Lists and Stories

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  9 Things You Might Not Know About Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler is one of the most well-known—and reviled—figures in history. As the leader of Nazi Germany, he orchestrated both World War II and the Holocaust, events that led to the deaths of at least 40,000,000 people. In the ensuing decades, he was the subject of countless books, documentaries,...
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  9 U.S. Presidents with the Most Vetoes The power of the veto held by the president of the United States has served as an important check on the legislative actions of Congress and has been utilized to varying degrees throughout history. Some presidents have chosen to use it in only a handful of instances, whereas others have completely...
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  9 Worst Generals in History Alexander, Napoleon, Rommel. Military greatness can most easily be defined by comparison. These battlefield bumblers serve to provide that contrast. list, worst generals, Lee, Confederate, World War I, ancient Rome, Civil War, American Civil War, World War II, NapoleonThis entire list could be...
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  A Brief and Cringe-Inducing History of Curb Your Enthusiasm It’s a television show famous for its cringe-inducing scenes: the main character retrieves his golf club from a coffin, splashes urine on a painting of Jesus, questions why his friend has a Black dermatologist—“even with the whole affirmative action thing?” Some viewers are so uncomfortable with...
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  A Brief (and Fascinating) History of Money Money. People worry about it, think of ways to get more of it, and dream about how to spend it. But how much do we really know about money? Keep reading for a short history of currency. WTFacts, money, currency, coins, gold standard, Bitcoins, paper...
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  How Oprah Got Sued for Dissing a Burger An earlier version of this article was published on the Britannica blog Advocacy for Animals. In December 1997 Oprah Winfrey, the American talk show host, and Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher and then director of the Humane Society’s Eating with a Conscience Campaign, were sued in federal...
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  A Brief History of Libraries Back in the day, before the advent of online search engines, people with questions commonly turned to the most reliable source they knew: their local library. All you had to do was ask, and a reference librarian would answer your question directly or point you toward a book containing the...
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  A Dose of Dolphin-Induced Dopamine: 8 Species of Adorable Cetacean Dolphins are like the Looney Tunes characters of the sea. Perfectly nice in the proper context, they are also klaxon signifiers of bad taste when rendered on t-shirts and human skin. There’s a reason, of course, that these fascinating mammals have such broad appeal. Graceful as gazelles and—due to...
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  A History of U.S. Presidential Elections in Maps The president of the United States is elected every four years by way of the electoral college, a system devised by the creators of the Constitution that today requires a candidate to secure at least 270 electoral votes from the states to win. That means the history of presidential elections is one...
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  A Journey Through Time Since the Precambrian The Phanerozoic Eon, also known as the eon of visible life, is divided into three major eras of time largely based on fossils of different groups of life-forms found within them: the Paleozoic (542 million to 251 million years ago), Mesozoic (251 million to 65.5 million years ago), and Cenozoic...
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  A Look at Hong Kong and China 20 Years After Reunification Hong Kong spent more than 130 years as a crown colony of the British Empire before the small Kowloon Peninsula and its neighboring islands were returned to China in 1997. Won in parts during the Opium Wars (1839–60), Hong Kong was valued by the British for its strategic location near the mouth of...
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  A Model of the Cosmos Sometimes it’s hard to get a handle on the vastness of the universe. How far is an astronomical unit, anyhow? In this list we’ve brought the universe down to a more manageable scale. list, encyclopedia, britannica, encyclopedia britannica, list, lists, scale, model, universe, cosmos, solar system,...
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  A Recent History of Climate Change Climate change is a broad topic that includes periodic alterations in Earth’s climate caused by natural forces (moving continents, changes in the wobble of Earth’s axis, and other biological, chemical, and geologic factors) in combination with the effects of various human activities (such as the...
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  The Arctic’s Seed-Filled Doomsday Fortress Beyond the Arctic Circle lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s largest secure seed storage. Opened by the Norwegian government in 2008, the facility is built into the side of a remote mountain on Spitsbergen, the largest of the Svalbard islands. Unlike other seed banks, which protect...
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  A Tale of Two Submerged Continents In February 2017 separate studies examining Earth’s geological and geophysical characteristics revealed evidence of ancient sunken continents in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In the first study, a multinational team made up of South African, German, and Norwegian geologists and geophysicists...
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  A Teen Girl Recalls Juneteenth in the 1950s June 19, 1956, fell on a Tuesday. It was 90 years to the day from the first celebration of Juneteenth, commemorating the day when enslaved Africans in Texas became the last in the nation to receive word of their freedom, more than a year after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the...
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  A Timeline of Environmental History Nearly all of the major milestones in U.S. and global environmental legislation have been enacted since the 1960s. Key policies and international agreements have been established for air and water quality, for plant and animal life, to heal the ozone layer, and to combat anthropogenic climate...
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  A Timeline of the World in 8 Maps These maps highlight notable milestones in human history from 3200 BCE to 1500 CE, a period that stretches from the development of stone tools in Australia to the building of the palace complex at Machu Picchu in South America. list, maps, timeline, visualization, world history, human history,...
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  A Trillion Tonnes of Antarctica Fell into the Sea Antarctica, Earth’s coldest continent, is known for its remoteness, its unique fauna, and its frigid surface of ice. Around Antarctica’s periphery, dozens of ice shelves (that is, masses of glacier-fed floating ice that are attached to land) project outward into the Southern Ocean. The two largest...
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  Abundant Animals: The Most Numerous Organisms in the World Success consists of going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. So goes the aphorism attributed (probably wrongly) to Winston Churchill. Whatever the provenance of the quote, these organisms have taken the message to heart. They’ve surmounted disease, starvation, predation, and...