The biggest hurdle to mass vaccination in the 19th century was keeping the virus alive out of the human body as the precious pus was being t...
About 12 kilometers north of the city of Arles, in the Provence region of southern France, is the small town of Fontvieille. It is a commune...
In the middle ages, many Russian communities, especially in the Novgorod and Pskov regions, believed in building churches as response to cal...
The pitch drop experiment began in 1927 when Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, set out to dem...
Ships aren’t meant to sink, but sometimes you have to wonder what miraculous forces kept a vessel afloat. The SS Baychimo was such a ship. ...
The British Pathé film archive has a chilling video of a man jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower. The man in the short video is shown...
Fighter aviation has come a long way from the crude old days when pilots shot down their own planes as often as the enemy’s. In those early ...
Until the late 19th century, the shores of Rotomahana, in northern New Zealand, were adorned by one of the most spectacular travertine terra...
One of Rome’s lesser-known attractions, the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola ( Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola in Italian), lies just ...
Every August, Alice Springs, a large town in the heart of Australia’s Northern Territory, holds an unusual boat race on Todd River, a river ...
Around the second half of the 13th century, a Dominican friar known as Stephen of Bourbon, began travelling the width and breadth of souther...
The 1999 Hollywood movie The Mummy is set in Egypt, but was filmed largely in Morocco. Marrakech became the Cairo of 1926, the year the sto...
Sunomata Castle stands at the confluence of the Sai and Nagara rivers, in the city of Ōgaki in Gifu Prefecture. It’s a typical Japanese cast...
Marketers give away freebies all the time to generate buzz and promote their products. Usually these freebies are cheap trinkets like toys, ...
The old city of Segovia, about 90 km north of Madrid, is best known for its aqueduct , but this historic city is full of architectural curio...
In a cave adjacent to an ancient cemetery near Beit She'arim, an old Jewish town in northern Israel, there lies a huge slab of glass app...
The Tokaj wine region in northeastern Hungary has been producing wine since Roman times. Tokaj’s wines were historically prized throughout E...
For much of human history, sleeping arrangements were very informal. You heaped a pile of straw or leaves on the floor, covered it with anim...
Back when San Francisco's luxurious destination Nob Hill was just another neighborhood in the newly incorporated city, a young German im...
In the middle of the Port of Antwerp, in Belgium, surrounded by an endless sea of shipping containers, stands an old church tower on a small...
History credits Orville and Wilbur Wright for flying the world’s first aircraft, but it was Yorkshire Baronet Sir George Cayley who first pr...
The city of Tyre in southern Lebanon is one of the oldest cities in the world. Originally founded by settlers from the nearby city of Sidon ...
The Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens began in 431 BC and would last for almost 28 years. In the end, Sparta prevailed, but its he...
Australia is dry, hot, unimaginably infertile and the most inhospitable of all inhabited continents. Yet, underneath the parched land, lies ...
On the night of 16–17 May 1943, a squadron of the Royal Air Force conducted a daring mission deep into German territory to destroy two dams ...
The outrageous plot of NASA hiring a group of miners for a space mission may remind you of a certain Hollywood movie, but back in the mid-19...
1766 was a bad year for farmers. Crops failed all across Europe, and prices of wheat, flour, corn and other foodstuffs shot up as a conseque...
The Triangular Lodge near Rushton, in Northamptonshire, England, is an unusual building. This three-sided house was built in the late 16th c...
The Turin Erotic Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll-painting that has long been a subject of intense interest among Egyptologists...
The first day of May used to be absurdly chaotic for New Yorkers, for it was “Moving Day”—the once a year tradition when nearly a million te...
In the Banda Sea, roughly 2,500 km east of Jakarta lies the Banda Islands, a part of Indonesia. For thousands of years, this group of ten is...
One of the most devastating weapons ever invented was not the atomic bomb but napalm, the incendiary agent that was used extensively against...
Near the village of Lympstone, in Devon, England, stands a unique 18th century property—a one of a kind 16-sided house built by two fiercely...
Situated on the east coast of Essex, England, on the estuary of River Roach, Foulness Island has long been controlled by the military. The a...
Casa de las Conchas, or the House of Shells, is a curious attraction in Salamanca, Spain. This stately mansion built between the late 15th a...
Cornwall, in southwest England, once had a thriving fishing industry and at the heart of this industry was the pilchard, also known as sardi...
Around 300 BC Seleucus I founded, on the current southeast coast of Turkey, the city of Seleucia Pieria. Located north of the mouth of the O...
Building a bridge over water is a daunting task, and despite the many technological progresses, the basics have remain unchanged since ancie...
The first airplanes to join the First World War were not made for combat. They merely played the role of an observer, scouting enemy positio...
About 80 km outside of Kyiv, in the small Ukrainian town of Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyy, there is a large complex of museums dedicated to preser...
The aqueduct of Segovia is a classic example of Roman water transport architecture—simple in design, yet magnificent to behold, and surprisi...
Writers usually have their favorite writing spots, a small, secluded space, sparsely furnished, where creativity flows unimpeded. The chosen...
High in the Andes among frozen glaciers, where virtually nothing survives, a small and plump, blue-gray feathered bird lays eggs and raises ...
Throughout the 19th century, the Paris morgue attracted thousand of visitors every day. Eager tourists consumed by a morbid fascination with...
At the intersection of Carmelita Avenue and Walden Drive, in Beverly Hills, California, there stands a house which appears straight out of a...
The Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles northwest of the city of Las Vegas, is scattered with relics from the United Stat...
