It would­n't sur­prise us to come across a Japan­ese per­son in Venice. Indeed, giv­en the glob­al touris­tic appeal of the place, we could hard­ly imag­ine a day there with­out a vis­i­tor from the Land of the Ris­ing Sun. But things were dif­fer­ent in 1873, just five years after the end of the sakoku pol­i­cy that all but closed Japan to the world for two and a half cen­turies.
The American Revolutionary War is one of the most studied conflicts, as well as one of the most celebrated times in U.S. history. Despite this, many of its basic facts have faded from memory. Many of us have forgotten the crucial battles and iconic people involved, alongside the motivations that drove the colonies to rebellion. However, understanding these events is necessary to understanding our country.
The Siege of Petersburg (June 1864 to April 1865), or the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, was among the last military operations of the American Civil War (1861-1865). It was not a siege in the traditional sense, but rather a period of static trench warfare. Both the Union and Confederate armies spent months in their opposing trenches around the vital railway junction of Petersburg, Virginia, wearing one another down through battles, raids, and attrition.
The silver penny of King David I (r. 1124-1153) was struck in the second half of the 1130s in Edinburgh and is now heading home. It was discovered in 2023 by a metal detectorist in the woods near Penicuik, Midlothian. They reported it to Scotland's Treasure Trove and after it was determined to be official Treasure, it was allocated to the NMS who paid its assessed value of 15,000 ($22,000) as a reward to the finder.
From 509-27 BCE, Rome was governed as a Republic that became a model for the United States and other modern governments. During this period, it expanded from a single city to control Italy, Greece, Spain, and much of North Africa. After Julius Caesar was assassinated, Augustus was crowned Emperor, ending the republican period. The country expanded to take over what is today Britain, France, Egypt, Judea, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Emperor Trajan ruled Rome when it was at its largest,
In many historic calculations of net worth, individual fortunes weren't measured in isolation; instead, they were compared to the GDP of the US at the time. When the US economy was much smaller than it is today, the wealthiest families and individuals carried more weight in the economy than others during more prosperous times. One of the richest Americans of all time is widely considered to be Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, whose wealth, at its peak in 1937, was equal to 1.5% of the country's GDP.
After a half-century of uncertainty, all Cheryl Buswell-Robinson wants is the body of her husband, Perry Ray Robinson, to be returned. In March 1973, Robinson called home to Alabama from a conference in Taos, New Mexico, to tell his wife he planned to join the American Indian Movement's takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation where tribal members were protesting then-tribal president Dick Wilson.
When Lawrence Fong visited museum ship HMS Belfast with his wife and children in 2024, he had no idea that he was about to make an extraordinary discovery. In the ship's East Asia Mess Decks he noticed a photo, and on reading the caption recognised the name of the person photographed - Lau So. That was the name of his maternal grandfather, but he knew little about him. He did know that his grandfather was a sailor during the Korean War and had died when Lawrence's mother was very young.
Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it seems Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the protective benefits of charring wood surfaces more than 100 years earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU funded research.
1 Which US president vomited on the Japanese prime minister? 2 Which literary character was the modern Prometheus? 3 What global event began in 2004 as the Bushy Park time trial? 4 Which consecutive digits made up this year's most perplexing meme? 5 Which medieval coin was worth four pence? 6 What Gascon brandy is France's oldest? 7 Which wild west gunfighter was a dentist? 8 Which element was used in rat poison and pre-X-ray meals?
The unique rock crystal jar decorated with gold filigree that was one of the treasures found in the Galloway Hoard has gone on display for the first time at the Kirkcudbright Galleries, less than 10 miles from where the hoard was discovered in 2014. The Galloway Hoard was buried around 900 A.D., and contains an unprecedented assemblage of precious artifacts and materials from Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, Persia and even as far as Central Asia.
