Lists and Stories

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  Acts of Union: Uniting the United Kingdom Once you have figured out the difference between Great Britain and the United Kingdom, you can move on to learning how the kingdom became united. Three “Acts of Union” are the key. The U.K. flag, the Union Jack, is a great visual aid for keeping the story straight, but the story started a long time...
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  Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the noted poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke Byron. Their marriage lasted little more than a year, and Ada never met her father. To counteract the "dangerous" mental tendencies of Ada’s father, Annabella emphasized music, French, and mathematics in her...
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  Add These 18 Paintings as Must-Sees During Your Next Trip to Australia The Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia created the earliest visual art in what is today Australia tens of thousands of years ago. The arrival of Europeans in Australia added Western practices to the country’s cultural heritage. This list focuses almost entirely on...
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  Ahoy! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day! International Talk Like a Pirate Day is arguably one of the Internet’s favorite holidays. It may be a surprise to some, though, that this parody celebration is older than social media—older even than Friendster or MySpace. In June 1995 friends Mark Summers and John Baur were playing a game of...
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  All 119 References in “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Explained In his Billboard Hot 100 hit “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” American songwriter Billy Joel rattles off a list of historical references in order to argue that his generation…well, like the title says, didn’t “start the fire” of global tragedy, scandal, and screw-ups. Some items in his list are...
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  All 81 References in Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Explained In his 1989 hit “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” American songwriter Billy Joel rattles off a list of historical references in order to argue that his generation…well, like the title says, “didn’t start the fire” of global tragedy, scandal, and screwups. (Britannica explains all 119 events here.) In...
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  Alternative Christmas Visitors Santa Claus, a more secular form of St. Nicholas, has been an American Christmas mainstay for more than 200 years. According to tradition, the rotund, bearded, red-garbed elf delivers toys to all good children around the world via a reindeer-guided flying sleigh, while appreciative youngsters gift...
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  Amazing Mangroves Mangroves are salt-tolerant trees that grow in tropical and subtropical coastal areas around the world. They often form vast impermeable thickets and serve as a buffer between marine and terrestrial environments. Mangroves have been cleared in many places to develop beach resorts and coastal...
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  American Red Cross Month 2016 Following in the footsteps of every U.S. president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, on February 29, 2016, Pres. Barack Obama proclaimed March as Red Cross Month. Roosevelt first designated March as Red Cross month in 1943, during the height of World War II, in an attempt to honor the humanitarian...
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  American Utopias From the colonial era on, the United States has had a rich array of self-contained utopian communities, walled off from the mainstream of life and dedicated to pursuing various notions of individual and collective perfection. Although economic factors often made such projects unsustainable in the...
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  America’s 5 Most Notorious Cold Cases (Including One You May Have Thought Was Already Solved) Cryptic codes. Threatening notes. Romantic rendezvous gone wrong. Not every murder gets solved. For all the amateur sleuths out there, we’ve collected the United States’ five most notorious cold cases: list, true crime, cold case, murder, United States, Zodiac killer, cipher, California, Arthur...
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  America’s Boomer Generation The core of the American hippie movement during the 1960s and ’70s were twentysomethings who belonged to what demographers call the baby-boom generation. This generation, made up of men and women who followed in the footsteps of America’s Silent Generation (born between the early 1920s and about...
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  An Inconvenient Truth: 10 Years Hence This article was originally published on July 14, 2016. It’s hard to believe that it has been 10 years since the cinematic release of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the controversial film featuring former U.S. vice president Al Gore that attempted to convince the moviegoing public that the problem...
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  An Interview with Jimmy Carter: Global Challenges to the United States in a New Millennium The following interview with Jimmy Carter was originally published in Britannica’s Book of the Year in 2004. Few people in the United States have a better overview of the state of the world than Jimmy Carter. He has been a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy, a successful peanut farmer, governor of...
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  Animals That Were Named Totally Wrong The colloquial names given to many animals can be confusing because they suggest something that is not the case. The flying fox, for example, isn’t a fox at all. It’s actually a large fruit-eating bat found in tropical and subtropical regions around the world. Here are some other animal misnomers....
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  Anne Frank’s Diary On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank, her family, and four other Jews were discovered after two years of hiding. They were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps, where Anne and her sister, Margot, were separated from their parents. After the war, Otto Frank, the family’s lone survivor of...
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  Anniversary of the Tokyo Firebombing On the night of March 9–10, 1945, Allied bombers carried out an incendiary attack on Tokyo, Japan, setting off a firestorm. About one-fourth of the city was destroyed, and some 100,000 people died. The attack came just weeks after a similar air raid on Dresden, Germany. spotlight, japan, world war...
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  Are Bats Really Blind? Bats are idiosyncratic creatures, with habits that humans find incredibly odd—like occasional bloodsucking, sleeping upside down, and staying up all night. We characterize bats as supernatural, associating them with vampires and even superheroes. With their talent for echolocation, that’s no...
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  Are Bats Rodents? With their fuzzy noses and rounded ears, bats are often called “rats with wings” or “flying rodents” by people who misunderstand them. But are they really related to the rodent family? Flatly, no. Bats are not even remotely related to mice or rats. Bats belong to the order Chiroptera, which is...
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  Are Black and White Colors? Color, in terms of pigment, is every shade and hue found in a brand new box of crayons (and any combination you could make from them). To put it in scientific terms, however, color is simply the range of visible light that humans can see. Different colors, such as red and orange, and other...