With the first headlines screaming "Gold! Gold! Gold!" in 1896, the Klondike Gold Rush was on – and it almost instantly became the stuff of legend. One of the key figures in the early discoveries that set off the gold rush was the Tagish wife of pros...

In 1815 a manuscript containing one of the long-lost treasures of antiquity was discovered – the letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, reputed to have been one of the greatest Roman orators. But this find disappointed many nineteenth-century readers, w...

Ray and Barbara Bane worked as teachers in Barrow and Wainwright, Alaska, in the early 1960s – but they didn't simply teach the children of their Ia±upiat Eskimo and Koyukon friends and neighbors: they fully embraced their lifestyle. Doing so, they r...

Never has there been a president less content to sit still behind a desk than Theodore Roosevelt. When we picture him, he's on horseback or standing at a cliff's edge or dressed for safari. And Roosevelt was more than just an adventurer – he was also...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! In 1936, following the sale of Newton's unpublished manuscripts at auction, the scientific world was shocked: it turned out that Newton's writings in physics and mathematics, often conside...

It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army – who had kidnapped her a mere nine weeks earlier. Bu...

A leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he...

Jehuda Reinharz, born in Haifa in 1944, spent his childhood in Israel and his adolescence in Germany, and moved with his family to the United States when he was seventeen. These three diverse geographies and the experiences they engendered shaped his...

William Hyde Wollaston made an astonishing number of discoveries in an astonishingly varied number of fields: platinum metallurgy, the existence of ultraviolet radiation, the chemical elements palladium and rhodium, the amino acid cystine, and the ph...

Deemed by Heinrich Heine a city of merchants where poets go to die, Hamburg was an improbable setting for a major intellectual movement. Yet it was there, at the end of World War I, at a new university in this commercial center, that a trio of twenti...