Why Did the Clovis People Mysteriously Vanish?
Ancient people of North America’s Clovis culture migrated to South America roughly 11,000 years ago, then mysteriously vanished, researchers have discovered.In a new study, researchers analyzed DNA from 49 people living over a span of 10,000 years in Belize, Brazil, the Central ...read more
The WWI Origins of the Poppy as a Remembrance Symbol
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
The Last Official Death of WWI Was a Man Who Sought Redemption
Shortly after 5 a.m. on November 11, 1918, German, British and French officials gathered inside a railroad dining car in a dark forest north of Paris and signed an armistice to end World War I. Rejecting German calls to immediately halt hostilities, Allied commander Ferdinand ...read more
The Surprising Interrogations That Led to Saddam Hussein’s Capture
After coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and toppled its government, the U.S. military launched an intensive manhunt. The target? The nation’s deposed dictator, Saddam Hussein, who escaped Baghdad when the capital fell. Nine months later, in an operation code-named “Red ...read more
DNA Identifies Origins of World's Oldest Natural Mummy
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
Why Were Vietnam War Vets Treated Poorly When They Returned?
Twenty-one-year-old Steven A. Wowwk arrived as an infantryman in the Army’s First Cavalry Division in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam in early January 1969 to fight in an escalating and increasingly unwinnable war. By June, Wowwk had been wounded twice—the second time seriously—and was ...read more
10 Kristallnacht Photos That Capture the Horror of 'The Night of Broken Glass'
“Our synagogue is burning!”Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky dropped the phone and ran to his place of worship. It was 2 a.m., but the sky was already bright. As he approached the Synagogue Prinzregentenstrasse in Berlin, pushing his hat down so he wouldn’t be recognized, ...read more
Why World War I Ended With an Armistice Instead of a Surrender
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the incessant boom of artillery abruptly went silent along the Western Front in France. An American medical officer, Stanhope Bayne-Jones, suddenly could hear water dripping off a bush next to him. “It seemed mysterious, ...read more
Watch the Emotional Reunion of a Concentration Camp Survivor and One of His Liberators
The first time Joshua Kaufman met Daniel Gillespie was April 29, 1945, when American liberators marched into the notorious Dachau concentration camp 12 miles outside Munich, Germany and smashed in the prison doors. Gillespie, a gunner with the 42nd Rainbow Division, was deeply ...read more
How Gary Hart’s Sex Scandal Betrayed His Character
Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate in the spring of 1987 when the Miami Herald reported that rumors of his “womanizing” were true. The ensuing scandal over his extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice ended his candidacy. Yet according to Gail ...read more
How Landing the First Man on the Moon Cost Dozens of Lives
A half-century ago, NASA was preparing feverishly for a moon landing in a race against the former Soviet Union. The non-stop campaign of testing and launches was also a race against time—specifically to honor slain president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge for the country to land a ...read more
The False WWI Armistice Report That Fooled America
A minute before noon on a November morning in 1918, a telegraph inside the United Press office on the third floor of the New York World headquarters chattered a message of salvation to a war-weary country. After reading the cable from France, pressmen grabbed the largest type ...read more
The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart
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
Is This Cigar-Shaped UFO an Actual Alien Ship?
Could a large, cigar-shaped object floating through space be part of an alien spacecraft? Astronomers at Harvard University don’t rule it out in a recent paper.Scientists spotted the object in October 2017, at first thinking it was a comet or an asteroid, and later wondering if ...read more
Native Americans Couldn’t Vote in Every State Until 1962
Do U.S. citizenship and voting rights go hand and hand? For most of the country’s history, the answer has been no—just look at the example of Native voting rights, which weren’t secured in all states until the 1960s.Native Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens when the country ...read more