Tag: history

Today is said to be the day in 1858 that a colonial magistrate in India began using fingerprints for identification. But that's just one part of the history of how and why our prints are such a valuable bit of biometric information today.

Canada was only one name out of many that were suggested for the new country.

It was on this day in 1894 that Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, aka Annie Londonderry, set off on a bike trip that, over the next fifteen months, would make her the first woman to ride a bike around the world.

John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played for more than 11 hours over three days.

Today is the anniversary of the day in 1849 that President James K. Polk died just months after leaving office. He was the shortest-lived ex-president of all. And it was a pandemic that killed him.

Hundreds of thousands of laborers toiled for decades to build Egypt's legendary Great Pyramid... or did they? Professor Emeritus Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba did the math.

It was on this day in 1876 that the U.S. first fell in love with the banana, when it was introduced at the World's Fair in Philadelphia. Though, back then, eating a banana was quite a bit different than it is today.

For a time the powers that be only named hurricanes after women. Roxcy Bolton spoke out for years to change that policy, arguing that women “deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster.”

The word "dinosaur" was coined in the 1840s, but people have been finding dinosaur fossils for thousands of years. So what did people think dinosaur bones were before we had an idea that dinosaurs existed?

It's National Waitstaff Day, and whether or not you're back to dining out, it's a good time to figure out a little of where restaurants come from. (It's complicated.)

This day in 1780 was a very strange day for New England. The sun decided to leave the sky around 10 in the morning, leaving everything pitch black and scaring the heck out of the locals.

The moon waxes and wanes in its phases month after month, and it always comes back. Except for that time in 1110, when records indicate that the moon vanished for months, or maybe even a year or longer. Scientists finally think they know what happened.