This is Victoria Island in Canada's arctic far north. It's the eighth largest island in the world. The island almost entirely uninhabited except for the town of Cambridge Bay because the weather is considered a bit chill...

World War I was the first war in which submarines...  ...2006 issue of the International Journal of Naval History , David A.H. Wilson writes about efforts to use bi...

Sin taxes are taxes on behaviors that the taxing authority (a government) wishes to discourage. They are punishments for socially disreputable actions such as, for example, remaining unmarried. This specific type of tax...

The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, but the territory had been on the real estate market for a decade. Russia wasn't making money from it and, as a result of the Crimean War, Russia was also reassessi...

Mormon founder Joseph Smith was killed in 1844, and in 1847, his followers settled in the far west wilderness that would eventually be Utah, under the leadership of Brigham Young. They just wanted to be left alone withou...

Between 1816 and 1836, the border between Missouri and Iowa was surveyed several times, because the first survey was done so badly, and there were four possible borders, all slightly different. The nine-mile-wide band of...

The 1.5-acre Pheasant Island is in the middle of the Bidasoa River, which is the border between France and Spain. It's the place where the the 1635-1659 war between France and Spain was officially ended with the Treaty o...

(Image: Google Maps)On December 6, 1917, Finland declared independence from Russia. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of that event, its friendly neighbor, Norway, would like to give it a mountain.The Norwegian governme...

(Photo: Damien Ramon Naidoo)Once upon a time, to make lead round shot, nations and businesses would build shot towers. These are industrial sites sometimes hundreds of feet tall. Workers would drip molten lead from the t...

(Photo: @joefoodie)And you should apply! It requir...  ...standing of its roles and development in American history . The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC wa...  ...tes curator Paula Johnson:"We have collected food history for many years, so when we were doing the researc...