Stories

On the night of September 5, 1949, 28-year-old Howard Unruh went to the movies in Philadelphia, planning to meet a man with whom he’d been having an affair. Delayed by traffic, he arrived too late.

For decades, paleontologists puzzled over how sauropods—some of the largest land animals to ever live—managed to circulate blood up their towering necks.

On December 8, 2013, Metallica played a concert unlike any other. Inside a transparent dome near the heliport of Carlini Base in Argentine Antarctica, the American heavy metal band performed for 120 people—making them the first group to play on all seven continents.

In the early years of World War I, British and French forces sought creative solutions for desert warfare. Among the strangest was the Sizaire-Berwick Armored Car, later dubbed the “Wind Wagon.”

In July 1959, at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon handed a cup of Pepsi to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

On March 1, 1692, a packed meetinghouse in Salem Village awaited the testimony of a woman few had noticed before: Tituba, an enslaved servant of Reverend Samuel Parris.

On a sunny afternoon in August 2004, passengers aboard a Chicago River architectural tour expected sights of steel, glass, and skyline.

In 1954, a strip of land barely wider than a hallway became the site of one of Beirut’s strangest homes. Known as Al Ba’sa—Arabic for “The Grudge”—this paper-thin building was constructed during a family dispute that played out not in court, but in concrete and bricks.

On May 17, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky, chief of the KGB’s London station, received a cable from Moscow ordering his immediate return. Though recently promoted, he had been secretly working for MI6 for over a decade.

Months before the First World War reached its conclusion, Britain, France, and Russia held covert discussions on how to divide the territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire.