Posts

The subject of “The Butler,” Eugene Allen worked inside the White House for 34 years and served eight presidents — and finally got his due. Kevin Clark/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesEugene Allen. 2008. In a career spanning 34 years and eight presidents, Eugene Allen witnessed some of the most important moments in 20th-century American history — all from his unique point of view as White House butler. Before The White House Eugene Allen was born on a Virginia plantation in 1919 and spent much of his early life working as a waiter at various whites-only establishments in the South....

“It just came right at me. It really went for an attack.” TwitterA sign warning people about the otter that was posted by wildlife officials in Lake Lily Park in Maitland, Fla. “I’ve never seen an animal behave like this,” said one victim soon after the attack. The animal had clamped onto her leg with its teeth and held on for 25 yards as she tried to escape, ultimately leaving her temporarily unable to walk afterward due to the injuries....

Today, H. H. Holmes lives on in infamy as “America’s First Serial Killer,” but the story we’ve all been told may not be completely true. Of the great mass of people staring up at the towering white structures in Chicago’s Jackson Park and enjoying the sight of the world’s first Ferris Wheel, no one knows that the blue-eyed devil walks among them. His name — or, rather, his latest name — is Dr....

From 1904 to 1908, more than 80 percent of Namibia’s Herero people and 50 percent of its Nama people were killed by German forces in a genocide carried out in concentration camps like the one on Shark Island. Ullstein BilderdienstHerero tribespeople who escaped Shark Island. Shark Island is a lonely, desolate place, almost Martian in its barrenness and removal from the wider world. Hewn from rocks worn smooth by the Atlantic’s beating waves, the only protection from the brutal African sun afforded there is a smattering of palm trees....

For years, “secret societies” have caused controversy, conspiracy, and intrigue amongst those who stand on the outside looking in. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: 1 of 21The Bohemian ClubThe Bohemian Club is one of America’s most exclusive groups. It includes 2,500 of the country’s richest, most conservative men, and is rumored to have control over some of the largest corporations in the country, such as oil companies, and the Federal Reserve....

Gerda Cole was 18 years old when she left her newborn daughter in the care of another family. Against all odds, the pair reunited 80 years later. TorontoSun/YouTubeGerda Cole (left) and Sonya Grist (right) reunited after 80 years. Gerda Cole was a destitute World War II refugee when she placed her newborn daughter in the care of a German couple in England in 1942. Agreeing never to communicate with her child again, the 18-year-old Austrian forged ahead and put her past behind her....

After walking 600 miles to Canada in 1830, Josiah Henson returned to the United States to free over 100 more slaves. Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic SiteJosiah Henson’s memoir inspired the title character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In June 1862, during the dark days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln checked out The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the Library of Congress. Published a decade earlier, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a runaway bestseller by Harriet Beecher Stowe that pushed scores of Americans to rethink their attitudes toward slavery....

“What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner,” Leonard Lake confessed in one of his home videos. “Slave. There’s no way around it.” On June 2, 1985, a man named Charles Ng was arrested in a San Francisco hardware store for attempting to shoplift a vise. It would have been an ordinary arrest, but the officers at the scene ended up getting more than they bargained for. As they took Ng into custody, a friend of his turned up to pay for the vise....

He also downloaded several YouTube videos, including the viral hit “Charlie bit my finger.” In a new data dump of declassified material, the CIA released a cache of files obtained from the personal computer of Osama Bin Laden recovered during the 2011 raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader. Though some information related to Bin Laden’s media consumption habits became known immediately following his death, this information shows much more about the infamous terrorist’s viewing habits, as well as information about his life and his role as leader of a terror organization....

During the Porajmos, the Nazis exterminated a quarter of Europe’s Roma population, yet this brutal genocide went unacknowledged for decades. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: Holocaust Photos That Reveal Heartbreaking Tragedy Only Hinted At In The History Books The Forgotten Holocaust: Heartbreaking Photos From The Armenian Genocide 25 Tragic Photos Of The Forgotten Genocide In Nazi-Occupied Poland...

