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Take The Utterly Ridiculous Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)
In his 1938 novel The Unvanquished , William Faulkner portrays Colonel Sartoris as a figure emblematic of post-Civil War Southern...
244 views


The Tulsa Race Massacre: When Black Wall Street Burned in 1921
In the early summer of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a place of contradictions. It was a city on the rise, oil-rich, bustling with new...
1,760 views


L.A. Woman: Why The Doors’ 1971 Raw, Ragged and Final Triumph is Their True Masterpiece
By 1970, The Doors were teetering on the edge. The past five years had been a whirlwind: hit records, sold-out tours, obscenity trials,...
157 views


Autochrome Lumière: When the World First Turned to Colour in the Early 1900s
These days, we don’t give colour photography a second thought. It’s everywhere. From the high-res selfies on your phone to vintage film...
952 views


How the CIA Helped Kill a Dictator—And Failed to Kill Another
In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA dreamed of a Caribbean sweep, one bullet for Trujillo, another for Castro. Only one found its...
470 views


Ian Fleming’s Jamaica: The Island That Made 007
In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces plotted the downfall of Hitler and Mussolini, a little-known episode played out in the Caribbean....
3,390 views


The Monk That Lived For 82 Years And Died Without Ever Seeing A Woman.
It’s one of those stories that sounds more like legend than fact, yet tucked away in the quiet, windswept monasteries of Mount Athos, it...
322 views


The Year Women Became Eligible To Vote in Each Country
It’s easy to forget how recently women in many parts of the world were granted the right to vote — and just how uneven the journey to...
224 views


When Innocence Ends: The Case of Mary Bell and the Scotswood Murders
In the summer of 1968, as children ran barefoot through the derelict streets of Scotswood, a working-class neighbourhood in Newcastle...
379 views


Oscar Wilde on Trial: Wit, Scandal and the Fall of a Victorian Icon
It began with a calling card, scrawled with a misspelled insult, and ended in a prison cell. The most celebrated playwright in London,...
399 views


The Photographer Who Might Have Been a Serial Killer: The Chilling Case of William Bradford
When police raided William Bradford’s Los Angeles apartment in 1984, they weren’t just looking for evidence of two murders. What they...
4,421 views


Madame Abomah: The Towering Life and Legacy of Ella Williams, the African Giantess
In an age when spectacle was king and public fascination with “human curiosities” filled theatre seats from New York to New Zealand, one...
958 views


The Eviction of Mary Filan: When The Trump Organisation Ousted a Widow from Her Home
For more than 30 years, Mary Filan — a widowed 74-year-old woman semi-paralysed from a recent stroke — had lived in Apartment 6B, 143-15...
666 views


The Summer the Sharks Came: Beach Haven and the 1916 Jersey Shore Attacks
At the dawn of the 20th century, Beach Haven had the feel of a seaside postcard come to life. Situated at the southern tip of Long Beach...
315 views


Phil Hartman And The Night He Was Killed By His Wife
It’s hard to imagine a man so gifted at delivering joy being consumed by such a grim ending. Phil Hartman wasn’t just another comic in...
817 views


The Prince of Fraud: Anthony Gignac and the $8 Million Royal Ruse
In the summer of 2017, the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach — one of the most iconic luxury destinations in America — nearly welcomed a...
452 views


The Curious Rise and Fall of Dickens World: Kent’s Victorian Theme Park Experiment
When it opened its doors in May 2007, Dickens World promised visitors the chance to step directly into the fog-shrouded, gaslit streets...
525 views


The Forgotten Treehouses of Paris: Rediscovering Les Guinguettes de Robinson
There was once a time when Parisians traded the grand boulevards and zinc-topped cafés of the capital for something rather more...
662 views


The Intimate Male Portraits from Herbert Mitchell’s Collection
In 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received an extraordinary bequest from Columbia University librarian Herbert Mitchell, a lifelong...
3,690 views


How Did The Beatles Change The Music Industry?
When The Beatles burst onto the global stage in the early 1960s, they didn’t simply ride the wave of pop culture—they redirected its...
63 views


Dancer, Film-Star, Spy And Activist, Josephine Baker Was Someone That Lived A Full Life
Known to many as the dancer who took Paris by storm in the 1920s, Josephine Baker’s story is one of dazzling reinvention and fearless...
92 views


That Time When David Bowie and Iggy Pop Were Caught In a Marijuana Drug Bust
If you’ve ever fallen down an internet rabbit hole of famous mugshots, you’ll know the one, David Bowie in a crisp shirt, sharp...
734 views


The 3 Heroes Who Saved Europe from a Nuclear Explosion: Ananenko, Bezpalov, and Baranov
“How could I do that when I was the only person on the shift who knew where the valves were located?” It wasn’t a line from a Cold War...
129 views


The Chilling Case of Diane Downs: The Mother Who Shot Her Children to Win Back a Lover
"My mom." That’s all eight-year-old Christie Downs needed to say. After surviving a stroke and slowly regaining her ability to speak,...
7,993 views
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