Although poinsettias are a multimillion-dollar business in the U.S. today, these fiery plants have ancient roots.
They were first cultivated by the Aztecs hundreds of years ago. Native to Mexico and Guatemala, the poinsettia, known to the Aztecs as cuetlaxóchitl (kwet-la-sho-she), was used for medicinal purposes.
The U.S. Civil War ended in 1865 after four grueling years of conflict.
But the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox Court House didn’t instantly bring closure to a tattered nation.
By the time most people in Europe started eating with forks, chopsticks had already been around in Asia for millennia.
The versatile utensil is believed to have been invented in China roughly 5,000 years ago.
In early 1901, English inventor Hubert Cecil Booth traveled to Empire Music Hall in London to witness a strange invention.
That was a mechanical aspirator designed to blow pressurized air to clean rail cars.
Tiny, hidden survival tools packed into the waistband of your pants may sound like something fantastical from a spy movie.
But in the case of British wartime pilots, they were a reality.
But the first universities predate those major periods in history, not by years but by centuries.
Cats certainly aren’t unknown in the world of physics.
Isaac Newton had a cat named Spithead (and supposedly created a cat door for him), while Albert Einstein once said that only two things provided refuge from the misery of life: “music and cats.”
Egypt may be home to the world’s most famous mummies, but not the world’s oldest.
That distinction belongs to Chile, where mummified remains predate their Egyptian counterparts by more than 2,000 years.
At the start of the 20th century, before the Wright Brothers finally got their famous Flyer off the ground in 1903, airships were seen as the future of human flight.
Pigeons tend to get a bad rap among urban dwellers, but the birds have a distinguished history of service.
Bred for their instinctive ability to find their way home from long distances, homing pigeons were trained as message-bearers as far back as in ancient Egypt.
Today, cultures around the world have specific rules and phrases for the common toast.
In South Korea, one accepts a drink with two hands, and in Italy, locking eyes is absolutely essential.
But how exactly does the word “toast,” as in dry bread, figure into all of this?
There are more people on Earth today than ever before, nearly 8 billion, to be exact.
This represents a full 7% of all 117 billion people estimated to have ever lived throughout the course of human history.
Amelia Earhart once took Eleanor Roosevelt on a nighttime ride.
Although her aviation career lasted just 17 years, Amelia Earhart remains one of the most famous people ever to take to the sky.
In addition to being renowned for her many firsts, including being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first person to fly alone from Hawaii to the mainland U.S.
Over the years, studies have shown that gift wrap can even positively influence the perception of a gift, a fact that was clearly understood in some ancient cultures.
When paper first emerged in ancient China around the second century BCE, it was primarily used for wrapping medicine and delicate goods.
Most grade school students can tell you that the first airplane was flown by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903.
But the origins of the parachute go back further, much further, depending on your criteria.
May 1 used to be moving day for everyone in New York City.
The crowds at Manhattan's Rockefeller Center get crazy during the holidays.
Imagine the majority of the city's population packing the streets with beds and other personal belongings on a single day of the year.
Because of the incredibly advanced craftsmanship of ancient Rome’s architects, as well as their remarkably long-lasting building materials, many of the ancient empire’s most marvelous construction projects can still be seen by millions of tourists today.
Some 6 million people visit the Colosseum each year alone. However, the most amazing engineering achievement might be Rome’s eye-catching aqueducts, one of which still supplies Rome with water millennia after it was built.
By all accounts, Baber’s call was much like millions made from cellphones every day — except that the renowned British climber was standing on the summit of Mount Everest.
Pumpkin itself is native to North America and was first cultivated around 5500 BCE.
The winter squash was almost certainly introduced to European settlers by the Wampanoag people of Massachusetts, who helped the newly arrived colonists at Plymouth survive their first winter.
In October 1705, the Connecticut settlement of Colchester was facing an early winter.
While New England was known for its cold snaps, this one was unusually premature and severe, with temperatures so low that nearby waterways froze.
