On June 15, 1215, King John of England met a group of rebel barons in a meadow called Runnymede, on the banks of the River Thames. Surrounded by tents, guards, and the weight of near civil war, John affixed his seal to a document that would be known as Magna Carta.

Long before the North Sea filled with water, a vast expanse of land stretched between Great Britain and mainland Europe. This area, now entirely submerged, is known as Doggerland.

In the skies over wartime America, a peculiar aircraft appeared—sleek, silent, and flying without a visible propeller. But what truly shocked those who saw it wasn’t just the shape of the plane. It was the pilot.

In the early 1930s, travelers pulling into Harland Sanders’s service station in North Corbin, Kentucky, had little to look forward to beyond fuel and a windshield wipe.

In 2007, a group of British pensioners stepped into Abbey Road Studios to record a cover of “My Generation” by The Who. They weren’t a tribute act—they were The Zimmers, a newly formed band of elderly citizens, some in their 90s, brought together by a BBC documentary.

In the 11th century, clean drinking water in Europe was hard to come by, and waterborne diseases were common. Arnold of Oudenburg, a former soldier turned Benedictine abbot in present-day Belgium, took an unusual approach to protecting his community.

For decades, the leading theory held that the first Americans arrived in a single migratory wave from Eurasia across the Bering land bridge over 15,000 years ago.

In 1665, Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens lay sick in bed, watching two pendulum clocks he had built swing from a beam above him.

Perched on a hill in Halifax, West Yorkshire, Wainhouse Tower rises 275 feet (84 meters) into the sky. Though it looks like a grand Victorian monument, it began as something more practical: a chimney.

In 1882, on the cliffs of Posillipo, Italy, locals watched in confusion as a Frenchman aimed a strange device at birds and pulled the trigger. But no feathers flew.