Thanks to his self-determination and profane genius, singer Rudy Ray Moore reinvented himself as Dolemite and changed the face of black culture. Comedian International EnterprisesRudy Ray Moore financed his 1975 blaxploitation film Dolemite with the profits from his stand-up records, risking it all for a chance at glory. If not for Eddie Murphy’s latest project, Rudy Ray Moore may have remained just as underground today as he was in the early 1970s....

Up until this year, you were legally bound to pay one of the biggest media companies in the world a fee if you sang “Happy Birthday” in public. Here’s the backstory. It’s bigger than the Beatles, Bach, and Beethoven. It’s beloved by children, often reviled by adults, and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. So just what is the omnipresent, divisive item in question? The “Happy Birthday” song. And despite its ubiquity, its owners have been able to charge royalties for those who sing it for decades....

Following the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, American troops felt an urge to personally punish the camp’s guards. What exactly transpired still isn’t known. Wikimedia CommonsPolish prisoners in Dachau toast their liberation from the camp. Dachau concentration camp, located in the state of Bavaria, Germany, was the first concentration camp established by the Nazi regime. On April 29, 1945, Dachau was liberated by the U.S seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division....

A new scientific study reveals how American Christians imagine both the face and personality of God — and the results aren’t quite what you’d think. Joshua Jackson et alThe composite faces that study participants believed to be most God-like (left) and least God-like (right). For millennia, artists, writers, and philosophers have tried to understand and depict the face of the Christian God. But now scientists have taken a shot. A team of psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took hundreds of randomly varying pairs of human faces, then showed them to a sample group of 511 American Christians....

This one startling photo captures the horrifying extent of the buffalo slaughter carried out by early settlers of the American West. This mountain of skulls piled up in the Midwest in the mid-1870s captures the extent of the buffalo slaughter carried out by American settlers. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons The American bison was once the symbol of a vast, limitless country filled with seemingly endless land and equally endless opportunity. But American settlers soon ensured that the bison would ultimately symbolize the dark, ugly side of “manifest destiny....

Keikaimalu, the world’s first known surviving wolphin, was born to a male false killer whale and a female bottlenose dolphin. Wikimedia Commons A baby wholphin in Hawaii. The story of the wholphin, which combines of the words “whale” and “dolphin” much like famous Hollywood couples Bennifer or Brangelina, begins with Sea Life Park just outside of Honolulu, Hawaii. A male false killer whale named I’anui Kahei shared an aquatic pen with Punahele, a typical female Atlantic bottlenose dolphin....

The reasons why we kiss and hug might seem simple and self-evident, but 64% of the world’s cultures don’t even kiss at all. And those that do don’t even really know why they do it. Time to find out… Far more about our lives than we realize is understood through touch. Humans (not to mention animals) can communicate an immense amount of information, from aggression to benevolence, with just a handshake or a tap on the shoulder....

Rarely found in the Southern Hemisphere, amber can preserve ancient organisms exactly as they were millions of years ago. Jeffrey StilwellThe two mating flies are between 40 million and 42 million years old and were found in a Victoria coal mine site. A research team from Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere, and Environment in Melbourne just discovered some of the oldest fossils ever found in Australia. The historic findings include a pair of 41-million-year-old flies frozen in amber while mating....

From his signature cigar to his blood-soaked mob hits, these photos of Al Capone show the legendary Chicago gangster as he really was. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: 26 Famous Gangsters From The Height Of The Public Enemy Era The Gruesome Story Of Baby Face Nelson — Public Enemy Number One The Violent Life Of Pretty Boy Floyd – Public Enemy Number One...

Spanning five decades and making an estimated $42 billion in revenue, Star Wars has become a permenant fixture in our global culture. In the below gallery, we look at a wonderful collection of behind the scenes photographs from Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, the three original Star Wars that started it all: Filming the title sequence for The Empire Strikes Back....