The Disappearance of The Waratah
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 20, 2026
On the evening of 26 July 1909, the SS Waratah sailed from Durban, South Africa, bound for Cape Town. A luxury passenger liner, she was coa...
Showing posts with the label History
Rupes Nigra: The Fabled Magnetic Mountain at The North Pole
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 17, 2026
In 1577, the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator wrote a letter to his friend, the English scientist, occultist and royal advisor John Dee...
Barbara Thompson: Prisoner of the Aboriginal
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 15, 2026
When Captain Joseph Frazer rescued Narcisse Pelletier from Aboriginal people in 1875, it was not the first time a white captive had been re...
Edmond Locard And The First Forensic Laboratory
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 8, 2026
In 1910, the Lyon police offered criminologist Edmond Locard the opportunity to form the first police laboratory. He was given two assistant...
The Antarctic Snow Cruiser
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 5, 2026
Somewhere on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, buried beneath hundreds of feet of snow (or perhaps at the bottom of the ocean), lies an enor...
The Bombay Docks Explosion of 1944
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 25, 2025
On the afternoon of 14 April 1944, the city of Bombay, then the jewel of British India’s western coast, was shaken by a catastrophe so viole...
England's Coffeehouses and the Birth of Public Debate
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 22, 2025
When coffee first arrived in England in the mid-17th century, it brought with it far more than a new beverage. It introduced a radically new...
Charles-Henri Sanson: The Prolific French Executioner
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 17, 2025
In the violent upheaval of the French Revolution, few figures stood closer to death than Charles-Henri Sanson. Kings, queens, nobles, priest...
The Heroic Deed That Earned Karl-Heinz Rosch a Statue
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 16, 2025
In the autumn of 1944, as World War II raged across Europe, a moment of extraordinary humanity occurred in the Dutch village of Goirle. On ...
The Lost Forty: How an 1882 Surveying Error Saved a Patch of Forest from Logging
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 11, 2025
In the northern reaches of Minnesota, within the sprawling Chippewa National Forest, lies a rare remnant of America’s ecological past—a 144 ...
