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+16 +4
The Manchus ruled China into the 20th century, but their language is nearly extinct
The last emperors of China, the Qing Dynasty, were Manchus. Their language is close to dying out in modern China, so now there's a last-ditch effort to save it, and the link it provides to China's history and traditional medicine.
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+9 +1
Fascinating Historical Events That Happened Around The Same Time
You might believe in synchronicity (the concept that two or more events are meaningfully related) or you might just put it down sheer coincidence. But the following 18 examples put the world's hist...
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+13 +1
Infographic: See Just How Popular The Most Popular Books Ever Written Are
Objectively popular literature, though, transcends a regional sample and becomes ubiquitous. (Think 50 Shades of Grey, for a recent example, or perhaps never think of 50 Shades of Grey ever again.) But the only way to gauge how popular such wildfire phenomenon books really are is to put them in a historical perspective, and crunch the numbers.
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+17 +2
Norman Rockwell's 'Saying Grace' Sells For $46 Million At Auction
The painting of a woman and boy bowing their heads in prayer set a sales record for Rockwell's art.
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+12 +6
82 Years Before Edward Snowden, There Was Herbert O. Yardley
On the National Security Agency's site, there is a timeline dedicated to the most significant events in cryptologic history. Among its many entries: November 4, 1952, the day the NSA itself was created; December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; and the earliest event that is commemorated, the U.S. State Department's decision to hire a 23-year-old Indiana native, Herbert O. Yardley, on November 16, 1912, just prior to the outbreak of World War I.
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+10 +3
Imperial history of the Middle East
Who has conquered the Middle East over the course of the world events? See 5000 years of history in 90 seconds.
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+7 +2
The secret double life of a gay neo-Nazi Nicky Crane
He was the British extreme right's most feared streetfighter. But almost right up to his death 20 years ago, Nicky Crane led a precarious dual existence - until it fell dramatically apart.
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+11 +4
Velvet Underdogs: In Praise of the Paintings the Art World Loves to Hate
Without a doubt, black-velvet painting lives up to its reputation as the pinnacle of tackiness. You could point to any number of cheap, poorly done images of Elvis, scary clowns, matadors, “Playboy” nudes, and strange unicorns sold to American tourists by Mexican painters starting in the ’50s. But when velvet collectors Caren Anderson and Carl Baldwin look at these pieces, they see something else.
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+18 +3
Library of Congress: 75% of Silent Films Lost
A study from the Library of Congress reveals for the first time how many feature films produced by U.S. studios during the silent film era still exist, what condition they’re in and where they are located.
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+8 +2
Will One Direction defy the history of boy bands?
What is it with “boy bands” that make them so ephemeral? Will One Direction follow the same direction as so many boy bands?
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+17 +8
The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With A Little Help From the CIA
One of the great things about the late great Nelson Mandela is that he didn’t hold grudges. How else could he have accepted normal relations with the CIA, which tipped off the white-supremacy regime to his whereabouts in 1962? According to a 1990 Johannesburg Sunday Times newspaper account, a CIA agent by the name of Millard Shirley fingered Mandela for the apartheid regime’s secret police, allowing them to throw up a roadblock and capture him.
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+12 +2
The Caveman’s Home Was Not a Cave
Our picture of man’s early home has been skewed by modern preconceptions. It was the 18th-century scientist Carolus Linnaeus that laid the foundations for modern biological taxonomy. It was also Linnaeus who argued for the existence of Homo troglodytes, a primitive people said to inhabit the caves of an Indonesian archipelago.
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+10 +2
Exploring Christian Perspectives on Animal Rights
“There was a time when Rebecca, our eldest, was desperate to have a pet,” David Clough told me, when we met at the American Academy of Religion conference, held in Baltimore before Thanksgiving. “And she was in the unhappy position of having a father who had reflected ethically on the question at some length” — a father with misgivings about the human use of animals, even for companionship.
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+28 +6
Mandela death: How a prisoner became a legend
As the imprisoned Nelson Mandela became the face of a global campaign against apartheid, within South Africa a ban on his image meant people weren't sure what he looked like - and he became a mythological figure, recalls author William Gumede.
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+11 +4
The Real Reason for Pensions
Augustus Caesar, in 13 B.C., worried that retired soldiers might rise up against the empire. So he came up with a clever solution: after twenty years in a legion and five years in the military reserves, a soldier would earn, in a lump sum, a pension that worked out to about thirteen times a legionnaire’s annual salary. Pay the veterans off, the reasoning went, and they’ll be less inclined to overthrow you.
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+14 +7
Twenty years ago the NSA tried to protect you from spies, not spy on you
There's a crushing monotony to stories on how the National Security Agency has been bending and breaking every rule to crack open your mail.
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+7 +2
Pearl Harbor: Photos From the Pacific and the Home Front After Dec. 7
On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, LIFE presents rare and classic photos from Hawaii and the mainland in the aftermath of the 1941 attack.
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5 Old-Timey Medical Treatments That Actually Work
The transorbital lobotomy is a pretty brutal practice. In 1946, Dr. Walter Freeman created the procedure, in which physicians hammer an ice pick through the eye socket into the brain to sever nerve fibers in the frontal lobe.
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+15 +5
A Brief History Of Octopi Taking Over The World
In honor of the totally-not-evil logo for the National Reconnaissance Office's latest space mission.
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+9 +1
Let’s Review 50 Years of Instant Replay
Instant replay has made sports persnickety, dilatory, and faux-precise—if only we could rewind.
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