In the early 1990s, British parents were gripped by fear. Reports spread of strangers posing as social workers, arriving unannounced at homes, and taking children “for evaluation,” never to be seen again.

On January 14, 2025, inside Padua’s Palaindoor track, Emma Maria Mazzenga crossed the finish line in 54.47 seconds, setting a new world record in the indoor 200 meters for the W90 category.

Grady Franklin Stiles Jr., born on June 26, 1937, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was part of a family that had lived under the carnival lights for generations.

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.