History

The human past — events, eras, empires, and the conflicts that shaped them.

All Ancient Medieval Modern War & Conflict Empires & Civilizations Archaeology

History Archaeology

A 3,000-Year-Old Egyptian Prosthetic Toe Was Custom-Fitted

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History Archaeology

America's Oldest City Is as Old as the Egyptian Pyramids

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History Archaeology

Bronze Age Western Mummies Were Genetically Local Loners

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History Ancient

Egyptians Invented the World's First Synthetic Color

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History Archaeology

Pompeii's Walls Preserved 11,000 Pieces of Graffiti

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History Ancient

The Oldest Peace Treaty Hangs on a Wall at the UN

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History Ancient

The World's Oldest Customer Complaint Is About Bad Copper

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History Modern

The 1918 flu killed more people than the First World War

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History War & Conflict

In 1983, one Soviet officer's hunch may have stopped a nuclear war

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History Medieval

Two Italian cities fought a deadly medieval war — and the winners carried off a wooden bucket they still display

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History Medieval

One Baghdad scholar gave us both 'algebra' and 'algorithm'

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History Ancient

The Antikythera Mechanism: a 2,000-year-old analog computer

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History Modern

The first crewed Moon landing happened on July 20, 1969

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History Ancient

Babylonian astronomers used proto-calculus to track Jupiter

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History Medieval

The Black Death killed up to half of Europe

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History War & Conflict

Breaking the Enigma code may have shortened WWII by years

75 sec read

History Ancient

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid

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History Ancient

The first writing was invented to keep accounts

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History Modern

The Berlin Wall fell after a garbled press conference in 1989

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History Empires & Civilizations

Genghis Khan may be the direct male-line ancestor of about 1 in 200 men alive today

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History Medieval

Cologne Cathedral took 632 years to build — across dozens of generations

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History Medieval

Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire

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History Archaeology

Pompeii's famous body casts are plaster poured into human-shaped holes

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History Ancient

Romans heated their homes and baths with underfloor central heating

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History Archaeology

The Rosetta Stone unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs by repeating one decree in three scripts

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History Ancient

The Library of Alexandria didn't die in a single dramatic fire

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History Modern

Columbus Reached the South American Mainland

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History Medieval

The Church Banned the Crossbow as Too Deadly

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History Modern

Three Ships Set Sail to Found Jamestown

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History Modern

Stalin Expelled Trotsky From the Communist Party

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History Modern

The Great Migration of 1843 Opens the Oregon Trail to Families

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History War & Conflict

The shortest war in history lasted under 40 minutes

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History Modern

Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 — but not slavery itself

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History Empires & Civilizations

The British Empire was the largest in history

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History Ancient

Çatalhöyük: a 9,000-year-old town with no streets

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History War & Conflict

Enemy soldiers stopped fighting to share Christmas in 1914

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History War & Conflict

D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history

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History Ancient

Eratosthenes measured the Earth with a stick and a shadow

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History Modern

The 1861 telegraph linked America coast to coast — and killed the Pony Express

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History Archaeology

Gobekli Tepe's stone temples predate Stonehenge, farming and pottery

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History Medieval

Gutenberg's Bible launched mass printing in Europe

40 sec read

History War & Conflict

The Hundred Years' War actually lasted 116 years

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History Empires & Civilizations

The Inca ran a 24,000-mile road empire without writing or the wheel

40 sec read

History Medieval

Korea printed a book with movable metal type 78 years before Gutenberg

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History Empires & Civilizations

Mali's Mansa Musa gave away so much gold he wrecked Cairo's economy

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History Empires & Civilizations

The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire ever

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History Modern

New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote, in 1893

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History Archaeology

Otzi the Iceman is a 5,300-year-old murder victim preserved in glacier ice

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History Empires & Civilizations

Persia's Royal Road carried a message 1,500 miles in nine days

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History Archaeology

Radiocarbon dating reads a built-in clock that starts ticking at death

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History Archaeology

Tutankhamun's tomb was found nearly intact in 1922 — with about 5,000 objects

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History Medieval

Vikings reached America 500 years before Columbus

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History War & Conflict

World War II is the deadliest conflict in human history

50 sec read

◆ On this day

On this day in History

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15 Jun 1215

History Medieval

King John sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede

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6 Aug 1945

History War & Conflict

The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima

45 sec read

12 Oct 1492

History Modern

Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas

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16 Oct 1793

History Modern

Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution

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26 Nov 1922

History Archaeology

Howard Carter peered into Tutankhamun's tomb and saw "wonderful things"

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7 Dec 1941

History War & Conflict

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, pulling the U.S. into World War II

45 sec read

2 Jan 1492

History Medieval

Granada falls, ending Muslim rule in Iberia

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16 Jan 27

History Ancient

The day Octavian became Augustus and Rome got an emperor

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17 Jan 1773

History Modern

Captain Cook's ship first crosses the Antarctic Circle

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18 Jan 1778

History Modern

Captain Cook becomes the first European to reach Hawaii

45 sec read

18 Jan 1919

History War & Conflict

The Paris Peace Conference Opens After WWI

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21 Jan 1793

History Modern

The King Who Lost His Head

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