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 […]

The recipe is simple: take an empty glass bottle, fill it with gasoline or other suitably flammable liquid, and stuff a piece of cloth – preferably also soaked in gasoline – into the neck. To use, simply ignite the cloth and throw. The quintessential improvised weapon, the Molotov cocktail has become a potent symbol of armed rebellion and violent protest […]

Air raid sirens blared and curtains of tracer rounds rose into the sky as the ominous drone of aircraft engines grew ever closer. Suddenly, a flight of enemy aircraft swooped low over the sleeping anchorage, unleashing their deadly cargo of torpedoes and bombs onto an unsuspecting fleet. All around, geysers of water and flame erupted into the air, lighting up […]

On the morning of January 17, 1955, Eugene P. Wilkinson, commander of the U.S. Navy submarine USS Nautilus, transmitted one of the most consequential messages in the history of naval warfare: underway on nuclear power. Prior to this, military submarines were more aptly termed submersibles, with the majority of their time spent on the surface. Nuclear propulsion finally transformed the […]

It is one of the most widespread and recognizable religious symbols in the world: the anguished figure of a man, naked but for a loincloth and crown of thorns, hands and feet brutally nailed to a wooden cross. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth in 33 C.E. is perhaps the single most famous and consequential act of capital punishment, spawning […]

Has there ever been a piece of home decor that more perfectly encapsulates an era than the Lava Lamp? An icon of the psychedelic and hippie movements of the 1960s and 70s, this mesmerizing tube of undulating, brightly-coloured blobs is the perfect mood-setting accessory for when you just want to lay back in your bean bag chair, consume an illegal […]

Ah, pirates! As fellow YouTuber The History Guy so famously stated: don’t all good stories involve pirates? For hundreds of years, these raiders of the waves have struck fear into the hearts of sailors and captured the popular imagination with a romantic image of freewheeling, swashbuckling adventure. But while the world of fiction abounds with tales of pirates commandeering all […]

Gladiatorial combat may seem outdated and barbaric, but it is, at its heart, a combat sport like mixed martial arts, boxing, and even professional wrestling, with very similar appeal. There were clearly defined rules, a sense of dramatic flair with costumes, and even character archetypes. It was indeed bloody, but not as nearly as fatal as many think today. Not […]

“God…France…My son…Josephine.” These were the final words of Napoleon Bonaparte, spoken on May 5, 1821. The Corsican-born leader, who in less than two decades rose from humble artillery commander to Emperor of the French and conquered much of mainland Europe, died far from his beloved France – exiled to the remote, windswept island of Saint Helena. Napoleon’s cause of death […]

The Battle of Thermopylae as seen in the movie 300 was just one of many battles in the Graeco-Persian Wars. It wasn’t one the Greeks won, but we think of it as a kind of victory. Leading the Greeks through the push back against the Persians were the Spartans, a warrior society built on the backs of some rather brutally […]

On February 20, 1947, a captured German V-2 rocket roared off the launch pad at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico and streaked off into the sky. Within three minutes, it reached an apogee of 109.4 kilometres – just above the 100 kilometre Karman Line that defines the boundary of outer space. Though completely forgotten today, this launch was a […]