History
878 verified facts in this category, showing 201–300.
- 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.
- An aeolipile is a bladeless radial steam turbine that spins when its central water container is heated.
- The 1945 Resko Przymorskie Dornier Do 24 crash involved a military flight transporting mainly children.
- One of the prizes offered for solving a problem recorded in the Scottish Book was a live goose.
- The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval prayer book whose parchment was reused, with the original text underneath being a copy of works by Archimedes.
- The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval parchment manuscript that was scraped and overwritten but originally contained several previously unknown works by Archimedes.
- The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were conducted with British consent.
- The United Kingdom began the world's first nuclear weapons research project, codenamed Tube Alloys, in 1941.
- The Hawaiian Islands were known as the Sandwich Islands in 1874.
- King Ferdinand the Catholic himself confirmed Juan Cabrero's pivotal support for Christopher Columbus's voyage.
- Diego Columbus confirmed Juan Cabrero's pivotal support for Christopher Columbus's first voyage.
- Christopher Columbus credited Juan Cabrero, along with Diego de Deza, as being responsible for the Catholic Monarchs' acceptance of his Indies Enterprise proposal in 1492.
- Ovis longipes palaeoaegyptiacus was one of the two most commonly domesticated sheep depicted on the reliefs of early pharaonic tombs.
- Ancient Egyptians domesticated corkscrew-horned sheep and depicted them on stone tomb murals of pharaohs.
- Ancient Egyptians believed coffins could transform the deceased, not just contain them.
- Napoleon was actually average height for his time at 5'7", but British propaganda depicting him as tiny became the lasting image.
- During WWI, Germany's African colony surrendered two weeks after the war ended in Europe—colonial troops received the armistice news late and fought until November 25, 1918.
- Daniel Defoe wrote a biography of Jonathan Wild a month after Wild was hanged in 1725.
- Ann Davis became the first woman hanged in Australia.
- As a last resort, the museum considered selling its most valuable object, the Gutenberg Bible, to resolve its financial crisis in the 1920s.
- The Judiciary Act of 1801 abolished the circuit-riding duties of Supreme Court Justices.
- Former CIA Director Leon Panetta said during the 2011 document release that the documents 'remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them.'
- Karl Theodor Merrem demonstrated his proposed stomach operation on three dogs without anaesthesia.
- On 29 January 1881, surgeon Theodor Billroth removed a cancerous tumour from the stomach of patient Therese Heller in Vienna.
- The first U.S. design patent was granted to George Bruce in 1842 for a new typeface.
- The Supreme Court initially consisted of one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices, and the number of Justices changed six times before settling at nine in 1869.
- The Supreme Court's first opinion was issued on August 3, 1791, in West v. Barnes.
- The Bering land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska is estimated to have been approximately 600 miles wide.
- Human remains found on Santa Rosa Island, one of California's Channel Islands, were redated to between 11,100 and 11,500 years before present.
- The small, lightweight stone tools found at the Debra L. Friedkin site in Texas do not resemble Clovis tools.
- While dissecting a sheep's head in Amsterdam, Nicolaus Steno accidentally discovered the parotid gland, which produces saliva.
- In October 1666, Nicolaus Steno dissected the head of a great white shark and found that each jaw contained 13 rows of teeth.
- During Apollo 13, spacecraft temperature dropped to 38 degrees Fahrenheit after electrical systems were shut down, causing condensation to form on all the walls.
- In 1982, after holding a 'GRAS Safety Review of Sodium Chloride,' the FDA declined to regulate salt under its GRAS/food additive authority and instead encouraged food manufacturers to voluntarily reduce sodium in processed foods.
- The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) was passed by Congress in October 1990 via a unanimous-consent procedure in the House with no debate, sponsored by Henry Waxman, with Senators Ted Kennedy, Howard Metzenbaum, and Orrin Hatch supporting it in the Senate.
