Stories

In the remote mountains of Japan, a stark practice once gripped rural communities. Known as ubasute, it involved carrying an elderly relative up a mountain and leaving them there to die.

On a steep hillside near Cerne Abbas, a colossal chalk figure has puzzled historians, archaeologists, and locals for centuries.

IBM’s punched card systems, developed decades earlier for data processing, became intertwined with Nazi Germany’s administration from the regime’s earliest days through the end of the Second World War.

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted with explosive force, killing 57 people. Among them was Robert Emerson Landsburg, a 48-year-old photographer from Portland, Oregon.

In May 1845, two British ships — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — set sail from Greenhithe, England, with 134 men on board. Their mission was to chart the fabled Northwest Passage.

Born enslaved in Saint-Domingue on 20 May 1743, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture became the most prominent military and political leader of the Haitian Revolution.

On the night of 11 March 1944, thick smoke poured from a chimney at 21 Rue Le Sueur in Paris. Neighbours complained of the stench.

Before dawn on February 12, 2014, security alarms at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, signaled trouble.

Every 26 seconds, Earth shakes. The movement is too subtle for people to feel, yet sensitive instruments around the world register it like clockwork.

He introduced Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, a supposedly 18th-century French scientist born in 1716, as the man behind the litre.