‘Meldeman Plan’: The First Siege of Vienna
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 25, 2022
One of the oldest topographical maps of Vienna is the so-called “Meldeman-Plan’’ published by the Austrian painter and printer Nikolaus Meld...
The Miraculous Survival of Phineas Gage
Anonymous
Mar 24, 2022
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Except in the case of Phineas Gage, who became a lot of things but strong after an accident that o...
Did an Ancient Persian Queen Suffer From Breast Cancer?
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 23, 2022
In Histories , written in the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus tells the story of Atossa, the queen of Persia, who was struck b...
What the Megaliths of Jharkhand Reveal About Tribal India
Anonymous
Mar 23, 2022
In 2016, a cluster of over 300 megaliths were discovered under a maze of shrubs and garbage near Ranchi. The tombstones of Yamuna Nagar had ...
Joice Heth: The Hoax That Launched P.T. Barnum as a Showman
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 22, 2022
Phineas Taylor Barnum, the “greatest showman” on earth was still making a modest living as the owner of a grocery store in 1835 when his pat...
The Whipping Tom of 1681
Anonymous
Mar 22, 2022
The streets of London have witnessed some of the strangest men come and go over the years. From commoners like Theodore Hook, who halted the...
The Mystery of The Campden Wonder
Anonymous
Mar 21, 2022
The year was 1660. In south west England’s Gloucestershire sat a small town called Chipping Campden—a single street rotting under soot and l...
How Dusko Popov Inspired James Bond
Anonymous
Mar 19, 2022
In Into the Lion's Mouth: The True Story of Dusko Popov , author Larry Loftis calls Dusko Popov a showman. He's the stuff of movies,...
Henry Ford’s Soybean Car
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 16, 2022
You might blame Henry Ford and his hugely popular T-model for sparking our insatiable passion for cars and the environmental degradation it ...
The Lying Stones of Adam Beringer
Anonymous
Mar 15, 2022
Fossils prove the existence of life at its peak, but in Dr Adam Beringer’s case, they wrote nothing but demise. Almost 300 years ago, he dis...
Jenny: The Orangutan That Helped Darwin Evolve His Theory
Anonymous
Mar 14, 2022
If you visit the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library (DAR 191) today, you will find notes on orangutans recorded by Charles Darwi...
Treaty of Kadesh: The World’s First Peace Treaty
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 10, 2022
On the walls of the Temple of Karnak near Luxor, Egypt, and on the temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II in Thebes, are engravings that describe a g...
The Sculpted Rocks of Rothéneuf
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 10, 2022
In 1879 in a small town in the south-east of France called Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, a postman began the construction of a fantastic palace, w...
Ambergris: The Highly Sought-After ‘Whale Vomit’
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 9, 2022
The sea washes up all kinds of strange stuff , from carcasses of whales and squids to fossils and ancient shipwrecks. But nothing is as prec...
Thomas Midgley Jr.: The One-Man Environmental Disaster
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 8, 2022
The unnatural warming of the Earth’s atmosphere in the past century or two can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution when humans began...
The Field of Cloth of Gold
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 4, 2022
Situated just ten miles south of Calais, Balinghem is an unremarkable little village, but five hundred years ago this quiet countryside play...
The Turf Mazes of Britain
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 3, 2022
Turf mazes are labyrinths made by cutting a convoluted path in an area of short grass or lawn, and were once a common feature of the English...
Tarrare: The Man Who Ate Too Much
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 1, 2022
If gluttony is a sin, then perhaps the worst offender was a man named Tarrare who lived in 18th century France. He had such an insatiable ap...
Mensur And Bragging Scars
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 25, 2022
This is Otto Skorzeny, often regarded as Hitler’s deadliest general. An Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the SS during World W...
Giuseppe Fieschi’s Infernal Machine
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 24, 2022
On July 28, 1835, Giuseppe Marco Fieschi positioned himself in front of an open window on the third floor of N. 50 Boulevard du Temple in Pa...
