Stories

In 1760, French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil set sail from Paris with one goal: to observe the rare 1761 transit of Venus from Pondicherry, India.

In the summer of 1951, an unexpected rider stole the spotlight in Sweden’s most grueling cycling event.

In the 1950s, the Sizeland family purchased a speck of land in the Thousand Islands region of New York with a unique goal—to build a holiday retreat on what is now called Just Room Enough Island. Measuring about 3,300 square feet, the plot barely fits a house, a tree, and a few shrubs.

In the middle of one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, 843 acres of carefully designed nature form a sanctuary that draws over 42 million visitors each year.

In colonial America, children were seen as workers from a young age. On farms, even six-year-olds had chores.

On April 23, 1917, the German Navy Zeppelin L 23 encountered the Norwegian cargo ship Royal on the North Sea, roughly 85 nautical miles off the Bovbjerg Lighthouse.

Long before Newton or Leibniz, a Babylonian scholar was plotting planetary motion with surprising mathematical sophistication.

In the heart of Osaka’s Fukushima ward, a highway slices through the fifth to seventh floors of a 16-story office tower.

Moviegoers watching classic winter scenes from early Hollywood might assume they’re seeing innocent holiday magic.

In the early 1960s, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography faced difficulties using a submarine as a stable platform for acoustic studies.