It was February 1945 in the mangrove morasses of Ramree Island along the coast of Burma. It was here where a dark page of World War II was written. When Japanese soldiers withdrew from a losing fight with Allied soldiers, they trudged into a labyrinth of mud and water that would spell doom into their
On September 10, 1945 in a dry town in Colorado called Fruita, a farmer by the name of Lloyd Olsen was trying to prepare an evening meal for his family with the help of a chicken. What then followed was no ordinary barnyard mishap. When Olsen’s axe chopped off the head of a young Wyandotte
The Cold War was a tactical battle between two superpowers with bold ambitions of the globe’s future. Born out of World War II, this decades-long tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was not your average war—no direct battle between the two powerhouses took place. Rather, it was a war of ideologies that
Imagine a monetary system so mighty it fuels oil deals in the Middle East and coffee trades in East Africa. This financial powerhouse would be none other than the US dollar, the greenback that’s ruled the global economy for over a century. Born during the scrappy days of a fledgling America, the US dollar rose
In a dusty archive at the University of Zürich, a Swiss teenage victim’s preserved lung dating back to the 1918 Spanish Flu has spilled genetic secrets on one of history’s deadliest diseases. Swiss researchers (spearheaded by paleogeneticist Verena Schünemann at the University of Basel) managed to sequence the full genome of the 1918 flu virus
July 1916 remains an unforgettable moment in maritime history, when the coastline of New Jersey became the site of underwater horror. Over a span of twelve days, a series of shark attacks—two in open ocean waters and three in the brackish Matawan Creek—sent shockwaves across the nation. The mysterious predator, nicknamed the Matawan Man-Eater, spurred