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.

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.