Posts

Cinderella may seem straightforward—girl loses shoe, finds her prince and lives happily ever after—but hundreds of iterations of the fairytale exist. In each telling of the tale, the pauper-turned-princess changes drastically, yet whether she’s a grief-stricken witch, a meek domestic goddess or Disney’s sugar-coated queen of courage and kindness, there’s still something about her that grips each generation anew. Read on to learn about the rich (and lengthy!) history surrounding Cinderella....

A court found Julia Enright guilty of murdering Brandon Chicklis in 2018, which prosecution alleged she did as a “special gift” to her current boyfriend. Telegram & Gazette/TwitterJulia Enright was found guilty of murder in the second degree after a three week trial. A treehouse might conjure images of childhood innocence. But a murder trial in Massachusetts alleged that one such structure set the stage for the gruesome murder of 20-year-old Brandon Chicklis....

War and inequality brought a violent end to the Romanov dynasty of Russia, making these images of the Romanov family’s final years all the eerier. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: Anastasia Romanov: How The Daughter Of Russia’s Last Czar Became One Of History’s Most Elusive Women The Tragic Story Of Maria Romanov, The Beautiful Daughter Of Russia’s Last Tsar...

“Besides planting trees, besides coming together to do something good for our country, it was a national unity. Everywhere, everyone was doing it - starting from very young age to the older age.” @PMEthiopia/TwitterMillions of Ethiopians broke the world record after planting 353 million seedlings in under 12 hours. As countries around the world try to fight back against climate change, Ethiopia has just launched a campaign that certainly sets them apart from the pack....

The confines of the dog cage made 14-year-old Mary Crocker’s joints so swollen that her family once duct-taped her to a ladder to see if it would straighten her body back out. Effingham County Sheriff’s OfficeMary annd Elwyn “JR” Crocker Jr. The bodies of 14-year-old Mary Crocker and her 16-year-old brother Elwyn “JR” Crocker Jr. were found buried behind their family’s trailer outside of Savannah, Georgia last December. Mary’s body was so beaten and gaunt that it was clear she had been tortured before she died....

How India’s Great Banyan Tree came back from the brink of death to become one of the most astounding living things on Earth. Wikimedia Commons No other living thing on Earth is quite like India’s Great Banyan Tree. Its record-setting canopy — which covers some 156,000 square feet, about the size of a Manhattan city block — makes it the widest tree in the world. And all this from a tree that doesn’t even have its main trunk anymore....

The Kaiten was not only a weapon of destruction but a symbol of the strength of the Japanese pilots’ spirit. US Navy/ Wikimedia CommonsShips in port at Ulithi in late 1944. The Kaiten hide under the water. It was the early hours of the morning on November 20, 1944. The sun was rising off the bow of the USS Mississinewa, and rays of orange light were breaking over the small port of Ulithi in the Caroline Islands....

The stunt backfired when the young defendant was sentenced to 10 days in jail for contempt of court. Wilson County Sheriff’s OfficeThe internet was ablaze with laughter when Spencer Boston smoked a marijuana cigarette in front of a judge in court. A courtroom in the town of Lebanon, Tennessee, lit up with laughter after a defendant tried to smoke a marijuana cigarette — while he was being charged with marijuana possession....

Mary Jane Kelly was an enigmatic figure with a mostly unverified story. What was clear, though, was the horrifying nature of her murder. Wikimedia CommonsThe mangled corpse of Mary Jane Kelly. Jack The Ripper’s last victim was as mysterious as the notorious serial killer himself. Mary Jane Kelly, generally considered the fifth and final victim of the Victorian serial killer, was found dead on November 9, 1888. But little of what’s known about her can be verified....

The ancient game of pelota was a deeply meaningful tradition to Mesoamerican cultures and was intimately linked to life, death, and the gods. Getty ImagesStone carvings depict pelota players using their hips to propel the heavy rubber balls. Archaeologists studying the ruins of a Maya Sun Temple at the Toniná archaeological site in southern Mexico recently discovered 400 urns filled with a combination of human ashes, coal, rubber, and plant roots in an underground crypt beneath the temple....

