History

In 1900, sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera found a corroded bronze lump in a Roman shipwreck. It took 70 years to realize it was a mechanical computer that predicted eclipses, tracked...

During WWII, a Polish soldier named Witold Pilecki voluntarily got himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz to gather intelligence. He spent nearly three years inside, organized a resistance movement, t...

The ancient Nabataeans carved Petra into sandstone cliffs, but their real achievement was water. They built a hydraulic system that moved 12 million gallons daily through a desert. The city supported...

The Library of Baghdad, the House of Wisdom, was the intellectual center of the world for 500 years. In 1258, the Mongols threw so many books into the Tigris that the river ran black with ink for six...

The Byzantine empress Theodora started life as a circus performer and the daughter of a bear keeper. Emperor Justinian changed the law so he could marry her. During a revolt that nearly toppled him, s...

Sybil Ludington was 16 when she rode 40 miles through the rain on the night of April 26, 1777, to warn American colonists of a British attack. She rode twice the distance Paul Revere did. Revere got a...

In 1325, a Moroccan scholar named Ibn Battuta left home at 21 for a pilgrimage to Mecca. He didn't return for 29 years. He traveled 75,000 miles across 44 modern countries, three times the distance Ma...

In 1835, the entire national debt of the United States was paid off to zero. It lasted about a year. Andrew Jackson made it happen by selling federal land and vetoing spending bills. It has never happ...

In 1816, a medusa-class frigate wrecked off the coast of Senegal. 147 passengers were abandoned on a makeshift raft for 13 days. Only 15 survived. The French government tried to cover it up. Gericault...

In 1945, a peasant boy in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, found a sealed clay jar while digging for fertilizer. Inside were 52 ancient texts that had been buried for 1,600 years, including gospels that the early...

Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with 60,000 men and 12,000 slaves, each carrying four pounds of gold. He gave away so much gold in Cairo that he crashed the local econ...

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd threw a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea looking for a lost goat. He heard pottery shatter. Inside were jars containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, hidden for 2,000 years. The...

In the 6th century, Byzantine empress Theodora started life as a bear trainer's daughter and a stage actress, which at the time was barely legal. She married Emperor Justinian and became the most powe...

In 1518, a woman in Strasbourg started dancing in the street and couldn't stop. Within a month, 400 people had joined her. Some danced until they died of exhaustion. No one has ever fully explained th...

The Haitian Revolution of 1791 was the only successful large-scale slave revolt in history. Enslaved people defeated Napoleon's army and founded a new nation. France demanded 150 million francs in rep...

Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba fought the Portuguese slave trade for over 30 years in 17th-century Angola. When Portuguese officials refused her a chair at negotiations, she ordered a servant to k...

Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim eunuch, commanded a fleet of 300 ships and 28,000 men across the Indian Ocean in 1405. His flagship was five times the size of Columbus's Santa Maria. China then burned its...

In 1071, the Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned to depict the Norman Conquest of England. It stretches 230 feet long and was likely embroidered by English women whose country had just been conquered. Th...

Ancient Rome had a 15-story apartment building called Insula Felicles. It was one of the wonders of the city. The upper floors, where the poor lived, regularly collapsed. Rent was cheaper the higher y...

The city of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley had indoor plumbing, public baths, and a sewage system in 2500 BC. Rome wouldn't match this sanitation for another 2,000 years. No one knows what language...

In 1931 the French government built a full-scale replica of Angkor Wat in the middle of Paris for a colonial exhibition. It attracted more visitors than the Eiffel Tower. Most French people saw the re...

Timbuktu in the 15th century had a university with 25,000 students and libraries holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Scholars came from Cairo, Baghdad, and Fez. European cartographers still...

Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba fought the Portuguese slave trade for 40 years in 17th century Angola. When Portuguese diplomats refused to offer her a chair during negotiations, she ordered a serv...

In 1799, a group of Napoleon's soldiers found a broken slab of black stone in Egypt while digging fortifications. It took 23 years and a rivalry between an Englishman and a Frenchman to decode it. Tha...

During the Haitian Revolution, formerly enslaved people defeated Napoleon's army, the Spanish, and the British within 13 years. Haiti became the first free Black republic in 1804. France demanded 150...

The city of Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BC in present-day Pakistan, had indoor plumbing, a sewage system, and standardized bricks. No palace or temple has ever been found there. Archaeologists sti...