Smart News History & Archaeology

New Research

There's New Evidence That Communist Leaders Secretly Airlifted Bears to Bulgaria in the '70s and '80s

Some of these Bulgarian bears are not genetically like the others...

Rocket cat and rocket bird, Buch von den probierten Künsten, Franz Helm, c 1535.

Cool Finds

Incendiary Bats, Rocket Cats: Military Strategists Will Dream of Attaching Firepower to Anything That Moves

In 16th century manuscripts, drawings of feline grenades

Cool Finds

Tennessee Is About To Get a New State Artifact

A Native American sculpture is about to become Tennessee's state artifact

Quick, wash off the arsenic before it melts your skin!

Cool Finds

To Get Rid of Body Hair, Renaissance Women Made Lotions of Arsenic, Cat Dung And Vinegar

"When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn’t come off"

Cool Finds

Officially, More People Died Falling Off the Great Fire of London Monument Than in the Fire—But Only Officially

Which makes more sense, considering the fire destroyed nearly 90 percent of the homes in the city

New Research

Neanderthal Hunters Probably Didn’t Herd Mammoths Off Cliffs

Not that it's impossible, in general; it just probably didn't happen at this one particular spot

Cheese

Cool Finds

The Oldest Cheese in the World Was Found on Chinese Mummies

A strange substance found on the neck and chest of mummies in China is the world's oldest cheese

V-J Day in Times Square, New York City.

Cool Finds

That Time the U.S. Government Made All Bars in America Close At Midnight

In 1945, the government gave America a nationwide curfew for the first and last time

Ukraine's Independence Square February 23

Cool Finds

Ukrainian Protesters Are Already Establishing a Museum for Maidan Artifacts

Less than a week after the uprising in the Ukraine, some groups are already documenting the historic moment

New Research

The Mystery of This 500-Year Old Mummy Is Only Beginning To Be Solved

For more than a century, no one in Germany knew where this mummy came from

New Research

Scientists Figure Out Where Stonehenge Stones Came From, Still Don’t Know How They Got to Stonehenge

Scientists add two miles to the stone's 140 mile trip, but still don't know how they made it

Cool Finds

See the Last 40 Years of Cell Phones in One Animation

While the next big iPhone announcement might not blow you away, we’ve come pretty far since 1974

Iron Age coin hoard

Cool Finds

Hoard of Gold Coins Found in California

In what can only be described as every child’s dream, a couple in California found treasure buried in their backyard

The original man cave.

Cool Finds

Paris Is Adding Two More Women to the Pantheon (New Total: Three)

Since its construction, the mausoleum has been filled with 73 bodies. Only one of them is a woman.

This handbag from around 1300 in Mosul, Iraq is on display at the Courtauld Gallery in London until May 18, 2014.

Cool Finds

This 700-Year-Old Purse From Iraq Is Remarkably Intact

Handbags have been popular for millennia, but usually we don't find them all in one piece.

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

The FBI Was Still Investigating John Wilkes Booth a Century After Lincoln's Death

The blog Wonders and Marvels came across the FBI file on John Wilkes Booth

The first map of the new Hollywood development, from 1887.

Cool Finds

Hollywood Was Once an Alcohol-Free Community

Modern Hollywood is a far cry from its intrepid female founder's "dream of beauty"

The storming of the Bastille

Cool Finds

The French Revolution in Pictures

The French Revolution Digital Archive has more than 14,000 images from the Revolution of 1789

This is the late 18th - early 19th century internal (vaginal) irrigator made of bone discovered at City Hall Park, New York City.

Cool Finds

A Strange Object Found at New York's City Hall Was a 200-Year-Old Feminine Hygiene Product

Archaeologists were initially mystified

Vitruvian Man

Trending Today

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man May Not Have Been a Flawless Picture of Health

He may have had a hernia

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