The late 19th century ceded a lot of authority to scientific ways of viewing the world — and “Psychopathia Sexualis” is an apt example. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: Inside The Mysterious Lives Of 19th-Century Garden Hermits Inside The Salacious 19th-Century Murder Of New York Courtesan Helen Jewett, America’s First Tabloid Bombshell 15th-Century Etiquette Book Tells Kids Not To Be Greedy With The Cheese Or Pick Their Nose...

More than 36,000 pups are expected to be born on Bogoslof Island this year. NOAATens of thousands of northern fur seal pups are being born every year on the island. On a remote island in the eastern Bering Sea, something peculiar has happened. Tens of thousands of baby seals are being born every year on Bogoslof Island, a tiny patch of land in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands – which also happens to be the tip of an underwater active volcano....

If you thought the Salem witch trials were bad, wait until you learn about what went down in Spain. Although it’s the Salem witches of colonial New England that we usually associate with witch trials, the persecution of those believed to be witches is not a concept limited or even native to the U.S. In fact, the largest scale and most ruthless of witch trials didn’t take place anywhere near the United States, but in Spain....

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty. Sadly, it’s a war we’re still fighting, and a war we’ve always been losing. Americans love to declare war on abstract ideas. The War on Christmas, the War on Drugs and, declared on Jan. 8, 1964, the War on Poverty. Much like these other “wars,” President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty was, by and large, a failure. In 1964, poverty wasn’t a new problem, but it was a newly realized and newly contextualized problem after the first numbers on poverty came out in 1959....

A recent Supreme Court ruling spells bad news for Russia’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. It appears that the U.S. presidential administration isn’t the only federal entity who’s got religious bans on the brain. On Thursday, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Kremlin, which earlier this year initiated an effort to legally ban the approximately 175,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) from the country for their “extremist” views, The Washington Post reported. In court, government officials called the pacifist Christian sect a “threat” to “public order and security” and thus a religious group that must be banned....

Saving the world isn’t always about spur-of-the-moment heroics — though sometimes it is. These eight people managed to save the world in their own ways. When most people think of saving the world, they picture Superman swooping in at the last minute, bomb squads barely defusing deadly devices, and scientists discovering eleventh-hour miracle weapons to fend off alien hordes. But the real-life heroes who have saved the world have much better stories....

“It’s a crazy story. I couldn’t believe it. I never thought that a judge would declare someone dead without a certificate.” Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP via Getty ImagesIn 2017, a French court mistakenly ruled that Jeanne Pouchain was dead. For three years, a French woman has been trying to convince the government that she is still alive. According to The Guardian, Jeanne Pouchain was declared dead by a French court back in 2017....

Amie Huguenard spent three years with her boyfriend Timothy Treadwell studying and filming grizzly bears in Katmai National Park — until a brown bear killed them both. Willy FultonAmie Lynn Huguenard was Timothy Treadwell’s constant companion on his final three trips to visit the grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. In the summer of 2005, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man made a minor celebrity of Timothy Treadwell, a man alternately seen as either a reckless crank or a naive idealist....

Now called the mesentery, medical researchers overlooked this organ for centuries. J Calvin Coffey/D Peter O’Leary/Henry Vandyke CarterThe small and large intestines with the newly discoverved mesentery. Researchers have now discovered a new human organ hiding in plain sight inside the body’s digestive system. Previously thought to be a group of fragmented and unimportant structures throughout the digestive system connecting the abdomen to the intestine, the mesentery, as recently reported in the medical journal The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, is actually one continuous organ....

The 20-year-old robbed the grave of an unidentified 19th-century corpse and boiled, licked, and drank the broth of its bones. Wikimedia CommonsBone broth is quite popular with numerous health benefits. But drinking broth made from a century-old human corpse, of course, is ill-advised. Bone broth is not only delicious but it is actually also quite good for you. The collagen in bone broth benefits the gut lining, reduces intestinal inflammation, and makes for healthier skin....