The greatest cataclysm in human history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power. And it ended because other human qualities — courage and perseverance and selflessness, faith, leadership, and the hunger for freedom — combined with unimaginable brutality to change the course of […] Read more

On this day in 1938, Marians invaded Grovers Mill, NJ—at least that’s what one and one-half million radio listeners believed. H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was performed in the style of a news alert on CBS by 23 year old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe […] Read more

If you thought you could get invited to the White House, say, for a state dinner, would you give it a try? After all, you’re paying your share for the spreads they put on there, so you’ve got a right to be halfway curious about what they’re like. And in case you’ve got a friend […] Read more

The Zambezi river is 1,700 miles long from its source to its mouth on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was formed during the volcanic upheavals of the Jurassic period about 150 million years ago, when an old river was split into two. The Zambezi is the fourth-largest river in Africa. It rises in […] Read more

The Zambezi river is 1,700 miles long from its source to its mouth on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was formed during the volcanic upheavals of the Jurassic period about 150 million years ago, when an old river was split into two. The Zambezi is the fourth-largest river in Africa. It rises in […] Read more

He endured the loss of nearly everything he held dear but somehow never lost his faith in the future. He distilled a century of enlightenment thinking into one sentence which began “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Yet he owned more than 200 human beings and never saw […] Read more

Welcome to the Rice Museum’s special exhibit: Tibet, the Sacred Realm. The photographs you are about to see contain more than 180 images, most of which have never before been shown in public. No country in the world remains more mysterious, distant, and inaccessible than Tibet. Bordered by the massive Himalayas to the south and […] Read more

Ah, Smurfs. Little. Blue. Different. Plus, you have to like any language in which the word smurfy can be substituted to mean pretty much anything. In Hanna-Barbera’s 1987 holiday treat, Papa, Brainy and the gang set out to foil a yuletide thief –who looks and sounds a lot like Gargamel […] Read more

Titanic. At 882 Feet…nearly four times the length of a Boeing 747, it’s the largest ship ever built. Titanic is part of a fleet of colossal new ships, along with the Olympic and the still to be launched Gigantic. The White Star Line owns the fleet and with this trio of giants they hope to […] Read more