History
852 verified facts in this category, showing 101–200.
- A Finnish metal detectorist uncovered a roughly 1,000-year-old Viking Age silver hoard weighing about 10 pounds, described as Finland's largest coin hoard of that era.
- Kathleen Martínez's team discovered a submerged port from Cleopatra's era near the Egyptian temple of Taposiris Magna, where divers mapped polished floors, towering columns, and anchors beneath the Mediterranean.
- An 8-year-old boy in Germany found a silver coin minted 1,800 years ago while playing in his school's sandbox; the denarius dates to the reign of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ruled from 161 to 180 C.E.
- Archaeologists recovered a 4,300-year-old mummy named Hekashepes in the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, with layers of gold encasing his remains.
- Code breakers deciphered 57 encrypted letters sent by Mary, Queen of Scots during her years as a prisoner in England.
- The Japanese merchant ship Montevideo Maru was torpedoed by an American submarine on July 1, 1942, while carrying around 1,000 Allied prisoners, most of whom were Australians who died when the ship sank.
- The Lagar Velho child's grave was dug into a little-used section of a rock shelter, where pine branches were burned inside the pit before the body was placed there.
- Most of the unexcavated portion of the Monte Verde archaeological site was bulldozed in 1988.
- In 1537, Pope Paul III declared in a Papal Bull that American Indians were human.
- Radiocarbon dates from Monte Verde, Chile, averaged approximately 12,500 radiocarbon years before present, about 1,000 years earlier than the Clovis culture.
- The Friedkin site in Texas is dated to about 15,500 years old, and the Gault site in Texas is dated to about 16,000 years old.
- Monte Verde in Chile is a pre-Clovis archaeological site dated to about 14,500 years old.
- The ice-free corridor through North America's interior is thought to have opened roughly 14,000 years ago, yet Cooper's Ferry contains evidence of human activity dating to 15,000–16,000 years ago.
- Radiocarbon dating indicates that people at Cooper's Ferry in western Idaho were making tools and butchering animals between 15,000 and 16,000 years ago.
- The Page-Ladson site lies in a 30-foot-deep sinkhole in Florida's Aucilla River, which during the late Pleistocene—when sea levels were approximately 300 feet lower—was a spring-fed pond rather than part of a river.
- Archaeologists found a bifacial stone knife and other stone artifacts at Florida's underwater Page-Ladson site dated to 14,550 years ago, about 1,500 years before Clovis points spread around 13,000 years ago.
- Radiocarbon dates from seaweed associated with stone tools at Monte Verde, Chile, placed humans there as early as 14,200 years ago.
- A bone projectile point found stuck in a mastodon rib in Washington was radiocarbon-dated to 13,800 years old, about 800 years older than the oldest known Clovis artifact.
- People used boats to settle Australia as early as 50,000–60,000 BCE, indicating boat technology was already well known during the period humans were moving through or out of Beringia.
- Humans were present on the western side of the Bering land bridge at Siberia's Yana Rhinoceros Horn site as early as 25,000 BC.
- Between 2009 and 2013, Senate Republicans blocked 79 of President Barack Obama's nominees using filibusters, more than the 68 nominees blocked by filibuster during the entire previous history of the United States.
- Commander Lionel 'Buster' Crabb was a Royal Navy frogman who died during a Cold War spy operation in Portsmouth.
- Nicéphore Niépce's heliography process used bitumen of Judea mixed with lavender oil, in which sunlight hardened the solution in exposed areas while unexposed portions remained soft and could be washed away.
- Because Niépce's exposure of Le Gras took about eight hours, during which the sun moved from east to west, the finished image appears illuminated on both sides of the building.
- U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs was assassinated on February 14, 1979, during a botched, KGB-supervised attempt to rescue him from terrorist kidnappers.
- The Supreme Court held that Donald Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for alleged conduct involving discussions with the Justice Department, while his alleged pressure on Vice President Mike Pence is subject to at least presumptive immunity.
- Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that a former president has absolute immunity for actions within his 'conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,' at least presumptive immunity for all official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
- The CIA's 2005 destruction of interrogation videotapes occurred despite objections from President George W. Bush's White House counsel and the director of national intelligence.
- The U.S. Census Bureau added "Mexican" as a racial category in 1930 for people born in Mexico or with Mexican-born parents who were "definitely not white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese," but in 1936 the census director ordered that "Mexicans are Whites and must be classified as 'White.'"
- In the 1870 U.S. census, "Chinese" appeared as a color category alongside White, Black, Mulatto, and Indian, and for census purposes it included Japanese people but excluded Hawaiians.
- The 1910 special U.S. census of American Indians, overseen by Harvard anthropologist Roland Dixon, reported that mixed-blood Indians were increasing much faster than full-blood Indians and concluded that, unless conditions changed, full-blood Indians would eventually disappear altogether.
