Amusing Planet

On the evening of 17 September 1908, a young American officer named Thomas Selfridge climbed into a fragile wooden aircraft at Fort Myer, Vi...

In 480 BC, Xerxes the Great, the fourth king of the Achaemenid Empire, launched the largest invasion the Greek world had yet faced. Xerxes’s...

In the 3rd century BCE, at the height of the Hellenistic age’s appetite for spectacle and scale, a ship was built so vast that even ancient ...

In the early 19th century, the idea of exporting ice to the tropics sounded like a joke. Ice was heavy, fragile, and melted. Yet one Boston ...

Few writers have multiplied themselves as radically, or as deliberately, as Fernando Pessoa. The Portuguese poet did not merely use pen name...

High in the arid mountains and along the old caravan routes of southern Morocco stand a series of fortress-like structures that once guarded...

High in the Ural Mountains, in the south-eastern corner of the Komi Republic, the Pechora River rises. It descends from the slopes, flows br...

High in the branches of trees, you may sometimes spot what looks like an abandoned bird’s nest—a dense, tangled mass of twigs clustered toge...

On the morning of 15 January 1857, residents of Hong Kong awoke to what seemed an ordinary day. As usual, loaves of fresh bread were deliver...

In the late 19th century, the British Empire wrapped the globe not only in pink on maps but in copper beneath the seas. This vast web of su...