Category: Interesting Stories

Great Britain famously defended itself so pugnaciously during World War Two that no mainland British soil was occupied by Germany. It’s often said that the only British-owned territory on the face of the globe that did fall under Nazi occupation was the Channel Islands, a tiny archipelago off the northwest coast of France. The islands […]

Queen Victoria married her sweetheart, the German Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in a lavish ceremony at the Chapel Royal in St. James’ Palace, London, on February 10, 1840. Understandably, the wedding was an enormous affair, and one of the most anticipated events of its day. Victoria was an immensely popular monarch among the […]

In 2016, an ecological organization based in the UK called the Natural Environment Research Council invited its members and the British public at large to name the latest acquisition to its fleet of research vessels: a £200 million ($330 million) state-of-the-art polar research ship. The vessel, which was to be built in Liverpool, was essentially […]

The very first labor strike in American history occurred right back at the very founding of what is now the United States. In 1619, the burgeoning colony of Virginia held its first elections, but despite having been living and working in Jamestown for over a decade, a vast number of Dutch and Polish craftsmen were […]

When the Vikings invaders first began arriving on the coastlines of central and western Europe, few people had seen anything more frightening. Beginning in the mid-8th century, and enduring for several hundred more years, bands of violent and bloodthirsty Norsemen ransacked their way across northern and eastern England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and other parts of […]

Long before the actual migratory behavior of birds and animals was known, precisely where seasonal animals went to during the winter or summer months, was a longstanding puzzle. Unable to comprehend any other explanation, Aristotle believed that migratory animals simply morphed into one another, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Another theory, proposed by […]

There’s an old notion that Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales collection of stories, is the inspiration for April Fool’s Day. According to the theory, in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the vainglorious cockerel Chauntecleer explains that he was tricked by a sly fox, “Syn March bigan thrifty dayes and two”—which some readers take to […]

As the Black Plague swept across Europe in the 14th and 15th century, claiming the lives of perhaps as much as one third of the entire continent’s population, then desperate people began turning to all kinds of madcap treatments and cures as a means of escaping the infection. Among the seemingly endless list of supposed […]

It was sometime in the late summer or early autumn of 79 CE that Mount Vesuvius—the enormous volcano in southern Italy, near the city of Naples, erupted with such enormous ferocity that many of the surrounding Roman towns and villages were obliterated. Most notable of all of these were the towns of Stabiae, Herculaneum, and […]

If you’ve heard of the English writer and wit Dr. Samuel Johnson, it’s probably thanks to his dictionary. Johnson was essentially England’s Noah Webster; he spent more than a decade of his life compiling a monumental Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1757. Johnson’s Dictionary remained the standard, go-to dictionary of British English for […]