Henley-On-Todd: The Waterless Regatta
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 8, 2020
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 ...
Saint Guinefort: The Holy Greyhound
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 8, 2020
Around the second half of the 13th century, a Dominican friar known as Stephen of Bourbon, began travelling the width and breadth of souther...
Gara Medouar: The ‘Spectre’ Crater
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 3, 2020
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: The Castle That Was Built on a Single Night
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 2, 2020
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...
The Yukon Square Inch Land Rush of 1955
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 1, 2020
Marketers give away freebies all the time to generate buzz and promote their products. Usually these freebies are cheap trinkets like toys, ...
Hostile Façades
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 27, 2020
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...
The Great Glass Slab at Beth Shearim
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 26, 2020
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 Wine Cellars of Hercegkút
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 25, 2020
The Tokaj wine region in northeastern Hungary has been producing wine since Roman times. Tokaj’s wines were historically prized throughout E...
The Great Bed of Ware
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 25, 2020
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...
Charles Crocker’s Spite Fence
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 24, 2020
Back when San Francisco's luxurious destination Nob Hill was just another neighborhood in the newly incorporated city, a young German im...
The Lost Villages of The Port of Antwerp
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 21, 2020
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...
George Cayley: The Man Who Invented Flight
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 19, 2020
History credits Orville and Wilbur Wright for flying the world’s first aircraft, but it was Yorkshire Baronet Sir George Cayley who first pr...
How Alexander Turned The Island of Tyre Into a Peninsula
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 17, 2020
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 ...
Pericles' Funeral Oration, The Most Famous Speech in History
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 16, 2020
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's Great Artesian Basin
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 13, 2020
Australia is dry, hot, unimaginably infertile and the most inhospitable of all inhabited continents. Yet, underneath the parched land, lies ...
The Dambusters Raid of 1943
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 11, 2020
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 ...
How Mining Engineers Helped NASA Get to The Moon
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 10, 2020
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...
The Nottingham Cheese Riot of 1766
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 6, 2020
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...
Rushton Triangular Lodge
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 5, 2020
The Triangular Lodge near Rushton, in Northamptonshire, England, is an unusual building. This three-sided house was built in the late 16th c...
New York Moving Day: Mayhem on The Streets
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 4, 2020
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...
