The Catholic Church ruled both the spiritual and p...  ...odd turns with forced baptisms, polygamy, famine, torture , prophesy, and violent battles. Read an account o...

Once upon a time, "trial by fire" was a literal tr...  ...nt from the guilty -burning, poisoning, drowning, torture

In Boston in 1774, tensions were building up that...  ...m was about to endure.The story of John Malcolm's torture at Smithsonian also describes the political backg...

If crucifixion as a means of capital punishment hadn't died out in the ancient world, it would labeled cruel and unusual punishment, and would never fly in the civilized world. The common wisdom is that the practice ende...

Foot binding was a tradition among Chinese women from around a thousand years ago to less than 100 years ago. Billions of women endured the crippling tradition, although many died trying to achieve the goal of "lotus fee...

To many wealthy Lithuanians, it was just a fancy h...  ...secret prison there, where they interrogated (or tortured , your choice of word) suspected al-Qaeda terroris...

Back in the middle ages, a popular form of torture is to force a poor sap to sit on a pointy stool c...  ...ackside.Fast forward to modern times and lo, this torture chair was transformed into an edgy "Stake-ch...  .... If you doubt the historical authenticity of the torture...

The Pew Research Center conducts a lot of surveys...  ...pecially Evangelicals, are more likely to support torture than those unaffiliated with any religious organi...  ...o church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new surve...  ...east once a week -- 54 per...

AskMen has a pretty nifty post about the 5 things...  ...t Shakespeare. Take, for instance, the word " torture " - yep, good ol' Will invented it (well, tec...  ...nted it (well, technically he made the noun " torture " which existed at the time into the verb for...  ...into the verb form):3-...