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

Scientists just made a major discovery about the role of female artists and scribes in the Middle Ages—all based on some 1,000-year-old dental plaque. The plaque in question belonged to a middle-aged woman buried in a small women’s monastery in Dalheim, Germany around A.D. 1100. ...read more

Born into slavery before the American Revolution, Jude Hall fought valiantly in several of the war’s most crucial battles, earning the nickname “Old Rock” for his strength and heroism. Yet while he would gain his freedom after the war, and a small plot of land in Exeter, New ...read more

Just before 10:30 am Beijing local time on January 3, the robotic spacecraft Chang’e 4 made a soft landing in the South Pole-Aitken Basin area of the moon, otherwise known as the “far side” or “dark side” of Earth’s only natural satellite. It is the first spacecraft in history ...read more

Soon after arriving at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman received word that the scientists of the Manhattan Project had successfully detonated the world’s first nuclear device in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert. On July 24, eight days ...read more

The history of Christmas is long and complicated, but by the 16th century, when Henry VIII ruled England, it was beginning to resemble the holiday we know today in some important ways. It may surprise you to learn that some of our favorite traditions of the Christmas season date ...read more

Archaeologists have discovered a more than 4,000-year-old tomb decorated with colorful drawings and sculptures hidden beneath the sands of Saqqara, the sprawling royal burial ground located in the desert near Cairo, Egypt. Hieroglyphs carved above the tomb’s door identify its ...read more

We know the ancient Egyptians loved cats, but what about the Vikings? Recent genetic research has shown that these seafaring Nordic explorers brought domesticated cats on board their ships to kill rodents, helping the furry felines spread across the globe. But the Vikings also ...read more

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