At 6:47 a.m., as the plane glided toward San Ramon, an air traffic controller made contact to let them know their transmission wasn't coming through clearly. A moment later, what sounded like a scream ripped through the airwaves. "Skipper's shot," someone was shouting. "We've been shot." The air traffic controller asked the pilot to repeat the message, but no answer ever came. A seismograph at a nearby military base spiked, and a United flight in the area radioed in to say they'd spotted a plume of black smoke coming from the hills south of Danville.
A small post to ensure you're not left empty-handed today. If you have 17 minutes to spare amidst the festivities, this lecture from Ancient Rome Live on the Early Christian churches of Rome is a gift box of information about the evolution of Christian churches in Imperial Rome, complete with tours of the early churches that survive today. Happy last day of Brumalia!
Also much as it is today, it was a period of carousing and merriment. The weeks around Christmas were celebrated with feasting, drinking, singing, and games. Mummers would blacken their faces and dress up in costumes, often in the clothes of the opposite sex, to perform plays in the streets or in homes. Carolers, too, would sing door to door as well as in the home. Wealthy lords threw open their manors, inviting local peasants and villagers inside to gorge on food and drink. Groups of young men called wassailers would march in and demand to be feasted or given gifts of money in exchange for their good wishes and songs.
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Today is Thursday, Dec. 25, the 359th day of 2025. There are six days left in the year. This is Christmas Day. Today in history: On Dec. 25, 2009, passengers aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 foiled an attempt to blow up the plane as it was landing in Detroit by seizing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (OO'-mahr fah-ROOK' ahb-DOOL'-moo-TAH'-lahb), who tried to set off explosives in his underwear. (Abdulmutallab later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.)
Name the six countries or territories Donald Trump has said or suggested he would like to annex, acquire or take control of. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images The original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (of which only one survives) were located in which four present-day countries? Photograph: MR1805/Getty Images/iStockphoto 11-15 Name the only five Caribbean countries to ever qualify for the finals of the men's football World Cup. Photograph: Gilbert Bellamy/Reuters
For all their hard work, peasants had a fair amount of downtime. Add up Sundays and the many holidays, and about one-third of the year was free of intensive work. Celebrations were frequent and centered around religious holidays like Easter, Pentecost and saints' days. But the longest and most festive of these holidays was Christmas. As a professor of medieval history, I can assure you the popular belief that the lives of peasants were little more than misery is a misconception.
He held land from the English Crown on one unforgettable condition: every Christmas, he had to perform "one jump, one whistle, and one fart" before the king. Roland the Farter's strange duty was no tavern joke-it was a recorded act of feudal service that shows how ceremony, humour, and power could share the same royal stage. Roland the Farter (also known as Roland le Petour) was a twelfth-century entertainer at the royal court of England.
The continuing excavation of Berlin's oldest square, the Molkenmarkt, has uncovered a rare cache of six 13th century silver coins. The coins were minted by co-ruling Margraves of Brandenburg-Salzwedel Otto IV and Otto V (1260/65-1293) Five of them are intact one denier coins; the sixth is one half of a denier that was cut down the middle. The obverse side depicts the margrave standing between two domed towers supported by double arches. A crowned eagle is on the reverse.
Between minefields and barbed-wire fences, millions of soldiers faced each other in trenches along the Western Front, sometimes only some 30 meters apart. The combat zone stretched from the English Channel through Belgium and France to the Swiss border. As the war dragged on, soldiers huddled in their dugouts, where rats, lice, the cold and poor food wore them down, and death hung over them.
Today is Wednesday, Dec. 24, the 358th day of 2025. There are seven days left in the year. This is Christmas Eve. Today in history: On Dec. 24, 2013, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous pardon to code-breaker Alan Turing, who was criminally convicted of homosexual behavior in the 1950s. Also on this date: In 1814, the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent, which would end the War of 1812 following ratification by both the British Parliament and the U.S. Senate.
Do you enjoy solving puzzles? What would you do if given a foreign code to decipher but no guide to grammar and no dictionary? That is exactly the problem faced by archeologists and linguists with regard to a number of ancient writing systems that remain a mystery to this day, despite technological advances. They tell of advanced civilizations whose writing we cannot understand.
