Stories

From Silent Films to Snack Bars In 1926, brothers Maurice “Mac” and Richard “Dick” McDonald left Manchester, New Hampshire, for Southern California, aiming to make it in Hollywood. They hauled sets at Columbia Studios, but dreams of producing films faded. In 1930, they opened a movie theater in Glendora. The venture failed during the Depression. […]

On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14168, requiring all federal agencies to adopt a definition of sex based on reproductive roles “at conception.”

Before he ever stood on a stage, Johnny Cash served as a radio intercept operator for the U.S. Air Force. In 1950, at age 18, he enlisted and was stationed in Landsberg, West Germany, during the peak of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union.

In a private collection, a preserved human head and shoulders stunned researchers. The skull was cut open, the brain removed, and the arteries filled with a red mixture of beeswax, lime, and cinnabar mercury. Radiocarbon dating revealed the specimen dated to A.D. 1200–1280.

On March 5, 1960, Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez—known as Korda—took a portrait of Ernesto “Che” Guevara during a funeral for victims of a ship explosion in Havana.

John Jeremiah Garrison Johnston, born in 1824 in New Jersey, became known across the American West for one thing: eating the livers of men he killed. After deserting the military, he changed his name and moved west, becoming a trapper, hunter, and scout.

On October 27, 1904, New York City opened its first subway line. Its southern terminal, the City Hall station, was the centerpiece—a single curved platform beneath City Hall Park, clad in Romanesque Revival architecture.

On April 28, 1988, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 departed Hilo for Honolulu with 95 people on board. At 24,000 feet and 23 nautical miles from Maui, an 18-foot section of the fuselage tore off, exposing the cabin to open sky.

Between 1227 and 1241, Pope Gregory IX led the Catholic Church through a time of growing superstition. In 1233, he issued Vox in Rama, a papal bull that associated cats—particularly black ones—with satanic rituals.

The Broomway, a 600-year-old tidal path across the Essex foreshore, once served as the only low-tide access to Foulness Island. Running six miles over the Maplin Sands, it followed a faint ridge of firmer ground, marked by bundles of twigs known as “brooms.”