Lists and Stories

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  Did a Calendar Change Cause Riots in England? Imagine that you are a member of Britain’s House of Lords. The date is February 25, 1750—in Britain, at least. In most of continental Europe, the year is 1751. A bit confused? The year is 1751 according to the Gregorian calendar, but Protestant Britain chose to stick with the older Julian calendar...
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  Did Anyone Really Think the Titanic was Unsinkable? You probably know the story of the great irony of the Titanic. The ship hailed as “unsinkable” sank after it struck an iceberg on its very first trip across the Atlantic Ocean. In hindsight, it seems almost silly that anyone would assume that a ship weighing more than 50,000 tons (when fully laden)...
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  Did Dinosaurs Really Have Feathers? Science is learning more and more about the versatility of form in dinosaurs with each great find in China, the Americas, Antarctica, and elsewhere. During their heyday in the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, dinosaurs evolved to fill niches in most ecosystems. Some were large, some were...
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  Did Duchess Anastasia Survive Her Family’s Execution? The 1956 movie Anastasia offered a more hopeful ending to the decades of mystery that followed the execution of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family in 1918. In the movie, his youngest daughter, Anastasia, is suffering from amnesia and goes by the name Anna. Ingrid Bergman played Anna,...
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  Did George Washington Really Say, “I Can’t Tell a Lie”? In the words of Henry Lee’s eulogy, George Washington was "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." His accomplishments were titanic: commander of the victorious Continental Army during the American Revolution, first president of the United States, “Father of His...
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  Did Humans Live at the Same Time as Dinosaurs? TV shows such as The Flintstones depict humans and dinosaurs living together in harmony. But that’s just fiction, right? Actually, not quite. The dinosaurs the earliest humans lived among were not the huge lumbering lizards we most commonly think of when we see the word. Those had been extinct for...
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  Did Joseph McCarthy cause the Red Scare of the 1950s? Joseph McCarthy was a junior Republican senator from Wisconsin still in his first term when he delivered the incendiary Lincoln Day speech that rocketed him to political stardom. Tensions between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union had been at a rolling boil since the end of...
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  Did Jules Verne Invent the Submarine? Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1870) contains two of his most memorable creations, the mysterious Captain Nemo and a marvelous submarine, the Nautilus. This submarine is 70 metres (230 feet) long and armour-plated, capable of sinking any ship,...
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  Did Lucille Times Boycott Buses Before Rosa Parks? On December 1, 1955, 42-year-old Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in defiance of the law. Today Parks’s act of resistance—as well as the subsequent boycott—persists as one of the key moments of the civil...
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  Did Marie-Antoinette Really Say “Let Them Eat Cake”? “Let them eat cake” is the most famous quote attributed to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution. As the story goes, it was the queen’s response upon being told that her starving peasant subjects had no bread. Because cake is more expensive than bread, the anecdote has...
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  Did Mozart Write “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”? The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is remembered for his precociousness, his prolific output, and his beautiful and memorable melodies. With all due respect to the famous opening bars of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, probably the most familiar melody associated with Mozart is known to English speakers...
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  Did Nero Really Fiddle as Rome Burned? According to his biographer Suetonius, the Roman emperor Nero "practiced every sort of obscenity,” ranging from incest to cruelty to animals to homicide. Nero was such a bad guy, in fact, that he may very well have been the first Antichrist in the Christian tradition. But did Nero actually fiddle...
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  Did the Beatles Really Say They Were More Popular than Jesus? In March 1966 Maureen Cleave, a reporter and friend of Beatles member John Lennon, published a profile in the London Evening Standard: “How does a Beatle live? John Lennon lives like this.” In the profile the 25-year-old Lennon discussed his strained relationship with his father, the toys he bought...
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  Did the Vikings Discover America? Did the Vikings discover America? It’s a question that requires some unpacking. To begin with, there’s the problem of the Eurocentric perspective of the word discover, which looks at the encounter with the New World from the vantage point of guys on ships and ignores the fact that indigenous people...
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  Does Trench Warfare Still Exist? The phrase “trench warfare” immediately conjures images of the mud and slaughter of the Western Front during World War I. Millions died in fruitless offensives that saw men “go over the top” into withering machine gun fire. Ultimately, inventions such as tanks and airplanes allowed troops to move...
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  What Are the Different Types of Pollution? Pollution can be described as a nutrient or substance that is out of place. More specifically, however, it is the addition of any substance (solid, liquid, or gas) or any form of energy (such as heat, sound, or radioactivity) to the environment at a rate faster than it can be dispersed, diluted,...
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  The First Atomic Bombs Tested and Used During World War II This infographic explains how the U.S. government created, tested, and used the first atomic bombs during the 1940s. The following text provides a detailed description of the infographic. The first atomic bomb was built in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II under a top secret U.S....
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  Do Birds Pee? Most people are all too familiar with the white sludge that can fall from above as you enjoy the outdoors, universally recognized as bird poop. Yet we don’t experience a similar threat, as far as we know, in the form of a liquid bird urine. This begs us to ponder: Do birds pee? The answer to this...
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  Do Camels Store Water in Their Humps? Camels have long been known for their ability to go weeks at a time without needing to drink water—an ability that makes them particularly useful pack animals for people traveling across arid environments and that earned them the nickname “ships of the desert.” Camels are also known for their...
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  Do Cats Cause Schizophrenia? Schizophrenia—any of several severe mental disorders having such symptoms as hallucinations, disorganized thinking, withdrawal from reality, or bizarre behavior—is produced by premature deterioration of the brain. This deterioration is usually a product of genetic predisposition combined with...