We all have to start somewhere and the Ancient Greeks didn’t arrive in Greece ready to write world changing epic poems, philosophy, and tragedies. They wandered into the Aegean after splitting from other Indo-Europeans, settled, founded a civilization, saw it collapse, and started again. As you do. The story of how the Greeks became the Greeks is a complex and […]

In May 1855, a 16-year-old girl known to history only as Cornelia called at the office of New York surgeon James Rushmore Wood complaining of severe toothache and swelling in the right side of her lower jaw. Following standard procedure, Wood lanced Cornelia’s jaw, extracted a few teeth, and sent her on her way. But Cornelia’s condition only got worse. […]

On September 2, 1945, hundreds of servicemen and representatives from every Allied nation gathered on the deck of the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Under the watchful eye of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, representatives of the defeated Empire of Japan signed the formal instruments of surrender, officially bringing the Second World War – […]

On April 12, 1961 at 9:07 AM Moscow Time, a Soviet Vostok rocket blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and soared into the sky. Minutes later, the rocket reached an altitude of 200 kilometres, placing its payload, 27-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Gagarin circled the earth once before reentering the atmosphere, landing by parachute near the city […]

On a snowy, blustery morning in March 1968, a two-man MiG-15 UTI jet took off from Chkalov air force base outside Moscow on a routine training flight. Barely ten minutes later, the aircraft’s pilot radioed air traffic control, announcing it was cutting its flight short and requesting permission to land. Then, the transmission went dead. At nearby Kirzhach airfield, a […]

Near the end of the groundbreaking 1988 hybrid live-action/animation film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? hardboiled detective Eddie Valiant is in hot pursuit of three villainous cartoon weasels, who escape through a tunnel into the animated ghetto of Toon Town. Before following them in, Valiant pulls out and loads a cartoon gun given him by none other than Yosemite Sam, whose […]

Of all prominent American families, few are more popularly associated with tragedy than the Kennedys. Most infamous of these misfortunes are, of course, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that of his brother, Robert, in 1968. Also well-remembered is the death of John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife, and his sister-in-law in a plane crash in 1999. […]

If ever there was an ultimate weapon of war, it would have to be the nuclear submarine. For more than 60 years, ballistic missile-armed submarines have prowled the world’s oceans, ready to unleash nuclear armageddon at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, fast attack boats track and stalk the missile-armed ‘boomers’, the two rivals locked in a shadowy game of cat-and-mouse deep […]

Arlene, Cindy, Emily, Farrah, Katia. These are not, as you might expect, the names of women who were considered for Mambo No. 5, but rather the names of hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and other tropical storms. The practice of giving storms human names is now an accepted part of life, with the names of particularly destructive and deadly storms like Katrina, […]

Of all belligerent nations in the Second World War, few were as creative and prolific in their pursuit of exotic weapons technology as the Third Reich. From jet aircraft to ballistic missiles, air-independent submarines, and infrared detection, German scientists and engineers pioneered many of the key technologies that would shape the course of late 20th-century warfare. Yet despite their cleverness, […]

Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed – a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. And then one day he was shootin’ at some food, and up from the ground come a bubblin’ crude. Oil, that is – black gold, Texas tea. Yes, oil: the sticky, fortune-making, war-inspiring, planet-warming liquid that makes the work go […]

In May 1961, a U.S. Navy aircraft was flying a routine submarine patrol over the Arctic Ocean when it spotted something unusual on the pack ice below: a small cluster of plywood buildings. This was the remains of the Soviet drifting ice station NP-9, hastily abandoned when an ice ridge began destroying the station’s runway. This discovery immediately piqued the […]

200 kilometres off the coast of Mozambique lies the island nation of Madagascar. With a land area of 587,000 square kilometres, it is the fourth-largest island in the world after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo; and the second-largest island nation after Indonesia. A French colony from 1896 to 1960, Madagascar has long been the world’s primary producer of vanilla and […]