History

History

A gold pocket watch that belonged to a man who died onboard the Titanic when it sank has sold for a record sum. The watch, which belonged to 67-year-old Isidor Straus, went for 1.78m at auction, the highest amount ever paid for Titanic memorabilia. He was given the watch an engraved 18-carat Jules Jurgensen as a gift on his 43rd birthday in 1888.

Her name was Iva Toguri D'Aquino, and she was born in Watts to Japanese parents in 1916 and had a degree in zoology from UCLA. She wanted to be a doctor. But she traveled to Tokyo in 1941 to care for a sick aunt, with disastrous timing. She made the trip without a passport, which doomed her desperate efforts to board a ship home as the war erupted.

London has been through some serious change in its lifetime. Founded by the Romans in 43 AD, the capital's 2,000 year history has seen the city go through plagues, fires, industrialisation, the Blitz, and the tech boom. Now a new photo book has revealed London's lost and secret histories. To be published on November 23, Panoramas of Lost London: Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870-1945, features more than 300 black and white photos, 60 of which have never been seen before, showing London in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The stylish patrons of a hookah lounge on a terrace in the shadow of Dubai's Burj Khalifa; the teens I spotted taking selfies around a hookah at Istanbul's Ciragan Palace; the friends sharing a pipe on a sidewalk in Cairo; the men setting up a hookah on a sand dune in the Saudi desert-they're all carrying on a tradition that began in the royal courts of Mughal India before traveling to Iran, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, and, eventually, the West.

Today all that's left of the ancient city of Semiyarka are a few low earthen mounds and some scattered artifacts, nearly hidden beneath the waving grasses of the Kazakh Steppe, a vast swath of grassland that stretches across northern Kazakhstan and into Russia. But recent surveys and excavations reveal that 3,500 years ago, this empty plain was a bustling city with a thriving metalworking industry, where nomadic herders and traders might have mingled with settled metalworkers and merchants.

On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university's bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as "the inventor ... or at least one of the inventors" of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.

"Rape is not with meaning when it's a husband and wife. ... Maybe this is the risk of being married, you know?"

Then, from April 1915, a new nightmare began: gas warfare. Lethal poisonous gas was first used by the German Army in the war, but it was soon adopted by all sides. Although there were often terrible and lasting consequences for the individual soldiers who experienced a gas attack, the weapon did not prove strategically decisive since wind and countermeasures like gas masks frequently negated its effects.

On Nov. 19, 1959, Ford Motor Co. announced it was halting production of the unpopular Edsel. Also on this date: In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. In 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean made the second crewed landing on the moon.

When Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online. Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era, with some claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that "progress" is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past.

Like nearly all Americans, you descended from an immigrant, the British penny. Those coins were once so valuable that they were split into halves and even quarters your late British cousins, the halfpenny and the farthing. In Britain, the coin's history goes back to the time when kings and queens had names like Offa and Cynethryth and Aethelred the Unready, and your name likely traces its lineage from the German for pan pfanne, for pan, which evolved to pfennig, for penny.

extraordinary ambassador

Peña's diary was stored away after his death - no one knows where - and resurfaced in 1955 when it was self-published by one Jesús Sanchez Garza, who never disclosed where he had obtained the manuscript or where it might have been since circa 1840. Published in Spanish in Mexico in 1955, the work received no attention from English-speaking scholars, who did not even know it existed.

If I have provided you with any factoids in the course of Atlantic Trivia, I apologize, because a factoid, properly, is not a small, interesting fact. A factoid is a piece of information that looks like a fact but is untrue. Norman Mailer popularized the term in 1973, very intentionally giving it the suffix -oid. Is a humanoid not a creature whose appearance suggests humanity but whose nature belies it? Thus is it with factoid.

was an affair between white men and one in which the Indian was not called on to act.

Have you ever wished that you could go back in time and see what the first Thanksgiving dinner was like? Well, time travel may not be possible, but the Plimoth Patuxet Museums in Plymouth, Massachusetts are offering the next best thing. The museums feature immersive reproductions of a 17th century English village, cottages, grain mill, plantation, and the Mayflower ship.

For his part, Superman comes from the planet Krypton, meaning he's actually an extraterrestrial who happens to look like a human. A spaceship brought him to Earth as an infant, and he draws his superhuman powers from the sun, which charges him up, as well as the low gravity of his adopted home planet. Spider-Man, meanwhile, got bitten by a radioactive spider, granting him his "spider sense" and ability to climb up walls.

Argyle Passage links the busy Tottenham High Road with Argyle Road behind and has always been a pedestrian route, dating back to when this area of countryside was first transformed into the urban sprawl we know today. Although Tottenham remained rural until the 19th century, the High Road itself is ancient - a descendant of the Roman Ermine Street, later diverted slightly to avoid the flood-prone Moselle Brook.

In 1939, as the world prepared to plunge into the chaos of World War II, a small, frozen country withstood the onslaught of the Soviet Union. Three million Finns against 171 million Russians. One hundred and five days of combat at -50C (-58F). This forgotten story is what Olivier Norek, 50, a former police officer and author of crime novels, brings to light in The Winter Warriors, which has already sold more than 300,000 copies in France.

The ship's purpose was confirmed by the discovery of 152 pieces of light blue-green Buncheong stoneware, bearing the characters Naeseom, referring to the Naeseomsi, the state official responsible for managing tribute food and drink for the royal court and high-ranking officials. Grain transport ships were part of the state-run joun transport system. The cargo ships carried grain and other goods from provincial warehouses to the royal capital of Hanyang.

One of the strongest insights from Dyer's article is the sheer ubiquity of carpenters in medieval England. They appear in villages, small market towns, major urban centres, and forested regions where timber was abundant. Using evidence from the 1379-1381 poll taxes, Dyer estimates more than 10,000 carpenters were active around 1380 - or about one in every 270 people was employed in the craft. Their presence spans every kind of medieval settlement, demonstrating that carpentry was a cornerstone trade, not a marginal or urban-only occupation.

By the 1130s, the Assassins had created their own home in Syria - a network of strong mountainous castles and a safe base from which, if necessary, their fidais teams could operate. But there was something strange about the way in which their hit squads, the fidais, were deployed. Having established an independent homeland, the obvious course of action for the famously clannish Assassins would be to withdraw from their Sunni neighbours - these were, after all, people who detested and persecuted them.

On Nov. 15,1969, a quarter of a million protesters staged a peaceful demonstration in Washington against the Vietnam War. Also on this date: In 1777, the Second Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation. In 1806, explorer Zebulon Pike sighted the mountain now known as Pikes Peak in present-day Colorado. In 1864, late in the U.S. Civil War, Union forces led by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh (teh-KUM'-seh) Sherman began their March to the Sea from Atlanta;

A mask of a woman wearing a Phoenician hairstyle that is unique on the archaeological record has been discovered at the Tophet cemetery and sanctuary in the suburbs of Carthage in Tunisia. The sculpture dates to the late 4th century B.C. and is believed to have been a votive offering. The Tophet of Carthage was open-air sacred precinct that was in use as a cemetery and temple from the 8th to the 2nd century B.C.