- Eyed or holed sewing needles used during the Younger Dryas period were made from the bones of bears, birds, bison, caribou, fish, and foxes, as well as ivory.
- The Renft-Combo was banned in East Germany in 1975.
- On 31 October 1965, a Beat demonstration took place in Leipzig, organized after two youths secretly printed and distributed flyers calling for it.
- Many exhibits from the Chinese Gelehrtenhaus, including stamps, ink stones, and decorative tiles, were recovered with fire and smoke damage from the ruins of the Buchgewerbehaus after the bombing of Leipzig on 4 December 1943.
- During the 1976 US swine flu vaccination program, prompted by the H1N1 outbreak at Fort Dix, nearly 43 million Americans were vaccinated in the first 10 weeks before the program was halted.
- Willy Brandt was born as Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm on 18 December 1913 in Lübeck.
- Photographer Erna Wagner-Hehmke documented the work of the Parliamentary Council on the Basic Law text from September 1948 to June 1949, including portraits of its 'fathers' and four 'mothers'.
- Roughly every second article of the German Basic Law has been amended since its 1949 proclamation.
- The entire city area of Lübeck was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1987.
- The German Basic Law was originally conceived as a provisional arrangement, intended to last until German division was overcome.
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced variolation (in the form of inoculation) to Europe in 1721 after observing the practice in the Ottoman Empire, where her husband was stationed as ambassador to Turkey.
- Abraham Lincoln was infected with smallpox at some point in his life.
- The skeletal remains of deep ocean fish, including sharks and tuna, as well as fishing implements such as hooks and weights, were found at these Island Southeast Asia archaeological sites.
- Analysis of 40,000-year-old stone tools excavated at sites across the Philippines, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste yielded traces of plant processing.
- Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and shells found in layers associated with the burial indicates it is 29,000 years old.
- The skeleton was unearthed six feet beneath the floor of the Tham Din cave site in Prachuap Khiri Khan, Thailand.
- Thailand's Fine Arts Department announced the discovery of what it called the oldest human skeleton ever found in the country.
- France won only three medals at the 1924 Chamonix Winter Olympics, which it hosted.
- The Our World television broadcast aired on June 25, 1967 and was estimated to reach 400 million viewers in 24 countries.
- In 1884, Viennese ophthalmologist Karl Koller discovered that a mild solution of cocaine applied to the eye would deaden the nerves' sensitivity to pain.
- The radical mastectomy developed by William Halsted was still used to treat breast cancer in the 1970s.
- Cosmonaut candidate Anatoly Kartashov was badly injured during a centrifuge test in July 1960 and was subsequently suspended from the program without appeal.
- French aviator Eugène Lefebvre was killed on September 7, 1909, when the aircraft he was testing crashed at Juvisy-sur-Orge.
- Ferdinand Léon Delagrange is credited with being the first to take a woman, Thérèse Peltier, aloft in an airplane, on July 8, 1908, in Milan.
- Thomas Selfridge is considered the first person to die in a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft crash.
- About a week before Peary's headline, the New York Herald printed a front-page headline reading 'The North Pole is Discovered by Dr. Frederick A. Cook.'
- A fire on December 15, 1836 destroyed the Patent Office along with many patent documents and models.
- Mark Twain obtained three patents over his lifetime.
- King James I of Aragon decreed that the water tribunal was to remain 'as was established and become custom' in the area.
- On March 31, 2004, four American Blackwater contractors were killed by a mob in Fallujah while escorting a convoy of food trucks, and at least two of their burned bodies were strung from a bridge spanning the Euphrates.
- The Civil Aeronautics Authority, a predecessor of the FAA, claimed all airspace above 500 feet as public domain.
- In May 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-2 in favor of the Causbys in United States v. Causby.
- New Mexico's territorial supreme court judge upheld Yee Shun's conviction.
- After his appeal failed, Yee Shun committed suicide.
- More than 1,300 stone and bone tools were found at Bianfu Cave in sediment layers indicating hominin occupation of the site between 70,000 and 190,000 years ago.
