May 07, 2015
The Rest Is History
The long-lost love of Vladimir Lenin, abandoned insane asylums, and the stuffed-animal collection of a literary legend.
Read MoreMay 8, 2025
May 07, 2015
The long-lost love of Vladimir Lenin, abandoned insane asylums, and the stuffed-animal collection of a literary legend.
Read MoreMay 07, 2015
Why didn’t the sinking of the Lusitania cause the United States to enter more quickly into the war?
Read MoreMay 06, 2015
For hundreds of years, medical quacks have offered what science could not—the promise of perfect health.
Read MoreMay 01, 2015
The end of all-male socializing, the whiteness of early color photography, and the ubiquitous hair of Edgar Allan Poe.
Read MoreApril 24, 2015
Books enjoyed by Frankenstein’s monster, real-life ends for the characters of Wolf Hall, and the closeted life of Mark Twain.
Read MoreApril 16, 2015
A bestselling 1836 book offered unbelievable tales of sexual depravity in a convent.
Read MoreApril 16, 2015
Henry David Thoreau’s neckbeard, amateur John Wilkes Booth historians, and the mystery of Morgellons Disease.
Read MoreApril 15, 2015
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president enjoyed a production of “Our American Friend” at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. Early the next morning, Lincoln died in a boarding house across the street—the first American president to be assassinated. With Lincoln’s death, the divided country lost not just its leader but one of its wisest thinkers, a man who had something to say on nearly every subject, and then some.
Read More2023:
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
c. 1850:
Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.