Category: Interesting Stories

For centuries, natural scientists understood the use of tools as an aid in certain day-to-day tasks to be an exclusive feature of human beings—a defining sign of our superior intelligence, compared to the lesser creatures of the animal kingdom. More recently, however, that viewpoint has been forced to change, as more and more creatures have […]

Throughout the country’s long history, the United States’ presidents have each achieved a remarkable set of honors, prizes, and firsts. Woodrow Wilson is the only US president ever to have held a Ph.D. President Taft is the only person to have both held the presidency and served as ‘Chief Justice of the Supreme Court’. On […]

Of all England’s kings and queens, Henry VIII must certainly be one of the most well-known. The second of England’s Tudor monarchs, Henry is perhaps best remembered for his string of turbulent marriages, that are now so well known that a famous rhyme immortalizing their fates, “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived”, has slipped into […]

The Sonoran Desert in the far southwest corner of the United States regularly reaches temperatures over 105°F and sees barely half an inch of rainfall across the entire year. That might make it an unlikely place to find a lake, but remarkably, California’s vast, shallow, and highly saline Salton Sea stands at the desert’s northern […]

On June 11, 1557, the long-reigning king of Portugal, John III, a grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, the financiers of Christopher Columbus’ transatlantic crossing, died suddenly at the age of 55. John’s son and heir, also called John, had died three years earlier aged just 16, and as a result, the Portuguese throne […]

E is the most frequently used letter in the English language. Although estimates vary as to just how common it is, you can expect the letter E to account for around one in every nine letters you will read or write in an English text on average. (Contrast that to poor old Q, which only […]

The line of succession to the British throne dates back more than 1,000 years. In that long history, countless wars, battles, coups, and conquests have seen the throne change hands between rivaling parties on numerous occasions. But on at least one of those, in the winter of 1120 CE, the entire English line of succession […]

In 1941, the American author JD Salinger submitted a number of his early short stories to the New Yorker magazine. Despite having had some success writing for similar publications, including Story and Collier’s magazine, the New Yorker proved a tougher publication to crack, and the magazine initially turned many of Salinger’s stories down. Finally, however, […]

On the morning of January 28, 1896, a landmark in the history of transport was made—albeit by an unsuspecting local police constable, in the sleepy English village of Paddock Wood in Kent, 40 miles outside London. As he cycled his usual route through the village, the unnamed constable’s normal morning routine was suddenly shattered by […]

When Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her diamond jubilee in 2012—marking a record-setting 60 years on the British throne—the UK and the Commonwealth erupted into a vast series of flag-strewn tea parties, colorful villages fetes, and Union Jack street parades. That might be how royal anniversaries are celebrated today, but journey back through history and the […]