- Time use surveys have been used since at least 1900.
- One of the declassified documents outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection.
- CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, houses nearly 13 million pages of declassified Agency documents.
- More than a dozen fragments of a rare knotted silk-and-wool carpet recovered from the Burgzand Noord 17 wreck are believed to originate from present-day Pakistan, possibly Lahore, based on their knotting style and patterns.
- Large ships anchored at Texel instead of sailing the 55 miles to Amsterdam because the sandbank called Pampus made Amsterdam's harbor difficult to enter.
- The Burgzand Noord 17 shipwreck site yielded more than 1,000 artifacts.
- During the late Neolithic period, around 2800–2400 B.C., large winter feasts involving substantial quantities of roasted pork were held at ceremonial sites in southern England, including Durrington Walls and Marden.
- Excavations at Durrington Walls recovered approximately 8,500 animal bones, with pig bones outnumbering cattle bones by ten to one.
- Most of the attacks during the Tet Offensive were turned back, and communist forces suffered heavy losses.
- National Liberation Front commandos blasted through the wall surrounding the American embassy in Saigon during the Tet Offensive and unsuccessfully attempted to seize the embassy building.
- Within three days of the Six-Day War's start, Israeli forces captured the Gaza Strip and the entire Sinai Peninsula up to the eastern bank of the Suez Canal.
- On May 30, 1967, Jordan's King Hussein signed a mutual defense pact with Egypt in Cairo, placing Jordanian forces under Egyptian command, and Iraq joined the alliance shortly afterward.
- Ernest Shackleton's steamship Quest, used on his final Antarctic expedition, sank off northeastern Canada on May 5, 1962, after sea ice pierced its hull.
- Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said one of the figures on the Campo Viejo monolith shows possible Maya traits, and that more study is needed to determine the piece's origin, meaning and implications.
- Lino Espinoza García of Mexico's National Institute of Archaeology and History said one of the figures depicted on the Campo Viejo monolith has Maya traits.
- The circular stone platform and a monolithic sculpture found at the Campo Viejo site have been dated to the Early Classic period, between A.D. 200 and 600.
- In July, Bob Ballard's team used remotely operated vehicles aboard the E/V Nautilus to survey 13 World War II wrecks in Iron Bottom Sound in the Solomon Islands, including the Japanese destroyer Teruzuki and the shattered bow of the U.S.S. New Orleans.
- Archaeologists found a 1,700-year-old royal tomb at Caracol in Belize dating roughly to A.D. 330–350, containing a shattered jade-and-shell mosaic death mask, jade ear flares, and the bones of an elderly man.
- The oldest saddle in the archaeological record is approximately 2,700 years old and was found in a woman's grave at the Yanghai cemetery near China's Taklamakan Desert.
- The urn atop the Treasury at Petra is made of solid sandstone rather than containing treasure.
- Archaeologists discovered 12 ancient skeletons in a tomb beneath the Treasury (Al-Khazneh) at Petra in Jordan.
- The Herculaneum scrolls, about 1,800 papyrus scrolls discovered in the 18th century, were reduced by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius to charred lumps once thought unreadable.
- A carved stela found near the platform at the Coatepec, Veracruz site measures about 6 feet tall, 5 feet wide, and 10 inches thick, and was placed face down with structures later built on top of it.
- The Venus de Milo statue was accidentally rediscovered in 1820 by Greek peasant Yorgos Kentrotas, who found its top half while salvaging marble building blocks from ancient ruins on the island of Melos.
- The Lagar Velho burial included pierced deer teeth and shell ornaments, and the body was covered with red ochre pigment.
- In 1998, archaeologists discovered the buried skeleton of a four-year-old child dating to approximately 25,000 years ago at Lagar Velho near Leiria, Portugal.
- In 1997, a blue-ribbon commission of Paleoindian specialists visited the Monte Verde site in Chile and declared it a valid pre-Clovis archaeological site.