At its peak, the British Empire was the largest Empire in history, encompassing nearly one quarter of the Earth’s surface and more than one quarter of its population. Throughout its history, this massive geopolitical entity was perceived by its proponents as a beacon of civilization, an engine for trade and building local infrastructure and prosperity, a source of military and […]

On the morning September 2, 1945, delegates from the victorious Allied powers and the defeated Empire of Japan gathered aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, to sign Japan’s official instrument of surrender. By 9:23, the ceremony was over; after 6 brutal years and over 75 million deaths, the Second World War was finally over. The world breathed […]

By the winter of 1944 and 1945, the German Third Reich was in dire straits. Adolf Hitler’s final offensive in the Ardennes had failed, the Soviet Red Army was driving ever closer to Germany’s borders, and day and night Allied bomber aircraft were pummelling German cities into smoking rubble. With the end in sight, the Nazi government hastily assembled a […]

Pop quiz: who was the first woman in space? Many of you probably just answered Dr. Sally Ride, who launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983. But you would be wrong: Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, not the first overall. That honour belongs to a now scarcely remembered Russian woman who, all the […]

From October 1945 to October 1948, almost 1,700 Nazi officers and officials underwent the famous Nuremberg trials, charged with committing war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. The trials resulted in 200 death sentences, while 279 defendants were to serve life prison terms. Similar trials for similar charges were conducted in Tokyo, from April 1946 to November 1948, […]

We all have to start somewhere and the Ancient Greeks didn’t arrive in Greece ready to write world changing epic poems, philosophy, and tragedies. They wandered into the Aegean after splitting from other Indo-Europeans, settled, founded a civilization, saw it collapse, and started again. As you do. The story of how the Greeks became the Greeks is a complex and […]

In May 1855, a 16-year-old girl known to history only as Cornelia called at the office of New York surgeon James Rushmore Wood complaining of severe toothache and swelling in the right side of her lower jaw. Following standard procedure, Wood lanced Cornelia’s jaw, extracted a few teeth, and sent her on her way. But Cornelia’s condition only got worse. […]

On September 2, 1945, hundreds of servicemen and representatives from every Allied nation gathered on the deck of the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Under the watchful eye of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, representatives of the defeated Empire of Japan signed the formal instruments of surrender, officially bringing the Second World War – […]

On April 12, 1961 at 9:07 AM Moscow Time, a Soviet Vostok rocket blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and soared into the sky. Minutes later, the rocket reached an altitude of 200 kilometres, placing its payload, 27-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Gagarin circled the earth once before reentering the atmosphere, landing by parachute near the city […]

On a snowy, blustery morning in March 1968, a two-man MiG-15 UTI jet took off from Chkalov air force base outside Moscow on a routine training flight. Barely ten minutes later, the aircraft’s pilot radioed air traffic control, announcing it was cutting its flight short and requesting permission to land. Then, the transmission went dead. At nearby Kirzhach airfield, a […]

Near the end of the groundbreaking 1988 hybrid live-action/animation film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? hardboiled detective Eddie Valiant is in hot pursuit of three villainous cartoon weasels, who escape through a tunnel into the animated ghetto of Toon Town. Before following them in, Valiant pulls out and loads a cartoon gun given him by none other than Yosemite Sam, whose […]

Of all prominent American families, few are more popularly associated with tragedy than the Kennedys. Most infamous of these misfortunes are, of course, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that of his brother, Robert, in 1968. Also well-remembered is the death of John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife, and his sister-in-law in a plane crash in 1999. […]

If ever there was an ultimate weapon of war, it would have to be the nuclear submarine. For more than 60 years, ballistic missile-armed submarines have prowled the world’s oceans, ready to unleash nuclear armageddon at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, fast attack boats track and stalk the missile-armed ‘boomers’, the two rivals locked in a shadowy game of cat-and-mouse deep […]

Arlene, Cindy, Emily, Farrah, Katia. These are not, as you might expect, the names of women who were considered for Mambo No. 5, but rather the names of hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and other tropical storms. The practice of giving storms human names is now an accepted part of life, with the names of particularly destructive and deadly storms like Katrina, […]