So the recent discovery of what appears to be 2 men near the river's edge in a photo of Cincinnati taken in 1848 is kind of a big deal among photography historians. The photo was taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter -- who were standing on th
This state's official name — The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations — is more than just a mouthful. To many, it evokes stinging reminders of Rhode Island's prime role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the
A former Secret Service agent says he nearly shot President Johnson hours after Kennedy's assassination. Gerald Blaine recalls standing guard outside the Washington home of newly sworn-in President Johnson in the early hours of Nov. 23, 1963.
The U.S. government has recognized the World War II architect of a mission to rescue more than 500 U.S. bomber crew members shot down over Nazi-occupied Serbia. It was the largest air rescue of Americans behind enemy lines in any war.
This unfinished painting of Jesus and Mary could be a lost Michelangelo, potentially the art find of the century.
Impending operational collapse of some of the largest U.S. banks will serve as the catalyst for re‐creation of RFC‐type liquidation vehicle(s) to handle the operational task of finally deflating the subprime bubble. (so what is an RFC?)
The laws signed by Adolf Hitler taking away the citizenship of German Jews before the Holocaust were placed on rare public display yesterday at the National Archives. Still, Nazi actions against the Jews began before the laws were signed in 1935, wit
The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.
... one of the only times the Japanese staged an attack on the American mainland during World War II, using giant paper balloons carrying explosive payloads.... carrying either an incendiary or an antipersonnel bomb ... launched from eastern Japanese
Recently I read an interview with an LBJ devotee who’d left Berkeley with a PhD in political science in 1964. Then he heard Dean Rusk make the case (in 1965) for “deterrence” (aka The Domino Theory) and “. . .with just a few of Rusk’s well-chosen s
"He went to sleep not knowing if we had invaded Iraq. It was the last thought on his mind. When he woke up, I was sitting by his side. He looked at me and reached over to pull the television over to him. He was looking at me like, 'Did it happen?'
It was always thought the Titanic sank because its crew were sailing too fast and failed to see the iceberg before it was too late. But now it has been revealed they spotted it well in advance but still steamed straight into it...
While Texans are fiercely proud their state was once its own republic, and California celebrates the same former status on its flag, relatively few Louisianans know that a group of their forebears overthrew Spanish rule to carve out a tiny, independe
Jimmy Carter walks down memory lane to a time when he was sort of the original Tea Party candidate. His reminiscing is a big step up from shouting “racist!” so we say: Knock yourself out, Jimmy.
In September 1940, Pilecki didn't know exactly what was going on in Auschwitz, but he knew someone had to find out. He would spend 2 1/2 years in the prison camp, smuggling out word of the methods of execution and interrogation.
Actually, his sentence was a judicial jest. After Maged spent 3 days in jail, the judge canceled the rest of his sentence, remitted the fine and "gave him a little lecture on the importance of cooperation as opposed to individualism." The judge empha
A reclusive old lady who died alone in her flat in southwest England and had no one to pay for her funeral has posthumously shot to fame after it emerged she was an intrepid World War Two secret agent.
A Dutch history student has unearthed the world's oldest share, dating back to 1606 and issued by the sea trading firm Dutch East India Company. Locked away in forgotten city archives, the share was made out to Pieter Harmensz, a male resident of the
Rachel Sussman shows photographs of the world's oldest continuously living organisms -- from 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago's coast to an "underground forest" in South Africa that has lived since before the dawn of agriculture.
Rare color footage of the bomb damage inflicted on London during World War II has surfaced on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Blitz. The dramatic footage shows the destruction of several London landmarks, including the flagship John Lewis stor
The 3-D image of the bard is said to be quite different from other depictions. The recreations — they've been done for Napoleon and Abe Lincoln, too — are based on scans taken from death masks and in some cases masks made during life
According to legend, members of the "White Guards" tried to cross Lake Baikal with the railway cars while it was frozen over with winter ice. But the weight of the cars caused them to crash through the ice and the gold sank into the depths.
Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.
Matteo Ricci’s 1602 map is all written in Chinese. In Ricci’s own words on the map, he has consulted Chinese sources to add hundreds of names and corrected the geography. Almost 50% of the 1114 names, including those on the American continents, do no
The real problem was the size of the vessel. Sailing into a mere three foot wave in a small open canoe under sail is a sure way to get killed. The vessel needs size and certainly closure to avoid been swamped.
A British archivist believes he has uncovered the real-life inspiration for French novelist Victor Hugo's mysterious character Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
Negotiations among the Big Three would obviously never result in the withdrawal of the Red Army from Germany and Eastern Europe before the Soviet objectives of reparations and security would be at least partly achieved. However, on April 25,
One of the great mysteries of the nuclear age was solved just five years ago: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on August 9,
Briton completes epic, 2 1/2-year expedition to become 1st man to walk entire Amazon river After 859 days, thousands of miles and "50,000 mosquito bites," Ed Stafford became the first man known to have walked the entire length of the Amazon river