For decades, the military has announced the retirement of aircraft that were supposedly nearing the end of their usefulness. Yet many of those platforms are still flying today. Whether it's because replacements arrived late, failed to replicate critical capabilities, or just couldn't meet operational need, these aircraft refused to disappear. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a closer look at military aircraft that just refused to retire.
The word vampire first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojevic, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it.
On December 6, 1917, in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a Norwegian freighter called the Imo collided with a French cargo ship called the Mont Blanc. It happened that the Mont Blanc was headed for a military convoy loaded with some 2,300 tons of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, 35 tons of benzol, and 10 tons of gun cotton, all destined for the battlefields in France. The collision shoved the Mont Blanc, now on fire, toward the shoreline.
Long before Christmas turkeys arrived shrink-wrapped in the shops, they walked to market on their own two feet. First introduced to England in the 1500s, the birds gradually gained in popularity to become a must on the dinner tables of London's wealthy. But before the advent of refrigeration and the railways, getting turkeys from Norfolk and Suffolk farms to the capital involved a long walk for the birds.
Born in June 1924 in a Jewish family, he describes how he had a relatively normal childhood until the Anschluss of 1938 - when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany - meant that life "took a completely different meaning and survival became the only aim". "Jewish shops and premises, synagogues, offices and anything where there was a Jewish connection quickly became a target for violence, fire, destruction, robbery, and personal attack," he writes.
Long before 'chaplaincy' became an official military institution, medieval armies were already wrestling with a deadly spiritual problem: how could soldiers fight, kill, and still hope for salvation? The answer emerged through new forms of confession and pastoral care—changes that transformed warfare in the Latin West and helped create the first true military chaplains. Military chaplains play an exceptionally important role in Western armies, offering spiritual care and moral support to soldiers and their families.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact was an agreement signed in August 1928 by 63 countries, which all promised, after the horrors of the First World War (1914-18), to regard war as an illegal instrument of national policy. Unfortunately, this sentiment for peace and cooperation was not upheld by all future leaders, and the pact was broken several times through the 1930s by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, to name just a few.
Today is Tuesday, Dec. 23, the 357th day of 2025. There are eight days left in the year. Today in history: On Dec. 23, 1972, in an NFL playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders, Steelers running back Franco Harris scored a game-winning touchdown on a deflected pass with less than 10 seconds left. The Immaculate Reception, as the catch came to be known, is often cited as the greatest NFL play of all time.
The barrow was discovered in an archaeological investigation during the construction of a new access route to Twentyshilling Wind Farm. In a pit in the center of a ring ditch were five urns in fragments. The burial pit and urns contain fill with a mixture of alder, birch and hazel charcoal. Some hazel nutshells were also recovered from the pit and the urns.
How­ev­er cel­e­brat­ed by his­to­ri­ans, scru­ti­nized by archae­ol­o­gists, and descend­ed-upon by tourists it may be, Pom­peii is not excep­tion­al - not even in the fate of hav­ing been buried in ash by Mount Vesu­vius in the year 76, which also hap­pened to the near­by town of Her­cu­la­neum. Rather, it is the sheer ordi­nar­i­ness of that medi­um-sized provin­cial Roman city that we most val­ue today, inad­ver­tent­ly pre­served as it was by that vol­canic dis­as­ter. The new Lost in Time video above recon­structs
The story of the birth of Jesus appears only in two of the four Gospels of the New Testament: Matthew and Luke. They provide different details, though both say Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The exact day, month and even year of Jesus's birth are unknown, said Christine Shepardson, a professor at the University of Tennessee who studies early Christianity. The tradition of celebrating Jesus' birth on Dec. 25, she said, only emerged in the fourth century.
Medieval underwear is supposed to be the ultimate non-subject: private, practical, and largely invisible. Yet medieval artists kept finding ways to show it-right at the moments when a body matters most. In manuscripts, panel paintings, and devotional imagery from Northern Europe, men's undergarments-usually called braies-appear when someone is working, humiliated, punished, exposed, or put on display for a moral lesson.
