Source: Wikipedia
On August 25, 1835, readers of a cheap New York daily called the Sun opened their paper to an astonishing announcement. A celebrated astronomer, working from an observatory at…
Source: Wikipedia
Some mysteries survive because the facts are murky. The Mary Celeste has survived for more than 150 years because the facts are unusually clear, and they make no sense.…
Source: Wikipedia
Every Olympic marathon produces drama. Only one has produced farce on this scale. The marathon held at the 1904 Games in St. Louis — staged alongside the World's Fair,…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It is one of the few episodes in military history where the entire body count consists of a single hog. In the summer of 1859, on a green…
Source: Wikipedia
The story of invention is usually told as a story of intent: someone identifies a problem and engineers a solution. But a surprising share of the objects in an…
On a map of northeastern Africa, along the border between Egypt and Sudan, there is a small landlocked rectangle of desert with a peculiar distinction: it belongs to no one.…