During the Cold War, the CIA developed some of the strangest espionage tools ever conceived.

In the 18th century, beachgoers did not stroll freely into the surf. Instead, they stepped into small wooden huts on wheels known as bathing machines.

In the early 1900s, railway engineers faced a steep problem in the Swiss Alps near Brusio.

In 1887, Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was a young journalist who had moved to New York City after leaving the Pittsburgh Dispatch.

In northern Greece, on the monastic peninsula of Mount Athos, Mihailo Tolotos lived his whole life inside a cloistered world. Raised by monks and bound by regulations that kept women away from the peninsula, he spent decades in prayer, study, and work while the outside world changed.

In 15th-century Europe, powdered human remains were stocked on apothecary shelves and swallowed as medicine.

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.