When looking through famous mugshots, the chances are you’ll have stumbled across David Bowie’s effortlessly stylish picture. It’s enough to make you think a...

Bessie Coleman soared across the sky as the first African American, and the first Native American woman pilot. Known for performing flying tricks, Coleman’s ...

What would happen to your family should one of your siblings join a deadly political beast? If you were a member of the Göring family in the first half of th...

1. "I COME COMPLETELY FROM THE MOUNTAINS." Ég kem alveg af fjöllum. This phrase throws some shade at mountain dwellers, and means, “I have no idea what you’r...

The English alphabet has a fascinating history, and the development of each letter of the alphabet has its own story. Although English is widely spoken, for ...

Those who lived through the 1940s and 1950s will not forget the devastating ravages of poliomyelitis, a spinal cord motor neuron disease caused by the poliov...

The common consensus is that writers hate editing, but that’s not always the case. Truman Capote once said, “I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the ...

Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes, and today I want to share with you a short 3-minute video clip I watch from time to time. It's called Just a Ride,...

The mind of Kurt Vonnegut, like the protagonist of his best-known novel Slaughterhouse-Five, must have got "unstuck in time" somewhere along the line. How e...

On March 8, 1964, a small group of Sioux made landfall on Alcatraz Island, which had been abandoned as a prison the previous year. They invoked the 1851 Tr...

On the frigid morning of Feb. 12, 1908, a quarter of a million people lined the streets of New York City to witness the start of a contest without precedent:...

In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document p...

December abounds with holidays and reasons to celebrate. There's St. Nicholas Day, the Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Lucia Day, Hanukkah, Christmas,...

Whilst bees are better known for being colonial insects, outside of the hive a particular species of bee known as the osmia avosetta has crafted a beautiful w...

In the autumn of 1938, when the Munich Agreement was being signed in Europe, Charles Chapin was putting the finishing touches to the first draft of a script w...

The history of Hollywood film before 1968 breaks down into two eras: "pre-Code" and "post-Code." The "Code" in question is the Motion Picture Production Code...

As hard as 16-year-old Betty Robinson was running, there was no way she was going to get to the train before it pulled out of the station. Robinson’s biolo...

James Jamerson is the Schoenberg of getting from the I chord to the IV chord. He’s algorithmically generating a new pattern every phrase…[He] belongs with Ba...

Language families There are around 6,000 spoken languages in the world today, and some are more distantly related to each other than others. In the discipl...

When John Wojtowicz robbed a Brooklyn bank to pay for his lover's gender-reassignment surgery, he inspired the classic film "Dog Day Afternoon" — which onl...

Remember the classic guess who? game that originated from the 1970s? Well, Polish designer Zuzia Kozerska has created a far more meaningful, inspiring and fu...

In 1920, Dutch writer and traveler Gerard Nolst Trenité, also known as Charivarius, published a textbook called Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraak...

Generations of us know Roald Dahl as, first and foremost, the author of popular children's novels like The BFG, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factor...

Dedicated to Lord Vishnu — the Hindu God who is the Protector of the Universe — the Padmanabhaswamy temple is one of 108 main shrines where the Vaishnavities...