10 Things You May Not Know About Margaret Thatcher
She was born in an apartment above her father’s grocery store. The house where Margaret Thatcher was born. (Credit: Thorvaldsson/Wikimedia Commons) Born Margaret Hilda Roberts, the future prime...
View Article10 Things You May Not Know About Nat Turner’s Rebellion
Turner was an educated minister as well as a slave. Turner reportedly told Thomas Ruffin Gray in a jailhouse interview published in “The Confessions of Nat Turner” that when he was three or four years...
View Article10 Things You May Not Know About the Battle of the Somme
The first day of the Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest in the British Army’s history. Painting depicting a Welsh unit at the Battle of the Somme. (Credit: National Museum & Galleries of Wales...
View Article8 Ways the Erie Canal Changed America
The Erie Canal opened the Midwest to settlement. Prior to the construction of the Erie Canal, most of the United States population remained pinned between the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the...
View Article10 Literary Classics That Have Been Banned
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn A page of Huckleberry Finn with redacted passages. (Credit: Trevor Hunt/Getty Images) Not all Americans have found Mark Twain’s Great American Novel so great. Weeks...
View Article10 Things You May Not Know About the Nuremberg Trials
Nuremberg was chosen as the location for the trials because of its symbolic value. A huge crowd of soldiers stands at attention beneath the reviewing stand at a 1936 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, Germany....
View Article10 Things You May Not Know About Annie Oakley
Annie Oakley was not her real name. The fifth of seven surviving children, Oakley was born Phoebe Ann Moses on August 13, 1860, in rural Darke County, Ohio. Although she became a Wild West folk hero,...
View Article10 Things You Should Know About the Oddest Founding Father
He died after a gruesome bit of self-surgery. After suffering from crippling gout throughout the fall of 1816, the Founding Father’s pain grew even worse when he began to experience a urinary tract...
View Article8 Things You May Not Know About “Jingle Bells”
J.P. Morgan’s uncle wrote “Jingle Bells.” Sheet music of Jingle bells. (Credit: Brasil2) Born in 1822, songwriter James Lord Pierpont composed the music and wrote the lyrics for the holiday standard....
View Article10 Things You May Not Know About the Harlem Globetrotters
The Harlem Globetrotters originated in Chicago. Members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. (Credit: David Reed) In spite of the team’s name, the squad was born 800 miles west of Harlem in...
View Article10 Things You May Not Know About Alexander Graham Bell
He was an immigrant. Alexander Graham Bell Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. After attending school in Scotland and London, the 23-year-old immigrated to Canada with his parents...
View Article10 Grisly Papal Deaths
Saint Peter Saint Peter One of the original 12 apostles, Peter was personally chosen by Jesus to be the “rock” upon which he would build his church, according to the Gospel of Matthew. The Roman...
View ArticleA Trip through Neverland: 8 Unbuilt Disney Attractions
Riverfront Square The Gateway Arch is often referred to as the Gateway to the West and is part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and is a prevalant landmark for St. Louis. It spans both 630...
View Article10 Words You Didn’t Realize Were Named After People
Shrapnel Henry Shrapnel While a lieutenant in the British Royal Artillery, England’s Henry Shrapnel spent years of his time and a portion of his fortune trying to invent an even deadlier weapon of...
View Article10 Trains That Changed the World
Liverpool and Manchester Railway “Views of the Most Interesting Scenery on the Line of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.” (Credit: SSPL/Getty Images) The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester...
View Article5 Historical Figures Erased from the “Sgt. Pepper” Cover
A vinyl LP for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by The Beatles. (Credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images Jesus Christ When British pop artist Sir Peter Blake and his then-wife Jann...
View Article10 Rejected American Flag Designs
America’s national color palette has been set since 1818, when a law was passed requiring the American flag to sport 13 alternating red and white horizontal stripes—one for each of the original...
View Article6 Brilliant Tesla Inventions That Never Got Built
“It seems that I have always been ahead of my time,” Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla once mused. While the eccentric inventor pioneered advances in radio, television, motors,...
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