In July 1959, at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon handed a cup of Pepsi to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

On March 1, 1692, a packed meetinghouse in Salem Village awaited the testimony of a woman few had noticed before: Tituba, an enslaved servant of Reverend Samuel Parris.

On a sunny afternoon in August 2004, passengers aboard a Chicago River architectural tour expected sights of steel, glass, and skyline.

In 1954, a strip of land barely wider than a hallway became the site of one of Beirut’s strangest homes. Known as Al Ba’sa—Arabic for “The Grudge”—this paper-thin building was constructed during a family dispute that played out not in court, but in concrete and bricks.

On May 17, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky, chief of the KGB’s London station, received a cable from Moscow ordering his immediate return. Though recently promoted, he had been secretly working for MI6 for over a decade.

Months before the First World War reached its conclusion, Britain, France, and Russia held covert discussions on how to divide the territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

In 1931, strange noises echoed through the farmhouse at Cashen’s Gap on the Isle of Man. The Irving family claimed the sounds came from something alive behind the wooden wall panels—scratching, rustling, and eventually, speech.

In the lush forests of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, wildlife photographer Christophe Courteau was quietly capturing shots of a gorilla troop when the unexpected happened.

In postwar Poland, amid shortages and restrictions, a self-taught engineer named Stanisław Skóra built machines that looked like they came from another planet.

In the quiet Sant’Agostin neighborhood of Venice, a plaque marks the former home of Aldus Manutius, the printer who changed the way the world reads.