In August 1877, during a poker game, McCarty trades insults with a local blacksmith, Francis Cahill. The game turns violent. Cahill pins McCarty to the ground, and McCarty shoots. Cahill dies two days later.
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It's been connected to the Knights Templar, and some believe it wound up in Ethiopia. But what exactly is really supposed to be inside the Ark, anyway?
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The 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady, who went from taking portraits of the rich and famous to taking death portraits on Civil War battlefields, is known for depicting the cost of war. The truth of Civil War photographer Mathew Brady is he funded the photojournalism himself and went into debt.
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With voguish gangsters and bootleggers like Al "Scarface" Capone and George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes capturing the public's attention, the government knew it needed an equally dramatic response to their sensational criminality, one that would strike fear in the hearts of potential lawbreakers.
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Religious texts explain more about the Garden -- for instance, that the Garden of Eden consisted of two gardens. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, there were both a "higher" and a "lower" Garden.
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Even Alcatraz prisoners who didn't have access to jobs had to get to work first thing in the morning.
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Hypatia was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She was a scientist, educator, and intellectual, though many details of her life remain obscured. She was a brilliant woman who was deeply tied to Alexandra's reputation as a center of learning and progress.
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Mary Anning, who devoted most of her life to uncovering and preparing fossils, found some of the most astounding ancient creatures ever revealed in Britain.
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A charity event puts everyone to work toward a common goal and is usually for something that no one can argue about. Every once in a while a charity event occurs that is a disaster unto itself. Here are some of the biggest, grandest, charity disasters.
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From curses to enslavement to the downright weird, the Ancient Greco-Romans had it all. And, one of these revenge methods was certainly as strange as they come: using the enemies' names as toilet paper.
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Queen Victoria carried with her a royal curse, one that she passed on to other royals. Unlike that episode of Doctor Who, where Queen Victoria passed on lycanthropy to her heirs, her royal curse is more of a medical nature: She was a carrier for hemophilia.
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In the 2017 report, researchers speculated on whether the brace kept Kennedy sitting upright after he'd been shot in the neck by Lee Harvey Oswald. Had the president not been wearing it, he may have crumpled forward, making it more difficult for Oswald to fire the fatal second shot.
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When trying to locate the physical, actual inspiration for the Garden of Eden, you might assume that we'd be looking for a pretty lush, verdant expanse stuffed full of bountiful fruits. But there have been a lot of climate changes in the Middle East going back to, oh, 10,000 BCE or so.
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It was the Middle Ages; things were bound to be terrible compared to now. The sad thing is, even if people lived through the hunger and the wars, a doctor might end up killing them instead. Medicine, especially military medicine during the Crusades, was crude and often very dangerous.
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Before Robert Koch discovered the tubercular bacillus in 1882, the lack of understanding of the bacteria and the disease it caused led to some wild theories and attempts to curb the spread of tuberculosis. Surprisingly, this intersected with vampire legends in an especially curious manner.
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The United States has made some decidedly imperialistic moves in its history. Here are some islands that the United States has stolen.
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Geoglyphs are basically designs that someone's made on the surface of the earth, through etchings or piling up elements to create a picture. Geoglyphs can be found throughout the world. These are the most mysterious geoglyphs on the planet, from Peru to Ohio.
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In today's cutthroat political era, Americans are used to hearing a lot about presidential elections, but it wasn't always like that.
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Once humans started eating more grain, "bacteria in the human mouth flourished, pouring out acids that eat away at the teeth." The Sudanese skeletons belonged to farmers, so why were their teeth in such great shape?
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Britain destroyed and withheld evidence of crimes in Africa with the explicit purpose of being kept out of the hands of post-independence governments.
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It's usually safe to assume that the winner of the popular vote will win the electoral college. That assumption has fallen flat five times in American history.
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The infamous Russian gulag was a system of prisons, specifically designed for hard labor. This is the messed up truth about the Soviet labor camps.
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Gaius Julius Caesar is known for having been a statesman who changed the course of history. Per Britannica, he was a general who overthrew the long reign of Roman nobility and replaced it with a dictatorship. (He came, he saw, he conquered, or in his words, Veni, vedi, vici.) July is his namesake.
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The ark of the covenant is of great importance for many religions, and even more so for the Israelites who escaped Egypt. They carried the ark with them during the Exodus, and, because of its importance, they constructed a place to shelter it, called a tabernacle, to keep it safe while they rested.
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Even as American politics is absorbed as a spectator sport, there is still a lot that people don't know and falsely believe about US elections.
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Is a "mountain man" precisely the kind of long-bearded, ax-hefting hermit you imagine him to be? Who exactly were these atavistic conquerors of tree and hill, these intrepid trappers of critters and traders of tabacky? Something a bit more authentic than who we see on The History Channel, mayhaps?
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One man wrote of Boone, "He never liked to take life and always avoided it when he could." An historically accurate depiction of Boone reveals that he would have rather negotiated peace than engage in violence, and this attitude would put him into a bit of trouble with the military in 1778.
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