On New Year's Eve 1899, the captain of this Pacific steamliner sailed into history. Or did he?

How drugs, demons, and the search for immortality gave us words we use everyday.

More than mindless bloodshed, the gladiatorial games were organized sports. Gladiators were treated as world-class athletes, receiving superior diets and medical care.

Hint: It wasn't always an asteroid.

The role of the Devil’s advocate was to argue against the beatification of mystics. Contrary to popular belief, they did not wear Prada. 

Unlike other world rulers, Genghis Khan was laid to rest not inside an elaborate mausoleum but an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia. Maybe.

In the Canaan religion, Yahweh was a lesser god, who was assigned the land of Israel. Here's how he became "God Almighty."

The strangest thing about trying to predict the future is that our only clues lie in the past.

Experimental archaeology is the practice of recreating past events using knowledge and tools available at the time. Sometimes, it involves elephants.

Human sacrifice appears to be as old as humanity itself. Still, experts disagree on how and where the practice first originated.

Searching for truth in unorthodox ways can be a valuable exercise. But Anatoly Fomenko's alternate world history is just plain weird.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not to mark Mexican independence.

"Immodest Acts" tells the story of Benedetta Carlini, a lesbian nun who claimed to be a mystic visionary but failed to convince the leaders of her faith. 

Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod saved countless lives, but some religious leaders denounced his invention.

Vladimir Putin adores Fyodor Dostoevsky. A close reading of the legendary author’s texts reveals the feeling might have been mutual. 

In theory, history is the sum of everything that ever happened; in practice, it’s a story we tell ourselves to make sense of and justify our actions in the present. 

One particular revolution was so important, that at least one historian thinks the 20th century officially began in 1914 and ended in 1991.

Many first-hand accounts from the golden age of piracy were grossly embellished, meaning it's extremely difficult to separate Blackbeard the legend from Edward Thatch the person.

For a long time, important events could only be visualized retroactively through paintings. Photography allowed us to capture history as — or sometimes even before — it happened. 

Just don't expect the apocalypse to look like it does in the movies.

The decades-long conflict is best understood not through secondhand accounts of historians, but the primary accounts of people who actually experienced it.

From textiles and transportation to chemicals and microchips, a group of researchers proposes a new way to measure the impact of innovation.

Hubble, our greatest space-based observatory today, is just the beginning. The Hubble Space Telescope has been astronomy’s most revolutionary observatory in history. The stars and galaxies we see today didn’t […]

Halley’s comet only visits every ~76 years, but its meteors arrive twice each year. The most famous comet of all — Halley’s comet — returns to our inner Solar System every ~76 years. Halley’s comet […]

50 years ago, Apollo 9 launched. Without it, we never would’ve landed on the Moon. The Apollo program is most famous for its greatest achievement: taking humanity to the Moon. It […]

The Solar System’s outermost, undisputed planet wasn’t discovered until the 19th century. Here’s how you can easily find it yourself this December. There’s no greater scientific thrill than discovering something […]

It’s not simply Hubble’s Law anymore, but the real history is far more complex than the stories you’ve heard. One of the most mind-blowing facts in our existence is that space […]