Two Irish lads, Jim Quinn and Paddy Flanagan, were digging around in a potato field in 1878 when they struck silver. They dug up a hoard of stunning metalwork dating back to the 7th or 8th centuries—a treasure trove that included the famous Chalice of Ardagh. My...
I like the way that NPR begins its report on a major new archaeological discovery: "There's no denying the Philistines have taken some guff over the past, well, thousands of years. After all, they're one of the Hebrew Bible's most infamous villains, seed of both...
"If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate," businessman Thomas J.Watson once said. James R. McClintock, Baxter Watson, and Horace Hunley certainly had their share of failures as they pioneered the creation of submarines during the Civil War....
There's much more to Saint Patrick than shamrocks, green hills, and snakes. His real tale is a pirate story because Patrick first came to Ireland when he was captured by Irish pirates just before his 16th birthday. Learn the real story behind Saint Patrick in our...
Frederick Douglass, the famed orator and abolitionist, saw his life change in one afternoon in 1833. Learn about his incredible battle with an overseer--a struggle that changed a slave into a man, he said. Click on the link below, and you can watch our second "History...
My favorite canine writer, Snoopy of Peanuts fame, received a boatload of rejection slips in his pursuit of a publisher over the years, and some of them are gems. "Dear contributor, thank you for submitting your story to our magazine," one publisher wrote to Snoopy....
On a misty night in October of 1863, the aptly named David, a small Confederate torpedo boat, set out to slay the much larger Union vessel, the New Ironsides. The David was the first important steam-powered torpedo boat developed by the Confederacy--a forty-eight and...
Venetia Burney was having breakfast on March 14, 1930, when her grandfather read aloud a newspaper story that said a new planet had just been discovered. This planet had been found at the farthest reaches of our solar system, in cold, dark space. Venetia, who was just...
The young man rode his horse along the road that weaved through the lush countryside of Assisi, Italy, when he heard a sound that struck terror in anyone who heard it. It was the ringing of a clapper, a type of bell--a signal that the man approaching on the road was a...
Superman started out as a villain. When two students from Glenview High School in Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, wrote a short story in the early 1930s about Superman, their new character was a villain who wanted to conquer the world. But within a year,...