Today in history: On Jan. 27, 1984, singer Michael Jackson suffered serious burns to his scalp when pyrotechnics set his hair on fire during the filming of a Pepsi-Cola TV commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Also on this date: In 1756, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria. In 1880, Thomas Edison received a patent for his incandescent electric lamp.
This freak storm eventually became the catalyst for Norway's most infamous witch trials-some of the most intense in Europe. Known as the Finnmark witchcraft trials, the proceedings continued throughout the 17th century. By 1692, 111 women and 24 men had been prosecuted for practicing witchcraft; 91 of these individuals, the vast majority of them women, were sentenced to death-a figure that represents around one-third of those condemned for the crime of witchcraft in the entirety of Norway's history.
It could have been a heart-to-heart between friends. "Men are all alike," one participant said. "In what way?" the other prompted. The reply: "They're always bugging us about something or other." The exchange continued in this vein for some time, seemingly capturing an empathetic listener coaxing the speaker for details. But this mid-1960s conversation came with a catch: The listener wasn't human. Its name was Eliza, and it was a computer program that is now recognized as the first chatbot,
Today is Monday, Jan. 26, the 26th day of 2026. There are 339 days left in the year. Today in history: On Jan. 26, 1905, the Cullinan Diamond, at 3,106 carats (621.2 grams) the largest diamond ever found, was discovered in South Africa. Also on this date: In 1887, groundbreaking began for the construction of the Eiffel Tower; the tower would be completed just over two years later. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act establishing Rocky Mountain National Park.
OREGON CITY - It'll be a long and arduous journey emblematic of the original 1840s Oregon Trail migration itself. But, in the end, some years from now, restoration of the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive and Visitor Center in Oregon City should produce a beacon of history, education, and pride for the state and citizens of all backgrounds. An updated venue will include a new addition housing original wagons, a beautiful plank house, amphitheater events, and expanded programming.
Finding out what actually happened in the deep past can be a slog, so when ancient history is packaged as mystery-spine-tingling but solvable-it's hard to resist. Who doesn't want to know how a lost civilization got lost, or where it might be hiding? The trouble is that what gets touted as a lost civilization often turns out to have been there all along.
More than 200 scans from multiple satellites, including Italy's Cosmo-SkyMed and the US-based Capella Space, showed uniform results suggesting massive pillars about 65 feet in diameter wrapped in spirals and plunging nearly 4,000 feet deep. Those pillars appear to end in 260-foot cubic chambers beneath all three pyramids and the Sphinx, which Biondi described as 'huge chambers' measuring roughly 260 feet in length and width.
Ah, the Disneyland of old, when people really dressed the part. Men wore suits and hats in the theme park. Women wore dresses, stockings and high heels. If you know the exhaustion of a park day in athleisure wear and sneakers, imagine what it was like in 3-inch heels. And while those ornately outfitted women were running around chasing their kids in the scorching Anaheim heat, the men were ... enjoying the spa?
Scotland's in turmoil in the 1330s-and Edward III spots an opening. In this episode of Bow & Blade, Michael and Kelly break down the Battle of Dupplin Moor, where tactics, terrain, and timing turn chaos into catastrophe. The hosts of Bow & Blade: Kelly DeVries is a Professor at Loyola University in Maryland and Honorary Historical Consultant at the Royal Armouries. You can learn more about Kelly on his university webpage.
1 Lydia of Thyatira is claimed to be the first person in Europe to do what? 2 In what country do mountain lions eat penguins? 3 Single pot still is a style of what drink? 4 Violet, you're turning violet is a line in what book? 5 Whose Easter Sonata was originally attributed to her brother? 6 Which two small UK cities share a name? 7 Who spoke the pitmatic dialect? 8 Which football team won five NASL titles? What links:
Max Weber famously argued that one of the hallmarks of a modern state was a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a defined territory. Within the compass of the law of war, Weber's insights have been associated with the legal tradition of ius ad bellum. This is the concept that governments retained the exclusive authority to declare legitimate war.
The team identified multiple buildings aligned roughly west-east, in several sizes, ranging from about 8 × 7 metres to 14 × 8 metres. Within these structures are rectangular halls-some interpreted as spaces for worship-alongside smaller rooms that may have served devotional or practical functions for the monks. Excavators also noted evidence of plastered wall surfaces and tiled floors, as well as architectural features such as entrances and surviving supports, including beams.
One of the most southerly sites, at the very edge of the alluvial river plain and close to the marshes: the transitional zone between sea and land, with its shifting watercourses, islands and deep reed thickets.
As a writer of political fiction for many years, including four seasons of my TV series Borgen, I find myself in the strangest of landscapes watching Donald Trump desperately wanting Greenland like a spoilt child who has never heard the word no. We dedicated an episode to Greenland in the first season in 2010 and then it became the main setting for the fourth season in 2022.
It should be noted, however, that the advances of Mesopotamia's Early Dynastic period differed from Egypt's in significant ways, notably in that Mesopotamia - even under the rule of Sargon or later empires - was never the cohesive ethnic or political entity Egypt was, and the kinds of cultural development cited for this era were not as uniform as they were in Egypt.
Early migration and Erik the Red The first humans settled in Greenland around 4,500 years ago. They came from the North American continent. In the 12th century, they were gradually displaced by Asian immigrants, the Thule people, who arrived on the island from Siberia via the Bering Strait. Their descendants are the Inuit, from whom most of the 56,000 Greenlanders today are descended.
It was a love letter written by one of the more important British spies of the cold war that made Tom Brass realise he had never fully known his mother. The spy in question was John Cairncross, the alleged fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring, whose spycraft also helped the Soviets win the Battle of Kursk and turn the tide of the second world war.
The only building known to have been designed by Vitruvius himself was found under Piazza Andrea Costa in a preventative archaeology excavation before redevelopment. Unlike the ancient public building found in 2023 which was speculated to be the long-sought basilica, the newly-discovered structure matches the detailed description in Vitruvius' De Architectura. The accuracy with which the remains found coincided with Vitruvian descriptions left experts astonished.
The Last Kingdom (2015-2022) is a historical fiction TV series based on Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories novels and adapted for television by English screenwriter Stephen Butchard. With five seasons, the show began as a BBC production and was later acquired by Netflix. Filmed in Hungary and Wales, it is based on English history during the 9th and 10th centuries, as the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fought against the invading Vikings.
In the dire months since Donald Trump's return to power, you've no doubt read a version of the famous mea culpa "First They Came"-perhaps woven into the lines of an essay or op-ed, perhaps thumbed out on social media. Part warning, part exhortation, the short text (it's often mistaken for a poem) comes to us as tragically earned wisdom from the rise of the Nazis, alas grimly relevant to the America of today.
Though it's eas­i­ly for­got­ten in our age of air trav­el and instan­ta­neous glob­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, many a great city is locat­ed where it is because of a riv­er. That holds true every­where from Lon­don to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to New York - and even to Los Ange­les, despite its own once-uncon­trol­lable riv­er hav­ing long since been turned into a much-ridiculed con­crete drainage chan­nel.