- Census Superintendent Robert Porter declared that the 1890 census's detailed figures on quadroons and octoroons "are of little value" and "misleading" as an indication of racial mixture.
- The 1890 U.S. census classified people of African descent as black, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon, defining "octoroon" as anyone with one-eighth or any trace of black blood, and counted 6,337,980 blacks, 956,989 mulattoes, 105,135 quadroons, and 69,936 octoroons.
- Alma Thomas's 1934 master's thesis focused on using marionettes as a 'correlating activity' to combine lessons in anatomy, design principles, electrical engineering, history, language arts, music, sewing and woodworking.
- Hayden Trubitt bought the rediscovered 14-page 1857 'Laws of Base Ball' at auction in April 2016 for $3.26 million after taking out a $1 million mortgage on his home.
- Philippe la Renotiere von Ferrari had willed his stamp collection to a Berlin museum, but the French government seized it during World War I.
- The unique one-cent British Guiana magenta stamp, issued in 1856, sold at auction in 1970 for $280,000.
- On the eighth day of his interrogation, CIA interrogators repeatedly slammed Nashiri against a specially designed wall using a towel wrapped around his neck.
- In 2002, the CIA interrogated Abu Zubaydah for 20 days at a secret 'black site' prison in Thailand.
- Venona records identify Soviet agents who infiltrated the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of State, Department of the Treasury, Office of Strategic Services, and War Department, as well as agents with access to the White House, Congress, political parties, the media, and defense industries.
- British intelligence decodes in the CIA's Select Documents recorded the roundup and transfer of Italian Jews to Auschwitz.
- By 1970, the CIA's Operation Momentum in Laos cost $500 million annually, equivalent to about $3.3 billion in today's dollars.
- During and after World War II, the Soviet Union deported roughly 10% of the population of the Baltic states, making it difficult for guerrillas to obtain food and supplies from the population.
- The CIA's ZR/RIFLE project was a plan to develop an assassination capability that designated a European associate of organized crime to recruit future operatives, but never advanced beyond the drawing board.
- In one CIA anti-Castro operation, an associate of Robert Maheu left wiretapping equipment openly in a Las Vegas hotel room, leading a maid to discover it, local police to be called, and the associate's identity and actions to be recorded in the Clark County justice system.
- The CIA tried to recruit organized-crime figures to assassinate Fidel Castro because agency officials believed the mafia employed 'master assassins' and still had influence in Havana's underworld.
- During the Bay of Pigs operation, at least one CIA pilot became lost and made an emergency landing in Mexico, where authorities impounded the aircraft.
- CIA ended its remote-viewing research in 1977 and transferred the program to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
- The number of major U.S. aerospace and defense prime contractors declined from 51 in the 1990s to five.
- NIE 15-90 identified Bosnia as 'the greatest threat' of violence in Yugoslavia's breakup, even though the estimate focused more heavily on Kosovo, where fighting appeared imminent.
- In October 1990, the US National Intelligence Estimate 'Yugoslavia Transformed' (NIE 15-90) forecast that Yugoslavia would cease to function as a federal state within one year and would probably dissolve within two.
- Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, blocked Peter Diamond's nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even though Diamond had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, and Diamond was never confirmed.
- Mike Gravel briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 with a campaign manager and chief of staff who were both 18 years old at the time.
- In 1971, Mike Gravel conducted a one-man filibuster against the Vietnam-era draft and read 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.
- Making a complete outfit of a parka, pants, gloves, and boots for one adult during the Younger Dryas period could require up to five hides and an estimated 105 hours of work.
- Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt and colleagues estimated that at least 500 people were needed to quarry, transport, and erect Göbekli Tepe's 10- to 50-ton stone pillars, some moved from locations as far as a quarter-mile away.
- Archaeologists found floors made of burnt lime and clay inside the stone circles at Göbekli Tepe, the earliest such floors ever discovered.
- Only about 10 percent of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated, and archaeologist Bahattin Çelik's survey identified at least a dozen other nearby sites with round buildings, T-shaped pillars, and animal carvings.
- Some of Göbekli Tepe's carved stone vessels were large enough to hold 43 gallons of beer or porridge.
- Göbekli Tepe's largest enclosure, Building D, measures at least 65 feet across and contains two freestanding limestone pillars each 18 feet tall and weighing an estimated 8 tons.
- Only about 10 percent of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated.
- Archaeologist Laura Dietrich analyzed more than 8,000 grinding tools from Göbekli Tepe, along with hundreds of stone vessels, including vessels large enough to produce 43 gallons of beer or porridge.
- Göbekli Tepe was abandoned completely around 8200 B.C., with no evidence that its inhabitants gradually adopted domesticated grains or began herding goats and sheep.
- A 25-foot-wide, nearly 8-foot-deep pit carved into Göbekli Tepe's bedrock may have served as a cistern, while a carved channel found about 150 yards away was identified as early plumbing for collecting rainwater.
