Lists and Stories

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  St. Patrick’s Day March 17 began as a feast day in observance of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Over time, the holiday evolved into a secular celebration of Irish culture, green beer, and anything with a shamrock on it. Irish immigrants to the United States were largely responsible for the transition, and...
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  St. Paul’s Contributions to the New Testament Although St. Paul was not one of the original 12 Apostles of Jesus, he was one of the most prolific contributors to the New Testament. Of the 27 books in the New Testament, 13 or 14 are traditionally attributed to Paul, though only 7 of these Pauline epistles are accepted as being entirely...
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  Stealing Beauty: 11 Notable Art Thefts The Mona Lisa is encased in bulletproof glass, and the millions who view the painting each year do so from behind a large railing approximately six feet away. In spite of security precautions such as these, theft remains a very real concern for museums around the world. With that in mind,...
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  Still Singing Her Heart Out She is the streetwise sound of heartache, pain, and resilience. Her lived-in mezzo-soprano voice paired perfectly with her flair for the dramatic—the tight spotlight on her pale face and her expressive hands—as well as her admittedly harrowing life. Many details of Edith Piaf’s life are well known,...
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  Street Photography: How a Single Camera Brought About a Genre Candid images of the everyday, of common or unusual scenes playing out in public, are so ubiquitous in today’s image-flooded culture that it’s hard to remember that street photography as a genre formed only a little more than a half-century ago. A number of well-known artists were taking...
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  Super Bowl Sunday: An Unofficial Holiday On Sunday, February 7, 2016, the Carolina Panthers will meet the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl to determine which team can lay claim to the 2015–16 National Football League (NFL) title and the coveted Vince Lombardi Trophy. The game is considered to be the pinnacle of American gridiron football....
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  Swedish History Is Evident in These 14 Buildings Sweden’s history as a sovereign state stretches back a thousand years, though its boundaries were often changing until the early 19th century. These 14 buildings provide useful snapshots of how the country’s distant past has influenced its more recent history. Earlier versions of the descriptions...
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  “Swinging London” Experiences Jimi Hendrix In the autumn and winter of 1966–67, Jimi Hendrix launched his star into the firmament of rock and roll legends by becoming an overnight sensation in London. His road to seemingly instant popularity in the United Kingdom and explosive success upon his return to the United States in 1967, however,...
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  Talking Ocean Trash: Ghost Gear Keeps on Fishing An earlier version of this article was published on the Britannica blog Advocacy for Animals. In July 2015 a piece of debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was discovered on Réunion, an island in the western Indian Ocean. Since then, more than 20 pieces of possible debris have been...
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  Teenagers Who Changed the World in 2020 Teenagers are changing the world in many widely different fields, from social and political leadership to new technologies that battle the effects of climate change. Many of them did so in the difficult year of 2020 even while facing great personal challenges. All the exceptional teenagers profiled...
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  Telescopes: Seeing Stars Recently the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope was completed in China. The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is, as its name says, 500 meters (about 1,600 feet) across, which makes it 2.5 times larger than the previous largest single-dish radio telescope, the...
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  Ten Days That Vanished: The Switch to the Gregorian Calendar When it comes to calendars, small errors can add up over time. The Julian calendar—the prevalent calendar in the Christian world for the first millennium CE and part of the second millennium—was an improvement over the Roman republican calendar that it replaced, but it was 11 minutes and 14 seconds...
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  Thanksgiving Day in the United States In the United States the holiday of Thanksgiving has been an official national holiday since Pres. Abraham Lincoln, after a campaign by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, declared it as such in 1863. In the modern consciousness, Thanksgiving is strongly associated with the near-mythological story...
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  That’s a Wrap: Methods of Mummification Mummies have been the antagonists of horror-based media since Western societies discovered them. We have to admit, dead bodies drained of fluids and wrapped in linens can be pretty bone-chilling. However, the process itself is much more than just wrapping up bodies. It involves advanced scientific...
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  The 10 greatest basketball players of all time It’s time for Britannica—OK, one editor at Britannica—to jump into the perpetually unresolved “greatest ever in [insert sport here]” fray. We’re not technically a sports website, but this editor (hi!) has been obsessively watching sports for nearly three decades and arguing about them with friends...
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  The 100th Indianapolis 500 The Indianapolis 500 celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2011. In 2016 it celebrates another milestone: its 100th running. Why the gap? The first 500-mile race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway was held on May 30, 1911. It was called the International Sweepstakes, and it was a dangerous event: one...
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  The 12 Months of the French Republican Calendar French revolutionaries believed they did not simply topple a government, but established a new social order founded on freedom and equality. Far from limiting reforms to the state, revolutionaries sought to align French institutions and mores on the basis of the new republican ideals through a...
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  The 1916 Shark Attacks That Gave Sharks a Bad Rap These days, even the mention of sharks can strike fear into the hearts of many—but it wasn’t always this way. Decades before Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) convinced beachgoers not to go into the water, there was one fateful summer when a series of shark attacks led to widespread panic and earned...
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  The 20 Under 40 Series: Young Shapers of the Future The future is unwritten. It is also right around the corner, and, if, as science fiction author William Gibson noted, it is not evenly distributed, more and more young people around the world are reaching toward it to shape it, improve it, and make it more equitable. These “shapers of the future”...
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  The 24 Days of College Football Bowls ...