could be the reason our ancestors began cultivating grains in the first place. Inside a ...read more

No cultural symbol of the 1920s is more recognizable than the flapper. A young woman with a short “bob” hairstyle, cigarette dangling from her painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band. Flappers romped through the Roaring Twenties, enjoying the new freedoms ushered in by the end ...read more

On March 8, 1965, two battalions of U.S. Marines landed on beaches of Da Nang, marking the first official engagement of American troops in the Vietnam War. Over the next several years, as the United States escalated its ill-fated involvement in that conflict, hundreds of ...read more

“Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.”-Senator John McCain, Faith of Our Fathers After a devastating ordeal as a POW in Vietnam, John McCain launched a ...read more

A non-profit organization that went into debt buying the world’s largest private collection of Abraham Lincoln-related artifacts 11 years ago has turned to crowdfunding in efforts to pay off the remaining $9 million it still owes. If it fails, some of the collection’s most ...read more

By the end of 1919, more than 70 years after the first national woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, Congress finally passed a federal women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But the fate of the 19th Amendment all came down to Tennessee. In the summer of 1920, ...read more

They may be only 10 percent of the population, but it’s become apparent that left-handers have the edge in at least one prominent area—politics. No fewer than six out of 13 U.S. presidents since World War II have been lefties, helping to fuel speculation that left-handed people ...read more

In early August 2008, after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent troops into the rebellious province of South Ossetia, Russia came to its defense, beginning a five-day-long conflict that ended with Russian troops within striking distance of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. ...read more

Archaeologists in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land are exhuming and testing the remains of 95 people believed to be African-American convicts forced to work the sugarcane fields during the Jim Crow era. The grave sites were uncovered in April during the construction of a new ...read more

Article 5 is the cornerstone of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)  and states that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all of its members. But despite its importance, NATO has only invoked Article 5 once in its history—in response to the terrorist attacks ...read more

As the summer of 1914 approached, the balance of power in Europe looked shaky at best. It would take only a single crisis—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek by a young Bosnian Serb nationalist in ...read more

The charred remains of a 14,500-year-old pita-like flatbread, made from grinding together cereals and tubers, were discovered in a stone fireplace in the Black Desert in Jordan, according to a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of ...read more

When Germany signed the armistice ending hostilities in the First World War on November 11, 1918, its leaders believed they were accepting a “peace without victory,” as outlined by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points. But from the moment the leaders of the ...read more

The founding fathers set a high standard of ideals for the new nation to live up to back in 1776. But from the very beginning, debate about the best way to do that has been an inherent part of the American experiment. Since its founding, the United States has had both high and ...read more

When the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War broke out in Massachusetts in April 1775, few people in the American colonies wanted to separate from Great Britain entirely. But as the war continued, and Britain called out massive armed forces to enforce its will, more and ...read more

Almost as soon as World War II ended, the question of what to do with a defeated, destroyed Germany threatened to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. At Potsdam in 1945, the Big Three (the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union) agreed to ...read more

Newly discovered film footage from 1935 offers a rare glimpse of President Franklin D. Roosevelt walking, in a show of extreme effort that he went to great lengths to hide from the public eye. Fred Hill of New York was attending the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House with ...read more

A set of silverware made to commemorate Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday in 1939 has been sold at auction in Dorset, England for £12,500 (or $16,583 in U.S. dollars). The rare set of cutlery—which included two knives, three spoons and three forks, each engraved with the ...read more