- The Jebel Sahaba victims are considered evidence of the world's oldest-known large-scale armed human conflict.
- Göbekli Tepe contains huge stone vessels capable of holding more than 40 gallons of liquid.
- Geomagnetic surveys conducted in 2003 revealed at least 20 stone rings buried beneath Göbekli Tepe.
- Göbekli Tepe contains no burial sites; instead, archaeologists have found pits containing human bones mixed with animal bones and flint tools.
- Göbekli Tepe consists primarily of monumental structures rather than a settlement area.
- Microscopic analysis showed that the grooves on the Göbekli Tepe skull fragments were deliberately made with a flint tool.
- The decorations on the 12,500-year-old Shigir Idol resemble geometric motifs found at Göbekli Tepe, an 11,000-year-old temple in modern-day Turkey.
- The West Berkshire wood artifact predates Stonehenge by approximately 2,000 years and is the oldest wood carving ever discovered in England.
- Excavators found no cooking hearths, houses, trash pits, or clay fertility figurines at Göbekli Tepe, features that were found at nearby settlements of approximately the same age.
- At a prehistoric village 20 miles from Göbekli Tepe, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated wheat strains, with radiocarbon dating placing the development of agriculture there at about 10,500 years ago, roughly five centuries after Göbekli Tepe was built.
- University of Chicago and Istanbul University researchers examined Göbekli Tepe in the 1960s but dismissed the hill as an abandoned medieval cemetery after finding broken limestone slabs.
- Ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys at Göbekli Tepe mapped at least 16 additional buried megalith rings across 22 acres, while the excavated area covers only about one acre, less than 5 percent of the site.
- The northern point of the triangle formed by Göbekli Tepe's enclosures is the largest of the three and the only one whose two stone monoliths bear anthropomorphic carvings.
- A computer algorithm based on standard-deviation mapping found that three of Göbekli Tepe's circular enclosures appear to form a geometric triangle.
- Surveys indicate that about 15 additional rings of huge stones may remain buried beneath Göbekli Tepe's soil.
- Experts initially studied Göbekli Tepe in the 1960s but dismissed it as a medieval cemetery; German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt revealed the complex's true age in 1994.
- Early excavations at Göbekli Tepe uncovered tens of thousands of wild-animal bones, chiefly gazelle, along with wild plant remains, and initially reported no hearths, houses or trash pits, though later excavations found evidence of habitation such as houses, hearths and cisterns.
- Göbekli Tepe was first investigated in the 1960s but was dismissed at that time as a medieval cemetery, before being re-explored in the 1990s when its much greater age was recognized.
- Göbekli Tepe predates Stonehenge by approximately 6,000 years and is estimated to date to the 9th–10th millennium BCE.
- Some T-shaped limestone megaliths at Göbekli Tepe weigh up to 50 tons.
- At Göbekli Tepe, megaliths are arranged in circular formations with several formations stacked on top of one another, and each completed circle was covered with dirt before construction resumed above it.
- Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey contains T-shaped limestone megaliths, some exceeding 16 feet (5 metres) in height and weighing up to 50 tons.
- George Mueller's 'all-up' testing philosophy meant the Saturn V's first flight used all three live stages and a live Apollo command and service module, rather than testing stages incrementally with ballast.
- Apollo 7 launched on October 11, 1968, with high-altitude wind restrictions waived, even though an abort could have carried the command module back over Cape Kennedy, where its early-model Block I couches likely would not have protected the crew from serious injury.
- Apollo 7's crew—Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham—reentered Earth's atmosphere without wearing helmets, despite Mission Control's warnings about cabin leaks, rapid depressurization, and landing impacts.
- In 1968, ABC broadcaster Jules Bergman asked 25-year-old Poppy Northcutt how much attention men in mission control paid to 'a pretty girl wearing miniskirts' instead of asking about her technical work.
- During Apollo 8, Poppy Northcutt's team created the return trajectory and refined it in real time using relatively primitive computing tools.
- Poppy Northcutt was initially barred from working overtime due to laws restricting women's working hours, so she worked extra hours without pay to prove her qualifications.
- Retainer sacrifice in ancient Egypt existed only during the First Dynasty, roughly from 3100 BC to 2900 BC.
- In addition to pharaohs, some high court nobility in ancient Egypt occasionally had retainer sacrifices performed for them as well.
- The Christmas Eve truce of 1944 took place during the Battle of the Bulge.
- The Christmas Eve truce of 1944 reportedly occurred on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1944, in the Hürtgen Forest.
- The Christmas Eve truce of 1944, also known as Truce in the Forest, was an informal ceasefire between American and German soldiers during World War II.
- Francis Biddle, as U.S. Attorney General, revoked the second-class mailing rights of the Boise Valley Herald in September 1942.
- Vitruvius described the aeolipile in his work De architectura.
- Hero of Alexandria, a Greek-Egyptian mathematician and engineer, described the aeolipile in the 1st century CE.