The Past
All Stories
Legend holds that newly elected popes in the Middle Ages had to present their genitals for inspection to confirm that they were male.
The design was as intricate as that of modern-day, factory-fabricated denim jeans, and just as durable. The ancients had fashion.
In the 1960s, politicians and bureaucrats were formulating the Central Arizona Project. Citizens fought back.
Sixty years later, will anybody have heard of COVID?
Nero’s reputation as one of the most malevolent emperors in Roman history might be partly slander.
Six hundred years in the history of trousers.
As the Manhattan Project headed for completion, German attempts to build a nuclear weapon had already been dismantled.
Explore how belief shapes destiny, from Oedipus Rex to modern geopolitics.
A 1.5-million-year-old hominin bone shows signs that the victim was eaten by lions — and humans.
The use of the letter x as an unknown is a relatively modern convention.
In many ways, it was worse than Chernobyl.
Today, many Maya sites are polluted with toxic levels of mercury. The contamination likely originated from cinnabar paints and art.
Ice harvesters once made a living from frozen lakes and ponds, but the work was strenuous and dangerous. Then refrigeration changed everything.
The arsons were no accident, archaeological evidence suggests.
The global extent of the Revolutionary War surprises many Americans today — but it was crucial to independence.
Only Caesar lived to tell the tale.
You could send your potential paramour a perfume bottle, a cigar cutter, travel plans — or maybe some cocaine.
Meet the masterful con-men who impressed the great and the good despite the astonishing fiction of their very existence.
Almost all royal lines try to legitimize their rule with legendary origin stories. Here are five of the strangest examples.
There were at least eight other human species, some of whom existed for far longer than we have. Who were they?
The Te’omim Cave in the Jerusalem Hills is filled with skulls and oil lamps — objects a new study says may have been used in dark rituals.
Fossil Cycad National Monument held America’s richest deposit of petrified cycadeoid plants, until it didn’t.
Giambattista della Porta’s contributions to codebreaking changed the course of communication.
These clocks burn powdered incense along a pre-measured paths, each representing a different amount of time.
Probability, lacking solid theoretical foundations and burdened with paradoxes, was jokingly called the “theory of misfortune.”
Mounted on horses and armed with unique, powerful bows, the archers of Genghis Khan inspired terror wherever they rode.
A classical equivalent to Chanel No. 5.
