History

About a century and a half ago, some Native American tribes of the Southwest used facial tattoos as spiritual rites of passage. Through a series of strange tragedies (and some possible triumphs), a white Mormon teenager who was traveling with her family through the area in the mid-19th century ended up sporting one too, a symbol of a complicated dual life she could never quite shake.…

"Somme," wrote a Prussian veteran afterwards. "The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word." The first day remains, by some measure, the worst in the history of the British Army: An almost unbelievable 19,200 men were killed.…

In the five months that followed, 400,000 British and Allied troops, and a similar number of Germans, lost their lives, without any noticeable gain or loss of territory.…

How a chicken farmer, a pair of princesses, and 27 imaginary spies helped the Allies win World War II.

It was the toughest mission of D-Day. Allied plans called for 225 Rangers, including Dog Company, to land on a tiny beach, scale the ten-story-high cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, France, under a torrent of enemy fire, and destroy the most dangerous gun battery threatening the American portion of the invasion.

It was a suicide mission.…

… The Battle of Midway is important to memorialize and remember for many reasons. Among these reasons is that it is an inexhaustible source of still-relevant lessons on how to successfully apply intelligence at all levels of war.…

…former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe took to twitter to…

…A new study looked not at military and historical records but at tree rings and found that the winter of 1241 was cold and snowy. Big deal. A little sold and snow couldn’t stop the mighty thundering army led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu, could it? No, but it could stop their horses. The Mongols depended on dry, flat plains for their fast and furious attacks and for grass to feed their all-important horses. The snowy winter of 1241 became the swampy spring of 1242, the plains became muck, the grass became scarce and the Mongol Horde became the army formerly known as the mightiest fighting machine of history as it picked up its saddles and went home.…

President Barack Obama delivered…

…Archeologists have unearthed some 82,000 artifacts dating back to the 17th century at the Museum of the American Revolution construction site on 3rd and Chestnut streets… mid-18th century pottery from a tavern on Chestnut Street to granite foundations of the city’s first skyscraper, a patent medicine business.… [and] fragments of a English delftware punch bowl…

The Trojan War was a grander event than even Homer would have us believe. The famous conflict may have been one of the final acts in what one archaeologist has controversially dubbed “World War Zero” – an event he claims brought the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world crashing down 3200 years ago.

And the catalyst for the war? A mysterious and arguably powerful civilisation almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists: the Luwians.…

Alan Young, the amiable comedic actor who became a TV icon in the early 1960s starring opposite a talking horse named Mister Ed, died Thursday. He was 96. …later career included doing the voices for Scrooge McDuck and other cartoon characters…

A couple of divers in the ancient Israeli port of Caesarea brought up some items from the seabed last month, leading to the discovery of a treasure trove of bronze statues, coins and other artifacts that went down with a cargo ship 1,600 years ago. … Among the artifacts the divers recovered were a bronze lamp depicting the image of the sun god Sol; a figurine of the moon goddess Luna; a lamp in the image of the head of an African slave; fragments of three life-size bronze cast statues; objects fashioned in the shape of animals; a bronze faucet in the form of a wild boar with a swan on its head; and fragments of large jars that carried drinking water. All that and lots of money…

Bill Nye…

Experts have discovered a new geoglyph 30 meters (100 feet) long among the Nazca lines on an arid plateau in Peru that experts say depicts an imaginary animal with a long tongue. Archaeologists say the rock carving may date back 2,000 years.…