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HomeHistory20th century history

Category: 20th century history

By The Generalist Posted on April 15, 2022April 14, 2022

The Man of the Hole

The Man of the Hole is an indigenous man living alone in the Amazon rainforest. Authorities believe that he is the last survivor of a tribe otherwise wiped out by illegal loggers.

Categories: 20th century history, 21st century history, South America
By The Generalist Posted on April 3, 2022April 2, 2022

Oldest government in exile

The Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic has operated as a government in exile for more than a hundred years.

Categories: 20th century history, Europe, Politics & law
By The Generalist Posted on March 17, 2022March 16, 2022

Continent of stability (Part 2)

Beyond the boundaries of the natural elements may lie a whole new form of matter without protons or neutrons: quark matter. [2 of 2]

Categories: 19th century history, 20th century history, 21st century history, Physics & chemistry
By The Generalist Posted on March 14, 2022March 13, 2022

Continent of stability (Part 1)

Nuclear physicists predict an “island of stability” beyond the current end of the periodic table. But there’s another possibility even further out: an exotic “continent of stability.” [1 of 2]

Categories: 20th century history, 21st century history, Physics & chemistry
By The Generalist Posted on March 8, 2022March 7, 2022

School bus kidnapping

In 1976, twenty-six children riding in a California school bus were kidnapped at gunpoint and hidden inside a truck that was buried in a quarry. Twenty-seven hours later, after sixteen hours underground, they escaped.

Categories: 20th century history, North & Central America, Politics & law
By The Generalist Posted on February 24, 2022February 22, 2022

The scientists of Mars

When asked why we have no proof of extraterrestrial life, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard joked that Martians were already among us… they just called themselves Hungarians.

Categories: 20th century history, Computer science, Europe, Mathematics & statistics, North & Central America, Physics & chemistry, Technology
By The Generalist Posted on February 22, 2022February 22, 2022

The Phony King of England

Disney’s Robin Hood features a song about the “Phony King of England.” That song is based on an old (and very bawdy) English folk ballad about “The Bastard King of England.”

Categories: 20th century history, Europe, Film & television, Music, North & Central America, Politics & law
By The Generalist Posted on February 21, 2022February 20, 2022

Buried film history

In 1978 a cache of five hundred film reels was discovered under an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. These buried reels included the only copy of films that had been lost for decades.

Categories: 20th century history, Film & television, North & Central America
By The Generalist Posted on February 16, 2022February 19, 2022

Ski ballet

The 1988 Winter Olympics included three freestyle skiing events as a demonstration sport: moguls, aerials, and ski ballet. Two of these have become official Olympic sports. One has not.

Categories: 20th century history, Games & sport
By The Generalist Posted on February 15, 2022February 14, 2022

Constipation Blues

The blues music genre at its core is about hardship, oppression, and suffering. But it took Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to sing about that real pain down inside.

Categories: 20th century history, Health & medicine, Music, North & Central America
By The Generalist Posted on February 10, 2022February 9, 2022

The end of the world will be televised

When it launched in 1980, CNN was the first 24-hour news channel in television history. It has been running non-stop since that launch. But what happens if the world ends? Well, CNN plans to go out in style.

Categories: 20th century history, Film & television, North & Central America
By The Generalist Posted on February 9, 2022February 8, 2022

The generalist

For more than fifty years, Norbert Pearlroth sat in the reading room of the New York Public Library main branch every weekday from noon until 10pm. Unknown to almost everyone, he was researching one of the 20th century’s great sources of facts and trivia.

Categories: 20th century history, Education & philosophy, North & Central America
By The Generalist Posted on February 1, 2022January 31, 2022

Horses of Chernobyl

Przewalksi’s horse is genetically distinct from modern horses (it has an extra chromosome pair). It went extinct in the wild in 1969, but a small population was introduced to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 1998; they have thrived.

Categories: 20th century history, Animals, Europe, North & Central Asia
By The Generalist Posted on January 28, 2022January 27, 2022

Original cliffhanger

Cliffhangers have been a staple of serialised fiction for centuries, but the first literal cliffhanger appears in an 1873 novel by Thomas Hardy.

Categories: 19th century history, 20th century history, Europe, Film & television, Literature
By The Generalist Posted on January 27, 2022January 26, 2022

Seventh child

By tradition, the president of Argentina is godparent to all seventh sons and seventh daughters born in the country; in Belgium, the seventh children are named after the reigning monarch, and that monarch also becomes their godparent.

Categories: 20th century history, Europe, Religion & belief, South America
By The Generalist Posted on January 24, 2022January 24, 2022

Eventful pub

There are few pubs in the world that can claim to be the site of the founding of a religious denomination, the creation of a style of beer, and also a murder by a famous gangster. But there’s at least one pub that can.

Categories: 19th century history, 20th century history, Europe, Food & agriculture, Politics & law, Religion & belief

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